The One You Feed - What If You’re Wrong? How Uncertainty Makes Us More Human with William Egginton

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

In this episode, William Egginton invites you to ask the question, “What if you’re wrong?” as he explains how being uncertain makes us more human. William explores the surprising overlap between a physicist, a philosopher, and a poet—each of whom came to the same unsettling truth: that we mistake our model of reality for reality itself. But this isn’t just about subatomic particles or dusty old philosophy books. It’s about how certainty—especially in our relationships—can blind us. What if embracing uncertainty is actually the doorway to wisdom, compassion, and a more connected life? Key Takeaways: Exploration of the intersections between philosophy, literature, and quantum physics. Discussion of the nature of reality and the limitations of human knowledge. Examination of biases and their impact on perception and understanding. Importance of interpretation in both science and philosophy. Relational understanding of identity and its formation through interactions. Analysis of free will versus determinism and its philosophical implications. Concept of “degrees of freedom” in understanding human agency. Implications of quantum mechanics on our understanding of reality. If you enjoyed this conversation with William Egginton, check out these other episodes: How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag Unsafe Thinking with Jonah Sachs For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

we shouldn't be surprised that stories can help us interpret the mathematical explanations of the physical world that are at the basis of physics. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. You know those moments when you're absolutely certain? You know why your partner did something that is driving you crazy? What if quantum physics proves you can't be that certain about anything? Today philosopher William Egginton joins me to discuss his book, The Rigor of Angels,

where a physicist, a philosopher, and a storyteller all stumbled upon the same unsettling truth. We mistake our model of reality for reality itself. What really stuck with me in this conversation is how quantum mechanics doesn't just challenge what we know about particles, it challenges what we think we know about ourselves and each other. And as it turns out, learning to live with that uncertainty might just be the key to feeding the good wolf within us. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. This episode, Lizzo opens up like never before

about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to Lizzo! Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The number one hit podcast, The Girlfriends, is back with something new,

The Girlfriends Spotlight, where each week you'll hear women share their stories of triumph over adversity. You'll meet June, who founded an all-female rock band in the 1960s. I might as well have said, we're going to walk on the moon. But she showed them who's boss. They would rush up and say, not bad for chicks. Come and join our girl gang. Listen to The Girlfriend Spotlight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not telling you, I'm not telling you, I'm not telling you, I'm not telling you, I'm not telling you. Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch. Or if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? Am I going and she's eating my lunch? Or if hypnotism is real? We will use this suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control.

But what's inside a black hole? Black holes could be a consequence of the way that we understand the universe. Well, we have answers for you in the new iHeart original podcast, Science Stuff. Join me or Hitcham as we answer questions about animals, space, our brains, and our bodies. So give yourself permission to be a science geek and listen to Science Stuff on the iHeartVideo app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Bill. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. It's good to be here.

I'm excited to have you on because we're going to be discussing your book, which is called The Rigor of Angels, Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and The Ultimate Nature of Reality, which is pretty heady stuff for the one you feed, but I'm pretty certain we're still going to make a great conversation out of it. But before we start, I'd like to start by asking you about the parable that we use. And the parable goes like this. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and

bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. The beautiful parable, and I'll honestly tell you,

I had not heard it before, but I find it very meaningful. It resonates with some of the biggest philosophical influences for me. In particular, psychoanalysis, Freud, this idea that we have that the self is not unitary, that the self is divided. And some of the ideas that I work through in The Rigor of Angels is not only is it not unitary,

but that we are down at the deepest core of ourselves relational. And without those relations, we wouldn't even be a self in the first place. So often we have in what we call Western metaphysics, this idea of at the core of ourselves, some kind of a unified identity that then fights its way out into the world. And you can think about Descartes, this idea of a thinking substance that works its way out and influences the world of things, of extended substances in the world. And what your parable and my reference to psychoanalysis tries to remind us all the

time is that that thinking substance isn't a substance, it's not a one thing. It's a set of relations at all times and that it can never really be closed and become one. I also like the side of the parable where the child is asking which side wins because really we are always struggling. The great French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the last interview or one of the last interviews he gave with Le Monde actually gave its title, Je suis en guerre contre moi-même, I'm at war with myself. And I do find we are often at our heart and some sort of an expression of a struggle,

struggle between impulses, struggle of which of ourselves is gonna win out in the end. And I love the fact that that's where your title, your podcast comes from. That's a great and beautiful response. And I'm tempted to dive right into the deep end of the pool there around what the nature of the self, but I'm gonna resist, but we're gonna get there.

I wanna start though, by talking a little bit about your book. And in your book, you are bringing together three different thinkers. Tell us about who the three different thinkers are. Yeah. So the book really is sort of a braided, if you will, intellectual biography of three extremely important people to me. The Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose life spanned the 20th century, his almost exact contemporary, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who first was the main force behind the invention of quantum mechanics, and the 18th, early 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who's in some ways the most important

figure of modern European philosophy, just because of the number of areas that he touched. And you know, the story behind this book was an idea, if you will, that all of these three great thinkers from three radically different fields, philosophy, poetry and literature, and quantum physics, so the hardest physics of the natural world, all converge upon this idea that when we are trying to understand the world, what we're trying to truly understand is a model of the world that we make ourselves as humans, and that we can be led astray by the belief, and yet it's a core belief that returns over and over again, that in fact,

we're not understanding some image we make of, that in fact, we're not understanding some image we make of the world as humans, we're understanding the world itself. And as simple a mistake as that seems, it can have enormous consequences. You say in the book that this book is in many ways a cautionary tale about the danger of assuming that reality must conform to the image we construct of it and the damage that our fidelity to such a seductive ideal can wreak. So I wanted to just make sure we put a fine point on what this danger is and you say elsewhere that these three thinkers shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to

think they knew God's secret plan. So talk to me about what you mean when you say our attempts to understand actual reality and the limits to our knowledge. Absolutely. So I like the idea of cautionary tale. I think I got that ultimately from Borges since he's a tale teller. And I, after years and years of reading, began to realize that there was a common theme to many of Borges' stories. And that common theme was a searcher is out trying to find some sort of an ultimate answer. And he's tempted by this ultimate answer, drawn towards it.

And then ultimately either falters in that quest or in fact thinks he, it's often he succeeds in that quest but that success leads to the destruction of himself, the destruction of the world. And what Borges is trying to show us over and over again is that knowledge is inherently faulty. Knowledge of the world is inherently limited. The shortest parables, since we started this show

with a parable, is a beautiful, he has also parables, he has a beautiful one called the parable of the palace that I sometimes cite, but this one is just called a rigor in science. I have a recording, in fact, it takes him 55 seconds in his old age and his faltering, slightly wheezy voice to read this story. And it just tells of an emperor who has control over an entire realm and sends out his cartographers to map the realm. And the first time they come back with an enormous map, say the size of a small city, and he says, it's a good map, but it's just not accurate enough. So he sends them out again. And then they come back with a much bigger map, and this covers the size of a state in his realm. And he says, this is really a much better map,

but it's still not as accurate as I want. And when they come back the third time, they come with a map that point for point corresponds in actual size to the realm itself. And then Borges finishes the tale by saying the map and in fact the realm itself are nothing but the dusty remnants that blow across the desert of what was.

So the idea that knowledge, what we're seeking of the world can't be perfect because if it's perfect, it's as useless as a map that corresponds point for point and actual size to the realm that it's supposed to be mapping. The old days we used to go on road trips and carry paper maps. Well, imagine you're doing a road trip

at the United States, but your paper map is the size of the United States. Not very helpful. It's completely debilitating in every possible way. Yeah. How does that tie to, or does it tie at all to what we're starting to see in the world today, which is that information has become in many ways almost infinite to us. The number of things that we can, I'm going to use this word loosely, know is

almost infinite. And it sounds a little bit like what you're saying, because I think at a certain point, all this information that we keep absorbing and consuming is a useless map at a certain point. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it, because Borges is just such a great author to think through these issues with. And I'm far from the first one to make this comparison, but he had this story, the Library of Babel, which is, again, it's a kind of a parable, but it's a parable about

information. And the idea of the Library of Babel sets up a scenario in which every possible book exists in the library and only one copy of every possible book exists. And every possible book is the result of a generative mechanism that involves the 22, in the case of the Spanish language, letters of the Spanish language, and a certain number of constraints, how many shelves in the library, in each room of the library, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. But the idea there is you can imagine a scenario in which a very limited set of signs conspire with each other, mix with each other, intermingle with each other to create every possible word, every possible meaning, every possible story we've ever told. But of course, within all of that maze, and it's inconceivably large, and I

talk about the size of this library in the book, truly inconceivably large to give you a sense. Our actual known universe would be about the size of a proton in comparison with the universe that Borges imagines, but it's not infinite. So it's this absurdly large maze of rooms upon rooms upon rooms filled with books. You can actually find in theory every meaningful sentence ever created by the history of humanity, conceivably in every possible language as well. But the chances of any one person finding a book that from beginning to end makes any sense whatsoever are calculable at zero, because the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the books will

be jumbles of science that don't mean anything at all. And I think in some ways, you know, as I said, I'm not the first to say this, but the world of information of just raw data that's out there and available and that we comb through on a daily basis is in some ways like that library. It's just jumbles upon jumbles of, I don't even want to call it information. That's what we distinguish, right, between information, which has applicability and utility and data, which is this sort of empty mess. But we're surrounded by profits, by interpreters who take it upon themselves to point the way to us or point out what in this jumble should be paid attention to, what

is meaningful. And of course, those profits more often than not now are in fact algorithms that are programmed to be the profits that guide us towards certain sets of data and identifies this as information and hence useful to us. But under which definition and as determined by whom, usually by corporations who are intending to get profit out of our following that way. And I think that's exactly right, that we are being guided at all times. And the reigning ideology behind this is that we're touching ground on something real when

the vast, vast majority of the time, we're not touching reality at all. What we're touching is someone's take on reality, someone's interpretation of reality. I think that go back to this cautionary tale that I'm describing the book as. This is also a cautionary tale about that. It's about our relationship to and our belief in our faith in all of the different stories that are coming our way across these screens on a minute by minute, second by second basis. That parable ties in perfectly. I love that you've given two sort of parables slash stories so far.

Let's go a little bit deeper here into what all three of them sort of intuited and Heisenberg more or less sort of proved on a level, right? Is that there is a limit to our knowledge, limit to human perception. So talk to me a little bit about the limits to our knowledge and how is quantum physics showing us that there are limits to that?

Absolutely. So Heisenberg did a lot of great science in his life, but he was respectively 24 going on 25 and 27 when he made his two greatest discoveries and those discoveries are intimately linked. That blows me away, by the way, that a 25-year-old did that. It just doesn't make sense. No, it's extraordinary. And as I make, you know, pains to point out in the book, he was not just a wunderkind in math and science, which he absolutely was, but he was well-read, could have been a concert pianist, incredible abilities in music and in language.

His father was a professor of Greek, so he could read philosophical classics as the original Greek. Well, so he's, you know, and Einstein, which is who is another great character in the book, you know, these were what we would call as well great humanists, right? And you know, they play interesting, I think, roles in this book and in history as being at odds around this fundamental philosophical question and obviously I come down hard on the side of Heisenberg, but there's no lack of just adoration and respect on my part for everything that Einstein did. And you make the point with Einstein that although he may have been perhaps on the wrong

side of the debate, his insight into the questions to ask moved the whole field forward. He was still a genius in the way he thought through these questions and the challenges that he posed. That's exactly right. No one could formulate a thought experiment with more clarity than Einstein. And he would do so to poke holes in what was emerging as the consensus around what ultimately then is proven

over the century of science since then to be the case, which is the weirdness of the quantum world. But his attempts to poke holes in it, use of these thought experiments, in fact, as you just said, very correctly drove the whole enterprise forward in a way that perhaps it never could have gotten without his constant provocations. So he played an enormous role in this. He was born at the beginning of the century, Eisenberg was. And so respectively in 1925 and 1927, the papers that he published, what they respectively did was on the one hand show that every attempt to extract knowledge from the world involved an active intrusion on the

world and the part of the knower in a way that registered itself in the events that were being measured and that this could be mathematically shown. And in fact, what he had to come up with was for him a new kind of mathematics. It turned out that the mathematics actually existed, we call it linear algebra, but he created matrix mechanics. And one of the mathematical curiosities is unlike in the normal algebra or normal arithmetic that we learn of addition, for example, and multiplication, which have a property that's known in math is commuting. These are commutative operations. What that means is that whatever you do in

one direction, you can reverse and do it in the other direction. In matrix mechanics, multiplication does not commute. It means that A times B does not equal B times A, which is mathematically weird. But to very quickly translate this into the philosophical point that's at hand, what it also means is that if your first operation A and your second one B has to do with a measurement of either, for example, position or momentum of a particle, what you choose to begin with actually affects the outcome that you're going to have. And this is extremely important because it means that the choice of the observer affects the outcome of, and this could be as simple a choice as which operation am I going to measure first, right, is going to have an indelible outcome, angewissheit, or ungenauigkeit.

So unblurriness, indeterminacy, and ultimately uncertainty, which is how it's translated in the common parlance, becomes the uncertainty principle. And there, he actually comes up with a number, basically. And that number is essentially the distance that we can drill down into reality, the closeness that we can get to measuring something before we lose all control on it. It's an equation that actually Paul Dirac derived from all of this complex mechanics, but I like to put it up on a board

when I'm giving talks about it and call it Heisenberg's poem. And he does one of the 1925 theory. But Heisenberg's poem, The Uncertainty Principle, is written out in an equation. And I like to think about it as a kind of pivot. What it does is it takes two values, which is the difference in your measurement of momentum and the difference in your measurement of position. And it says if you reduce the differences down to zero, which would be in essence knowing exactly where something is or knowing exactly how fast something is going, and you multiply them together, you're not going to get zero. That's a very strange thing in mathematics, again, because as we know from high school

math or from junior high school math, anything multiplied by zero should be zero. You can in fact, in this new mathematics that's required by the universes discovered by Heisenberg, you can reduce the difference in positions in theory of where a particle is to zero. And what you're gonna have on the other side of the equation when you multiply it by the difference in measurements of momentum is a number that as long as there's a positive value

on one side or the other is always very, very small, which is why we don't see it in normal measurements. But if you reduce your difference to zero on the part of the position, which means you know with exactitude, hyper-exactitude, absolute reality where something is, you now know absolutely nothing about its momentum and vice versa. If you know exactly with absolute precision how fast something is going, you have no idea where it is. It could be literally anywhere in the universe. And what this means is that the vast majority of the time we know roughly where things are

and how fast they're going, but it is actually physically impossible to know exactly how fast they're going and also know where they are or know exactly where they are and how fast they're going. And again, it's something that we don't usually run into because we live in this macroscopic world in which we don't need to know reality exactly. But, this gets back to the parable from Borges, what Heisenberg showed, as you pointed out, with scientific exactitude of its own

is where the limit is, how close we can get to reality. No matter how precise our instruments are, we're ultimately not going to get a picture that gets those deltas, those changes down to zero, because then we'll ultimately know nothing. Or to go back to the parable of the map, the map that's absolutely perfect will ultimately not be a map at all. It won't show us anything. So if we, at a fundamental level, can't understand, we can only get so accurate in our view of what reality actually is. This is what Heisenberg is showing. Borges is telling us that through some parables. And then Kant is sort of bringing this together from a philosophical

from a philosophical position. And ultimately, where I want to tie this back to the sort of work that we do here at The One You Feed, is this idea that, you know, you're talking about the cautionary tale of when we assume we know what reality is, and what that does to our science, right? In our day-to-day life though, I think the same principle applies, which is when we think we are seeing reality as it is, we are in trouble very often, I think. We're likely to wander into some trouble, right? If I go home and I assume that I know exactly why my partner did a certain thing,

yes, yes. I'm in danger of really messing things up. And so talk to me a little bit about this idea that we're always seeing everything through some perspective. That's exactly right. That perspective or that filter that we carry around with us necessarily carries biases with it. We're going to try to do our best

to diminish those biases. But the absolute certain way of not diminishing biases, but rather buying into them completely is to think that you don't have any. To assume that your knowledge, take the example that you were giving, what another person is thinking or feeling your interpretation in a moment of conflict with them nails it. You got it right. There's no more room for questioning. I know exactly what this person's intention was or something like that. Yeah. Right. And so Kant's view of the world was we're always going to be tempted to think

of the world this way and that we need to have, in fact, this is why he called his philosophy on the great three volumes that form the core of it, the critical philosophy. And they consist of three critique of pure reason, of practical reason, and of the power of judgment. These critiques are all about trying to find, you know, 100 years ahead of the fact or a little bit more of 100 years ahead of the fact that version in moral philosophy, in scientific philosophy, philosophy of the real, in aesthetics, that version of what Heisenberg will ultimately run into as this kind of limit of what human reason can do,

the limit of our ability to know the world. And Kant's, in a similar way to Borges, is realizing through kind of pure thought, thinking his way through these problems as opposed to wrestling with turning into equations the result of observations of nature, he's going to realize that yes, those limits are there, but also those limits are fundamentally necessary to being the kind of creature that we are.

So the kind of creature that we are is a creature that is dialogic, that is in relationship with other creatures, that's trying to know the world, albeit imperfectly, and trying to make the best decisions possible in the world, albeit imperfectly, and trying to make the best decisions possible in the world. And one of the surefire ways of mistaking the world, of getting it wrong, of falling into error, or even more dangerous than error for fanaticism, fundamentalism, is precisely to make that category mistake where we think that our knowledge isn't a picture, isn't through a filter, isn't through a mirror darkly, but rather is the world itself. We're always tempted by that. And at the same time, most

likely to be led astray when we fall to that temptation. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl, and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan.

I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like you kill somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story.

This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Terror flip flash is real, folks. And rapidly changing economic policies, they affect all of us to one degree or another. Trump 1.0, so that was more tariff talk. Now we are experiencing the widespread tariff action. Totally scattershot, totally random.

The theory, Matt, I think is that we're trading short-term pain for long-term gain. That's the tariff theory, at least. But I have a hard time envisioning the long-game rosy outcomes if these policy priorities kind of continue. It can be hard to know how to react to news of accelerating layoffs, increasing stock market volatility. That's why the How to Money podcast exists. We cut through the hype to give you crucial information that can help you to achieve your

money goals, no matter what is going on in the world. Yeah, it's our goal to help you make wise money choices that will allow you to build wealth over time and reduce anxiety levels so you can sleep well at night. How to Money comes out three times a week, but our Friday Flight episodes speak directly to what's happening in the financial news so you can digest this week's headlines without freaking out. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, all the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me and that disconnect is depressing. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for.

The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What we know about cognitive biases is that just knowing about them doesn't necessarily make them go away. And I hear that argument, and I believe it. And yet I'm convinced it's still better to know about them than not. I teach about perspective a lot. And one of the things I teach is you can't not have a perspective. Don't expect that you're going to come from a completely unbiased perspective. It's not possible. So if

we just start there, which is just, then we can open ourselves up to maybe I don't know the answer, you know? And a question that I love is, you know, kind of what am I making this mean? And what else could it mean? Like that question. And I think you can take that at a what's happening with my partner, or you could take that down to the core scientific level, right? Like even when you get to quantum mechanics, there are people who are interpreting what all this means. And I think that the math ends up being sort of undisputed, but the question of what it means has been disputed for a long time.

That's so important to point out. Stephen Hawking very famously said at one point, we don't really need philosophy anymore because we have, you know, fundamental physics and the answer to the world are all in physics. And as my friend and one of my influences in terms of my understanding of the physical world, the great Italian cosmologist and physicist Carlo Rovelli once wrote about that is the problem with that point is that Hawking wasn't making a scientific point. He was making a philosophical point.

Right. So he's entered the world of interpretation already. Philosophy is the world of interpretation.. Philosophy is the world of interpretation, literature is the world of interpretation, and yes, scientists interpret the world. Einstein was entering into the world of interpretation when he was dialoguing and debating with Heisenberg and those of the School of Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics about what their discoveries meant, how best to understand their discoveries. There's something along the lines of seven sort of dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics

that are out there today. You know, there's no final decision, right? These are all pictures of the world that try to make sense of what is ultimately a very difficult picture of the world to make sense of. And one of the sort of points that I'm trying to make in this book is you can be a scientist, you can be a physicist and have these interpretations, or you can be a non-scientist who's done his best to understand the mathematics and the physics behind it and learn from my fellow intellectuals and physicists about how to understand it, and then use, for example, philosophical perspectives or even literature and stories

to come up with and to reason your way to one or another interpretation. We shouldn't be surprised that this is the case, considering that the greatest physicists, in particular, Einstein, use stories to come to the truths that they discovered about the physical world in the first place, right? So Einstein famously told himself stories in order to understand, to have the breakthrough that led to relativity, especially 1905 paper, special relativity and then general relativity.

In 1915, his happiest thought was what became known as the equivalence between gravity and acceleration occurred to him when he thought about a story, which is he put into his mind an image of a person in an elevator-like box or chest being accelerated at a constant rate through space outside of a gravitational field and realized that for their perception, there would be no distinction between that and being in a gravitational field. And he did some very similar work

to lead to his breakthroughs with special relativity. So we shouldn't be surprised that stories can help us interpret the mathematical explanations of the physical world that are at the basis of physics. Yep. As I was reading, I couldn't help but think about how all this ties to areas that I've probably done the most study, which is Zen Buddhism and basically what happened when Taoism met Buddhism, right? That Zen emerged out of that. And these same insights are all the way back in those traditions. And largely, the way those conclusions were reached was by people trying to very much, this is me paraphrasing, but slow down the processes of the mind enough through meditation to apprehend things in a slightly different way. And I would say Taoism in particular, which then went on to influence Zen, has this idea at the core of it that our field of experience

is always construed from one perspective or another. As I've heard someone say about Taoism before, and I just love this line, there is no view from nowhere. And I just love the fact that we can sort of tie those things in as well. And I think that in Zen, there's also an idea of emptiness, right? And emptiness, as we hear it in the West, we think it means nothingness, but it more means that everything exists in relation

to something else, to everything else. And this is what you mentioned when you just mentioned Carlo Rovelli, who I believe his interpretation of quantum physics is called relational. And so let's talk about this idea that everything only exists in relation to something else. That's right, and this idea, we can tie that back

to the one that you just mentioned, that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. I mean, one of the whole sections, in fact, the book, The Rigor of Angels, is divided into four sections, and each of those sections is based on one of the four fundamental ways that we can get things wrong by overstepping the bounds of reason according to Kant. I give them different names. These are called antinomies in his work.

But one of those, the way my interpretation of it for the sake of this book is called the question or the imperative not being God. So one way of thinking about this is that we have an idea that there is a way the world is in and of itself and it exists kind of as if it were an object that could be seen by an all-knowing, all-seeing being. But that implies an outside to everything. And there is no such thing as an outside to everything. The universe is everything, so there is no outside to it, which means that any of us at any time

can only ever be positioned within the universe. And that also means in relationship to other beings in the universe. So the idea that somehow there is a self that is meaningful, that is consistent, that is self-contained, and then enters into relationships to other selves and then develops out of that, if you think about that very meaningful, that is consistent, that is self-contained, and then enters into relationships to other selves and then develops out of that. If you think about that very carefully, that implies that if you took all of those other things away and imagined just nothing, you could still have that self, that entity.

But the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics that I fully buy into, and that is Rovelli's's actually denies that. It says if you accept the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, everything results from what is at core a relation. So a measurement is a relation, an observation is a relation. It always involves coming together of things, but the things that are coming together don't precede in any logical or chronological sense the coming together, because that would imply that there is such a thing as a view from nowhere, a view from outside. But since there isn't, since all there is is this network of relations, that is why

at core there are relations rather than things. And this in fact, despite Einstein's resistance to accepting it, this is highly compatible with his theory of relativity, which says the same about velocity and time and simultaneity that there's no such thing as God's clock that's ticking away in the background. Olive Newton that tells us that no matter when you see it

or how long the information took to get to you and someone else that there was a time when this event took place. No, relativity says there's only time as measured by you in a particular inertial framework in relation to whatever was happening. And the same thing with gravity and with, as I say, the biggest question of where the universe is. The great poet Dante's words, it has no other where than here, and his here was the eternal mind, the mind of God. But the here there is that the universe holds itself, it contains itself. There is no outside from which to look at the universe as if it were some object and say and measure it and weigh it against

something else. You are only ever in. It against something else, you are only ever in. It is an outside that you are only ever in itself. There is no outside to it. And this is exactly what general relativity allows, in fact demands, which is that there's no framework from which to measure everything in the universe and say, and everything else exists or is measurable with regard to this. There's no standard perfect framework that's itself immobile. Every measurement everywhere, including of acceleration, including of gravity, always is in relationship to other things. So again, it's the same thing as with that one particle. If you took away everything else in the universe, we can't even say that the particle

exists. The same thing with this wonderful thought experiment, which is Newton's bucket, where Newton imagined a bucket of water spinning. And if we spin a bucket, we know that the water is going to glide up the sides because of centrifugal force. And then Newton asked this really excellent question, which was, well, what happens if that bucket is just spinning in the middle of nothing? How does the bucket know that it's spinning? And his answer was, because it spins in relationship to absolute space. And so yes, it will feel it. And Einstein's answer was the exact opposite, which was Einstein said, no, it spins in relationship to everything else in the universe.

So if there is no everything else in the universe, it's not going to feel it. It's not going to know it. And there is no such thing as spinning if there's no other object to spin against. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there. You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this.

And I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news, you can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at whenufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. I think that we can take this really small and then kind of back up to the everyday level. On the really small level you sort of just addressed it but when

you get down to a small enough you you know, level, the quantum level, one of the implications of quantum mechanics is, as you said, until you measure the thing, in a sense, it's not quite there, which makes no sense. But yet again, seems to be the truth. And that measurement, as you said, is a relation. You know, we talk a lot in the quantum world about an observer. And again, an observer observing something creates a relationship between those things. And then we can sort of jump all the way kind of back up to the day-to-day level with this and realize that we often think that we or let's just go back to a discussion with

me and my partner. I think that I bring who I am to those discussions and I think she brings who she is to those discussions. But the reality is we are a certain way in relation to each other. I relate to you differently than I relate to her. It's not saying I'm fake, that I have like multiple faces. It's just a simple fact that the relationship between you and me is a different thing than my relationship between me and her. But we often don't take that into account. We think that what we see from someone is who they are, without realizing that who they are in that moment is partially because of who we are. Yeah, you've said it very beautifully and I think that it

is very legitimate to make this comparison between the quantum level and the relational level at the human level as well despite the fact that one is as macroscopic as you can get the other is as microscopic as you can get. Heisenberg had a very famous sentence in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli as he was working out the uncertainty principle. And he said basically the result of this is the following, the path that a particle, in this case an electron, takes doesn't exist until we measure it. And that's a revolutionary statement.

And that's precisely the statement that for the rest of his life, Einstein couldn't accept. Just think about it a little bit. What is a path? What is the path that something takes? It only exists over time, right? And it only exists from some kind of a perspective. So a path without a measurement, it's an empty category.

It's a nonsensical thing. So anything that has a path, it's a connection, if you will, of dots through space-time, of moments or, all right, that then retrospectively, necessarily retroactively connects certain dots. Heisenberg figured that out, right? Heisenberg's figured out the mathematics of it, but he also figured out in some ways the philosophy of it. And he said, we're always applying some kind of a theory, a bias of the world in order to

decide in advance what kind of a path, what kind of an entity we're producing after the fact. So, your connection to who we are when we're in a relationship with another person is exactly the same. What is a personality? Personality has potentially some consistency, but it's only consistency that, if you will, is constructed among the various relationships that we are in. Now, they're very complex. They last over a long period of time. We have many different manifestations that go back from our youngest ages, our earliest memories, our earliest encounters with other human beings, with other places and things. But that infinite, intricate and complicated network over space-time that we then ultimately

call a personality, the hubris to then think that this is just some sort of a self-contained pure essence that then expresses itself different over time. I think that's in a some sort of a self-contained pure essence that then expresses itself differently over time. I think that's in a way part of the problem. We have to recognize that no, we actually are constantly constructing it and having it constructed for us by all of these infinitely complex web of relations that constitute us over time and in our lives. So let me ask you a question about that in relation to psychoanalysis. Because on one hand, psychoanalysis is, like you're saying, it's making the point that we are not unitary, right? There's a lot of stuff going on. And yet, it tends to sort of make a story out of something. You're this way because of this thing, right?

Freud famously kicked us off by telling us all these that we now know are kind of crazy theories that like we're this way because we have penis envy or we're this way because we have whatever, right? And it's often seemed to me that at a certain point in my life, I think recognizing and making stories out of how what happened in my childhood turned me into who I am could be useful. But I also at a certain point started really wrestling with this idea that you're talking about, which is that I am made up of countless causes and conditions. And to say that I'm this way because my father was that way is in many ways a vast oversimplification of a lot of variables that we don't know.

And so I'm just curious how you think about that and psychoanalysis because I kind of go back and forth with my feelings about it as an approach. 100%. There's no question that the idea that somehow our identities are set in stone at an early age, I think, is highly problematic. I think also it's very likely that certain relationships early on have a kind of precedence that may set us in a certain way. But the idea that we overcome, that we can't change, that we are in fact not in fact changing all the time is also ultimately wrong. I think that new relationships can overcome old relationships. They can build on or change or transform the imprint of early relationships at the same time. Freud, I think, was a visionary, but also Freud had his own limitations like any human who invents a theory.

And those theories are always subject to revision. I'm more influenced by a post-Freudian psychoanalyst, a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Lacan. But then he himself, you know, when I read Lacan's writings, which are famously difficult and themselves intentionally, I would say, subject to necessary interpretation, you know, My version of it is gonna be slightly, or in some cases very different from interpretation of others, and there's no question that my interpretation of this particular kind of psychoanalytic philosophy is itself gonna be subject to the variety

of relationships that have created me as the interpreter and reader and thinker that I am. So yeah, I do believe there's primordial relationships and experiences that are going to perhaps be more formative than others. I don't have an absolute leveling of formative experiences and relationships, but I also believe that there's a good deal of change and fungibility that happens over time. We talk about plasticity in neuroscience as well, right? That the brain is an extraordinarily plastic and changing and evolving organ as all of our embodied attributes.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl, and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan.

I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their

friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Terrorflip flash is real, folks. And rapidly changing economic policies, they affect all of us to one degree or another. Trump 1.0, so that was more tariff talk.

Now we are experiencing the widespread tariff action. Totally scattershot, totally random. The theory, Matt, I think is that we're trading short-term pain for long-term gain. That's the tariff theory, at least. But I have a hard time envisioning the long-game rosy outcomes if these policy priorities kind of continue. It can be hard to know how to react to news of accelerating layoffs,

increasing stock market volatility. That's why the How to Money podcast exists. We cut through the hype to give you crucial information that can help you to achieve your money goals no matter what is going on in the world. Yeah, it's our goal to help you make wise money choices that will allow you to build wealth over time and reduce anxiety levels so you can sleep well at night. How to Money comes out three times a week, but our Friday Flight episodes speak directly

to what's happening in the financial news so you can digest this week's headlines without freaking out. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore.

Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two

years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's pivot to what I believe is the last of Kant's antinomies. He talks about free will versus determinism. We just touched on it a little bit here, right, in what we were just talking about, which is, you know, to what extent am I the way I am because of things that came before and to what extent am I making free choices? Talk to me about Kant's view on this though and what view emerges from the work that you did in this book about free will and predetermination.

One of the best ways that I think and often is challenging, a way of thinking about and challenging our notions of what it means to be a free agent, an agent who decides in the world, is to ask the question, could you have decided otherwise? That seems to be kind of the bellwether for understanding whether a being is a free being. We say a rock that falls off a cliff could not have decided otherwise, it rolls down with a force of gravity. Then perhaps we look at an antelope running from a cheetah, the cheetah following in certain ways and either getting or not getting the antelope. And we say, could the cheetah have decided otherwise? And perhaps we decide, no, they didn't. And in legal jurisdiction, when we

say was someone acting, you know, under the influence of, for example, chemical or drug or perhaps a mental illness. Yeah, they couldn't have decided otherwise. And as a result, they were less responsible if they were legally inebriated. Well, they were, you know, who was the person who decided to take the drug that inebriated them led to the vehicular homicide,

for example, that makes them then responsible. So we asked this question, could you have decided otherwise? And if we say in a big philosophical sense, well, no one could have decided otherwise because from the beginning of time until the end, we live in a physical universe and every single one of our atoms is subject to the laws of physics, right? And so many of the arguments against free will take precisely that side, that form, which say, well, free will is a complete chimera. How could it possibly exist? We're physical

world. We're inserted in the mechanistic chain of being in the universe. So we could not have decided otherwise. The Kantian perspective is to say, well, sure, in some kind of a vast metaphysical sense, that may be true, because Kant did not believe in the idea of a kind of Deus ex machina deciding soul who sits behind our eyes and makes these decisions says, well, now you go left, now you go right. And how would that solve, as Daniel Dennett famously asked, how would that solve the problem anyways, because what's deciding what that decider decides, right? Right. That's not the point. Kant's point is how overwroughtly metaphysical can you get then to assume that there is an answer or someone who knows who could have decided otherwise?

Right. Because that person or that perspective would precisely have to be standing outside of the chain of being, would have to be situated at the beginning of time, outside of the chain of being, would have to be situated at the beginning of time, outside of time and space, and to say, oh, well, in this universe, Egenton would have made a different decision or could have made a different decision, but in this one, he didn't. No, Kant's point is, like all other beings, we are in time and space, and some beings, namely beings endowed with what we call reason, we hold responsible for their

decisions. And the great story that I find as a way of explicating exactly how Kant goes about this comes from hundreds of years earlier than Kant. And it's the story of Boethius in his cell awaiting execution, who's asking the exact same questions. And what Boethius asks is the question that the theologically minded ever since him and before him, Augustine was asking as well, if God knows everything from the beginning of time to the end of time, if God knows ahead of time, every single decision that I'm going to make, how can it possibly be that I'm making free decisions? And the answer is the realization that when we imagine God having that kind of a perception, that God who's having that kind of perception

isn't inhabiting time the way that we do. He's collapsing time. There's no difference between before and after. All of eternity is smashed down into one moment, but if all eternity is smashed down into one moment, then everything that I've decided has already been decided, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't deciding when I was doing the deciding. I'm still in space and time making

those decisions. And this is really from a theological perspective, from a very old theological perspective, they already worked out the problem and said, there actually is no incompatibility between something like your supposition or your imagination of what a perfectly knowledgeable infinite being, knowing everything that you have done or will have done and free will. And if that's the case, if not even a perfect, your imagination, your ideology of a perfectly omnipotent and omniscient God, if not even that contradicts free will, then certainly AI is not going

to contradict free will. Certainly all the electrodes we put in your brain and tell us that our decisions, big surprise, take time because we're beings in space and time, that doesn't contradict free will, right? Predictability doesn't contradict free will. It just means that some decisions take time and occur in embodied wet brains. That's all that that tells us. It's a fascinating question because it sounds like if I understand what Kant is saying, I'm going to vastly oversimplify this. He's basically saying, look, that perspective that

could know everything and know the way things are going to unfold doesn't really exist. So this question just doesn't even make sense. Exactly. We're imposing one way of thinking about the universe on a different way of making people talk about the universe. The language of freedom is the language that pertains to our beings as deciding ethical beings in the world, not the language of mechanistic determination. Right. Right. It's simply doesn't apply. And it's a dangerous way of thinking in the world, not the language of mechanistic determination. Right. Right? It's simply doesn't apply.

And it's a dangerous way of thinking about the world because then you start saying that you don't have responsibility for your actions when in fact you should have responsibility for your decisions. And we've talked about how everything is relational and that we are indeed the result of countless causes and conditions. And so I think about this question a lot because I sort of would be a little bit more like Kant and say, you know what, free will, whether we have absolute free will or no free will, seems to me you can't know the answer to either of those things really. And so let's be more practical, right? And so the practical side is, you know,

how much choice do we have? And I think about this, I'm a former heroin addict, right? And I think about the amount of choice that I had once upon a time in picking up drugs, and the amount of choice I have now, they feel radically different. And I think we all fall somewhere in this spectrum. And I think this is what gets to be sort of so hard because on one hand, if you buy that there's no free will, then like you said, there should be no consequences for anything because you couldn't have chosen differently. And yet it seems like in our justice system, we have sort of tried to wrestle with this question by saying, well, if you're insane,

we're not gonna hold you responsible in the same way. Right. How do you think about this in a day-to-day sense, the degrees of freedom that we actually have? Degrees of freedom, Eric, are a terrific way of thinking about it, because I think from this Kantian perspective, you're absolutely right.

What it does is it basically says, these absolute extremes are irrelevant to the actual question at hand. The extreme of on the one hand, you are some sort of a disembodied ghost in the machine who has perfect ability to decide everything at all times is a fantasy that has no impact in the real world. And the idea that you're simply a cog in the machine at any particular moment is a scientifistic view that assumes a God's-eye view that, again, has no relevance for what am I going to do right now, right? What is the right thing to do given the situation that I'm faced with right now? What is very relevant is the question of how much duress am I under? What are the circumstances that are constraining my actions right now?

Something like addiction is going to be one that has a great deal to tell us about the range of freedom, the degrees of freedom of our actions. Something like coercion would be one as well, right? You're perfectly free when given the choice of your money or your life, but really it's a forced choice, right? If you choose your money, you're not going to get your money. You're going to lose your life as well. Right? So under those situations, it's a so-called false choice. And there's many such situations, right? In life where we're presented with something as if it were a choice when it's not a choice, because in fact, we're under duress, under coercion, under the influence of something. So then the question becomes

when? And obviously standards change over time. You're absolutely right. Legal jurists prudence wrestles with this as it should. It's extremely important. The standards change over time. What used to be called the reasonable battered woman standard has become the reasonable battered person standard because it carried a certain bias to it that was highly sexist, misogynist, for example, that only a woman would be battered, but that a man under similar circumstances in an abusive relationship would clearly

have the agency and spine to be able to make decisions that would be different. So the very language that we convey these standards in tells us some of the biases that come along with it. But you said the right thing, there are degrees of freedom. And I think if we take a Sam Harris view about human freedom, that's simply a negational view that it's a straw man, that there's no such thing as free will. And let's sort of get rid of it. What you've done is you've thrown out the baby of actual notions, meaningful, pragmatic

notions of responsibility and freedom with the bathwater that you wanted to get rid of some sort of metaphysical idea of an ultimately free agent, which I think anyone who's thinking about these things in a rational, reasonable way, never really bought to begin with. Is there anyone in the philosophical world or that you know of that is sort of talking about these degrees of freedom in a useful and coherent way? Totally. In fact, I quote her in my book, but my colleague here at Johns Hopkins, when

I was actually writing the book, she wasn't yet here, but we hired her and I'm delighted for that. Jananne Ismail, who's a philosopher of science, whose book, How Physics Makes Us Free, in her book, she makes a really, really good argument, a bunch of really good arguments that I find highly simpatico with my own view and I just couldn't agree more with. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self-control. It's a free

guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. Oneufeed.net slash ebook. Alright, I'm going to ask you to end with something that is an example you give in the book about understanding the relation of space-time to each other, which is the first time that I feel like I was able to sort of see in some way this relation of space-time, which constantly I read about and I just feel like my mental picture is blank. I'm like,

I don't get this. Give me that example just because I found it so useful. Maybe our listeners will too. Do you think about relativity's limit on how fast we can go in the following way, that there's this ultimate speed limit and the speed limit is the speed of light, but that if something is in fact moving the speed of light like photons do, photons are the only thing that can, well, massless particles like photons can move at the speed of light. They're not experiencing time. So time isn't actually taking place

if you're, in theory, moving at the speed of light. And the way to think about this, and I believe that some version of this I borrowed from Brian Green, so giving credit where it's due, I think he helped me understand this as well, is to think about my image was a cart, like a golf cart, that's driving down. It has a maximum, obviously much slower velocity than the speed of light.

It's trying to get from one end of a football field to the other. And if you think about that one end of the football field to the other as being one of the axes of space-time and the other being sort of the width of the football field, then you have this maximum velocity. You soon realize that if you're trying to veer off the straight line with a maximum velocity, you're going to make less progress. You might get more so if you called the width of the football field speed, for example. If you wanted to maximize your speed, you can veer off in the direction of the other

line, but you're not going to make any progress in space. So I think about that or the other way around. So I think about the photon traveling at the speed of light is like the cart veering completely off in one direction and not making any progress anymore in time, but crossing vast distances of space. And you can choose and do one or the other. And of course, most of us are making some progress through space and progress through time simultaneously. But if we keep on increasing our speed, and we can't because relativity tells us

that we become more and more massive the closer we get to the speed of light, but you can still accelerate massive objects, the more you accelerate them, the slower they're gonna perceive time from their perspective. I just found that a really helpful way of thinking about it can go either straight ahead or straight to the side and those are sort of the maximum, you know, the speed of light.

But once you want it to do both, those things start to, I'm using a word here. At high velocities, they start to impact each other. Exactly. And like with quantum mechanics, we don't really notice it because the vast majority of our time, we're not living at high velocities. All right. Last question. How do particles become entangled?

Anything that interacts with each other has the possibility of being entangled. I restate that. This is more important. To get particles to be entangled in the sense that they're separated way apart from each other and then you affect one affect the other yeah after their initial relationship to each other they have to be kept in pristine isolation from anything else I see anything else comes in contact then that entanglement breaks and aha okay perfect I've always wondered quantum entanglement is one of the weirder quantum physics things

listeners you can look that up but I've always been curious how they become entangled all right Bill thank you so much I had a great time reading the book and preparing for this and talking with you so I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks Eric, it was great to talk to you as well. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget and thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly

not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community. Hey I'm Jay Shetty. This episode Lizzo opens up like never before about self love, transformation and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing.

The Grammy goes to Lizzo. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The number one hit podcast, The Girlfriends, is back with something new, The Girlfriends Spotlight, where each week you'll hear women share their stories of triumph over adversity. You'll meet June, who founded an all-female rock band in the 1960s.

I might as well have said, we're going to walk on the moon. But she showed them who's boss. They would rush up and say, not bad for chicks. Come and join our girl gang. Listen to The Girlfriend Spotlight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not your link, I'm not your link,

I'm not your link, I'm not your link. Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch. Or if hypnotism is real? We will use a suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control. But what's inside a black hole? Black holes could be a consequence of the way that we understand the universe.

Well we have answers for you in the new iHeart original podcast, Sighin' Stuff. Join me or Hitcham as we answer questions about animals, space, our brains, and our bodies. So give yourself permission to be a science geek and listen to Science Stuff on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.