The Joe Rogan Experience - #1631 - Brian Greene

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and the author of several books. His latest, "Until the End of Time", is now available in paperback.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day mr green how are you sir good how about you good to see you man good seeing you what's the latest you got a book out i do yeah the paperback of Until the End of Time is out today. Until the End of Time. Yeah. That's heavy. It is heavy, but it's a big story, but it's one that we have a nice part within, a small cameo. The human species has a cameo, so it's a human story, too. Yeah, the human species.

What have we been around for, what, 300,000 years, 400,000 years? It depends how you define the species, but yeah, that's not a bad number number some people go back to a million or so if you go back to early human species but yeah and compared to the length of time scales that compose reality from the beginning to the end that's zero that's nothing when you being a physicist being a person that really does have a much greater grasp of the concept of infinity and of time and of just the length that the universe has existed in its current form, how do you just get through your day and not freak out? Well, it's because my wife says, you know, you got to cook dinner. So, I mean, there are things that you have to actually get done. But it does change your perspective in a significant way because you recognize that the things that we consider to be, oh, so vital and important are just this blink of an eye on the cosmological landscape, on the cosmological timeline. And it does change the way you approach the world when you pay attention to it. It's hard to always pay attention to it, though. Look, I mean,

if I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking about quantum mechanics, I'm thinking about, you know, quantum tunneling, I'm thinking about relativity, time slowing down when I'm moving, right? So if you're in the physics mode, you are living life differently, but who can live that way for more than a moment? Because life is too powerful in its intrusion on the way you are living life differently but who can live that way for more than a moment right because life is too powerful and it's intrusion on the way you actually behave in the world but because of your perspective and because of your education on this do you feel like almost an obligation to try to expand people's perspective i'd say that's part of what my goals of life is, to do just that. I don't want people to not live their lives the way they have, but I want them to be able to broaden the experience

by recognizing that every day phenomenon is a small slice of the way the world is actually put together. And when you can see your life and your experiences, just a tiny sliver of a reality that's, like, bizarrely strange and utterly wondrous when you understand everything from black holes to time dilation to quantum tunneling to all that stuff that we have discovered over the last couple hundred years, yeah, it changes things. Is it a difficult thing to get across to people like do

you try to think like what is the best way that people are going to absorb these ideas because they are so they're not abstract but they're they're so outside of the norm in terms of the way people view the world yeah you kind of like i go hey i know you're concentrated on this but look at that yeah i mean the real difficulty is not so much getting people interested. You might think that that's the big hurdle. People are like, ah, don't talk to me about that stuff. It doesn't matter to my life. But that's no.

People are very curious and interested in what physics has found. What's hard is getting them to not just take it in, but to take it in correctly, so that they don't take the ideas and twist it into something else that suits whatever weirdness they may have encountered in the world. The number of times that I see people take the concepts of quantum mechanics and turn it into utter nonsense, because they're like, hey, oh yeah, probabilities, okay, that describes this quality of my world, or the weirdness of time. Yeah. That's why I had this like mind mill with my best friend on the other side of the, you know, that sort of thing. And,

and, and, and I, I don't, I don't fault people for that. These ideas are difficult, but if you ask me what the challenge is, the challenge is breaking through that and getting people to really understand what it is that we found. And it's weirder than many of the things that the human imagination would go to. But it's harder because it's very specific and rigorous and mathematical ultimately. And that's unfamiliar. Do you think it's the complications of quantum mechanics like the it's that it's so it's such a bizarre field of study study that it sort of lends itself being sort of occupied by people like the what the bleep do we know type folks that kind of co-opt it and then spread nonsense. It's exactly right. I mean, that film is an unfortunate but very good example of people who took the ideas and usurped them for their own purpose,

right? I had friends that are in that film who were deeply disheartened by the way their words were twisted. Well, they were tricked. They were tricked. They thought they were doing a documentary on quantum mechanics, and it turned out to be essentially a cult documentary. Exactly.

And so there is a sensibility of that sort, which is volitional. That's like a choice, I think, that was made. In fact, I think I mentioned to you once, the director of that film had called me to be in it, and I was like, whoa, what are you doing? Because I couldn't tell what the... And then he called me like a year after the film came out

and kind of apologized and said, you were right. Oh, so he didn't know. Yeah, he didn't know. So, but yeah. We should stop. Oh, so he didn't know. Yeah, he didn't know. So, but yeah. We should stop just so people that don't know what we're talking about understand what's happening. There is a person in that documentary that calls themselves Ramtha that they don't explain it in the documentary,

but they claim to be like, what is it, a thousand-year-old? 35,000-year-old sage from the lost land of Lemuria, I believe it is, which is like another lost land with Atlantis. They were like at war with Atlantis or something like that. So, yeah, it's a pretty deep cult. Yeah. And, yeah, I think I mentioned to you once, I actually accidentally found myself at one of their headquarters in, I think it was in Washington State, gave a talk at a gathering. And it was so sad at some level because I saw people searching for truth, but being misled by a charismatic speaker who was basically coming up with this nonsense, you know? And so that's one way in which these ideas are usurped. But others, it's less by design.

It's just more you hear quantum mechanics is weird, and then you hear something else is weird, and you say, oh, that must be quantum mechanics, because there's this general sensibility that the world is weird. But quantum mechanics is weird in a very specific way, right? I mean, Schrodinger, Erwin Schrodinger, wrote down an equation, a mathematical equation, that actually quantifies the weirdness in a very specific way that makes mathematical predictions

that we can test in the laboratory. So that's not just like, you know, people in their minds coming up with crazy stuff and saying, wouldn't that be curious if that was part of reality? This is stuff that has emerged from careful study. So when you learn that the world evolves according to a game of chance, it's as if there's a throw of the dice that determines how things evolve from one moment to the next. That's deeply unfamiliar. We don't go around the world thinking that there's a chance that something bizarre will happen.

But there is such a chance in every moment, in every experience of your life. The chance is so small in the big everyday world that we don't experience these things. But if you were an electron, yeah, you'd be having the weirdness of being two places at once in some sense. You'd have the weirdness of passing through solid barriers. These kinds of curiosities would be an everyday phenomenon if you were small as a particle like an electron. That's sort of what lends itself to the woo-woo people, right?

Yeah, totally. Because when you talk about things being in superposition, or you talk about spooky action at a distance, you talk about these bizarre things that they sound like magic when you talk about things being in superposition or you talk about spooky action at a distance you talk about these bizarre things that they sound like magic yeah when you're talking about something that's both moving and not moving yeah it's in two places at the same time or there's a probability of it being in these like that's describing stuff like that especially to the average person that doesn't have a background on this, they go, what is the world then? Yeah.

What are you saying? And I have to say that we physicists come to the very same place. We say, what is the world then? Yeah. What are we talking about? And the difference is we can then look back at the equations and say, if we're talking about quantum entanglement, we can see how two particles far apart in space will have behaviors that are correlated. You do something on this particle and it will have some instantaneous correlation with what happens at that particle regardless of how far apart they are in space. Einstein himself called this spooky. Yeah.

Spooky action at a distance. You do something in New York and it affects in some quantum mechanical way a particle in California. How could that be? How could that be? How can that be? Good. So I don't know at some level if I'm trying to answer you human to human, but if I'm answering as a mathematician, as a physicist, I can see it in the equations.

I see it in the mathematics. I see how this particle has a quantum wave, which has a piece that stretches all the way out to California and way beyond. And when I interact with this particle, I affect that probability wave instantaneously. Therefore, I change the wave in California even if my action is in New York. So I see that in the mathematics. I understand these words you're saying, but I don't understand it. Neither do I.

That's the point. So what level of understanding are we talking about, right? If you're talking about intuition, like a deep intuition, the way we understand two plus two is four, right? I don't have to explain that to anybody. They get it. They see two apples and two apples four, but they got it. But when it comes to quantum entanglement, I don't feel it that way. I don't have that intrinsic understanding of what it is. And so if you push me to say, well, what is it? I ultimately fall back on the math. Right.

And ultimately, I say the reason I believe the math is the math makes predictions that we can test in the laboratory. And then you say, well, then what kind of understanding is that? And some people would say that's the deepest understanding all we really want of a physical theory is for it to give a rigorous mathematical articulation of what happens out there in the world and it's the human brain struggling for some kind of intuition that's our problem that's a human problem that's not a problem of physics that's a problem of us being a human problem. That's not a problem of physics. That's a problem of us being satisfied. A problem of perception and understanding.

Perception and understanding, yeah. Yeah, so this spooky action at a distance. Why was it first, was it a hypothesis? Or was this something that was proven by math first? Yeah. So Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a curious fellow, very interesting life. But he realized looking at the equations that there was this quality of the math that if two particles come together and they interact for a little while,

and then they separate, they can no longer be thought of as independent or autonomous. I mean, the very basic quality of autonomy, you and I are autonomous because we can separate. We can go our separate ways and do whatever we want at our respective locations. So you would think that if two particles separate, they will also be autonomous. But he saw in the mathematics that they would not be autonomous, that what you did to one would have an effect in some quantum mechanical way on the other.

Now, he saw that in the mathematics. He called it out as the central feature of quantum mechanics. And that's a big statement coming from him because there are a lot of other weird qualities of quantum physics. Einstein then comes along, 1935 with two colleagues, and leverages this idea. Writes a paper where he tries to prove that quantum mechanics cannot be the full story of the world because of this weird quality of what you do here affecting something over there. It's not until the 1980s that people really start to test this idea. And by today, this is used all the time in the laboratory. Quantum computing makes use of this quality.

So this is no longer an idea that's abstract. It's something that's applied. Applied quantum entanglement gives us things in the real world in the laboratory. So this is beyond question real, even though Einstein thought it couldn't be, and Schrodinger considered it to be the strangest feature of the math of all. So beyond question, it's real. Yeah. But what do you think is happening?

Well, so if you're going to allow for the most exotic possibilities, some would suggest that you are probing the many worlds of quantum mechanics. So in quantum mechanics, all you ever do is predict the probability of this happening or that happening. Electrons, you know, 70% chance here, 30% chance here. If you measure the electron and you do find it over here, what happened to the other possibility? Some say it happens, but just in another world. In one world, you find the particle here. In another world, there's a copy of you that finds the particle over there. Each of you doesn't know about the other and thinks you are the unique version of you, the unique Joe Rogan. But now there are two of you, each thinking that the particle is found in one location or another. If that's the way quantum mechanics actually works, and some people

do think this, then quantum entanglement is in some sense less weird because what happens is that in one world, you have a certain correlation between the particles. In another world, you'd have a different correlation between the particles, and that's just what happens. So that's one, but you're allowing multiple universes in this explanation. That's pretty weird in its own right. The fundamental way that we encapsulate this, we say that quantum mechanics is non-local. Non-local means that the influences

are not limited to where they are applied. Our experience is, look, if I do something to this bottle of water, the influence is in this local neighborhood. What I did just now didn't affect something on the other side of Austin or on the other side of the world. But quantum mechanics is saying that that's an intuition built up from everyday experience, and everyday experience is grossly misleading when it comes to this kind of an idea. Severely limited. Severely limited. And this concept of many worlds.

So the idea is that there's multiple versions of you and multiple versions of everything that you've experienced. All the things you see that you consider to be Austin, Texas or the United States or the world itself. There's multiple versions of this happening simultaneously. How many? Well, in some sense, infinite. Oh, boy. Because the basic idea is that any outcome that is allowed by the laws of quantum physics, any outcome will take place in its own separate world. And so when you think about every decision you've ever made, every possibility that you've ever encountered, all of the outcomes happen, and that would happen

throughout all of time. So in some sense, there's an unending number of realities that are in the grand landscape of the quantum description. Now, we hear that, and you say, that's nuts. That sounds nutty, right? We experience one world. But if you look at the mathematics, as a guy named Hugh Everett did in 1957, he was a graduate student at Princeton, unknown. He looked at the math and he said, I want to look at the math and give it the most straightforward, intrinsic interpretation. And the most economical, intrinsic interpretation of the math is this one. It sounds grossly uneconomical, all these universes, but that's an output. The input is incredibly economical. You look at the equations and this is the most straightforward interpretation.

Every outcome does happen. It happens in its own world. Now, I'm not saying that I believe this, but it's definitely a worthy contender for the way that we should think about quantum mechanics. So do you guys get together and bounce these ideas off each other on a regular basis? It depends who you mean by you guys. You physicists. You physicists. So only some. So some physicists, when they hear about this kind of talk, they roll their eyes and they say, just use the mathematics. Make predictions for what we'll see at the Large Hadron Collider. Make predictions for what we'll see in this or that laboratory.

Don't try to understand it. Just do it. It's the so-called shut up and calculate approach to quantum mechanics. And Niels Bohr, who is, again, one of the founding pioneers of quantum mechanics, this was his perspective. I mean, Bohr basically said the goal of physics is not to tell us how the universe is in the sense of understanding. It's just to make predictions that we're going to see in experiments.

That's all that you should ever expect to do. There are other physicists who don't feel that way. And there are other physicists who think physics is a matter of telling us what's happening. Yeah. It's got to give us the story. It's got to peel back the curtain and give us a clear glimpse of what's happening behind the scenes. And so those of us who do have that as the goal do get together and do talk about these things. Well, I'm glad you guys exist because those shut up

and do the math yeah those guys they're not going to help me like that i'm not going to be able to understand that like you are a bridge to someone like me having the slimmest grasp of an understanding of what this stuff is all about although those guys would say that I am doing you a disservice. How so? They would say that I should convince you that there is no deeper intuition that you're missing. That the only way to understand what's going on is you learn the math, you do the calculations, and looking for anything else is looking for too much. Now, I don't feel that way. I feel that in the end of the day, when we understand the world deeply, it does give us insights into what's actually happening. The question you asked, what's happening in quantum entanglement, is, in my view, the

right question to ask. Unfortunately, I can't give you a good enough answer today, even though mathematically we understand it perfectly. I think one day we'll go beyond that. And there is work happening today. There are people who suspect that quantum entanglement is nothing but another idea of Einstein's in disguise. Wormholes, right?

You've encountered wormholes, probably if you ever watch any like Star Trek, these are tunnels from one point in the universe to the other, kind of shortcuts through the fabric of space. And some suggest that when two particles are entangled, there's actually a secret wormhole connecting them. And that wormhole means that they're secretly close together because of the shortcut. So they look like they're far apart, but there's actually a shortcut through a wormhole. So secretly, they're actually apart, but there's actually a shortcut through a wormhole. So secretly,

they're actually right next to each other. And then when you do something on one and it affects the other, perhaps it's not so surprising because through the wormhole, they're right next to each other. Anybody that would discourage you from discussing these kind of very strange ideas and expressing them that way,'re gonna discourage curiosity I think so which is gonna discourage interest in the field which is gonna discourage people to become physicists because it is fascinating and when you're talking about this concept of spooky action at a distance you're talking about wormholes connecting things together at far distances and

and things that we don't truly understand, but that you can show mathematically are correct. Like, that's amazing. I agree. I agree. And you have to look at the history, though. There was a period of time when people who thought about what's really going on got sidetracked. In the early days of quantum mechanics, what really needed to happen was develop the math, develop the equations, make predictions, go into the laboratory, have this hand-in-glove approach between theory and experiment so that you have a theory that you have confirmed. And the fear at that time was that if too many people start pondering, what does it all mean, then the progress toward that goal would have been diminished.

But we're beyond that. We have quantum mechanics, at least as a working theory that we can use to do wondrous things. And so more and more people are thinking now about these kinds of questions. So I think it's kind of a pendulum has swung toward the more philosophical, toward the more what does it all mean? How can we describe what's really going on here? Whereas if we were having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, I would say virtually no one is really thinking about things in the language that we're talking about. That's really strange, because if you think about how long people have been trying to understand the reality of the universe itself and how recent some

of these discoveries are, it really makes you think like what are we going to be able to show and prove is true 50 years from now, 60 years from now? Because if you go back a hundred years ago, you go to 1921, the understanding of the world itself is so grossly different than what we understand today. Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And the other side of that observation, which is exciting and daunting, is think about what science has done more or less to date. It's tried to understand things in the world that naturally form. Stars, planets, black holes, living systems. But from more or less now going forward, we're entering a realm where we

are going to start to create the new things that we're going to try to understand as we modify the genome, as we perhaps create artificial life, as we use physics to create new kinds of materials and structures that would never form on their own. But because our understanding is so refined, we can begin to manipulate objects at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic level. We can, going forward, be the driver of the new things in the universe around us as opposed to simply being the passive consumer of those things that the universe has given us that we then try to understand. So going forward, it won't only be trying to understand the stuff that has arisen naturally. It's going to be understanding the stuff that we create. And that's an interesting, exciting, but also frightening prospect.

So that's the concept of using these principles and this understanding of quantum mechanics to manipulate reality itself. Yeah, yeah. How do you anticipate that playing out? That's a tough one. I don't know. You know, it'll certainly be something that we approach in an incremental way. I'm not suggesting that tomorrow we're going to be developing,

terraforming new worlds or creating parallel universes. But there's a pattern that we certainly see playing out throughout the history of science, which is this. You're presented with some quality of the world, you don't understand it. You then experiment, you observe it. And then little by little, you begin to understand that you develop theories, mathematical ideas being the most precise ones to describe whatever it is that you're talking about. And once you have those ideas nailed down, you can then use them to manipulate the world. That's what we do with quantum mechanics. At first, we just wanted to understand atoms, right? Particles and things of that sort.

Now, we can manipulate the quantum world to create all sorts of technological wonders, the integrated circuit, which is at the core of every technological gadget that has transformed life on planet Earth. This is quantum mechanics in the hands of human beings. And so that pattern of going from lack of understanding to understanding to manipulation is the pattern that will continue to play out going forward. So that manipulation,

what will it be? Well, I think we're going to come to a time when we understand the structure of space far better than we do now, the structure of time far better than we do now. The structure of time, far better than we do now. Does that suggest that we'll manipulate space and time if the pattern persists? Yeah. Now, what does that mean? Will we build our own wormholes? I don't know. I don't know.

That's starting to go into crazy land, the woo that we were talking about before. But maybe it won't be woo 100 years from now. Or 1,000 years from now. And if we stick around long enough, if the pattern persists, that understanding ultimately gives you the lever to manipulate, right now, if you ask me what's happening at the cutting edge of string theory, quantum mechanics, it's understanding black holes. It's understanding how quantum mechanics and black holes talk to each other. And what is black hole?

A black hole is a weird region of space-time. So we're trying to understand space-time itself at the deepest possible level. And so the next step would suggest that we will manipulate it at some point in fairly significant ways. So the ways we've used it so far, you mentioned integrated circuits. How is quantum mechanics used to form integrated circuits? So an integrated circuit, in essence, is a little device in where you want an electron to follow a very specific trajectory to carry out this or that computation or process. Now, if you want to control electrons with that level of fidelity, you've got to use the mathematical laws that describe electrons with that level of fidelity. Newton's equations from the late 1600s, they won't work. If you think of the electron as

a little baseball or a little billiard ball, totally inaccurate. It will not allow you to manipulate their motion. But with quantum mechanics, you can manipulate the motion of the electrons because you understand their mathematical underpinnings. And so it was only by applying quantum mechanics to materials, to structures that could give rise to this kind of control over little particles that we could build these microscopic circuits. And they work. I mean, that's the proof in the pudding, right?

And so that's a key example of quantum mechanics transforming the world as we know it. And right now, there is work in string theory that is suggesting that this notion of quantum entanglement that we were talking about before, that may be the key to understanding the fabric of space-time itself. I mean, we use this metaphor, fabric of space-time, right? But any piece of fabric, it's stitched together by threads, right? So what are the threads of the spatial fabric if we push this metaphor and try to really understand it more fully? And one of the suggestions is the threads of quantum entanglement that tie distant objects together, those may be the threads that hold together the fabric of space-time itself. So that would mean that everything is somehow connected,

even if it's 13.7 billion light years away, these things are somehow or another directly connected. Yes. Now, to avoid that turning into the woo, you have to realize that when you have a lot of material and when you have a lot of time and a lot of space, these quantum entangled connections become so spread out that they become diluted. I thought about my best friend in California, then the phone rang, we must be quantum entangled. That's the sort of stuff that this kind of talk can lead to. But fundamentally, what you're saying is correct. It may be the structures in space, maybe fundamentally connected through these quantum entanglements. And it may be that the substrate space itself, we don't usually think of space as something because it's kind of invisible.

But we're within the fabric of space-time itself. And that arena may be stitched together by these threads of quantum entanglement as well. So this quantum entanglement will be diluted at a distance? So is that – what is the mechanism behind that? It's more diluted by the number of particles that are involved. So if you just have two particles in a pristine environment, like a total vacuum, and they're entangled, you can move them arbitrarily far apart and the entanglement will not dilute. That's the craziness. You could have two particles on opposite ends of the universe and you measure one and the other.

How is that done? Yeah, good. How do you do that? it ends of the universe and you measure one and the other how is that done like how yeah good yeah how do you do that and there are a number of experimental protocols procedures but one concrete one is you take an atom like an atom of calcium as one example you fire some laser on it and that excites the electron in the calcium atom to a higher energetic state. When that electron falls back down to a lower energetic state, it emits photons back to back. And because those photons were emitted from the same process, the electron falling down to a lower energy state, those photons will be entangled. So that's a concrete way where you can have back-to-back photons that

will travel arbitrarily far apart if they don't encounter anything else. That will be quantum entangled. Now, you were talking about integrated circuits. Now, I hear a lot of talk about quantum computing. Yeah. And I don't understand what that is, but everybody's telling me that it's going to revolutionize computing. How so? It's going to revolutionize computing.

How so? Well, as with everything, you have to interrogate precisely what one means by revolutionize everything. Maybe in some rough sense that's true. But let me just first say what it is and then say what the possibilities are. So imagine that you have a computer that can access – I'll use one particular link, access the many worlds of quantum mechanics. Now when you're carrying out a calculation, you don't have the calculation solely take place in one universe, you have it take place in a whole collection of parallel universes, allowing you in some sense to divide up the calculation and in parallel have it take place across this spectrum of universes. Clearly that will rapidly speed up the calculation because now it's no longer

happening in one universe. You've split it across many universes. So in some sense, quantum computing is trying to leverage that quality of quantum mechanics. Now that's one language, using the language of many worlds. You don't have to use language. You can also use just the language of probabilities. So if you have a particle like an electron, normally in a classical world, you'd say it's either here or there. In a quantum world, our world, it can be in a mixture of here and there. If it's in a mixture of here and there, you can do calculations here and there. Whereas in a classical world, you could either do the

calculation here or there. So it's basically substantially increasing the places where calculations take place, thereby substantially decreasing the amount of time that it takes these calculations to be accomplished. And by what mechanism? Like what separates quantum computing from regular computing? So in regular computing, you have quantum qualities because, like I said, the integrated circuit, you needed to understand quantum mechanics to guide the motion of the particle through the integrated circuit. But in the end of the day, a traditional computer, a classical computer, if we will, stores information as bits, zeros and ones.

So you have one bit that's either a zero, another bit that's either a one. And through that, you can store information and manipulate information. And that's what computation is all about. The quantum computer changes the bit to the so-called qubit. What is a qubit? A qubit is a specially defined and constructed digit that can be in a mixture of zero and one. And specifically, the way we usually do this is we have what are known as spin systems. And specifically, the way we usually do this is we have what are known as spin systems.

So an electron has a spin, like a little top, and it can either spin counterclockwise, that we call spin up, or clockwise, that we call spin down. In a classical world, the electron is either this or this. In the quantum world, it can be a mixture. And so literally, these quantum computers have these spin systems that are in these mixtures of up and down simultaneously and that allows them to do multiple computations simultaneously that allows them to decrease the time it takes to carry out the computation that's that's the essence of the idea is the structure of the computer different totally so a regular computer has a motherboard it has a regular computer has a motherboard, it has a processor, it has a hard drive. What is a quantum computer structure like?

You know, if you see some of these things, they look, I've heard them described, and it's not a bad description, it's sort of like chandeliers. You've got spin systems in arms of the chandeliers, and you have cooling systems that are vital to these computers because if there's heat that comes into the system, it can destroy this delicate mixture of up and down simultaneously. So they're far more delicate and it is much more difficult to, at this stage, have the number of bits. So an ordinary computer can have as many bits as you want. As you say, just, you know, put more boards, expand, you know, the random excess memory, you know, it's all up to you,

the user. For quantum computers, you've got to make sure that all these qubits are working together in order that they can perform these calculations. And it's very hard to have a whole lot of qubits maintain the so-called quantum coherence that allows them to work together. So the maximum number of qubits in quantum computers that have been built, it's only at 50. Very small relative to the number of bits that we're familiar with, you know, in, we're talking about gigabits, right, when you're talking about your billions of bits. So that is for the future, but there doesn't seem to be a fundamental obstacle to building a quantum computer that has a large number of these qubits. And in that way, in principle, being able to do calculations exponentially more quickly. That's the rough idea.

How far away are we from implementing quantum computing in daily life? Is it a cooling issue is it a an issue of just uh expanding our understanding of how to construct these things yeah um there are there are those in the field who are careful to say that they don't think that we'll ever have quantum computing in everyday life and the the reason for that is largely, you know, the cooling issue. And it has to do with the difficulty in maintaining the stability of these devices. They're so delicate. Whereas, you know, you drop your laptop, you may crack it or something. But, you know, for the most part, you drop your phone and it's fine. And so there are those who say that

we will never have these things in daily life. They'll always be highly specialized, you drop your phone and it's fine. And so there are those who say that we will never have these things in daily life. They'll always be highly specialized in laboratories that we somehow make use of as opposed to carry around in our pocket. But the same was said about ordinary computers 60, 70, 80 years ago when a computer in those days filled an entire room with all these vacuum tubes. Whoever thought that we'd be walking around in our pocket with something more powerful than that kind of device? Just 50 years later. Yeah.

So I'm skeptical whenever I hear people say never, never, never. But in this case, I'm almost open to the idea because these systems are so incredibly delicate. And in fact, one of the hurdles right now in quantum computing is they're not reliable. right now in quantum computing is they're not reliable. These qubits, they can flip from one state to another, ruining your calculation very easily. So what some of the quantum computer specialists are developing are what is known as quantum error correcting codes, redundancies in the information in the quantum system so that when this kind of spin flip should happen, you can correct it down the line and not have to start the calculation from scratch. What's causing the the quantum system so that when this kind of spin flip should happen, you can correct

it down the line and not have to start the calculation from scratch. What's causing the inconsistencies? Well, it's just the delicacy. You know, the way in which these spins are talking to each other can be disrupted by any kind of environmental influence at all. So it's just power surge, heat, you know, any kind of environmental influence. And so it's just a technological hurdle. It's not really a theoretical hurdle.

We understand what's going on. It's quantum mechanics, after all. But it's a technological hurdle to realize this possibility. But getting to the other question, you said, like, what will it give us if we have these quantum computers? like what will it give us yeah if we have these quantum computers and there are certain calculations that on a quantum computer you can do in the blink of an eye that might take years or centuries on a classical computer such as there are certain encryption ideas that have been applied to securing information and you know banks and things of that sort. In the old days, it was basically you'd build these huge prime numbers and you'd multiply them together and it would be the challenge of the person trying to hack your system to have to factor this big number and

virtually impossible to do in any reasonable period of time. There's an algorithm that people have come up with that works on a quantum computer that can factor these numbers instantaneously. with that works on a quantum computer that can factor these numbers instantaneously. So that doesn't sound so good, right? It means that information that was secure might not be secure. But of course then quantum computer scientists come along and they come up with a new encryption mechanism that's quantum mechanically based, and that one would be unbreakable even with a quantum computer. So that's the kind of development which is actually already starting

to happen. You know, a student of mine actually works for a company that generates quantum random numbers. You need random numbers in order to be able to have the security that nobody's going to know what number you actually have. And there are quantum mechanical devices that have already been built to generate those kinds of quantum numbers. But the overarching from 30,000 feet view is that we'll be able to take on calculations that we could never even imagine doing before, and that could revolutionize artificial intelligence. I mean, what is general artificial intelligence is about looking out at the world and seeing patterns, right? AlphaGo, this wonderful system that learned the game of Go and could beat masters in the world.

How did it do it? It looked at a huge number of games and saw the patterns in that huge number of games. And with that, gained an expertise that allowed it to become the champion Go player in the world. So it's all about pattern recognition. It's all about finding patterns. And that's what a quantum computer in principle could be incredibly powerful at. So artificial intelligence in principle could take an incredible leap forward, simulating various quantum systems that we want to understand better. Now, when we simulate them on a computer, we're simulating them on a classical computer

trying to mimic quantum mechanical behavior. Now, if you had a quantum computer, you could actually simulate it with the very physical ideas that are happening in the real world. So now you have a confluence between the methodology of the quantum simulator and the real world allowing you to do things that you couldn't do before. So it's just to say that in principle, there's a whole lot of understanding of the external world that these devices could give us.

And that's why people have become so excited about it. I think it's so interesting that we look to games to find out how intelligent and how powerful computers really are. Like for the longest time is could a computer beat a chess master? Yeah. And now that that problem has been solved, like not only can a computer beat a chess master, but they always will beat a chess master now, which is really fascinating. Yeah, it totally is. And there's a way in which that makes a lot of sense, because what is a game? A game is an artificial universe with very simple rules. And therefore, it's a simplified version of reality. And it's also a well posed game. I mean, tic-tac-toe versus chess, right? The difference is in tic-tac-toe, it's so simple that there's no creativity involved. You know, if you play it correctly, you'll always have a draw, right? The difference is in tic-tac-toe, it's so simple that there's no creativity

involved. You know, if you play it correctly, you'll always have a draw, right? But in chess, because of the great number of possibilities, there's a lot of creativity that comes into play. So it's a universe with a fixed set of rules. It's simplified and it has the opportunity for human beings to be creative. And so it's a wonderful testing ground for computers because if a computer can beat a human in that domain, now we can say, aha, that computer in some sense is creative. And the thing that we usually look to to define ourselves as human beings, how do we differ from other things in the world, the inanimate world? We're creative, right? We can come up with ideas. We

can come up with novel, innovative ideas. That's kind of how we define ourselves. And so when a computer starts to do that, it starts to challenge our humanity. And I think that's a good thing, right? I don't think that we are as different from the external world as we perhaps like to think. We are collections of particles governed by the laws of physics. And I think it's spectacular that a collection of particles under the ironclad rules of physics can be creative, can come up with ideas, can figure out quantum mechanics and general relativity. Like how spectacular is that? But all we are are big collections of particles governed by those laws. And all a computer is, big collection of particles governed by those rules. So I full well anticipate the possibility

for a computer to get to our level of cognitive power and beyond. And I full well anticipate that there will be the artificial systems that say to us, I have an inner world. I have conscious awareness. Now, how will we test that computer to see whether it was programmed to say that or whether it actually is having that inner world? I don't know. That's a tough one. But it's a question we face all the time. Like, I assume you have an inner world inside your head.

I don't know that for a fact. You, I assume, are making the same assumption about me. How do we come to that? We come to it based on the fact that we're having a conversation and we observe each other's behaviors and all of that comes together to suggest that we are each roughly the same and therefore I assume that what's happening inside your head is roughly the same kind of processes that happen inside of mine. We have to infer it and we're going to have to infer it for artificial systems too. And if you walk down the street and there's an artificial system sitting on a park bench, hand on its head saying, I'm so worried. What's it all about you know what's what's what's life what's it and if it's real you're gonna say wow that computer's having an existential

crisis and and there's a real inner world happening in there what other conclusion could you draw you know yeah the i think we have a an internal bias about our own uniqueness in terms of our ability, because we're so unique in comparison to all the other animals and our ability to manipulate the world and our environment and, and our use of creativity. Yeah. But it's really just variables. Yes.

And if you took into account like a computer, specifically a super powerful computer, like what we're assuming a quantum computer could become, could take into account all the things that have ever been said by any human being ever, the motivations for those things, whether it's love or emotions or jealousy or narcissism or whatever these weird human quirks are, and they could figure out a way to create works of art. Yeah.

They could figure out a way to do things that are uniquely moving to us. And that's what's going to be really weird. If a computer can write a book that blows you away, a computer can write a better version of The Great Gatsby. Right. You know? Yeah. And I agree.

And it's going to... I think it will happen because look i mean what is it that distinguishes us as a species many people will point to different things but one certainly is that we are deeply social as a species and because of that we've been able to learn from each other and therefore not had to start each generation from scratch right many other animals in the animal kingdom they start each generation from scratch, right? Many other animals in the animal kingdom, they basically, each generation kind of start from scratch. They don't have books that they can read about discoveries of an early age. They don't have teachers. I mean, some do,

but they don't have teachers that can give them the corpus of knowledge going back hundreds of years. They probably don't have universities where they can learn about what happened over the last 500 years and therefore not have to start from scratch. And so when you talk about the capacities of artificial systems, they will be far more social than we. Why? For exactly the reason you're saying. We typically learn from a handful of masters that had Albert Einstein's work. All physicists learn about it.

You know, artists maybe learned about the work of Rembrandt or Picasso, you know, the masters. But an artificial system can learn from every single other artificial system. There's no limit to the connectivity between those systems. So whatever pattern a given artificial system figures out, they'll all know about that pattern simply by communicating among themselves. In our environment, we only communicate with a small number of other human beings over the course of our lives. And again, some of that knowledge is stored and therefore it becomes widely accessible.

All knowledge gleaned by any artificial being within the network will be immediately shared by every other artificial being within the network. And therefore, the very thing that makes us special, the collective culture that allows us each generation to build on the insights of the previous and not have to go back to the beginning, that will be amplified enormously for artificial systems. So why wouldn't they be able to create the greatest work and the greatest novels? I think that will absolutely be the case. Yeah, we have information that somehow or another passed from parent to child, somehow through genes. And we see it not just in us, but we see it in the animal world. Like you can have a dog, and for whatever reason,

that dog knows it's supposed to lift its leg to pee on a tree, and no one has to teach it it. And there's other weird behaviors. Like I have a golden retriever. He loves bringing things back. He throws things, he gets them, and he brings them right back. Some dogs, it's hard to get them to bring things back. Not golden retrievers.

He's got it somehow or another in his system to bring things back to you. It's natural. No, there's this whole area of evolutionary psychology, which applies the ideas of evolution by natural selection, not just to the physical system. That's where we normally learn about it in school. We see how a given species changes over time because there's a random mutation, and that mutation allows that individual to better adapt to the environment, and therefore that particular morphology, that change, spreads widely through subsequent generations. That's normally how we talk about evolution by natural selection. But as you're saying, it also applies to behaviors. There are certain behaviors that allows an individual to better navigate in the ancestral world, and that behavior, if it had some genetic basis, can be passed on to the next generation and passed on to generations still. So yeah,

lifting up the leg to pee is one example of that, but there are many other behaviors. I mean, a canonical example is we have a predilection. We like sweet things. We like fats, right? Why? Well, the evolutionary psychologists have noted that in the ancestral world, those of our forebears who had a tendency to eat ripened fruits or to eat nuts, they stored up on calories so that when times turned lean, they were the ones that survived. And therefore, they passed on that propensity to enjoy sweets and fats. And we are the recipients of that long chain of behavioral predilection. So that's certainly the case. But the thing is, we then go beyond that. We are able to store culturally information and breakthroughs from an earlier generation that may not have any relevance to our DNA, and yet we can pass that knowledge on, right?

So Newton's ideas and Einstein's ideas, we will continue to pass these ideas on, and I presume they're not going to be imprinted in anybody's DNA. Maybe one day they will be, but certainly at the moment they're not. Your golden retriever, that kind of dog, you're saying it was a golden retriever? Yeah. It can't do that. The mother of your golden retriever and the mother of that mother,

and going all the way back, they pretty much all lifted up their leg and peed. And there wasn't a whole lot else that got passed through from sort of cultural heritage of things that one dog discovered that could then pass on to subsequent generations. So what makes us special is we certainly have behaviors that are passed through the lineage in this manner of evolutionary psychology, but we also have culture. And culture allows us to store the insights insights the breakthroughs of an earlier age allowing us to get to where we have gotten i mean i've often wondered if i got stuck on a desert

island how much of the world would i be able to like recreate even how much of the world of physics would i be not much right because i have assumed so much from earlier generations like i don't know that i could i couldn't build an integrated circuit. I couldn't recreate a computer. I could write down the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and I could work out for them the mathematics of black holes and entanglement, that sort of stuff I could do. But there's so much of the culture that I have no capacity to reproduce. And that's our collective socialization that we're able to benefit from the fact that we all talk to each other.

And we all know about things that happened in an earlier age. And that is what makes us special. And that is what we will also pass on to artificial systems because they're going to be able to do that too. It seems like almost a race in time to see if we can get to this quantum computing level on a personal, in a personal way that you can use before we destroy ourselves. Because if you go back to think about culture and the way we interact with information, how much it's changed since like, you know, the 1700s, 1500s, when things had to be written down, then the invention of the printing press and then all these different steps that have allowed us to access information more readily and

easily to the point where we're at now where you have a phone in your pocket you literally ask your question to and it'll Google it and come up with the answer for you and it's amazing right I mean when we were kids that would have been just a mind blower a device in your pocket that you could ask a question to and it literally has like the knowledge beyond your wildest dreams, access to scientific papers, thousands of years of people pondering the universe, and you can have the answers to almost any subject right there in your hand, but that's the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, no, it's crazy.

In fact, when I was a kid, not to bring up Star Trek again, you're going to sound like a Trekkie. I love Star Trek. Oh, you do? Well, I'm not actually much of a Trekkie, but just one more reference. When I was a kid, I remember thinking about what aspects of this television program are the least likely to ever happen. Okay, you got the transporter, you got the faster than light trial.

To me, it was the computer that you could ask any question and it would give you the answer wow i was like that will never ever happen and here we are did he what did they ask it like did they say computer yeah that's right you did it in fact kirk would do it just like that computer you know that's right and and they and the computer with yes jump you know you Jane Smith from 1920. You know, they just come up with the answer. And I was like, that's crazy. That will never happen. I love using Siri to make notes.

I always feel like I'm in the future when I can use Siri. Siri, make a note. What would you like it to say? Geez, I've never used Siri that way. How about this? We'll do it right now. Hey, Siri, make a note. See, it's a quantum Siri.

Oh wait, do it again? Oh, okay, I'll do it again. Hey Siri, make a note. Oh, why didn't it do that? You know why? Because I didn't do Hey Siri, I pressed the button. Hey Siri, make a note. Fuck, bitch.

Hey Siri, make a note. All right, now it's not working. See, I stepped on your demonstration. Hey Siri, make a note. It's not saying it. Wow. We got to call the genius bar. But it did it before, right? Yeah, I did saying it. Wow. We got to call the Genius Bar. But it did it before, right?

Yeah, it did hear it. Maybe it's... Oh, maybe the phone has to be closed. Hey, Siri, make a note. Jesus. Wow. Useless sack of shit. Here's Captain Kirk's.

Oh, wait a minute. Okay. It's on do not disturb mode. Hold on. Let me take it off of that. See if that'll help. Hey Siri, make a note. Nothing.

Oh man. What the fuck? Which iPhone is that? Maybe it has to be on... It's a broken one. It's a piece of shit one. It's a brand new one. God damn it.

Hey Siri, make a note. Hey Siri. Jesus. How does that work, Jamieie hey siri make a note yeah mine says what do you want to say hey siri make a note mine is not listening it's because it knows i'm talking to brian green it's like fuck you bitch how do you uh turn that on and off is that in general did it where do you uh where do you find siri yeah off? Is that in general? Mine did it. Where do you find Siri?

Yeah, it's in settings. I don't know. Wow. Mine did it the right away. But mine did it too, and then it stopped doing it. It's like, you're just too weird. Man, if I would have just shut up, we would have gotten through this. I know.

Here's Captain Siri. Oh, Siri in search. Here it is. Da-da-da-da. Listen for Hey Siri. Shut it off and turn it on. Continue. Hey Siri. Let's shut it off and turn it on. Continue. Hey Siri, make a note.

Hey Siri. Hey Siri. Oh my god, you bitch. Hey Siri, make a note. Oh my god, it's useless. Wow. Hey Siri, make a note. There you god it's useless. Wow. Hey Siri make a note. What do you want it to say?

There you go. Tell Brian Green that he's got to start eating eggs and he should exercise to strengthen his back. Okay. I created a note. I see it.

Okay. Super helpful. Real convenient. I see it super helpful real convenient so I had to shut it off and turn it back on again can Kurt do it? let's see history files subject former governor Kodos of Tarsus IV also known as Kodos the Executioner

after that background on actor Anton Caridian Kodos of Tarsus IV, also known as Kodos the Executioner. After that, background on actor Anton Caridian. So slow. Piece of shit. It's like Siri. Siri. Invoked martial law. Slaughtered 50% of population. Earth colony that planet. Earned body found when Earth forces arrived.

No positive identification. Case closed. Detailed information followed. You should be able to get that for Siri, that voice. You know, because Siri could be like an Australian lady. You could have her be a bunch of different things. That'd be a good app, yeah. Yeah.

Before we go too far away, did you see, you were talking talking about this this is the very crude version of what you're saying did you see this come out the other day that uh they this team created four new songs oh no from using ai from uh amy winehouse kirk cobain slash nirvana oh my god did you listen to them yes the nirvana one sounds a little bit like shit, to be honest with you. But the Amy Winehouse one did sound pretty good. Can you play us a little bit of it? Let's see. I guess, yeah.

See if we get sued. I'll play the Amy Winehouse one. Yeah, give me a little bit of it. Well, you know I got no idea Holy shit. That's pretty good. Right. It's all wrong And I like to get on going But that's all computer.

So the way I read that they did this was they took MIDI files, which would just be a computer-based audio to recreate the music you're hearing. And then they did what we've heard done to your voice with fake speech patterns. Yeah. It took like 30 songs to create the lyrics. Jesus. Then mix those together to create a decent sounding song. So how did they construct the way the song is put together?

That's with MIDI. So they took like, I don't know, I think it said like 30 to 40 different, you know, probably Amy Winehouse songs. Yeah, and find patterns. And yeah, just found like... You find patterns, you manipulate the patterns to create a new version of that kind of pattern.

You splice them together. So I would say the Nirvana one we can play just... You've heard a lot more Nirvana songs, so it sounds a little bit less... I'm a big Amy Winehouse fan. That's why I thought... I haven't heard enough of her to know. Play a little bit more of her.

Okay. That is bizarre to me. That's amazing. That could pass. There you go. Fuck yeah, it could I'm That's amazing. That could pass. There you go. Fuck yeah, it could pass. That's good. You hear the Nirvana one for a second?

Yeah, let me hear some of the Nirvana. I just thought this was a little... They gotta be able to recreate heroin and suicidal thoughts. The music doesn't sound as solid. It sounds a little more like a computer. like a computer. That sounds like a shitty Nirvana cover band from Portland. It's not as good.

That's why I didn't want to say it. But you had The Doors there too, right? Yeah, let me hear. There's a Hendrix one too? I did not listen to that at all. Give me some Hendrix because I'm a giant Hendrix fan. I'll tell you if this is horse shit. Not bad. It's not bad. My eyes are blind, I don't like, I just can't see. Not bad. It's not bad.

Let it go. I'm such a mad woman, oh baby, why'd you fall like that? Cause when it comes to it You're gonna kill me Oh, baby, now I know Baby That's pretty fucking good. They may have had an audio engineer that's someone that knows how to mix music

to add to how good this sounds. Maybe. But even that, that is again pattern recognition and putting things together so look that's a great example that's all that we do right that's what we do so why can't all we do is mix match patterns modify patterns you know that's that's all that we do anyway that if i if i'm being cynical and i often am that is what's going to lead us to become some sort of a symbiotic creature some sort of a integrated computer slash biological entity and is that a bad thing i don't know if it's about that yeah

i see i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing oh you're one of those i don't know you might be right look man you know about more about this shit than all i'm saying is we've been on a particular evolutionary trajectory and for a long time it's been thoroughly biological and thoroughly by random mutations. If that now moves to a new phase in which we've got new kinds of materials and new kinds of ways of modifying the system that's not just random mutation and natural selection, so be it. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like that's inevitable when you think about how we have this insatiable desire to innovate. Yeah. It seems like that's inevitable when you think about how we have this insatiable desire to innovate.

It seems like it's inevitable. And I'm sure you're aware of Elon Musk's Neuralink. Yeah, sure. They're initially going to use it for people that have injuries and diseases and neurological conditions. That's how it always begins. But it seems inevitable. It seems like if we can manipulate matter, and with CRISPR we're manipulating genetics,

it just seems inevitable that we're going to one day be something unrecognizable. Right. And that will happen in any event. It'll just happen more quickly. Because even evolution by natural selection takes you to an unrecognizable place. We just have to wait a very long time. Now we're simply speeding up the process by taking the reins of change as opposed to allowing it to be, you know, this or that, you know, cosmic ray particle banging into that particular genome and causing a mutation. And I often wonder about social trends and there's almost a frantic desire to escape from a lot of the biological constraints that human beings are saddled with.

Yeah, of course. One of them being like- Death being one of them. Yeah, death is a great example, right? The other one being aggression, what we call toxic masculinity. We never heard of toxic masculinity 20 years ago. It was a desirable trait, and now it's considered toxic. When we think about aggression and war, it's more abhorrent now than ever before in human

history. And as we move further and further, not just that, but even cruelty, bullying, there's all these things that are in the forefront of the conversation that we have about whatling out individual groups for what some people who are ignorant deem as undesirable characteristics. And a lot of it is biologically based. And we're moving away from that. We're less tolerant of that than ever before, even within recent memory, right? And this is moving towards, and also people are really concerned with mindfulness, being in the moment, being not externally motivated by negative thoughts and feelings. And we're moving towards some weird understanding of what we would deem to be our own ability to achieve some semblance of enlightenment, and that will be encouraged along by new technology

that maybe can eliminate some of the problems that we have. And then I think, and this is where it gets really weird, I think some of the problems that we have are biological sex-based problems, meaning our desire and ability to procreate and to attract mates. What if they come up with some new method of replicating, some new method that doesn't involve biological sex? I think it would be helpful to many physicists. You'll get more work done?

Or you'll be able to find mates easier. Or it'll no longer be a problem. I think all of the above. But the other question that that brings up at what point do you see decision making right what point do you see decision making to another structure an artificially intelligent as soon as it's far better than what we're doing right like when do you when do you stop walking across a mountain when you can fly over it in a plane right so you know but but the difficulty

of course i mean now we actually face this in a concrete way i mean do you allow an artificial system to have the right to choose who it kills if there's you know systems of that sort i mean well once the the thing that it's deciding to kill are the other like the the the old representation of a human being that is damaging the ocean, polluting the atmosphere, all these different things that come along with being a person who has access to these incredible technologies. We don't have the discipline to utilize these things fully. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that we haven't invented them personally. You can just get a gun, right?

You just go randomly running around shooting people if you maybe if you develop the concept of gunpowder and figured out how to put it inside a shell casing and figured out a bullet's trajectory and figured out rifling on a gun and all these different maybe you would have a greater understanding of what you've created and you'd feel more responsibility to be just to be more cautious with it yeah i feel that same way though when it comes to the stuff we were talking about before being vegan you know i feel like so many people eat meat but they're not part of the process by which that meat gets to their table. And I think if they were, they would probably approach it differently. I think so for sure.

That's why I started hunting. I went from... I mean, do you hunt your own meals? Yes, I hunt. Yeah. I do it every year. I hunt elk, which is a large animal. So when I get one of those, I can eat it for most of the year.

Yeah. See, I just hunt tofu. That's all I do. And, you know, just freeze it up and you had it for most of the year yeah and see i just hunt tofu that's all i do and you know just freeze it up and you had it for the whole year that's so processed do you you have to have some processed uh protein right like what do you take powders in do you yeah no i i do have a lot of protein powder but tofu peanut butter and you know i think the amount of protein that people think that you need and if you don't have it you're somehow going to fall apart i don't know i don't think that much about it and i survived to this point now maybe inside i'm corroding no i don't think you can do it correctly

if you do it correctly it can be done you really do need to have some algae like we were talking about before the podcast started that's a big one for b12 or supplement somehow another for b12 the thing is like what are your requirements like if you're trying to maintain a lot of muscle mass it's very difficult to do that but clearly i try to do that obviously clearly here getting jacked but that it's depending upon what you're trying to do most people that go vegan slim up like they lose muscle mass and but some of them they feel better that way like the more mass that you have one thing that it's got more of a cardiovascular requirement so it's it's more difficult to do long distance things when you have more mass and there's a a lot to be said for slimming down

depending upon like what your activities are that you enjoy sure what you're trying to do yeah yeah yeah and for me it's mostly sitting at the desk typing away doing physics as long as you have energy yeah you know you most certainly can be done correctly but that's why i was encouraging you to get eggs because eggs are really like if you have your own chickens and you have you live in a place where you can do that sure chickens are it's like it's a really great deal you have with the chickens they're like your pets but they give you food and you don't have to hurt them or coerce them yeah my chickens i would just come up to them pick them up and they would be cool they were i was picking them up since the time when they were chicks yeah so they'd be like oh is that dude's gonna pick me up like there was

no weird issues i'd pick them up take an egg touch them on the little head everybody was good like and they got food from me and they gave me food they made food and how many chicks did you have at one point in time i had 22 they were they were killed by my dog and by coyotes it's a long complicated story but the the coyotes at one point in time uh honey potted my dog and tricked him into killing chickens because i have i had a huge dog at the time i had this mastiff uh his name was johnny cash and uh he thought the coyotes was his friend he thought it was a dog he's like hey little friend and he was so big the coyote knew i can't kill this motherfucker but i think i could

trick this dummy into breaking into that cage because he's so big he broke through the chicken coop wow two two times one chickens do a thing called molting. Do you know what that is? I think I did. Isn't that when all the feathers? Yeah, not molting. Brooding. And what brooding is, a chicken gets this idea that this egg that they're laying, even

though there's no rooster, because chickens lay eggs with no rooster and those eggs are inert. They never become an actual chick. But the chickens get this idea in their head that this egg they're sitting on is going to become a live chick because that's what they're supposed to be doing they're supposed to breed with the rooster and the rooster gives them a chick and it comes out of the egg so the chicken will just decide this they'll pull their feathers off and they'll sit on this egg and they'll do it they want to do it for

like a long time and if you come anywhere near that they'll peck at you so you have to take them out of their little cage where they're sitting on this egg you know they they're in a large chicken coop that was bigger than this room and uh and they also free range like i would open the chicken coop in the morning they would run around the yard but i'd have to take them out and put them in a separate smaller cage where they have to stand on a rail and you just have to do it for a couple of days so they get it out of their head that they're raising a chick it's just some weird process that has and if you don't go through that process then it takes them like a full cycle of like 20 something days before they get out of it but they injure themselves they pluck all their feathers off they get real weird it's like some system happens in their head so i had to put them in a smaller cage

and the coyote tricked the dog into smashing this cage so me and the kids and my wife were playing some board game i forget what it is we're sitting in the living room and i see this fucking coyote run through the backyard with a chicken in its mouth running and then i'm telling you dude i had a fence that was like six feet tall and this coyote jumped over that thing like it didn't exist it was so elegant so graceful it's i i never saw a coyote do that before so i thought well fucking six foot fence you're not getting through this dude it was like this boing to the top bing their feet landed on the top of the like a like a um cast iron fence or a wrought iron fence rather landed on the top of the, like a cast iron fence.

Or a wrought iron fence, rather. Landed on the top and bounced right over it like it didn't exist. And then I go, how the fuck did he get the chicken? And I open up the door and I go in the backyard and there's Johnny Cash, the Mastiff, standing in front of this smashed box. And I'm like, you dumb motherfucker. You smashed

that so the chicken could get, the coyote could steal the chicken. So then, unfortunately, he had it in his head that it's fun to kill chickens because the coyote did that. And then he looked at the chicken coop, not that day, but a couple months later. He's like, I think I can just run right through that fucking thing because he was big.

And so he just used his paws and smashed a hole through the chicken wire because chicken wire is not going to stop a 140-pound mastiff. And he just tore a hole through and just went on a rampage. And he killed them? He killed a bunch of them. But then we fixed the cage and then kept him from that part of the yard. And then a fire came. And then the fire burnt the chicken coop down.

And there were some chickens remaining. They didn't die in the fire burnt the chicken coop down and there was some chickens remaining that they didn't die in the fire they they actually escaped once the once the fire started burning the chicken coop it kind of fell apart and they all they actually lived but then we put them in a smaller chicken coop this is a long fucking story yeah then the coyotes figured out how to get into that chicken coop and they killed them all right so that was it but that fire that you referred to right there going back to our evolutionary story, that's a critical moment. I mean, fire, you said what made us human? Fire made us human, right?

With fire, all of a sudden we could outsource digestion, cook the food externally so that we could have the amount of calories and nutrition that otherwise— Kill off parasites as well. Yeah, totally. A lot of things became edible. So just another example of, you know, these moments in our history that are pivotal that you don't focus attention on is necessarily that thing that made us ultimately who we are. So what things are we doing today that generations of the future or millennia in the future will look back and, aha, that's when we went through the transformation. It's very hard to know. But these things can have a ripple effect that is a profound consequence.

And computing, for sure, has the biggest ripple effect of our lifetime. I think that's for sure. And the other thing is, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there's now a connection between quantum computing and black holes. Yeah. What's that connection? It's a weird one. It's all weird. Well, this is like weird squared or something.

But work over the last 20 years has established that when you have a black hole, actually even more general systems, but talk about a black hole, there's an alternate description of a black hole in terms of what's known as the holographic description. It's as if there's a two-dimensional world that surrounds any given three-dimensional world that has exactly the same physics as the three-dimensional world that we're familiar with and yet it describes it in completely different language. So a black hole gravity is obviously essential. That's how a black hole forms. But in this dictionary that physicists have developed, there's a description of a black hole that doesn't involve gravity,

only involves quantum mechanics. And the beautiful thing is the quantum processes in that quantum world mimic the kinds of processes that people have been developing for quantum computing, quantum error correction code. And there's a dictionary that people have been developing for quantum computing, quantum error correction code. And there's a dictionary that people have proposed for that quantum language on the holographic boundary with physics in the interior. And the dictionary shows that the quantum error correcting code may be the reason why space-time itself holds together.

So there's this bizarre way in which everything that we know about in the world around us has a translated dictionary version in a different world that lacks gravity but has quantum mechanics. And so people are using some of the insights from quantum computing to understand questions about black holes and space-time. Is that strange? That's so strange. So as quantum computing expands, much like as computing expands, if you go back to the early NASA computers that filled up a whole room, we can extrapolate that as we get better at this and you look 50 years down the line from now, quantum computing will be the standard.

It will be the norm. Yep. And it will probably radically alter our understanding of everything. Including black holes. Including black holes. That's right. So there's a real possibility that the language that we use for space-time in black holes

may bear a profound imprint of the language that we are developing to understand quantum computing, quantum computers. I was just reading some article about black holes roaming through the universe and that some of them, some of them, they're detached from galaxies, right? They can be. I mean, oftentimes people think about black holes as these gargantuan structures that form from collapsed stars. There's a big one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy

that weighs 4 million times that of the sun. The photograph of a black hole in the galaxy M87 that got the world excited a couple of years back, 55 million light years away, billions of times the mass of the sun. But the reality is anything, if you compress it enough, becomes a black hole. If you take an orange

and you squash an orange down sufficiently small, according to Einstein, it becomes a black hole. So these things don't have to be gargantuan. The flip side of it is we also typically have an intuition that black holes are really dense, right? That's usually the way we think about them. But if you make something sufficiently large, regardless of how low its density is, it will also become a black hole. So you can make a black hole out of air by just having enough air. If you have enough air, sufficiently large sphere of air,

it would become a black hole too with the density of air. So all the intuitions that we typically have about black holes, that they have to be dense and they have to be gargantuan. Not right. So black holes are just a part of the elemental structure of reality itself. Yeah, when you look at Einstein's equations, right in his mathematics, there's a little formula that you can see where it says if you have any mass m,

whatever mass you want, and you squeeze it into a radius r that's less than two times Newton's constant, 2G times M divided by C squared, speed of light squared, a formula. Details don't matter. But you take any mass, if the radius within which that mass sits

is less than 2GM over C squared, it is a black hole, period, end of story, according to Einstein. Now, Einstein left out quantum mechanics. Weirdly, right? Because his Nobel Prize was for quantum mechanics. It was for a paper he wrote in 1905 about the photoelectric effect. But he never really believed that quantum mechanics was the true description of the world. And when he was developing the general theory of relativity, he was just

thinking about gravity and not quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking came along in 1974 and started to inject quantum mechanics into our understanding of things like black holes. And that's where Hawking proved that black holes are not completely black. He showed that black holes allow a certain amount of radiation to leak out of their surface, leak out of the event horizon, or leak out from just beyond the edge of the event horizon. And so, yes, when you think about black holes, as far as we can tell, they are a fundamental quality of the world, but you have to include quantum physics to truly understand them, and that's the cutting edge of what's happening right now. So they're a fundamental quality of the world, but they're also in the center of every galaxy. quality of the world, but they're also in the center of every galaxy.

It seems to be the case. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey did a wonderful study of a vast number of galaxies. And I've seen these wonderful images where they put like a little red circle around all those galaxies that have a black hole in their center. And there are red circles all over that imagery. So it seems to be a ubiquitous quality that black holes are at the center of galaxies and those are typically gargantuan black holes, millions or billions of times the mass of the sun. Do we know why they exist at the center of the galaxy? You know there's still a lot of uncertainty about galactic formation. You know, some have suggested that early stars, which were quite large compared to more modern stars, when they exhausted their nuclear fuel and they collapsed in on each other, they created black holes that were large. And then they

continue to suck in more material from the environment, they grew larger and larger still. So that's sort of one rough way that people think about how these massive, enormous black holes may have formed, but it's uncertain. LIGO, you know, this Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, gravitational waves, it took headlines a few years ago when it detected the first ripples in the fabric of space. It detected them from two black holes that were 1.4 billion light years away, like 1.4 billion years ago, rotating around each other,

going near the speed of light, slamming into each other, creating a tidal wave in the fabric of space that rippled outward at the speed of light. Part of it raced toward planet Earth. There wasn't anybody on planet Earth to see it at that moment, but it had 1.4 billion year journey to traverse. It raced toward planet Earth. There wasn't anybody on planet Earth to see it at that moment, but it had 1.4

billion year journey to traverse. It raced toward planet Earth. When it's about 100,000 light years away, it grazes the Milky Way galaxy. It continues to race toward Earth. When it's 100 light years away, a guy named Albert Einstein writes down equations that suggest there could be these gravitational waves unknown that one is already racing toward the planet, right? And it continues to race on. We're two light days. It's two light days away when they turn on the newly refined version of the LIGO detector. And two days later, that wave rolls by.

Planet Earth shakes the two detectors, one in Louisiana, the other in Washington State, giving us the first direct detection of ripples in the fabric of space and establishing that the story that I told you is true. Wow. So these things are real. Wow. They're out there. That is wild.

And before the direct radio telescopic imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope of the black hole in M87, that ripple in the fabric of space was the most direct evidence that black holes are real because when you took the way that the machine in Louisiana and Washington, it twitched for just, you know, a tiny fraction of a second. When you figured out using supercomputers what the cause of the wave must have been, you are led to two black holes that are 28 and 31 times the mass of the sun or 36 times the mass of the sun, numbers of that sort. And that was the only explanation for the data. And so there's this beautiful indirect proof

that these stellar-sized black holes are actually out there. And then, of course, we take a photograph of one in a nearby galaxy. So do we know why black holes would collide with each other? Are they attracted to each other because of their mass? It's a good question. Yeah. So certainly that is part of it. So binary star systems are not uncommon. They're fairly common where two stars will be orbiting around each other.

If those two stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, they can each collapse to a black hole. So that's one possibility. Or it could be a black hole's wandering through and captures another black hole. It's a possibility, too. I mean, I think, go ahead and ask your question, but there's one point I want to make as well, which is Wasn't that, please go. Yeah, well, it was just that

many people have in mind that black holes sort of reach out and grab everything in. But a black hole of mass M, a black hole whose mass is the same as the Sun, has the same gravitational pull as the Sun. It's not, it doesn't pull any harder than the Sun, it's just that you can get closer to it because it's so small and therefore you can experience the gravity more strongly. But you know, a brick of

mass M and a black hole of mass M, they exert the same gravitational pull. Okay, so we have this misconception that black holes are always these super massive objects that have incredible amounts of gravity and they're sucking in planets and stars and churning them up because we're thinking of massive black holes like the supermassive black holes are at the center of the galaxy yeah which is like what one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy well let's see so if if our galaxy has say a hundred billion suns you know and that guy is about four million times the mass of the sun yeah you're talking about you know a thousandth or something of that sort isn't that

crazy when you say that a hundred billion suns and you have to wrap your head around the idea of a hundred billion stars and that's and that's just our little puny little galaxy. Well, that's the thing. Isn't that crazy? There are at least 100 billion galaxies. At least. And this is just in the observable universe. I mean, do you know, if you take your thumb

and you put your thumb on a nice clear night and you block out a thumbnail worth of the sky, you're blocking out about 10 million galaxies. It's so crazy. It's so crazy. It's so crazy because those numbers, I hear you say those numbers. I can repeat those numbers, but I don't think I'm really internalizing them. You can't because they're so non-human scale, right? We've just never experienced anything like that at all.

And it could be that it's infinite. Space could go on infinitely far. It could be that the galaxies continue onward infinitely far. And therefore, the numbers we're talking about could be minuscule on the scale of the fullness of reality. You know, and that,

of course, that leads people to the conclusion, well, there must be other life out there. There are all these planets around all of these stars, all of these must be other life out there. There are all these planets around all of these stars, all of these suns that are out there. And I'm sympathetic to that perspective. But on the other hand, there are some pretty iconic qualities of our environment that allowed life to form. And intelligent life to form is yet another special event on top of the unlikeness of life itself forming. So who knows?

You know, if a meteor hadn't slammed into the earth 65 million years ago, it'd still be the dinosaurs walking around. And who knows? Maybe they'd develop to a point where they'd start to contemplate these things. But I doubt it, right? You know? And so there could be life out there. But if it's not intelligent life it would be interesting we'll learn a lot but it's unclear that it's going to

really change our sense of cosmic loneliness which is really where we're at at the moment yeah it's one of those things that are it's probably one of the biggest questions that human the human race has ever contemplated are we alone and? And if we are alone, is that good? Is it bad? Like, is it sad? Is it lonely? Like, if life really is so difficult to cultivate to the point where it gets to be able to alter its environment the way we do, if this really is a one in a hundred trillion opportunities.

Well, to my mind, that gives us a certain profound responsibility. Yeah. Right? I mean, we could be. We could be the only intelligent life in the cosmos, and what are we doing with our time? Well, some people are making quantum computers

that may revolutionize what it means to be a person. Yeah. But if that's happening all throughout the galaxy, that's when things get really strange. If there's multiple examples of this but not where we are maybe 500 years ago and maybe 500 years from and maybe a million years from dependent upon the vulnerability of their solar system right yeah and some people find that frightening right some people worry that i mean you know the james webb space telescope is supposed to launch in October, I think it is.

And it's going to have this refined capacity to look at planetary atmospheres. As planets go by their host star, they're going to observe the spectra of light that's absorbed by that planet's atmosphere. And so there's a chance that you might find biomarkers. Right, like nitrogen. Yeah, you know, methane and carbon dioxide and so there's a chance that you might find biomarkers right in that nitrogen yeah you know methane and carbon dioxide and so forth and so the question then is let's say there is some unmistakable signature that there's some light now first of all it may not be intelligent life but do you take a chance that it is do you do you try to you know make contact i mean you know stephen hawking famously was like don't contact the

aliens right he was like every time a civilization encounters another civilization it's not good for one of them right we see that on planet earth you know um but we're crude like when we're saying that we're talking about crude territorial apes encountering other crude territorial apes throughout history right when human beings have encountered other human beings they've gone what do you have you have gold i'll take that yeah give me your women give me this give me that and you know i'm gonna light everything else on fire yeah that's but that's just humans if we can get past this like what we were discussing before that the human race itself, is moving pretty far away from where we were

when we had to worry about pirate ships pulling up through our docks. And that if we continue to go on this path, and we get to the point where we all look like those gray aliens with the little feeble bodies and the giant heads, I think that iconic image, I think that's almost like we understand where this is going. Right. So the benign alien that we will one day become, if that's who we'd be contacting at some distant planet,

then maybe it would be fine. And look, how spectacular would it be to encounter another life form? First, to see whether the biochemistry is the same. Is life this one-off chance that happened only on these two planets because there's some coincidence?

Or is it that there are many ways to get living systems and many ways to get intelligent living systems? That is the first data that we'd ever have of that sort for sure. But, yeah, I mean the question is will we get to a place where they're not afraid of us? You know, if perhaps they're that much further ahead of us at the moment. Have you paid attention at all to the Pentagon's disclosure of these unidentified flying objects or what do they call them? Unidentified aerial phenomenon? Yeah. Anytime I hear that stuff, my eyes glaze over.

I have to tell you, you know, because, you know, it's not that there can't be alien life. It just feels to me so unlikely that they'd come all that way and hide, right? They'd come all that way, and just as we're about to make contact with them, they turn on the cloaking device or something of that sort. If they're able to travel that interstellar distance, they're not going to be afraid of us. They may not be interested in us. Why would you assume that they're afraid of us? Why wouldn't you assume that they're curious and observing

and making sure we don't blow ourselves up? Well, you know, if they're able to do that, I think that they'd be better at cloaking themselves, that we have no evidence that they're here whatsoever. Let me play devil's advocate. Wouldn't you think that the best way to acclimate people to the concept of extraterrestrial life is to slowly

expose people to things purposefully yeah I don't know that I would do it in sort of a mystery manner if I was designing that level of sort of aversion therapy you know to try to get them used to this idea that there's other life in the universe, nor would I take the approach, say, of, you know, the Twilight Zone episode, you know, the famous one, you know, you know, to serve man, it's a cookbook, you know, it's the other, the other approach. But the other thing to bear in mind

that I think puts us in a slightly funky context and brings us full circle, if space goes on infinitely far, which is certainly a real possibility, then you can mathematically argue that not only is there other life definitely out there, there are copies of us out there. I mean, you can argue this. An infinite number of copies. Infinite number of copies, because there's, in any finite region of space with a finite amount of energy, there are only finitely many ways that the particles can be arranged. And therefore, if you go on infinitely far, the particle arrangement has got to repeat, right? I mean, it's like you have a deck of cards. As you shuffle the cards, you get this order, that order, the next order. But you and I know you shuffle it enough times it has to repeat because there are only a finite number of different orders of the cards. So if you shuffle enough times, you're going to have to come back full circle.

Similarly, you're going to have to come back full circle with the particle configuration if you go sufficiently far away. And so that would say that, yeah, of course there's other intelligent life out there. We are out there. I mean, literally, we, in the sense of our configuration, would be among those particle arrangements out there in this infinitely large universe. So it's a very strange idea. There's an infinite number of you and I having this conversation. In fact, in some of those, there's a difference between what we observe here and what's happening out there. Infinite variability.

Infinite. Again, it's anything that's allowed by the laws of physics. Any configuration allowed by the laws of physics in principle would happen out there. So, you know, some would argue that that means that space does not go on infinitely far because the conclusion is too absurd, you know, to accept. I don't think that's absurd, because the world's absurd. Well, I would say that the world isn't constructed by our definition of absurdity, right?

The world just doesn't care. It is what it is. It is what it is. Right. So that's... But it's a mind bending possibility, which, you know, doesn't really reflect on the question of whether there's life out there in the usual sense,

because we mean in the observable universe that we have direct access to, and these regions would be too far away. But in that sense, we would be guaranteed that there would be life out there in this wider landscape. As we talked about, the concept of hundreds of billions of suns is so difficult for us to wrap our brain around, hundreds of billions of suns is so difficult for us to wrap our brain around, but that's nothing in comparison to the idea of an infinite number of universes. Yeah. An infinite number of the exact same thing that's happening on Earth happening all over the universe. Because it's so big.

Yeah. That's so, it's, you know, a hundred billion is impossible to wrap your head around, but that is beyond impossible. Right. And you're just... I'm saying it, but my puny little brain is just like spitting out the words in the correct order.

That's all I'm doing. But it's kind of the best that we can do, because again, the only things that we have intuition for are the things that we have experienced, And infinity is something that we have never experienced. So it's a concept that we kick around fairly freely, but it's a hard idea to really wrap your mind around. But we're talking about in terms of distance, right? We're talking about infinite distance, and through this infinite distance, there's infinite possibilities. And through those infinite possibilities, there would be what we're experiencing here in infinite forms and infinite variabilities all throughout the universe but when you're talking about the many worlds theory yeah you're talking about it

occurring not in a distance yeah but you're talking about it almost like in a sort of a separate realm yeah we normally talk about it. And those parallel worlds are somehow in existence, but they're not touching us. They're not, like, directly connected to us. And even those parallel worlds have infinite universes attached to them that are different, but connected. That's right. Now, the weird thing that happened some years ago, and it's an idea that's still in development. Some physicists have suggested that the infinite worlds of the many worlds interpretation and the infinite worlds of infinite space, you know, that we're talking about from just having reality extend infinitely

far, they may be connected. There may be a connection between those worlds. They may be the same ideas just described in a different language. So it may not be that you take the infinity of worlds from infinite space and then add the infinity of worlds from the many worlds interpretation on top of it. It may be that secretly those two ideas are the same idea, just described differently. Mm. So the same idea described differently so somehow or another, these infinite versions of us that appear all throughout the galaxy

are us. And they are the worlds demanded by this particular version of quantum mechanics. And somehow or another, we're interconnected. Yes. With those worlds. Yes, through this sort of quantum wave function. When people get real woo-woo, they open up this possibility that every decision you make With those worlds. Yes, through this sort of quantum wave function that would have all these possibilities. But that's when people get real woo-woo, they open up this possibility that every decision you make changes reality itself because you're now in a different timeline, you're now in a different version of what the universe would be.

Yeah, but for any individual experience, as far as we know, each individual psyche traverses one particular trajectory through this reality. So while I can imagine there's another version of me who did something else in some other world, it's not something that impacts me in a profound way because my experience is limited to the particular trajectory that I follow. Your day-to-day. My day-to-day. My day-to-day. So is it a mind slapper to imagine that there's a version of me out there? Yeah. If I allow myself to fully take that in, it can even be distressing. It's like, who am I? You begin to wonder what kind of identity, what kind of personal identity you have in

a universe where there are multiple versions of you out there in the wider cosmos. But who can keep that in mind for more than a split second? Again, we go back to Brian, make the dinner. Brian, take out the trash, man. You know? Yeah, you have to. Reality intrudes. But there's also this faith that we have to have that the reality that we experience when

we wake up every morning is a reality that we've been experiencing our whole life you know we we shut off and we turn back on again with memories and ideas we just have to assume that this is all linear yeah yeah and it all is all based on memory yeah i mean memory is the thing that really defines us both as an individual and collectively as we're saying as a species you know it's like when we lose that capacity to hold on to memories we lose everything right we lose everything that defines who we are and that's one of the saddest things about people that have memory disorders when you start to see them slipping away yeah and not recognize their own children and not not understanding what's going on or where they are. Yeah.

No, my, my wife's mother, you know, hope it's not too personal, but she has, you know, uh,

Alzheimer's and yeah, she no longer recognizes her kids. Um, and it's, it's, it's profoundly sad. It's, you know,

it's, it, there's a shell of an individual who's left, but without memory, there's no sense of who you were as a person any longer right you're just sort of existing in this fragile state yeah dependent upon all the people around you to use their memory yeah to sort of keep you going and if you think about it again it's a whole distinguishing quality of being a human right i mean most life lives in

the moment sure i mean all life has some degree of memory, and I'm not saying anything other than that. But most life lives in the moment in terms of the goal-oriented behaviors are fixated on solving an issue of the moment. Get the food, get the shelter, escape that predator, right? We are among the few species, and certainly we have the most refined version, where we can lift ourselves out of the cosmic timeline. We can imagine the distant past. We can make predictions about the far future, and we can see our lives within a temporal narrative that most other animals just have no awareness of. And to my mind, that comes with power. We can understand things so much more deeply, but it's also tragic because we're also the sole species who really understands death.

Yeah. Right? I mean, some people say to me, what about elephants? And I say, yeah, elephants, they do have morning rituals. I'm not saying that they don't respond to death of a member of their group, but that is, again, responding to something of the moment. And sure, they, for a few days, will carry out a ritual behavior. We live our lives constantly aware of the fact that our time is limited, our time is finite. And so that drives this search for meaning that many of us are on. That drives

this search for purpose. And so that singular capacity of our brains to stand outside of the timeline is what, to my mind, defines what it is that makes life worth living. Until artificial intelligence can replicate that and do it in a much better and more efficient way. That's right. So we may be at an inflection point where we're no longer the special species in that way. You're absolutely right. I've always said that I think that human beings are the electronic caterpillar that gives way to the butterfly. Yeah, it could be.

We're doing something. You know, a caterpillar doesn't know what it's doing. It's making a cocoon. We are doing something. You know, Caterpillar doesn't know what it's doing. It's making a cocoon. We're buying iPhones and new televisions and this constant need for the newest, best stuff. And even materialism in general.

Materialism in general fuels innovation because materialism, it makes you want the newest, greatest things. And the newest, greatest things are pushed by the fact that people are purchasing them. It becomes the big industry. If you looked at human beings from afar, like if you were objective and you looked at us like if we were something completely different than a human being observing us. Well, what do these things do? Oh, they make stuff. They make newer, better stuff. So they're things that they desire and that they create are better and more efficient every year that's what they do so they're just constantly innovating and creating

whether they're innovating personally or whether they're using their labor to fuel with the monetary success that they have from their labor and using that to fuel this innovation but overall the species right just like bees make beehives people make things yeah and that will ultimately be our undoing in a way they may be positive or or doing in the sense that it may be positive we may transform to another level of being and we can look back at this era as the caterpillar stage that allowed that to happen or we'll just be gone yeah what how did marshall mccluhan say i said human beings are the sex organs in the machine world huh i have to think that went through yeah yeah that's a good one it's a good one and that he think i think he said that in like the early 60s really yeah um was that media matters what was his

uh i forget the book yeah that does ring a bell i forget the book yeah um but there's something going on and if we keep going you say well where does this lead to it leads to like a dr manhattan from like the watchman it leads to some super powerful version of what a human being is it's almost unrecognizable from a god yeah well it's all a question of what a human being is, it's almost unrecognizable from a god. Yeah. Well, it's all a question of what energy we're able to conquer and bring within our capacity to control, right? Right. I mean, when we controlled fire, we had a new energy source, and that new energy source allowed us to cook food, as we were talking about.

That cooked food allowed the brain to grow. Yeah. And as the brain grew, it allowed us to work together in groups to get bigger animals. And in that way, there's this wonderful cyclical loop whereby there's this relationship between energy control and evolutionary development, right? So right now, where are we? Well, we're able to use some of the sun's energy. We haven't been able to use all of the sun's energy. Most of it goes off into space. But at some point, we'll fully be able to use some of the sun's energy. We haven't been able to use all of the sun's energy. Most of

it goes off into space. But at some point, we'll fully be able to use the sun's energy. Maybe we'll surround it with, I don't know, a Dyson sphere, this sphere that would capture all the energy and then beam it to wherever we needed it. So that will be a solar system level energetic control. And then at some point, we may go beyond that and be able to control the energy of many suns maybe all suns in a galaxy is that really feasible to control well to make some sort of a sphere around the sun uh well freeman dyson who is a very creative and and brilliant physicist again one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics yeah he he imagined either you build a sphere or he also imagined

a version where you'd have all these satellites in a spherical configuration around the sun. So maybe it wouldn't be a solid sphere, but it would be a spherical configuration. And so the sun's energy, which is mostly just radiating radially outward from the sun, could be captured. And if you could capture all of the sun's energy, then the things that you'd be able to do with that energy are radically different from the things that we're able to do with the energy sources that we now have. In fact, there have been at times, it was always hype, I thought, but there have been times when people suspected that certain

anomalous astronomical observations might be an advanced civilization having built a Dyson sphere, and we were seeing a signature of that in the sky. Nonsense. Yeah, I've seen those. But at least in principle, you can imagine that if you demarcate the moments in the species by the energy that it can control, So fire, then we can control the energy of an atom, right? We can certainly control that through fission. Well, at some point, maybe get to a place where we can truly control through fusion. Now we've built stars in the laboratory, if you

will. Then we'll control fusion on stellar scales, say through a Dyson sphere, and then we can keep on going. Now, where does that stop? I don't know. But if it doesn't stop, the ways in which we will evolve, I mean, just think about what fire did for us, right? The ways in which we're going to evolve, I think, are going to be utterly stunning. And of course, we'll be controlling that evolution by that point through the control over genomic systems or through our merging with artificial systems. So yeah, you're right.

Do you ever contemplate what that looks like, our merging with these artificial systems? You know, not in any particularly creative way. I mean, I follow what people have done and it's jaw-dropping, the interfaces that people have developed between brains and artificial computational systems. So where is that headed?

I don't know. It's enormously exciting, potentially frightening, but that's what we'll have to see where that goes. I think ultimately we have to release our grasp on who we are now versus who we're going to be. We will have to do that. Because it seems inevitable. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, you can fight it.

And I'm not by any means saying that we shouldn't try to have restrictions and controls that guide the way that artificial intelligence merges with humans and assist humans. I think we need to be mindful of that in order that we perhaps can have the most fruitful partnership as we go forward. But yeah, I do think at some point we'll have to give up an archaic sense of who we are in light of the capacities that these partnerships, these collaborations, if to put it in the most positive light, will yield. In a way, that's what the Unabomber was terrified of, right? Is that true?

Yeah. He wanted to stop technology. He thought that human beings are being foolish in their advancement of technology. And that technology, I'm pretty sure, that was part of his manifesto, that technology was going to replace us. Yeah, he had an interesting way of expressing himself. Well, he was a mess in a lot of different ways. There's a great documentary about him that I just watched recently.

What's his name? Ted Kaczynski. Yeah, right. You know, he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies. Is that true? Yeah, they dosed that guy up with acid. Are you kidding me? No, not at all, no.

And they did that to quite a few people, and a lot of them went mad. And he was one of them. He became a professor, but just for a short period of time, so he could gather up the money to buy this cabin and then start his attack on on people that created technology huh I did know all the people he blew up all the people that he sent these bombs to they were all related I think most at least were related to the propagation of technology huh that is that it's crazy and he he had all the

elements too like a very hateful like from the time he was young and was abandoned by his uh parents not abandoned in a way but left alone because he had some sort of a disease when he was young and so he's left in this uh hospital system with no contact with human beings for weeks and i believe even months at a, and it apparently really fucked up his personality. Really? Because it was at his developmental stage when he was very young and a baby, and just, you know, you need your mother, you need to be touched. And they had him in some hospital for a long period of time, and his brother, who was the

one who recognized that he was the author of the manifesto, because he knows how crazy his brother is, and he knows how he writes, he recognized the manifesto because he knows how crazy his brother is and he knows how he writes he recognized the manifesto and recognized the the language of it and and he relayed the things that his son had yeah and he relayed the thing that his brother rather had gone through with his parents he had very cold parents and like the whole the whole deal was really there was a lot a lot of elements that were in play to create a Ted Kaczynski but one of them was that he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies I mean it's sad and tragic but you know I don't know how you feel about it but you know the fact that we got this incredible paranoia about

psychedelics and maybe it was stories I didn't hear I didn't know about the Ted Kaczynski connection. But certainly there was this irrational paranoia that emerged, you know, I guess in the 60s and 70s and shut down what was incredibly promising research. I'm not saying the Timothy Leary approach, but I'm saying there were people who were taking a very considered approach to psychedelics to deal with very specific issues. considered approach to psychedelics to deal with very specific issues and and now it's starting to come back which i think is enormously powerful because look i mean you know everything that we've spoken about here today everything that we know about the world is filtered through the human brain right so when we talk about quantum mechanics and general relativity we're talking about we look out at the world we process it through this particular conscious state, and using that, we're able to come up with ideas that explain things that we observe. But there are other states of consciousness. I mean, ultimately, I think that we create, I mean, I believe there's a real external reality, but we create our own narratives about that reality. And if with

some additional substances, we can modify or enhance or enlarge the kinds of narratives that we're able to tell, the kinds of coherent stories that we're able to overlay on our experience, I think that's a vital thing. And psychedelics can help us get to that place. I think that's a vital role that they can play. I think the problem with psychedelics is when they're utilized without an understanding of the consequences of utilizing them. Yeah, of course.

Without discipline, without... You know, that's where we've really been robbed, is that if they didn't pass the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 where everything turned into a schedule one even things that weren't psychoactive they didn't pass that we would have most likely entered into a stage of our history where we were running legitimate studies and we got an understanding of the benefits of them like they're doing now with ptsd studies with mdma where they're realizing like, well, you know, this ecstasy stuff is not just a party drug. It actually can really help soldiers recover from some of the psychological wounds they have from combat.

And then you've got what Johns Hopkins has done with psilocybin. There's psilocybin studies, and they're about to enter into some of them with UFC fighters now. Oh, is that right? Guys who have had traumatic brain injuries and been knocked out and had head injuries. Because neurogenesis that occurs through psilocybin, it's very unique. Like psilocybin allows the brain to regenerate neurons. It's one of the rare things that does that. And they think there could be some therapeutic uses of that for people that have been in

car accidents, people, soldiers again, who've experienced head injuries, football players, the like, anybody that's had like problems with cognitive function, maybe even neurodegenerative diseases. There you go. Yeah. And all these things are just, we know that there are some mushrooms like lion's mane that has some cognitive benefits and neurogenesis properties. And they're hoping that there's some real therapy to these things.

And they were denied the use of them for decades and decades and based on ignorance. Yeah. No, I totally agree. It's interesting. When people hear me espouse my view that all we are are particles governed by physical law, a number of people who have had psychedelic experiences contact me and say, I've got proof that that's not right. And, of course, they will communicate some kind of experience they've had under the influence of some kind of psychoactive substance. And it's interesting because, you know, I usually don't respond, but on occasion I felt the need to respond. And it all comes down to, do you view what happens during a psychoactive experience as

tapping into some other deeper reality, or do you view it, again, as just some product of this amazing thing inside of our head when it is influenced in an unusual way by some kind of psychoactive substance? And to me, it just seems dead obvious that there's nothing beyond the particles and the laws. And if you change the particles, keep the laws the same, the experience is going to be a little bit different. And you're going to enter into a space that's unfamiliar, maybe terrifying if it's a bad trip, maybe thrilling if it opens up some unification of reality and you feel one with the cosmos. Fantastic. But to me, that's the miracle of the brain as opposed to tapping into some other kind of reality. I guess that's the sticking point

for people who think that there's got to be something more than this physicalist perspective of stuff and laws. That is a bias that we have. We want there to be something more. We don't know what that experience is. However, it's indistinguishable from the experience of entering into

another realm. The problem is trying to put it on a scale and say nope this is what it is because you're you're having this experience that's whether you want to call it a hallucinogen a hallucinogenic experience are you hallucinating like whatever whatever word you want to use whatever that thing is when you take these substances, it's a, like, if you are really being transported into another dimension and communicating with other entities and then coming back to Earth, or whether or not you're imagining it, the experience is the same.

That's where it gets really weird. Yeah. So, like, maybe everything happens in the mind. Right. And so there are versions, theories of the world, where the only thing that's real is consciousness. Yes. And the only thing that we do is we overlay experiences

within our own subjective consciousness, and we weight them as real or not real. But that's all artificial because it's all just in the mind. That's what I was going to get to next. Yeah. What do you think about that? I think it's nonsense. And it's not that it's crazy talk, right?

In principle, you could imagine the world being constructed that way. But I do firmly believe that there is real stuff that's governed by real laws. We may not have those laws. We may not fundamentally know what the stuff is. Right. But I think there's a real external stuff. And when that stuff is configured in the right pattern, such as a human brain, it can begin to have an inner world and inner experiences, which is itself wondrous and mysterious.

Don't get me wrong. But that inner world is not tapping into anything beyond its own inner experience. It's just this inexperience is infinite in its possibilities. It's infinite in its possibilities, or nearly infinite in its possibilities. I mean, and so where do you draw the line, I think is the real question, between reality as experienced in the human brain and experiences in the human brain that you want to call reality? And it's a tough question. It's a very tough question. You have to at some point have a means of saying there is real stuff in the world that our brain is experiencing and filtering in some

way versus stuff that's generated from the inner world itself. And that distinction is hard to make precise, but I think it's utterly profound. Have you had any psychedelic experiences yourself? Yeah, we discussed this once a little bit. I forget your answer, though. Yeah, so a couple. I don't consider myself well-versed in this world. Do you feel like that's something you're missing out on?

I do, actually. And I think as I get older and I become more aware of my own finite nature, as the curtain begins to start to roll down from the rafters, I do hunger for a distinct kind of experience. There's a book that I think everybody should read. Maybe you've read it. William James's book, Varieties of Religious Experience. It's old, written back in 1902. William James, great psychologist. He gave some lectures in Scotland, I think it was, at the turn of the century. And he interviewed a whole host of people in order to get a feel for the kinds of religious experiences, but really the kind of spiritual experiences that people would have. And some of them were generated through some kind of psychoactive substance that people were using at the time. And his descriptions are so vivid that I feel like I've been there on some of these excursions, these mental excursions.

But I do have a hankering. I do have an urge to enlarge my own sense of what reality is through that experience. And look, the thing that we once discussed was, you know, something that happened in Amsterdam, and it was probably very mild compared to other things, because I don't really drink, you know, I don't eat meat, I'm pretty clean in that way. So I'm pretty susceptible to these kinds of influences. And I did not enjoy the experience that I had. And I did not enjoy the experience that I had. It was pretty awful. However, back when I was in college, I had some other experiences on other substances, again, all relatively mild.

And those were far more enjoyable and mind-expanding. And I can see both sides, and I'm definitely, I feel compelled to explore more. And I think the world's getting to a place where it will become more amenable to people doing that. Yeah, they're starting to legalize psilocybin in a lot of states. That's the real gateway to these experiences. Once they make that legal, and then you develop, what we really need to do is develop places where you can, in a professional setting, where people actually

understand the dosage based on your weight, based on how much psilocybin is in whatever substance you're taking, or whether it's synthetic or whether it's in mushroom form, because it's very strong psilocybin-based mushrooms and other ones that are more mild. And once there's real legalization, like you can go into a marijuana store, for instance, in Los Angeles, and you could buy marijuana based on the THC content. So you could say, what do you have that's mild? And they go, oh, we got some of this. What do you have that's like crazy?

And they have space weed that really fuck you up. then they have edibles which are a totally different animal because your body processes is through the liver and it produces a completely different psychoactive substance so like we know all that now because marijuana has been essentially legal since the 90s and legal legal legal since 2016 when it was voted in in california yeah so we have much more of an understanding of the the real psychoactive effects and you can actually control it much more sure we need that with everything and yeah and i've read it i've read in some of these studies the people who are like newcomers to this they actually have an individual whose experience that sits with

the individual and guides them yeah on their journey oh yeah they have services like that yeah california is much more advanced and so is colorado and so is washington state and there's a lot of state but you know here in texas it's still illegal which is kind of fucking hilarious yeah you see my view is so what do we do as physicists? We tell one particular story of the world at the level of particles and laws. The chemist comes along and takes our understanding and builds molecules and atoms from it. The biologist comes and takes those structures and builds cells and living systems and that kind of domain. And then ultimately you get up to the neuroscientist who studies the brain and the philosopher who's trying to see meaning that the brain is striving for and so forth. What it all amounts to is a variety of stories that discuss distinct qualities of the world.

And the richest experience you get is from layering all those stories on top of one another so you can see the biggest possible narrative of all. Now, if these kind of psychoactive substances can give you new stories that you wouldn't have access to through the traditional means, the academic means of, say, of science, or through the philosophical means or artistic forays, if these psychoactive substances can bring in a new narrative, how wonderful could that be for all of us to be able to layer an additional story or multiple stories upon our understanding of the world? Well, you know who had that belief? Carl Sagan. Is that true?

Carl Sagan was a giant fan of marijuana. Have you ever seen Carl Sagan's quotes? Well, I did know that, but I've never seen any quotes where he's actually speaking about the experience. Yeah, see if you can find Carl Sagan on marijuana, because he had a direct quote that was very similar to what you were just saying. Really? That he believes there's certain thoughts that you achieve and states that you achieve on marijuana that are impossible to get to without it. I see.

Paraphrasing. Right, yeah. I mean, that's the basic idea. He was a heavy-duty pothead. As you can imagine, someone who's fucking staring at space all the time, like, man, this is crazy. Well, not everybody does, but- Using it from a different time where, you know, I mean, he's traveling in all these

circles with all these musicians and artists and all these different people, because he was not just an astronomer, he was also like a Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, a statesman of science. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Someone who's promoting it in a way. Yeah, yeah. And he did a brilliant job of doing that, obviously.

Yeah, totally. I was inspired by him. I mean, Neil obviously was. I was inspired by him too as a kid. Yeah. This idea of the wonder and the majesty of the cosmos as opposed to just sort of the test that you had to take in third grade on you know something that you're meant to memorize also

his elegant use of the language to describe it in a way that was so inspiring and so it was so moving the way he would describe the cosmos here it is the cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist, which I can achieve when high, sometimes carries over to when I'm down. I guess that's what they would call it back then, when I'm down. This is one of the many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time, I've been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered

that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. He also thought it dramatically helped improve his sex life, as he analytically explains here cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity the actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes from cannabis smoking and lastly he argues for outright legalization in light of these benefits the illegality of cannabis is outrageous an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and

dangerous world this is only one of many quotes that he's had on cannabis because this is not... Scroll up to the top of that. He had a whole essay on it. Yeah. There's a bunch of stuff. Yeah, so that was... Oh, he had a book called Marijuana Reconsidered. He did? An essay.

Oh, no, for a book he wrote in it. Oh, an essay in a book. Yeah. Okay, so it was someone else's book. Hold on, scroll back up. He called himself Mr. X. Oh, he wrote under a pseudonym. Interesting.

Huh. Huh. I mean, I agree with the conclusion about legalization. I'm not sure the argument there is the strongest one. What argument? Well, I don't know if Carl Sagan's sex life and his ability to hear art and music is the best argument for legalizing marijuana.

No, it's not the best argument, but it is an argument for... It makes a point for it, absolutely, yeah. ...for not just the use, but the is and makes a point for absolutely yeah for the not just the use but the enhancement of life through it yeah you know but the uh the other argument is it's uh it's it's something that we can control as a society as opposed to eliminate and if there is an option of that sort in general that's the right way to go well the war on drugs has been lost thankfully well part of it is like part of it yeah some of

it was misguided right it was a misguided war yeah i mean in fact i think new york just legalized if i'm not mistaken and i don't i i was wondering is that that retroactive? I mean, somebody who. It should be. Yeah, but is it? Yeah, no, it's not. There's a lot of people that are in jail for the rest of their lives for trafficking marijuana, which is incredible. Yeah. You know, and it should, look, it's just a plant, folks.

And it's not toxic and it doesn't kill anybody. And it's not even addictive. In very rare cases, there seems to be some people that purport some physical addiction to cannabis, but there's no real mechanism for it that's widely understood, like the mechanism for benzodiazepines being addictive or alcohol, whereas you get off of them, there's actually a real possibility you could die from withdrawal. There's nothing like that with marijuana. The addiction seems to be mostly psychological,

but again, the biological variability of people, like some people have weird reactions to stuff and some people may become actually physically addicted to marijuana, but it's super rare. And way more rare than a lot of things that we can buy readily everywhere all the time, whether it's cigarettes or prescription drugs. I mean, cigarettes are a great example.

It just doesn't make any sense. And I think now 12, 13 states, it's legal for that mistake. Yeah. Look, I'm an enthusiast. I love the stuff. It's heading in the right direction, I think. Yeah.

I don't. I don't. I mean, it happened in so long. Well, then maybe that's the problem, bro. Maybe we should just park one up. We should go to New York now. We should have a trip. It's legal in New York now?

Yeah. It is. Yeah, but you gotta fucking have a vaccine passport to go anywhere now. Wow. They're doing weird shit in new york that mario cuomo guy or uh andrew cuomo his son that guy jesus christ it's just these people it's it's amazing how people are exposed in their uh ability to navigate or not navigate the pandemic and like what it's done in terms of like different cities and how different places in the country have embraced freedom or embraced regulation and what

it's done yeah in terms of like the impact that it's had on the businesses and then in turn the economy and in turn people's lives and drug addiction but the thing to bear in mind too is everybody's situation is different that will impact impact their view. So, for instance, if I told you what we did, you'd probably think I was an extremist. We left New York City. We went up to the mountains and the Catskill Mountains. We cut ourselves off. But, you know, as I mentioned, I was with my 92-year-old mother. And I was with my son, who has an autoimmune issue.

Well, that sounds like a great thing, though. Right. That's what I'm saying. So one has to always gauge responses based upon circumstance. autoimmune issue well that sounds like a great thing though right that's what i'm saying so one has to always gauge responses yes for sure on circumstance that's not what my concern is my concern is government overreach yeah my concern is not personal decisions i think your personal decision was an excellent one yeah first of all i think if you can go to the catskills and live there like that's a good move period yeah i mean it's beautiful up there though my kids are

hankering to come back to civilization i'm sure yeah i'm sure but ultimately i think when they look back on that experience they're going to look back on it i think so i think so yeah you know uh my son already realizes that i mean the fact that you have a year to spend in an unusual circumstance where you rely on each other in a different way, when do you ever have that possibility? For instance, we never would eat dinner as a family. It would always be this chaotic thing in Manhattan. Everybody would just eat at their own moment.

We ate every meal together, and I cooked every meal for 350-some-odd or 70 days or something. Wow. So it was different. It was definitely different. So you got to expand your culinary skills i did absolutely number is everybody vegan the whole family vegan uh they're not but when i cook i cook vegan so they are deal with it they are eating vegan even though you know if they make their own meal and we had things in the refrigerator that are not vegan so right it's up to them yeah my family got together every night for movie night like we went through the entire adam sandler catalog in the

first couple months yeah we said we were gonna do that movie night somehow it like never fully happened it was great and i got to introduce my kids to movies that i saw you know that they had never like zohan which is one of my favorite movies i don't know that movie oh my god you never see that no oh my god it's one of Adam Sandler's greatest movies. Don't mess with the Zohan. It's fucking amazing. It's hilarious. We're going to have to watch that.

I think it's his best movie. Really? Other than Uncut Gems, which I think is fantastic, but in a completely different way. Uncut Gems is just this wild, chaotic movie that gives you anxiety. Did you see Uncut Gems? No, no. My son saw it. That's fairly recent, isn't it? Yeah, a couple years ago. It gives you anxiety. Did you see Uncut Gems? No, no. My son saw it. That's fairly recent, isn't it? Yeah, a couple years ago. It gives you anxiety.

You watch it going, Jesus! It's about a guy who's a hardcore gambling addict who, you know, I don't want to spoil it, but it's amazing. It's a really good movie, but it's so different than all of his other films, which are these like light-hearted, silly movies, but Don't Mess With the Zohan is fucking hilarious. All right. It's really funny. Going to check that out. Yeah, I'm a giant Adam Sandler fan. Because his movies are just silly.

They don't have some crazy message to them. There's no wokeness or no social responsibility. They're just madness. What about Jim Carrey? I love Jim Carrey. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I love especially some of the early stuff, you know. Dumb and Dumber?

Oh, yeah. It was great. Great. I heard the new one sucked, though. Did you see the new one? They got an Ace Ventura 3 in the works. Oh, really? Do they?

Oh, wow. I was two. Was two any good? Yeah. Winning Trickles? I never saw two. Yeah. Oh, that was recent.

No, no, no. I mean, not recent. Next to the original one. Oh, yeah. Close. Close to. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I never saw that. Dumb and Dumber 2 supposedly sucked, though, right? recent it was like no no i mean not recent next to the original one oh yeah close to yeah yeah yeah no i never saw that dumb and dumber 2 supposedly sucked though right correct well the opening was a good scene dumb and dumber 2 the catheter scene wasn't it how is that dumb and dumber 2 i have to maybe i'm getting my film i don't know but it was just interesting to

expose my kids to different things yeah Yeah, sure. But limited. The 10-year-old's not into anything scary. I have to be careful. Right. So their experience of the pandemic was fairly ordinary because they were going to school and you were here. Well, in the beginning they were not because we were in California and they were going to Zoom classes.

And then once we moved to Texas, this year has all been in school. And they both got COVID eventually. But mild? Very mild. Like one of them barely knew she had it. I was like, I want to get you checked. Because she had a headache. And I'm like, why do you have a headache?

Like, what's going on? And so because I have access to testing, I have access. I have a machine at my home. Oh, you do? And I have a machine here. Yeah, because when people come over the house to do work and stuff, I was like, testing, I have access. I have a machine at my home. Oh, you do? And I have a machine here. Yeah, because when people come over the house to do work and stuff, I was like, let's just test everybody. Because, you know, if you have someone coming over the house or someone doing things. And this way also, I knew like if my parents are going to come over, I want to make sure that everybody's, my wife's parents, make sure that, you know, everybody's okay.

So we tested her and like,ingo she had covid and then uh eventually my other daughter and my wife got it but i never got it and then but did you quarantine them at all did you change anything when that happened yeah i kept them yeah we quarantined them and made sure that uh we tested them up until the point where they were uh negative and then when they were negative we gave them three days of testing in a row to make sure that they're you know you want to make sure they're actually sure before you of course but it was quick i mean my my one daughter the first daughter she had a headache for a day and that was it yeah yeah i mean i don't think i've i've had it but the curious thing is i was in china in december and then in January, I suddenly got 104 fever. And I went to, you know, Columbia

Presbyterian Hospital. And they asked me, you know, where have you been? I said, China, they kind of freaked out. And they put me in an isolated room by myself. And this is when, you know, I had the backache. That was actually before our previous conversation. Did they even have COVID tests? They didn't have, they even have COVID tests then? They may have had the possibility to send a sample someplace else, but they didn't. Did you ever get tested for the antibodies? No, I have not.

My wife keeps telling me I should just out of curiosity. But that was like early January-ish. Shit, we could have tested you here. You got an antibody test? Yeah, we had an antibody test. The nurse would have tested you for that as well. I mean, the nurse who did the navel swab? Yeah. Oh still has antibodies he got coveted in october hey look at him strong james got strong antibodies in october okay yeah i mean it's amazing his antibodies are strong like you look it's a thick line because some of my friends who've had coveted their antibody tests

we've done it with them and their their antibodies are pretty low i see and they and without the the vaccine no vaccine yeah yeah no jamie's like fucking bulletproof with it he's got a thick fat line right antibodies for whatever reason and that's that's it's it varies so much you know depending upon the the individual yeah how was your wife's case not bad my wife has allergies and she gets these shots and that's what did her in. The shots always get her exhausted because she's allergic to fucking everything, like grass and horses and all kinds of shit. So she goes to an allergist to get shots, and it's radically improved her ability. But every time she goes, that day she's wrecked. She's like, ugh, because your body's overwhelmed.

that day she's wrecked she's like oh because your body's like overwhelmed with so your immune system is overwhelmed and that's what develops is the uh um resistance to these uh allergies but that night she started feeling like shit like but before that she worked out that day felt great and then we tested her the next day and she had it yeah but it's obviously it's you know it's dependent upon your health depending upon how much you exercise, what you eat, how well you take care of yourself, and then also what pre-existing conditions you have. Yeah, now it's going to be which variant, too. Yeah, that's what's weird is that this variant coming out of Brazil,

they're worried about. Apparently this variant coming out of Brazil is virulent. Yeah, so some people say we should consider it sort of a separate disease. I think we're going to probably deal with this shit every year from now on now. Yeah. But look, I mean, January of last year, they had the vaccine, right? I mean, isn't that an amazing thing? A few days after sequencing the virus, they were able to develop a vaccine.

So that, I mean mean it wasn't available right but now we have that knowledge presumably next go around the duration of time between identification and delivery will be much shorter yeah i would like them to really concentrate on i mean it would be really nice i know this is a time where no one wants to fat shame because everybody's worried about body positivity and letting people think they're okay no matter what you are but you're not your body when it's obese is much more likely to be susceptible to all sorts of ailments and 78 of the people hospitalized for covid were obese yeah i didn't know that number so it's a terrible number if you think about it that way that presumably you could have avoided 78% of the hospitalizations.

I mean, because it is a thing that a person can avoid. It is physically possible that you could not be obese. It's not something like you're born blind or you're born with leukemia. This is something that you, by virtue of your actions or your diet or your genetics, you're more predisposed to being heavy. It's unfortunate there's no emphasis on that, that all the emphasis was about stay inside, wear three masks, keep away from each other.

That's all well and good, but there should have been more emphasis on taking care of your body, taking care of your health, and it's just there was almost none. Almost none. The CDC didn't even have anything on their website about vitamin d until fairly recently is that true yeah yeah well until recently cdc was neutered yeah isn't that crazy yeah it's really crazy the former cdc director coming out and saying that it's more likely than not that this was a an accidental release of something that they were working on the wuhan lab and you know this is because of trump because the guy's such a polarizing figure yeah that

anything that he said everybody was like well fuck whatever he said you know like if that wasn't the narrative if he didn't have this you know constant desire to call it the china virus and the people didn't hate him so much people would have probably looked into that much more readily because i mean it's not out i mean you're talking about a level four lab that is in the same area where the breakout occurred and in that level four lab they work on wait for it coronaviruses you know and then newsweek now entertaining the idea and the cdc director former cdc director he comes out and says it's much more likely than not. Yeah.

It's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know anything about it. But all I can say is that as a scientist, the move from an era when nobody paid attention to facts or denigrated facts or denigrated expertise, at least moving in a direction where hopefully these facts and expertise actually matters, I think that's a vital move. It would be really nice if the facts only, and that's it, were what we discussed and expressed. Do you think that, is there enough funding for the type of research that you do for the type of things that you're interested in would would we be better off as a civilization if there was more money allocated to

the study of yeah absolutely i mean it's not as though the kind of science that we do is particularly expensive i mean those of us on the theoretical end of the universe don't need big equipment, but we do need students. We need the next generation. We need the postdocs and the graduate students. And now we find ourselves in like a zero-sum game where we're like, well, if we take that student, we can't take that one. Or if we take that student this year, then for the next two years, we can't take any other students. I mean, these are the kinds of calculations that literally are being done right now. And, you know, compared to the amount of funds that we spend, you know, I hate to frame it as a zero-sum game, but, you know, you divert some military funds to this kind of research.

They would never know the difference. And it would make an enormous difference to the ability of our kind of science to train the next upcoming generation. Yeah. So the answer is absolutely no, there's not enough funding. And it's a tragic situation because there are these brilliant young minds who want to pursue these kinds of ideas. And look, some will say, you know, some in government will say, well, look, that's all esoteric stuff, right? But those very same Congress people or senators, if they were in their position in the 1920s, I have little doubt they would have said the same thing about

quantum physics. It's just esoteric. It's just these guys and women who want to understand strange things about particles. But then 80 years later, quantum mechanics is driving a significant fraction of the economy, right? Quantum mechanics, as we're talking about, integrated circuits and all manner of electronic gadgetry. So it's incredibly short-sighted to not recognize that fundamental basic science is the engine of economic growth. That's not why I do it. I'm not that interested in economic growth.

I'm interested in the ideas and the insight. But put that all to the side. From a pure dollar and cents standpoint, it's a cheap investment for an incredible potential payoff. And we're being short-sighted by not funding it at the level that it should be funded. What do you think could enhance the public's perception of these things other than what you're doing, which is a great thing, by these speeches and going on podcasts like this one or by writing your books? What can we do to sort of allow people to understand the significance of this work and how it's really impaired by these decisions that you have to make to choose one student over another student or to be limited in the amount of students you could

accept. I mean, it's tough. I mean, certainly, as you're saying, you know, books and lectures, you know, television documentaries, I mean, all these things are really good for getting these ideas out into the public, into the culture, into the zeitgeist. But ultimately, you've got to catch kids at an early age because it's the kids at an early age who are open to these ideas without having to be convinced that they might be of interest. And it's only when they get to fourth or fifth or sixth grade that their attention starts to turn away from science,

which feels abstract and difficult, usually because of the way it's taught in the classroom. So one of the things that we do, I have this nonprofit, World Science Festival, it's all about creating experiences for kids and adults that allow them to immerse themselves in all of these ideas, from quantum mechanics to cosmology to nanoscience to personalized medicine, the whole gambit,

without it feeling like school. Right, make it exciting and fun. And without it feeling like it's all about assessment. So much of our educational system, I know this is an overgeneralization and all you teachers out there who are doing a great job, you know, fantastic, but it's so much of our educational system

is focused on assessment. I mean, my kids, so much of their learning of science and other subjects too, it's all about get to the next quiz, get to the next exam. And once they're through it, the material is gone. It's not there for the joy. It's not there for the wonder of it. where it's just so thrilling to learn about black holes and the Big Bang and quantum mechanics and entanglement and all the stuff that we were talking about, then I think you've got a chance that the next generation looks at science in a different way. Yeah.

Like, what do you think could be done to make it more exciting for kids? A documentary, for sure, is always a good one, because a really good documentary excites people in an entertaining way yeah and one that's structured well and it's got a good pacing to it that sort of stimulates people's fascination with the subject what do you think about i mean i don't know if you've done any work with this stuff but have you ever messed around with virtual reality so i was about to answer virtual reality before you said it so yeah so yeah, so we have a nice partnership, it turns out, with Verizon, who's, you know, they have this new 5G network. And they're trying to find ways to revolutionize things using that. And so we won a nationwide competition.

We're one of a handful of groups to create a virtual reality experience for middle school kids using the 5G network. So it's fast. There isn't latency in the system. And we created a virtual reality experience of planet formation and star formation. So the kids, you know, they put on the headset and they go in there. And they have these controllers where they can cause little dust particles and rocks to coalesce into a planet. And then they can try to shoot the planet into orbit. You have to have the right angle and the right speed,

or else it goes crashing into the star. And then they can accelerate the life cycle of the star using their controller and cause it to go supernova or turn into a black hole. So kids who go through this, it's a full-body experience of the cosmos. And so if you had a whole bunch of these experiences, this is just like a pilot experience. Imagine doing one of these for quantum mechanics.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to get to. You know, where you can sort of see the quantum entanglement and feel the quantum entanglement. Or imagine doing one for relativity, where you can experience time slowing down at high speeds or time slowing down to the edge of a black hole. slowing down at high speeds or time slowing down to the edge of a black hole then i think if that was an intrinsic part of the experience science would be taken in in like a visceral way and that's why we call this visceral science for that reason because it's a way in which science can kind of come into you not just through like studying but through experience. Yeah, that would be an amazing thing. How would you represent entanglement? Like, what visual representation of entanglement would you use, and how would you make it accurate? Because you're talking about something that we don't really, air quotes, see,

right? You're just measuring it. Sure, totally. I wish I had an answer for you, and that would be part of the development process, you know, to try to find a way. Because you can't literally represent it because, as you say, like the quantum probability wave is not something that we literally see. But there might be a way of representing it visually that would not be misleading and yet would give kids a sense of aha. That would not be misleading and yet would give kids a sense of aha. So that thing that I used to consider to be a particle as a dot, it actually has a spread out character from this probability wave. Now, those words would be hard to take in. They're abstract. But if you just saw the wave and it was represented in a vibrant manner, a kid might be able to take in the gist of the idea, not be able to do like calculations, but to take in the gist of the idea. And moreover, imagine you have kids that go into this system,

and it's a real well-developed system 20 years from now, say, and they do it from a really young age. They might develop a quantum intuition that you and I don't have. Like you were earlier asking me, so what's the intuition? Like how does entanglement work, you know, in a way that allows me to wrap my brain around it? Maybe you can't do it because your brain is too old. But maybe if you catch a young brain and they experience these weird ideas from the get-go, it may become part of their way of thinking of the world. And it may be much easier for them to visualize and get these ideas then without this kind of virtual reality experience so I think there's a huge potential in there there do you remember there was one of the things from what the bleep that a lot of

people took umbrage with was the dr. quantum yeah tune actually those were not bad not too too bad, right? Yeah. They kind of got it right in a way. Kind of got it right, yeah. But something like that that shows the weirdness of quantum reality or quantum physics. Yeah, yeah. And the thing that I thought was good about those two is, especially for the younger kid,

it put it in a bit more of a narrative. It wasn't just pedagogical. It was like this weird superhero character, I think is what it was. Dr. Quantum. Dr. Quantum or something. So I'm a great fan of putting scientific ideas in a narrative form.

Again, going back to evolutionary psychology, there are many reasons why we learn things better when they're framed in a story, because experience is story, and so we've gotten very good at extracting information from story-like experiences. So rather than abstractly teaching, you know, IH bar d psi dt equals minus d2 over dx squared psi plus v of x psi of x, rather than writing out the Schrodinger equation, this abstract piece of language, mathematics, if you can frame it in a narrative, if you can frame it in terms of how it was discovered, you can frame it in terms of maybe you follow the life cycle of an electron

governed by this equation, whatever, if you can put it into a story-like environment, kids and adults are going to get it more fully. into a story-like environment, kids and adults are going to get it more fully. What if you can take it and put it inside of a video game that's exciting to play? Yeah. So the lessons of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement and quantum physics inside some crazy video game

where you kind of have to understand what's going on in order to advance. Yeah, so you're speaking my language and you're taking away all my punchlines, which is really good. So right now we're working on a little video game where the player goes in, and they manipulate the speed of light, and they manipulate it by performing certain tasks. forming certain tasks. And to carry out the tasks, you have to get an intuition for special relativity, how the world behaves at high speeds, or in our case, as the speed of light gets lower, the relativistic effects become more manifest in the everyday world. So a game-like setting where you have to gain an intuition for the weirdness of physics, I think is a powerful combination. Yeah, that would be amazing if there was some sort of a way where you could

kind of give them these little hurdles that they have to solve in order to advance. Exactly. But make it surmountable. Yes, make it surmountable so it's not frustrating, but make it challenging enough and interesting enough that you try to get to that point. In some sort of a visual and exciting way. Yeah. And for instance, when you go near the speed of light, the world around you looks very different. It curves in on you. Buildings in a cityscape become compressed in one direction and angled in a different way. It's very weird. But if you then have a challenge that requires you

to have an intuition about that weirdness, like maybe firing a laser down a street but the street is now angled and curved because of the high speed you can imagine that you get a feel for it you get an intuition for it you know and and so again with this uh with the world science fest on verizon we're in the midst of building an experience of that sort and we'll see how well it does at giving folks a sense of these ideas in a game-like setting. I would imagine putting something like that together would be incredibly involving. It is.

Our journey is helped along by an earlier iteration of this idea that a group at MIT put together. I think it was called Slower Than the Speed of Light. It was a pretty rudimentary video game. How long ago was this? Maybe 10 years ago, I think. And so what we're doing is in a virtual reality environment, upping the experience. And in that way, I think that version, I mean, maybe the MIT folks, if they're listening, can chime in. I don't think it really caught on. But I think in a virtual reality setting where it's immersive it can be really really powerful that those things must be

incredibly difficult to code right like a virtual reality thing like what kind of a timeline are you on to do something like this well we created the version of planet formation and stellar formation, that was about one year, I guess it took. And how long is the experience? You can be in there, it branches out, so there's a lot of stuff that you can do, but a typical kid will be in there 20 minutes, 25 minutes. More than that, it can become sickening. I don't know how much virtual reality.

Yeah. I mean, I'm particularly sensitive to motion sickness. I get sick on like the Staten Island Ferry. And most of these things I'm pretty okay with. But after a while, you just start to feel uncomfortable. Is this it? Hey, there it is. Verizon Demo Day.

Well done. It's up there on the screen. Yeah, so. It's the best. Yeah, so this is from the perspective of a player. Wow. And that player goes, and again, of course, this is on a flat screen. Imagine you're in this 3D environment.

And using these controllers, you can grab hold of those little dust particles and rocks. You can use it to create a planet, as is happening right here. Wow. And so a protoplanet is forming, and ultimately the user will have that planet, and they then try to send the planet into orbit. You know, there we go. This is wild. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, and as the planet goes into orbit, it then sweeps up more debris as it grows larger and larger, gravitationally pulling in the other rocks and dust in its environment. So this is really our phase one version of this project. We are refining the visuals on this right now. And the black hole has formed.

There you see a black hole. And those are the other players? They're avatars, the other players. Yeah, exactly. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. This is cool. Yeah.

That's the way to do it yeah that's gonna get people excited about it yeah and we've we were supposed to roll this out in many schools but then the virus hit so it got put on hold but um at some point this will be in a lot of middle schools we rolled it out in cleveland a couple schools the kids love it you know um so there's a real real opportunity here to transform the way kids engage with these ideas that's really badass i love that you're doing that i think that's such a great way to do it to do it through virtual reality because virtual reality is so exciting as it is you know and to have it in some sort of a game form like that yeah you know and that this being

one of the first ones of those it could probably expand like if you can get it to the point where something like a fortnight game, you know what I mean? Something of that level of popularity. Yeah. That would be amazing. That would be transformational. Yes. To get to that point.

But it seems like it's not impossible. No, I agree. I agree. It is not impossible. One of the obstacles, of course, is that there's not a huge uptake on virtual reality equipment yet. That's starting to change as the prices come down. You know, the Quest, Quest 2, Oculus. Yeah, yeah.

You know, this was all done on a machine that would require a couple thousand dollars for you to invest in the computer and the headset. But all that will change, you know, in the not-too-distant future. But the other hurdle is you really do have to make sure that kids don't get sick. Like my wife, she has epilepsy. She had a brain tumor, and the end result was that she has epilepsy. And she went into one of, not this experience, but a different virtual reality experience.

And about a minute or two in, she started to have a seizure. So from the strobing, was it strobing? Not even the strobing. It was somehow that there was a mismatch between your movements in the real world and your movements in the virtual world. Because there was all sorts of stuff flying at her. This was an experience around like the rings of Saturn or something.

And it was the disparity between her sense of movement in the real world and her sense of movement in the virtual world. And she had to immediately get out of the headset and go sit down and get out of it. That's crazy. Yeah. Now, I was uncomfortable, but I wasn't sick in that experience. I had a friend whose wife couldn't look at a strobing image online. Yeah. If she saw something strobing online, all of a sudden, her brain would short circuit.

Well, my wife similarly will close her eyes if ever there is any strobing of that sort. That is so crazy. It was a tumor that they took the tumor out when she was 29 years old. So it was almost three decades ago. Wow. So she's fine, but there's this remnant effect. Or maybe she had this beforehand. No one knows cause and effect when it comes to this, but the bottom line is, yeah.

So for kids, you just have to be careful that you're not creating something that, you know. And that's the other thing that you have to be very mindful of. Maybe as virtual reality gets more and more involved or more and more accurate, it'll be less and less weird. You know, because like there's that thing that uncanny valley. Yes, of course. Yeah. With visualizations and so on. But the difference here is if you're not actually moving in the real world, but you are experiencing motion in the virtual world, that disparity.

For my wife, center into a seizure space, but for other people, it does make them feel sick. Right. So the challenge is to find a way. Because what you really want is you want to go into the virtual world and zip around. You want to go near the speed of light. You don't want to go to a black hole. But most of these systems, they have to be constructed

so that the environment appears around you as opposed to you zip into it and zip through it because of the feeling of nausea. What about some sort of a chair that appears to have the feedback where it makes it feel like you're actually going? There is a version of that one. And my wife did that one in a virtual reality setup that they had in California. And that worked okay for her.

I didn't want to get on it because, again, if I get sick on Staten Island Ferry, if I get in a chair and i'm on like a roller coaster forget about it you know i'm dead uh but but yes that that may ultimately help and and so yeah if you could somehow create a consonance between your sense of movement in both the real world and the virtual world then yeah i presume you'd be okay but look i mean i there was a there's a museum uh in Jersey, Liberty Science Center, and they have one of these devices, the spaceships that you go into, hydraulic motion and 3D visuals around you to give you a sense of, and as they're closing it up, they say, oh, by the

way, if anyone feels sick or panic, there's the escape button at the top. And it was all kids, and I was just in there with my kids. It closed up. It started to go. Immediately, I had hit the goddamn escape button, man, because I started to panic. I started to feel sick. And so I walk out of the thing. And there's a line of 100 kids waiting for the next ride, you know.

And I'm the sole person who walks out of the thing because I couldn't handle it, you know. That's hilarious. You know. There's a ride like that at Disneyland where it's a Star Wars ride. thing because I couldn't handle it. That's hilarious. There's a ride like that at Disneyland where it's a Star Wars ride. Yeah, I think it's a similar thing. Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's really fun. There's actually a new one where you're in the Millennium Falcon. I think this was the Millennium Falcon, actually.

That's the newer one. There's an older one called Star Tours that's been around for a few years. And then the new one is in, you know, they have a whole section of Disneyland that's all Star Wars experience that they spent fucking billions of dollars on. It's really incredible. But the Millennium Falcon ride is incredible. And I used to be able to do it. I mean, 20 years ago, I went to Universal Studios.

I don't know if they still have a theme park down there. It was near Disney. And I went on a Back to the Future ride. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is a Millennium Falcon. Is that the same thing? No. Is that different? The Back to the Future is a back to the future ride yeah yeah yeah so that is a millennium falcon is that the same thing no is that different the back to future oh that's star wars i'm getting all mixed up but anyway so i went on that and i loved it it was spectacular but somehow i've changed oh no yeah i can't i can't i got it i freaked out i totally freaked out i mean my heart started like palpitating And I was like, Brian, hang on.

Like for the kids, just hang on. I was like, I can't do it. I can't do it. Boom, I hit the escape hatch. Wow, that sucks. That sucks. Yeah. Well, listen, Brian, I really appreciate you coming in here.

It's my pleasure. And I appreciate your work. And you're an amazing communicator of science. I really think it's awesome the way you describe things. You make it very accessible, and it's really fun. Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the conversation. And your book is out right now paperback tell everybody until the end of time mind matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe did you do the audiobook as well i did the audiobook oh that's so important i hate when actors yeah do other people's stuff yeah thank you thank you brian appreciate you man thank you bye

everybody Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Appreciate you, man. Thank you. Bye, everybody. you