The School of Greatness - How To Create Meaning In Your Life & Achieve Your Full Potential w/ Sara Walker EP 1429

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

https://lewishowes.com/mindset - Order a copy of my new book The Greatness Mindset today!Professor Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. Her work focuses on the origins and nature of life, and in particular whether or not there are universal ‘laws of life’ that would allow predicting when life emerges and can guide our search for other examples on other worlds. Sara is internationally recognized thought leader in the study of the origins of life, alien life and the search for a deeper understanding of ourselves in our universe.In this episode you will learn,How finding new knowledge in science has the potential to transform our understanding of the world and change the way we live as a society.How our science today opens the possibility for creating alien life.How coming into contact with alien life could offer insight into the origin of life itself.The significance of life and what it does that no other system in the universe can do.How every living thing that exists is a real causal force in the universe.How loving ourselves is a key component of recognizing our potential as human beings.For more, go to lewishowes.com/1429

My friend, I am such a big believer that your mindset is everything. It can really dictate if your life has meaning, has value, and you feel fulfilled, or if you feel exhausted, drained, and like you're never going to be enough. Our brand new book, The Greatness Mindset, just hit the New York Times bestseller back to back weeks. And I'm so excited to hear from so many of you who've bought the book, who've read it and finished it already, and are getting incredible results from the lessons in the book. If you haven't got a copy yet, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward.

This is the book I wish I had when I was 20, struggling, trying to figure out life. 10 years ago, at 30, trying to figure out transitions in my life and the book I'm glad I have today for myself. Make sure to get a copy at lewishouse.com slash 2023 mindset to get your copy today. Again lewishouse.com slash 2023 mindset to get a copy today. Also, the book is on Audible now so you can get it on audiobook as well. And don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode. I often will describe the physics of life as the physics of how the universe generates novelty and how it explores the space of what's possible. But the unique thing that's happening on our planet that we haven't observed on any

other planet yet, but hopefully we will if we find alien life, is that... Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What's the biggest question you're trying to answer? What we are. What we are as humans, what the world is, consciousness. All of it actually. But I think specifically I care what we are as humans, but my research is on what life is. And I focus most of my career on the origins of life. And I started actually as a theoretical physicist. So I was more interested in early universe cosmology and particle physics early in my career.

Okay. So the origins of life. Yeah. Meaning how did the first human come about or how did the first life plant? No, the first life. So I think most people don't appreciate the fact that right now, as far as we know, our planet is the only one with life on it. So I think a lot of us have this idea that like, oh, Mars must have plants or something, but there's nothing on Mars that we know of. There's nothing in fact on any other planet, not even a microbe. We haven't found any life

beyond Earth. We haven't found any life yet. Yet. Beyond Earth. Beyond Earth. No life. No life. Anywhere. Anywhere. But do you think that there is humans or some type of life form in a planet somewhere? I hope so. I'm optimistic. Obviously, I can do what I do wanting to study alien life or origins of life if I thought we were the only life in the universe. But we don't have any evidence that life exists elsewhere yet. So I have to kind of maintain my optimistic and skepticism hats at the same time. So there's no evidence of alien life anywhere?

No. Unless, like, I mean, some people think there are. Like, we have evidence of UFOs visiting Earth. But I don't take that as transformative knowledge yet. Really? Yeah. So there is evidence of UFOs. Well, some people.

I didn't say I thought there was. Some people think there is evidence of UFOs. Well, some people. I didn't say I thought there was. Some people think there is. So I'm only bringing that up because probably some people will, like, you know, in the audience, there are probably people have studied reports of UFOs and things like that. So, you know, but the common sort of scientific standard knowledge right now is we don't know of any other life beyond our biosphere. And that's significant because all the life on Earth is connected by a common ancestry. So we know that humans descended from a common ancestry, but beyond that, obviously, we share ancestry with other apes. And then if you go further back in time, we share ancestry with every organism on this planet, all the way back to the first cells that emerged on Earth 3.8 billion years ago.

And so when we say that we don't have evidence of life outside of that, what we mean is that all life on Earth is connected and is essentially a representation of the same phenomenon in the universe. And when we're looking for alien life, we're basically looking for a different origin of life. Not connected to our ancestor origin. Dr. That's right. And so you may think that we already have evidence of that or you may not.

And I lean on the side that we don't because when you acquire new knowledge in science, especially if it's on such a deep question, it's usually transformative. So it transforms every aspect of human society. It's not just anecdotal colloquial knowledge or things that we associate with myth. It's things that emerge in our technology, things that transform our culture. And this is true. So for example, if you look at what Isaac Newton did 300 years ago, coming up with the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, right? They have real consequences on our societies today. And the fact that we wouldn't be launching satellites into space, right? If we didn't have

that knowledge. And, you know, a lot of the technology that we're using in this room is dependent on those satellites. So the kind of knowledge we acquire when we do this kind of deep thinking about the way the world works is transformative. And I think the life problem is something that we're just starting to get the understanding to be able to solve now. Right. And we don't, we haven't solved it yet. So what is the main theories out there about how the origin of life and the universe was created? What is the main, what are the main theories out there and which one, or is there a different one that you believe in or are curious about? I'm working on a theory that hopes to explain what life is

from the perspective of a new theory of physics, a new fundamental theory of physics. And it should be able to make predictions about the origin of life that we can test in the lab. And so I'm interested in building, like basically the large Hadron Collider is probably familiar to you or to people in the audience, which was a massive international collaboration to look for the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was predicted by theory, right? What is the Higgs boson? The Higgs boson is an elementary particle that was supposed to, it was conjectured

to exist because it needed to exist in order for the other elementary particles to have mass. So there was this sort of missing feature. Give me an example. Give me a second grade terms that I can understand. Let's see. Okay. So a particle that this could exist in, this cup, what do you mean? No. So there's things like electrons and protons, right? And they have certain properties associated to them. This is what defines them as elementary particles. So they have things like a charge. So an electron is negatively charged. Right? And so when you talk about currents flowing in a wire, you're talking about charges flowing.

Right? So they have a spin, which is kind of a more abstract property. And then they have a mass. Okay. And the mass is how much they weigh. And the particular feature of the mathematics of the theory that describes elementary particles basically had a missing component that there was no explanation for why they should have mass. And so we had to propose another particle that gives them mass. Got it.

And that was the Higgs boson. And it's sort of, you know, there's a lot of analogies about how the Higgs works, but not to get too far off topic. But the idea that I'm interested in is the idea that we could theoretically predict the existence of this thing and then build a massive multibillion-dollar experiment to go find it, and we did. And then this gives us clues to early universe cosmology and all kinds of things about the fundamental nature of the universe. But what we haven't done is actually do sort of an equivalent scale effort for the origin of life. You know, like where do cells come from? Where does biology come from? haven't done is actually do sort of an equivalent scale effort for the origin of life you know like where do cells come from where does biology come from um and so i'm working on this theory that we think we could build a large enough uh chemistry experiment one that could do lots of

soup chemistry lots of different chemical reactions and actually evolve alien life in the lab in the lab in the lab create an alien life here in the lab in the lab what is what does alien life in the lab. In the lab? In the lab. Create an alien life here? Yes. In the lab? In the lab from scratch. What does alien life mean? That's not like a little... Independent origin.

So not of this earth. It can't not be of this earth because we're creating it. In this earth. Yeah. But it's not linked to an ancestral link. It's not linked in the same sense that it's chemistry descended from the chemistry that evolved on this planet in biology. It's going to be independent chemistry. But this is a key feature of life that people don't appreciate. And this is also true when

people talk about origins of life. They think we can take like a cell. So our body is composed of cells. If you take a high school biology class, you might look through a microscope and see like a little single cell organism, E. coli, right? Like bacteria, all these kind of things that people talk about. So people have this kind of conception that a cell is the fundamental unit of life. But in this kind of theory that we're developing, which I'm doing with a lot of colleagues, that's not actually the structure we should be looking at. What you should be looking at is the lineage of information that's been propagating in that cell. So it's easiest to see with single cell organisms

that asexually reproduce. A cell will just split itself in half, right? And then you have two cells. And that's been happening for billions of years. So in some sense, those cells are immortal because they don't die. They just split in half and then they reproduce and then they continue the lineage. are immortal because they don't die. They just split in half and then they reproduce and then they continue the lineage. We are also doing that to an extent, right? Because cells, you know, I have two kids. Both of my kids were at one point a cell in my body, which is really weird. Isn't that crazy? It's totally crazy. Totally crazy. It's a little tiny cell.

Yeah. Isn't that nuts? But there's a lineage of information there. And that lineage, even in your own body, you know, the atoms in your body are not the ones that were in your body 10 years ago. You've been eating, you know, presumably you probably had breakfast today. So you're basically, your body's constantly rebuilding itself. So then you have to ask the question, well, what is you? What is the living thing? And so the conjecture we have is that the living thing is actually this pattern, this information that's causal in some sense,

that actually builds matter into certain structures. So it builds a Lewis, it builds a Sarah, right? And that's actually the feature that we care about when we're talking about life. And so when you're building an original life experiment, even when you do an experiment, you're actually putting information into the experiment. Everything we do is actually passing information into reality. So like I move this cup. If you want to explain where the origin of that cup being in that location is, it's me having existed here. And then if you want to explain me existing here, you have to go backward and backward in this causal chain of explanation. So that's what life is. Actually, life is this generative mechanism

that's building interesting things. And when we're… It's growing. It's expanding. It's multiplying. Yes. Right? Yes. That's what life is.

You're trying to figure out where did it come from. Yes. Yes. But you have to know what it is in order to ask about the origin. And so what I wanted… So also with this kind of thing about the cell, right? But you also get… You learn to live from your parents or whoever taught you as a child, right?

So there's also cultural information that gets passed to us and that becomes a key feature of who we are. So that's also part of life. So all of these sort of things that define who we are biologically, culturally, psychologically are passed down and it's information that's acquired in our history. And so all of that information basically traces its origin as far as we know to the origin of life on earth. Wow. So confirm if I'm wrong, but is this, are all astrobiologists and people working in outer space all agree that there's no life anywhere yet that we've found? Or is this kind of like a... Well, so that's why I brought up about the UFO, because I think certainly that community thinks we've already made contact, but they're not traditional astrobiologists. Traditional

astrobiologists would say, most of them would say, no, there is no evidence for life. There's always rare exceptions, though. So the community consensus is there is no life identified yet outside of Earth. And it's important to recognize that when we're doing science, science is a cultural phenomena in the same sense the way art is or other facets of human culture. It just happens to interrogate reality in a particular way, that we ask questions and we test hypotheses and we do experiments and we try to build the way that we think about the world based on the most logically consistent explanation for what we see. But it doesn't mean that we, it's, you know, we always know the objective truth, right? And it's a question whether we can know that. So saying there's a consensus is based on the sort of observational evidence we have

and our understanding of what life is. But we don't understand what life is. And the observational evidence is determined by our current technology and the questions we're asking. So then there's subject for people to possibly question that. And some people do. I don't see any compelling evidence for alien life, which is why I want to make it.

Even with UFO, even with like, didn't the Pentagon say last year that there's like UFOs and there's like technologies that we can't, like physics doesn't explain, like all these things, right? But they're not seeing the life is what we're saying. Yeah. We're seeing an object,

but we're not actually seeing a life form within the object. Yes. Gotcha. Yeah. So, and, and I would, I think that's an excellent way of saying it actually. Cause I, it, there's something quite deep there, which for me, making first contact with aliens is making first contact with an explanation for what life is. So we would have to understand the phenomena and And otherwise, it's just conjecture and sort of, you know, noise in the sort of in society that, you know, it's alien because we can't explain it. And that's fine. And it's fine if, you know, people want to make those arguments. I don't find them satisfactory because to me, making contact with alien life should be a transformative event for our species because we actually come to understand features of life at such a deep

level that we can recognize things that are like us even though they might be completely different right interesting have you talked to people that have seen ufos that are like convinced i mean i've talked to people that released the pentagon report i just i think um we're like flying the planes and said they saw everything or whatever. What did they say to you? But it's not convincing enough because there's no evidence backing, like there's no scientific conclusion. Yeah. So, I mean, there's always the sort of famous saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But I actually think the evidence can be very simple. It's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But I actually think the evidence can be very simple. It's extraordinary claims

require extraordinary explanations. And unless you're giving me a theory, I'm a theoretical physicist, so I'm super biased, you're giving me a theory that explains why that phenomenon is life, then it's anomalies, right? And people, even card-carrying astrobiologists, you know, because we don't know what to look for on other planets, we don't know enough about life.

You know, some people have proposed we should just look for anomalies on other planets, like things we can't explain in the data, and that might be the first contact with alien life. And so I would put that, you know, a lot of people, I mean, even if you look at the word alien, alien means other, right? So, and it means unexplained. So we use this word to describe things we don't understand. And what I'm saying is when we make contact with aliens, it should come from a place of understanding. And so that's what I'm striving for is what is that understanding? What is this phenomenon? How do we understand it from the deep roots in our planetary history of what happened 4 billion years ago and why we're here? And then what are the other things that might exist in the universe that are like us?

And how do we actually see them? What do you think came first then, souls or, I guess, living organisms? It's a really interesting and deep question. So I'm agnostic. So the questions of spirituality and how this connects with the history of how humans have thought about things, I think is actually quite deep because I think a lot of our intuition and the ways we talk about things from a spiritual dimension do reflect reality in interesting ways. And I really like there was a philosopher, well, not a natural philosopher, I guess,

around the time of Newton called Leibniz, who also co-invented calculus. But it's really interesting because, you know, Newton was working on gravity and he got really famous because he solved the problem of gravity. And Leibniz also invented calculus, which Newton invented to solve the mathematics of gravity. But he was studying biology and he didn't solve this problem because it was way too premature for us to solve that problem.

It was too hard a problem. But he came up with this idea of monads to describe the soul, which is this- Monads. Monads. So it's called the monadology, is this this piece of work and the idea of a monad is is basically that that things have causal power associated with them and it's like the call the causal power is what's propagating so this idea of lineage as i presented earlier is kind of this

idea it's a similar construct um so i would say that when you want to approach a hard problem, like why is it that planetary motion looks so regular and apples fall from the sky, like you don't have a concept of gravity, you have to look abstractly at those phenomena and try to look at what patterns unite them. And this is something that we do in physics quite a lot. We have this idea of unification. We take two things that look different and we find out how they look the same. And for me, I think life is a phenomena that we haven't unified with traditional approaches to physics. And so in order to do that kind of, you know, like how is it that life is the same as chemistry or how is it that life is the same as, you know, fundamental physics, you have to look one layer deeper. And when you look that one layer deeper, the kinds of structures you see as being important are what we would talk about

in physics or in the language I use on the sort of more technical side is causation and information. Those things are, it's a little like if you want to understand sort of abstractly what those concepts are, you know, it's like a bunch of people in the audience that can tell everybody they we have cups on our table. So I move my cup already. But if you have a cup on your table, move your cup. And you can ask, well, what is it that caused? I don't know how many people are going to move their cup, but however many of you. In part, it's the fact that I was speaking words and I suggested you do that. Right. So there's and I'm removed in space and time from the people that are, you know,

are presumably gonna be listening to this. So suddenly there's like information that left my mouth that is doing this other causal work in the world. That influences people. Yes, yeah. Culture, people. Yes. Herd mentalities.

Yeah, and there's an ordering to that structure. So like you couldn't be born before your grandmother, right? So the information is this idea that these sort of abstract things like words or the pattern in DNA might constrain possible futures. But the causation part is the fact that there's a particular ordering to the kind of events that can happen. And we have a sort of precise way of talking about this in the theory. It's very easy to think about in terms of molecules. But that would be the feature I think is more fundamental to what life is.

And if you build a theory based on those kind of properties, it starts to explain these other sorts of features. And maybe you want to say that those features are coincident to some people's concepts of the soul or other things that have been seemingly mysterious for most of human history in the same way planetary motion was once mysterious. Right. Right. And now we have reasonable theories that explain it. Reasonable or factual theories?

They're fashionable. Fashionable or factual or reasonable or somewhat reasonable theories, yeah. Well, yeah. So, I mean, there's always the possibility of coming up with better descriptions in the future. What I mean by reasonable is these are pretty accurate in their ability to describe phenomena we observe and allow us to build new examples like the satellites, right? If our laws of physics didn't work we wouldn't have satellites can you explain to me how i mean i get the concept but if you would have you know 30 years ago had a device that you could see your best friend from around the world

in real time it'd been like what is this it would have been the craziest thing you've ever seen in your life yes you know or an airplane over 100 years ago in the sky. You'd have been like, what is going on? Some god is flying in the sky, right? Right. Yes. How, I mean, how does something like a TV station or a video on a phone stream throughout the world, how does that actually work in physics? Yeah. So I think... And if it works on a physical device, can you do it as humans without devices through our minds?

I think we communicate in more ways than we currently understand. But I do think that, like to answer your first question about some of these features. So the physics that I'm interested in seems to suggest that the most interesting attribute of the physics is that time is actually fundamental. Ordering of events is fundamental. And elementary particles don't experience time. The universe can generate them in any instant in time. There's no memory necessary for the universe to make an electron. Electrons just always happen. But to make something like URI requires building up objects that know how to build other objects that know how to build other objects. So there's

this long causal chain of events leading to this conversation in order for this to actually appear in the universe. Like a cell phone with Wi-Fi. Yes. Yes. It won't happen on every planet, right? Because there's a particular history that has to happen for cell phones to come into existence. And the theory is called assembly theory. What it suggests is, so basically the way you construct it is easy to see for a molecule. You take a molecule, you break it up into elementary bonds. So molecules are made out of bonds. If you don't know about molecules, you can pretend you're playing with a Lego set.

So let's say we have a Hogwarts castle on the table. Let's use our imagination. And I smash it, right? And I ask you to build the object. There's a lot of ways of building that. And so we talk about this in terms of molecules. You think about all the possible ways of building up a molecule by just joining those Legos together or joining the bonds together.

And then that defines the molecule's set of possible histories for the universe to build it. And that is the molecule in this theory. It's not, the molecule is not the material object you see. It's all the ways that it could be built. And so now the molecule becomes an object that exists across time. Because if you think about that Harry Potter castle, in order to actually build it, you have to have an idea that the castle could exist. So there has to be information in your mind, a goal. And then you have to be able to assemble it by putting the right parts together. And the particular ways that you do it are things that you see unfold in time. And so in molecules, we talk about the minimal path to make the molecule as significant, because if the minimal path is very long, you're never going to find that object by chance.

So this is actually why I used Hogwarts Castle because if I just said, let's have three red bricks, I could probably find that structure pretty easily. That's like the prebiotic soup, as we would call it, like simple molecules early Earth can make. But if I tell you you have to make the Hogwarts castle, you know, the chances of you randomly stumbling on that are really hard. So it's not random that that thing emerges in the universe. It requires a certain history of information. So it required, you know, several centuries ago for people to build castles and for us to learn about storytelling and invent novels and for J.K. Rowling to come and write a novel about a particular little boy that was going to a magical school and also simultaneously for Legos to be invented. So if you look at all

the pathways to make that particular, it's not a coincidence that it emerged on our biosphere because all the information was acquired over time. And what we do in this theory is we basically say a molecule is that set of information, all the ways the universe can build it. And if it's sufficiently complex that that shortest path is too long, we will only find that thing in living systems. Because living systems are the only physics that can build complex things. Okay. And so this sets up the space that living objects are objects that have a size and time. So my cup and I are both 3.8 billion year old objects in the universe.

It took our planet 3.8 billion years to generate us. We're a little bit qualitatively different because the cup requires a lot of information to build it, but it's not an active agent like I am, so it's not going to continue to generate the creative process on this biosphere in the same way you and I are. But everything in this room is 3.8 billion years old. Yes, yes, and shares a common set of lineages. You and I are. But everything in this room is 3.8 billion years old. Yes. And shares a common set of lineages. So that's what we're saying is the physics of life.

And so some objects are older in time. And so this gets to the virtualization because I think of things like virtual realities as packing more time in smaller volumes of space. packing more time in smaller volumes of space. So if you were just the atoms in your body and they weren't organized into you as an entity, they wouldn't have a depth in time. But you have a very large depth in time. So an analogy, because we can see object size in space pretty well. You can't fit a Mack truck in a garage. You can't fit certain evolved objects in small volumes of time. And so a lot of our technology now is putting more and more time in smaller volumes I think really more and more space in small you mean like in a small device yes and having more so your point about yeah you're a

point like if I'm talking to somebody on zoom somebody across the planet can be like right in front of me right so now you've compressed something that's thousands of miles distance to the short interaction communication right now. Yeah. In front of you. So what does that do to us as physical, spiritual beings? Um, I think it's a confusing time for our planet, honestly. Um, and because there's a lot of growth happening all at once. And I, if you have children, you know what growing pains are. Any of us know what growing pains are. It's painful. Yeah, it is painful.

Your knees hurt. Your back hurts. You're like, you're awkward. Yeah. But to your point, I think like there's a lot of historical knowledge that we have and we don't know how to parse it with our technology. And it's interesting to me about technology. You know, like you were saying, you couldn't even have imagined it, right? But somebody did imagine it. That's why it exists. So in some ways, when I look around and,

you know, people don't like Starlink, you know, moving across their sky because you're like, it's blocking the stars. And I'm like, oh my God, human minds just put stars in the night sky. Like, how can you not appreciate the fact that everything in our environment is basically built by human minds? Human minds put stars in the sky? Well, Starlink. I thought you said stars in the sky. Well, I did because they look like stars in the night. They look, you know, I mean, have you seen it?

Starlink? No. Oh, it's so cool. It's just like a trail of little satellites. So it looks like a little, you know, like a comet or something. Well, not a comet. Comets have have long tails but meteorites coming into the atmosphere or something so it's like these these little tiny twinkling stars moving in unison across the night sky it's cool you know if ancients saw it's like the you know airplanes like people would have

thought they were gods and god only knows what they would think it was but it's intriguing to me that for all of human history and actually indeed the entire history of our planet we've looked at the night sky and just seen the stars that physics put out there, right? And now we're seeing things in our night sky that humans put there. And I think that can feel kind of alien in some sense because intrinsically we have a deep knowledge of our planet. This is why people feel comforted by the mountains and things, right? So it's like we come from this very ancient lineage on this planet. All of that knowledge has been acquired over, you know, billions of years, not even just millennia. If you go to your,

like your cellular level, right? It's like billions of years of knowledge in your body and then thousands of years as a human. And so nature feels comforting in some ways because of that. And for some people, the built environment can feel very alien, but it's because it, I think it's because it's new and, you know, and because of this feature of being constructed by us basically building stuff in the world around us. It's like the externalization of the human mind. AI is sort of a similar thing. It's like the externalization of the human mind. AI is sort of a similar thing. It's like people feel like AI is very alien. But if you look at the progression of our technology, you know, we built microscopes that allowed us to even know that we were surrounded by life. So

like this whole table is covered with microbes. If I had brought a microscope in, we could just be inspecting, you know, like what's growing on your table. Yeah. And then, you know, we have seismometers that allow us to feel earthquakes, obviously important in California. And we built telescopes that allow us to see like the deepest, you know, parts of the universe. Right. And we have quantum devices that allow us to probe these properties that we never knew existed. And now we're building technology that works off of principles

we think our own mind works on. And so- We're growing a lot right now. Yeah, we're growing a lot. Tell me about the quantum field. What is that for people to understand? Oh, so quantum physics, it's interesting because it's a theory that predicts features of the universe that seem quite odd for us because there are features of the universe that become apparent at really small scales.

So some of the features that seem kind of weird are like these kind of uncertainty relations. So if you know the exact position of something, you can't know its exact momentum. Momentum is just kind of like a feature of its motion. So, you know, like if I try to put you in a little box, I couldn't tell how fast you were moving, right? And that's kind of a weird feature. And then there's, you know, like quantum entanglement, which is if you separate two particles that were interacting and you make it so that they can't communicate, they still will act like they're communicating, being separated. So these kind of features seem very odd when quantum mechanics was founded. And of course,

a lot of people that have originally proposed quantum physics and people that study it now say that this is a theory no one really understands. There's not a standard interpretation of it. A big problem with quantum mechanics is we don't actually really know how to define a measurement in the sense that there's something called the wave function, which I assume is what you're talking about. So the idea is, you know, particles have this sort of wave-particle duality, and you can describe this kind of an abstract thing that exists in this mathematical space, which is the wave function. an abstract thing that exists in this mathematical space, which is the wave function. And when you take a measurement, you might collapse it to an exact measurement, but it might be in a super position of states before that. The super position, there's an example of like Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger was a very famous quantum physicist, which is like the cat could be alive and dead in the box until you take a measurement of it. This is what quantum physics would say. Of course, quantum physics is implied to large objects. It implies to small objects. But an element, electron, if it could be

alive and dead, it would be both properties at the same time. It could be over here and over here until you take a measurement. Then you can say where it is. And so this property is weird because now you have to say, well, what is a measurement? And measurements are actually kind of hard to talk about from this Everything is actually really hard when you try to construct a theory for it And I think people don't appreciate how how hard it it like how to get to quantum physics in general activity And this is really really really hard. It's an incredibly creative and painful process and coming up with new theories is emotional It's like it's and you have to like rely on this deep intuition. So

So quantum physics has these weird properties. And there's like the many worlds hypothesis, which is like the interpretation of quantum mechanics that all possible realities exist simultaneously. And the measurement is just like branching the wave function. So you're just saying you're on the one where the Schrodinger's cat was dead, but there's another one where it's alive and it just split into two realities instead of being one. Like a multiverse. Yeah, sort of. Sort of. Different realities, gotcha. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So it's interesting. The theory says a lot of interesting things. There's a lot still to be solved and understood about it. And a lot of people want to take sort of insights from quantum physics and apply them to sort of general principles of reality. And I think that's a bit of a stretch because quantum physics actually doesn't explain what life is. And we haven't

solved the physics of life and we don't know the physics of mind. And I think that physics might be even more interesting and even weirder than quantum physics. The physics of mind. Yeah. even more interesting and even weirder than quantum physics. The physics of mind. Yeah. Where is the mind? Presumably in your head, but not really. Depends on your concept of self, I guess.

I don't know. My mind feels like it's inside my head, but I also feel like I'm not an individual sometimes. Is the mind the same thing as consciousness and awareness? Yeah. So, well, it depends on what kind of question you're asking and what you want to know. I'm just curious. Yeah.

I'm just curious. Where does the mind come from? What do you want to know about your own mind? Yeah. Is my mind in my head or is it sensing the universe? Is it everywhere and yet here at the same time? Is my consciousness in my mind? Is my soul connected to my mind? Is it in a different place?

Are they talking to each other in a different way? How are they connected? Are they connected like the body? Or is it surrounding the body? Is it a sphere of energy rather than inside the body? I see what you mean. I don't think anyone has good answers to those questions. And if they claim they do, you should ask them a few more questions. Sure. Because I think the most interesting thing with these kind of things is

when you start talking to different people who have thought very deeply, like, I mean, I meet all sorts of people all the time from different walks of life and different scientific training, like some of the best thinkers in the world. And you get to these sorts of questions, and there's a lot of deep mystery there. And I think that's good. Like we should embrace the mystery and we should embrace the unknown because if we recognize the things we don't understand, then we have the capacity to understand them. I love this Marie Curie quote. It's like, now is the time to understand more so that we can fear less. It's not exactly, she has a much more eloquent way of

saying it. But so I don't think that we have a good answer to your question, but I do think, you know, the ways, the sorts of ways I know people talk about it. So some people want to think, so you're asking a question about consciousness. Cons you know the people the problem people are interested in there is not like your thought process but the fact you actually experience anything so like sitting in this room right now you know we're experiencing colors we have feelings about them we have like a mental image inside our head and some people find that to be very mysterious feature of consciousness and where does that intrinsic experience come from? And it seems very difficult to explain that particular feature based on current what are called materialist narratives.

So physics is based on the sort of principles of materialism, which is that matter exists, whatever you want to define as matter. So that's a whole other hard problem. Sure, sure. Matter exists, like particles exist, atoms exist. And if you want to describe the properties of those things, it seems like there's no place for mind to actually exist in that kind of description of reality. And so some people want to take sort of a dualist perspective that mind exists in this other plane and then interacts somehow with the

physics. But that actually has a lot of problems because it doesn't explain much about why those things interact, how they interact, why would it be the case that I have thoughts that do anything in the world. And so I tend to think that we really do exist. We are physical beings, but we might not understand the physics entirely yet. And I think that's much more productive because there you can then construct concrete questions about what would a physics look like if I built it based on these kind of properties I see and not the ones that maybe were developed for studying other areas of physics. Is there anything you know for fact, for true, like about the world, about the universe? Is there

actual truth that we can as human beings agree on? Or are they just theories that we agree on? I think they're theories and they're descriptions. But I would say I think we can, it's actually one of the hardest questions is to like what would be the thing that we can agree on? Or what's the ground truth? Like universal truth. Yeah. We don't know. We don't know.

We don't know. I know. Is that exhausting? It is, but it's fun. Do you feel like you're running around in circles. No, I don't know. I feel like I'm moving in a direction. That's good.

And I think the direction is like nominally what we might call human progress. Like we move in a direction of hopefully building better lives, right? And building more creative things and possibilities. And I think a large part of that is trying to understand the reality we live in and coming up with concrete explanations for it. And they're not permanent. There won't be an ultimate explanation, but there will be a better explanation that allows us to get to the next phase. So from a physicist's point of view, have we figured out what the meaning of life is?

Or is that just for each individual to figure out? It's both. So I would say each individual should figure out the meaning of their life. But I would say what I think, like when I think about what life is, what life does uniquely in the universe that no other kind of system can do is the creativity. uniquely in the universe that no other kind of system can do is the creativity. And so I often will describe the physics of life as the physics of how the universe generates novelty and how it explores the space of what's possible. So there's a lot of things that could exist.

Not everything gets to exist. We can imagine a lot of things that don't exist. But the unique thing that's happening on our planet that we haven't observed on any other planet yet, but hopefully we will if we find alien life, is that things that we can imagine to happen or can create new knowledge on this planet actually generate new possibilities. Like the example I gave of satellites or your example of the TV screen. Or airplanes. Yeah, I couldn't have imagined those. But somebody did imagine them. That's why they exist.

And it creates new possibilities. We can travel the world or we can connect with friends around the world or we can gain information or knowledge from a device. Yes, yes. And it's not all possible things, but it is like a large subset of interesting things that can happen on this planet that can't happen elsewhere. And I think that's what life is doing. interesting things that can happen on this planet that can't happen elsewhere. And I think that's what life is doing. How do we use your work to discover what each individual's mission is in life?

Is there information we can gain from the work you're doing? I think, you know, I always like to think what would be the physics 300 years from now? And I always think like morality or purpose might be interesting. So I do think about the implications of it. And I guess the thing that's interesting for me is to think about every living thing that exists as a unique thing and a real causal force in the universe to some extent. And for me personally, I feel like when I'm aligned with my purpose, like I feel like my purpose is really cheesy, but I feel like my purpose is to help humanity understand what life is. Like that's why, why I exist. Don't ask me why I think that I have no idea. Um, but when I think about that

question and that as my driving goal, all sorts of things happen that are interesting and I feel happy. It makes me happy and fulfilled. So I think, but, but also, um, uh, because I think about the physics of life, I always have this sort of metal level of description of what Sarah is doing. So I do these, and I talk in third person when I think about it from a metal level. It's okay. Yeah. So I do these like thought experiments about theoretical physics of theoretical physicists, which is, you know, like when you build theories, what do they do to reality? Like, you know, when you're a physicist and you build a theory, you care about making a prediction and doing an experiment.

when you're a physicist and you build a theory, you care about making a prediction and doing an experiment. But when you're thinking about it from the sort of meta level, you're like, what are the downstream consequences, centuries hence, of building this set of ideas in humanity now? And I guess it's that sort of long-term thinking and that ability of purpose and to think that your agency actually matters in the future, that then you can start to do your life's best work. And it might be, you know, like that is taking care of my kids. Or that is, you know, trying to do a billion dollar initiatives to solve the origin of life so we can understand what we are and deal with existential crises that we're facing now as a civilization. And it can bridge all those things. And it looks different for different people.

And I also think that's part of it because if you think the universe is trying to maximize creativity, we should be individuals but we're also collectives because we're part of the same phenomena so I think thinking about both those things also is important to realize that other people aren't really that different than you how do we how do you think we should ask the question about what our purpose is as individuals and finding our purpose That's such a great question. I always like Joseph Campbell's follow your bliss. Like this idea that like you should follow the things that make you intrinsically happy. And I also do this with my students at ASU. Like when I get a new PhD student, my first way of like mentoring them is to try to find out what their core passion questions are. And then how do we find problems to work on that are aligned with who you are intrinsically

and what you're interested in? Because I think, you know, if you want to unlock human potential, you have to have people working on things they love. And so I think for me, the first thing before you like try to think about a career or anything else you want to do in your life, you have to like, you have to think about how it makes you feel and how much like purpose it gives you and how much sense of, much sense of moving in a direction you feel like you want to be moving. Sure. And I find this all the time.

Like if you have a student, I mean, research is hard, right? And I think for me it's much more, you know, like people think science is this like technical thing that like you're just doing calculations or something. just doing calculations or something. But the way that we do science in the space I work in, which is this idea, like this generating new explanations and new ideas is much more creative. And I was saying before, it's pretty emotional because you're basically trying to find out how reality works and think about it and interrogate it and like parse it down to some concepts that you can talk to other people about and then bat those ideas around and try to build, you know, a theory and an experiment to test it. It's a really hard thing to do. And so I find like with students, if they don't really care about the problem, it's too hard to

do that kind of work. It's too hard. Yeah. You might be able to talk about it for a little bit, but you're not going to be able to deal with the years of research. Right, right. But if you love the problem, the rest of it's easy. So the problem you love is how did life originate? I think it's just, solving that. I think it's just what is life.

What is life? But that problem's gonna be solved by solving the origin of life. Interesting. They're not, they're the same problem and it's the same problem as making contact with alien life.

I think it goes back to this idea of like unifying things. Like people think these questions are different. What is a mind? Like, but I think all these back to this idea of unifying. People think these questions are different. What is a mind? But I think all these questions are deeply related. So what is life is what you're trying to answer. Yes.

What do you think it is? I think it's the universe's mechanism of creativity. But also what I was saying before is it's deeply related to the physics of time. So if I think about myself as a physical object that exists in the universe, I think about myself that's a very large object in time. So if I think about myself as a physical object that exists in the universe, I think about myself that's, you know, like it's a very large object in time. I have a lot of causal power, so to speak, and I have a lot of generative potential about what can come next because of that, because I'm just a very, you know, humans are very large objects. We don't look large,

but we're very large in the space of possibilities if you think about that kind of projection. So physical size, small. In time, we're very big. And in time, in terms of potential possibilities, we can generate in the future very big. Well, in terms of physics, what's your thoughts on the law of attraction? Or having an idea and seeing something in your imagination

and actually manifesting it or creating it, you know, with the speed that it comes quicker. What are your thoughts on that? I think, I think again, those are sort of similar. So I find in my own life, again, this is sort of like metal level thinking with Sarah. So this is not very scientific, but this is very intuitive for me based on the kind of science I do. That, you know, I have a very strong sense of purpose about wanting to work on these problems. And I find this kind of interesting alignment with other people that have shared sense of purpose and the kind of collaborations and creativity that comes out of that. You get excited from that. Yes. And in some ways, if I was going to rationalize that

in terms of physics of life, that makes sense to me because things that like like things will come together that have the knowledge to generate, you know, the potential space. way but I but I think I think there are some there are some explanations for things that we feel that maybe are very coincident with kind of things that might generally be features of life in terms of how how we feel fulfilled in our lives and how we feel a sense of purpose and ultimately like if you're trying to explain what life is you're trying to explain how the universe acquires purpose and and how it how is the universe a creative place? Sure. And I think the universe is generating itself. Like the universe is, you know, in standard physics, the universe just exists and everything exists all at once. There's no time, right?

But in this physics that we're building for life, the universe is generating itself at every moment, and we are actually part of that generation mechanism. So it's expanding. Yes. The universe is expanding. It's expanding in the space of possibilities. Not physically.

Well, it is physically expanding in terms of dark energy. Dark matter. Well, dark matter, no. So there's a difference between dark energy and dark matter. So dark matter is matter. So it's like made of physical stuff like this table. It just happens to not interact with the electromagnetic field. So it doesn't emit photons. And it seems to be in galaxies, and we have some evidence that there's

this other kind of matter that's not any of the matter that we know currently. It doesn't behave like any current elementary particles because it doesn't interact with photons in this way, but it's massive, or at least cumulatively it's massive. Dark energy, on the other hand, is the, we have observational evidence that the universe is expanding its acceleration, like its growth. So we used to think the universe was completely static, and then we realized that the universe was growing as a function of time, and we thought that growth rate should be slowing down because the matter in the universe should slow it down by the gravitational attraction. But what we've realized is actually the universe is accelerating its expansion. And so this force driving the acceleration is called dark energy.

What's on the edge of the universe? That may not be a meaningful question because the universe might not have an edge. So just it's infinite. It could be infinite or it could be, it has a finite size. So think of a ball, for example. So a ball doesn't actually have an edge. So the universe could just have a topology that's ball-like. It's a closed universe. But it could be larger than our visible universe.

So it, you know, like we're just, it looks flat locally. So we actually don't know the shape of the whole universe. There are some people that make conjectures about how to experimentally test features of the shape of the universe. But, yeah. Like if someone was to try to get to the edge of the universe or to the sphere of the universe, how long would it take with the technology we have? I don't know. I couldn't do that calculation off the top of my head. But I can tell you that in our solar system, we have launched the Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s. I think it

was 1977, but I'd have to double check that. And it passed the heliopause, which is the sort of outer range of like where the sun's solar wind actually influences, you know, like outer space just a few years ago. I don't remember. I think it was 2015. I don't know the exact years. I remember I was teaching astronomy and none of my students knew anything about Voyager or the fact that this was the first time a technological object left the solar system. Wow. So that was the first time humans ever left the solar system or a robot that we created. And that was a few years ago and it took- 40 something years, right? Yeah, exactly.

So the universe is quite big. But the interesting, so this is where I'm gonna push back on sort of like, you know, the traditional physics. Oh my God, the universe is huge. Let's look in awe kind of thing. Because I think people don't appreciate how much can be generated on this planet. Of course.

So chemistry, like people under appreciate how big chemical space is. So physical space, a physical size of universe, we can see out, we can see like Hubble, you know, like you can see the most distant galaxies. But if you want to look at chemical space and like how many molecules, so small molecules, let's say, you know, you have a dozen or so atoms. I actually don't know the exact numbers, but amino acid is the basic building block of a protein. You put two of those together, really tiny molecule, just that size molecule, there's estimated to be 10 to the 60 possible molecules. That doesn't sound like that's just a number I can throw out, but there's not enough resources in the entire universe to make

every small possible molecule. And on Earth, we have the generative capacity because we have human chemists, and in fact, we now have robot chemists, to explore a chemical space at speeds that we can't explore it. And so there's this space of possibilities that are accessible on this planet because of our technology and because of biology that are not accessible anywhere else. Or you want to think about the space of all possible technologies. That space is actually exponentially large. That's crazy. And if you could change a combinatorial space of all possible technologies, that space is actually exponentially large. That's crazy. And if you could change a combinatorial space to a physical space and there was actually a way of mapping them mathematically,

that would be quite hard. But I think Earth is bigger in the possibility space than the rest of the universe would be preserved. You mean like in the possibilities of what a human could create in their life? What is possible for every human to create in their own life? I don't know. Maybe it's unlimited. Some people think it's unbounded.

It's just, it's about the physical stuff. What limits us the most? Is it the physical elements? Is it our mindset? Is it? I think it's our mindset. I think we hold ourselves back a lot. Like collectively, like at the planetary scale,

like what are humans doing? And also individually. Because it's easy to emotionally hold ourselves back. If we thought about things rationally, we can make a lot of progress. But emotions are important too because they can be a guide to how things subjectively feel and kind of steer trajectories. What can we do from all your research and discoveries and knowledge? What can we do to improve our mindset so that we are more unlimited than we are limited as humans? I think the thing for me that's most interesting is the role of imagination and imagining a positive future.

So and this really struck me, actually. So I mentioned I work at ASU, which is a phenomenal university. But I remember a few years ago, we were starting a science and imagination initiative. And I thought that was kind of interesting. But the whole idea was to get scientists and science fiction writers together. But it was with a specific purpose, because most of our, you know, fantasy and science fiction writing was built on apocalyptic narratives. And the idea was, unless we can write about positive futures, positive science fiction futures,

how is humanity actually going to build them and envision them? And I thought that was such a powerful idea. And I really think about that in my own work. So a lot of scientists approach science thinking, you know, Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is the best explanation. But if you're somebody like me

that thinks theories themselves become causal, like they do things in the world, our ideas do things, they physically have consequences. Kind of like the, have you seen the whole Simpsons thing? Have you seen this? No, I don't know. I don't know what's on your table. The Simpsons, there's always like these memes,

but the Simpsons have, I guess, predicted so many different world events right yeah it's like they come up with an idea they write a story about it it comes out then 20 years later on the exact day or that year right like they predict coronavirus and trump winning the president you know all these different things and so is it the prediction that is causing is it you know is it the thought what is happening yeah i think i think there's a multiple things going on there but some of it's like you think you have an original thought but it's actually what you didn't realize you were doing is reading a lot of inferences that

were already there and so i you know i you mentioned about like the power of a human mind i think people really don't recognize how much information is in front of you all the time and that and also people emphasize so much their conscious brain, but I, I'm one of these people that recognizes my subconscious does everything. It's like my conscious experience is just report, like just talking with you. Right. But like almost all my thinking is in my subconscious brain. And so I try to have a, it sounds really cheesy, but I'm like, I have a healthy relationship with my subconscious brain. If I don't know how to think about something, I push it down. I let it stew down there. And I like ideas pop up when they're, when they're ready for me to like,

try to figure out what to do with them. How important is it, do you think for human beings to learn how to love themselves? I think that's critically important. Yeah. I love us. I think we're the most amazing thing that exists. I mean, love ourself. Yeah. The individual. No, I know, but I'm just, I think it makes me sad when people don't love themselves because I think to myself, like, you know, not every bit of matter in the universe ever gets to be alive. Right. And like every human is like this amazing configuration that has like, in some sense, unlimited potential of what they can do in the universe. And so I think loving ourselves is really important to realizing that potential. And yeah yeah, so I, but I'm also, like, I'm an extreme optimist. Yeah. But I like that. I can't remember, like, I don't know, someone said it's, like, the odds of being a human are, like, trillions to one or something, right? It's, like, for your parents to have that one sperm at that moment.

It's, like, trillions to one. Yes. And so learn how to enjoy it and appreciate it, right? Yeah, exactly. Not saying it's not going to be difficult times, but learn how to appreciate it and love yourself. Yeah, and even the difficult times, like all of us, I've been through things in my life, but they can make you who you are.

And I know people experience absolutely horrible things. But, yeah, I don't know. It's tough. And the question of, like, human suffering is super tough. Like, what do you do with that? But I think we do have a lot of potential, and I think people loving themselves is really important. And what is your meaning of life? What's the meaning of life for you?

I think it's this idea of creativity, but also just like this feeling of purpose. How do we find our purpose then? Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a tough one. I think you meet lots of interesting people. I think the thing for me that's been most interesting is, you know, I didn't travel much when I was young, but like later in life, like all of the people I've met and, you know, I didn't travel much when I was young, but like later in life, like all of the people I've met and, you know, in some sense you become an amalgamation of all the people you meet. And so I think if you're feeling like you don't know what your sense of purpose is, that you maybe haven't talked to enough people because like people are amazing. You learn so much from them.

And there's so much happening in the world right now that that there's there's so much to be done absolutely yeah so um so i i like learning from everyone i meet i think that's been really powerful for me what do you feel like is missing in your life right now um i feel pretty satisfied um besides the answer to what is life yeah Yeah. I would like it done tomorrow. What is missing in my life? I think, so I'm somebody that really appreciates counter perspectives. Like I think it's really healthy to adopt someone else's point of view for a little while and then just try to understand it and also to constantly challenge yours. And sometimes I'm just not sure I'm doing that enough really yeah so and I like

and also this sort of optimism like I'm a I'm like an excessive optimist so maybe like maybe I should be more pessimistic um and it's not really like I feel like those are missing for my life but I guess it's part of my constant questioning of like am I on the right track is to constantly check myself by doing those things so So I think it's important for me to be aware of my limitations and what I understand and don't understand and to play with those ideas and try to figure out how to. So I guess I would be worried about what I'm not thinking about. And that's probably on a personal and a professional level.

Sure. Yeah, I think of it as not as being pessimistic but being prepared. Yes. You know, prepared like, okay, I'm going to expect and hope for the best. But if everything doesn't go as planned, how can I prepare and train myself to be ready for these situations? Yeah. Not saying they're going to happen. Right.

But like from the sports world, we'd always prepare for like, okay, you're, you're exhausted. You have a penalty against you. You know, all these things are against you. How are you going to calm your mind and go into the next play? How are you going to come back? Not just expecting to be, you know, hoping to be winning, you know, like planning to win, but also preparing for challenges. Yeah. I think that's, you know, something we saw in the last few years is people weren't prepared for the amount of weight of challenges that were to come in human society. Yeah. And I talked about this in the show before, but in 2008, 2009, that time I was not prepared for the economy.

I didn't have any money. I was, you know, financially bankrupt. I was not prepared for the economy. I didn't have any money. I was financially bankrupt. I was physically injured. All these things I felt like I wasn't prepared. Whereas a year before, I felt like I was on top of the world. I was a great athlete. I was playing professional football. But then I wasn't prepared for the challenges to come.

And when that happened, and I went through a couple of years of adversity, I said, I want to make sure I'm prepared for when this happens again. Yeah. Make sure that I'm ready for it. Doesn't mean it's not. It may affect me in some ways, but it's not going to cripple me. And I think a lot of people I don't think are prepared. Yeah. In their lives for that and i don't think you need to say the world's going to be crazy and i'm a pessimist but it's when something happens in life am i physically mentally emotionally financially spiritually training myself yeah to be ready right i i really resonate with that and i think um you know like a lot of us are running in what I would call survival mode where it's like dealing with the instantaneous problem. And because we're so overloaded with those short-term problems, we don't have enough time to plan ahead. It's tough. And I personally have been spending the last few years of trying to get out of survival mode.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. I have two kids. They're six and nine. I went through divorce a couple years ago. But, like, their dad has bipolar disorder. And that whole process was really hard for me because I didn't realize I, I have two kids. They're six and nine. I went through divorce a couple years ago. But, like, their dad has bipolar disorder. And that whole process was really hard for me because I didn't realize I was living in survival mode.

The whole time. The whole time. Yeah. And, you know, he's a wonderful person. And we get along great. So it's, like, it's nothing to do with, like, any, you know, but it was just, like, the circumstances and, like, what you get yourself into. And then how much you don't realize you're doing and that you don't even have any capacity for like any long-term visions or any resiliency or anything. It's hard to think about the future when you're living in survival. Yeah. It's very hard. So I have empathy for that because

I've experienced that and I know a lot of people are going through that. How do you think we can get out of survival mode in order to plan for a greater future for our lives? I've been trying to learn how to say no to things. It's huge. It's really huge. And also set boundaries. So like this idea that like, cause I'm a yes person. Like I'm like, you know, I, and I'm a people pleaser. So like, I'm always trying to make everybody, everybody happy and always trying to like do everything for everyone. And I realized that like, that was really limiting my potential to actually do what I like, what I need to do and to also fulfill my purpose. And to even in it, like even to the detriment of like people in my personal life, you know, cause like if you're saying yes to everyone,

you're saying no to something. And, um, so, uh, it's interesting cause the pandemic really, I had a lot of, I would say yes to meeting and saying hi to everyone. Going to events and all these different things. And now I'm just kind of like, I've got a few core people I want to spend my time with. And I'm way more selective of events I say yes to. You've just got to learn to let go of the fear of missing out. Yes, exactly. And realize that you've got to take care of your own stuff first. That's exactly right.

And the quality of your time becomes so much better because you know you're choosing it too. Right. And I think that's really important. As an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, when we say yes to ourselves as opposed to saying yes to everything else in the universe, how does that apply to your studies? It's like you're selecting yourself. So I think, you know, like one way of thinking about what, this is interesting. I never thought about it this way. But like one way we think about life, like physics of life, is what gets selected to exist, right? And so in some sense, like your yeses are you selecting all the things that you want to allocate your time to. So if you're selecting yourself to exist and you want to have like a certain kind of life, you're saying yes to yourself.

What happens when you say yes to everyone else? You're diffusing. You're diffusing yourself. And you're like deselecting yourself in favor of other people. What happens when you deselect yourself? I don't know. Your intellectual lineage dies. Wow. Interesting. I don't know. So I mean, because you think about biological lineage, you have children, like every interaction you have in the world is in some sense like your children.

Like that's part of you propagating into the universe, right? Your message, your interactions. Yeah, your interactions. Everything you do. It's creating a ripple. Yes. Yeah. So, like I think, you know, we have a limited time where we actually exist as an individual human.

limited time where we actually exist as an individual human. And a lot of your immortality, so to speak, is your impact that you create in the world, the legacy of like what bits of you remain and start to act and like actually continue to influence things. So like, you know, Einstein's a good example. He lived for a certain period at the beginning of the last century, but his impact, you know, has, you know, he still exists on the planet in a lot of really interesting intellectual ways. And he exists more now intellectually than he does biologically because he didn't have that many kids, but intellectually he had a lot of, a lot of impact, right? So I think, I think when you're thinking about this idea of saying yes to yourself, you're just, you're trying to focus like, what is, what is, what is me and how do I define me?

And how do I define what kinds of influences I want to have? And you actually have control over it instead of just blanket, just sending your bits out into the universe and not really focusing your efforts on what you think actually matters to you and what impact you want to have. Interesting. What's the thing for people listening or watching, maybe all this went over their head. It went over my head too. That's okay. What is one thing you hope people think about today after this conversation, whether you've already said it or you want to say something new, what's one thing that you hope people take away from this in terms of their life, their own personal life and improving their life?

Well, I think one thing I think is an important observation is that we're really young, like collectively as a species, as things happening on this planet. We're really young and we have a lot of potential. And it's hard living. I mean, there's a lot of things happening on the planet. But I think the future can be bright. You know, there's millions of years ahead of us, potentially billions, you know, people get off the planet and we're at the early stages of that. And we can, we can do a lot to

affect what that looks like. That's cool. By what's happening on the planet now. What's one thing, and what's one thing we should do every day to improve the quality of our life? To be able to make a positive impact for millions of years. I think self-love is really, I actually really liked your emphasis on that. I think that's really important. And yeah, saying yes to yourself and also not being hard on yourself. I think this is something that we do way too much is like, we're so self-critical. So it's like, if you don't hit that marker, it's like, you know, a horrible person, whatever. And I think just having like forgiveness for yourself, you know, like I personally think it's good to set goals. And I like to set big goals.

But, you know, that puts a certain amount of pressure on you. So then the flip side of it is not to be hard on yourself. You know, just keep on trying. Keep on trucking, as they say. Keep on trucking. Yeah. I love this. How can we be of support to you, Sarah?

I don't know. I mean, I always say this, but I'm like, I want to solve the origin of life before I die. But I want us to solve it. Like, I want, I just think it's such an important problem to understand what we are and where we come from. So I'm just hoping more people get enthusiastic about thinking about it and wanting to help solve that existential. It's, you know, like people talk about these existential threats, you know, to humanity right now and all the things happening.

And I think to myself it's like we don't even know what we are. How can we answer all these things? So I think I just would like more people to kind of focus on the first questions, the first order questions, and not the ones that are downstream consequences. Sure, sure. So it's like, you know, like people in AI are like worried, have we built an intelligent AI and we don't even know what intelligence is. It's like, can we, can we answer the fundamental question before we ask all these other questions? So we need to know what life is, I think, to know what's, what's going on.

So I would like more people to be enthusiastic about that problem. I think it's solvable. I think we have the technology to do it and I think we have the right kind of theories in place. And the people that work in this area are just phenomenal thinkers. I mean, they're the Einsteins of today, I think are focusing on these kinds of problems. It's just, we don't know it yet because these are the theories that are, you know, people are going to be talking about like quantum physics a hundred years later, right? So what are those theories happening now? Who are those people?

And can we give them support so that they can do the work that they're supposed to be doing? Sure. Wow. Where can we go to learn more about you and your work? I do experiments a lot on Twitter. I like Twitter. It's really fun. But I'm a theorist, but I like playing with words.

So I do a lot of thought experiments on Twitter, which I think are fun. I read a lot of the comments. I don't respond to a lot of them because I don't like to, like, I just, I learn a lot from the ecosystem there, which is really fun. And I have an Instagram account, which is like more, I think of science as art. I like fashion a lot. So I kind of experiment more with that stuff there. And then my lab has a website, emergence.asu.edu, which talks about some of our research. And I have a book coming out at some point. The book's going to be answering what? What life is.

It's about the problem, yeah. So I deconstruct sort of the way people have thought definitionally about life and then try to rebuild this vision of what life is from a perspective of fundamental physics, bringing concepts of time and complexity and things. Yeah. Changing the world, helping solve some problems. Yeah. Working on it. Yeah. It's amazing. It's a collective effort. It's amazing, Sarah. I want to ask you a couple of final questions. This is a question called the three truths. So it's a hypothetical scenario. Imagine your last day on earth many years away. You live as long as you

want to live. You answer the question of where's life start from? What's the meaning of life? All these things. You discover the answers. You create the life you want to have. You see your kids grow up in a certain way that they envision and new invasion of all positive things but for whatever reason all of your research all your content is gone so no one has access to your information anymore yeah hypothetical okay but you get to leave behind three lessons for the world and this is all we would have to kind of remember your information by I call it three truths what would be those three truths for you it's interesting this idea of the information erasure.

Sorry. Like information doesn't actually leave the universe. We don't have access to it anymore. Your imprint is still there. The content's not there. Maybe the video, the written word, the audio is, for whatever reason, we don't have access to listen to it anymore. Yeah, no, no, no. It's fine.

But yes, I think I understand the analogy, but it's just interesting to me because I guess one of my, my three lessons would all immediately be playing off of that, that you leave an imprint in the universe. Like your existence actually matters. So the universe is fundamentally different, even if nobody remembers that you did that um and and all of us basically fundamentally change it um uh you know I I think the the intrinsic feelings we have of like purpose and um uh joy or you know like the self-love like those things are guides for for what we should be doing in some sense I think like you're you maximize your potential you know, in the way people would usually say it. But I also think in terms of this, you know, causal power and creativity.

I think the other one I find a lot of value in is to think about yourself as a lineage instead of an individual. And what I mean by that is we're so focused on the I, right? And not the fact that even I is a collection of like the histories of our life. And then we're a collection of the histories of the things that so, so, and also, it gives you a sense of continuity about the things you create in the world. Because like we were saying, you know, all these little bits of you go out in the world. So you're, you're basically, you know, a packet of information that's locally aggregated for a short amount of time, but it's part of this larger structure that goes all the way back 3.8 billion years and who knows how far into the future.

And I think thinking on those timescales for what we are is really very empowering. It's historically rooted, but also future looking. That's beautiful. Those are great. I want to acknowledge you, Sarah, for doing work that I have, you have a lot more wisdom than I do in this stuff, and it's so much unknown that you're tackling that is so confusing for so many people, and I'm just grateful that you're dedicating your life

so passionately to trying to understand and find the answers to these questions that I think a lot of people are curious about. So I really acknowledge you for studying, for, you know, gaining the expertise in these different areas, for collaborating with the brilliant minds of the world to find these solutions and making this part of your mission. It's really inspiring. Final question for you. What is your definition of greatness? Oh, it's going to go back to purpose, but but I just I just think greatness is like fulfilling your purpose like I I don't I don't know why I'm using that word so much today but I just

I think this I like I think the universe you know in some sense you could think of it as like aspiring to greatness like it wants like more more things to be possible and it's kind of this this generative mechanism of creativity and drive and and directionality of gender like of creativity that i i think is just great so maybe that's greatness i don't know um yeah so it's kind of yeah that sense of purpose and place in the universe and also that like you know i think we have a sense to put ourselves outside of reality like think we're describing it from the outside but when you put yourself in the universe. And also that, like, you know, I think we have a sense to put ourselves outside of reality and like, think we're describing it from the outside, but when you put yourself in the center of the reality, it's like, you know, I do exist and I do matter. Yeah. There you go. And I'm a real thing. The universe generated. You are. Yeah. So are you. Thank you. Isn't that

great? I love it. Perfect. Sarah, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's you appreciate it yeah sure amazing thank you thank you so much for listening I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness make sure to check out

the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links and also make sure to share this with a friend

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and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.