Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene

three-two-one Brian Greene ladies and gentlemen how are you sir good thank you how are you doing this man my pleasure enjoyed your work for many many many years so I really appreciate you coming in well thank you I appreciate that like I was telling you I just started your new book and how's it going it's going well it's hasn't confusing [ __ ] out of me yet but I know it's coming it will be coming no doubt yeah with all your work so the beginning of time the beginning of the universe - the end that's essentially what you're summarizing yeah that's the that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book I I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing how it started how things like you and me rise up how consciousness emerges issues a free will and whether we have it and then on to the future what's going to happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far far future it's uh I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of commingle to create life and when you think of entropy a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos yeah exactly but that's not necessarily the case it's only part of the story I mean entropy kind of gets a bad rap right it's the thing that you want to avoid but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it it's this disintegration it's this decay it's this drive toward disorder and that's kind of true but the reality of the situation is more subtle because overall entropy needs to go up but that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way and in fact the universe is incredibly clever stars the ubiquitous feature of the heavens they are pockets of order that naturally form but as they form they increase the entropy in the surroundings so the net entropy goes up even though this beautiful orderly bright object in the sky appears and it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place without stars the particles of the universe would just disperse the universe would get bigger and bigger colder and colder and that would be it there wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity stars themselves just the fact that they exist is very strange that you have this thing and ours is fairly small right it's a million times larger than Earth yeah and it's going to burn for billions of years and it's just hovering there yeah and it creates all the life yeah literally is responsible for all the life yeah and when they supernova that creates the actual ingredients for life which is even more strange like you can't have biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding yeah I mean we often in a poetic way said that we are made of star stuff yeah that's Carl Sagan but you can also say that we are are made of you know nuclear refuse right we heard the news right us yeah that that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe and it rains down on planets and at least on one such planet that stuff comes together and yields life so it is a cycle I mean I don't want to sound like The Lion King here but you know it that's really what it is well what I'm so interested in about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that that have to take place in order for all this life in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going to go yeah yeah exactly and the remarkable thing and sort of them the main point that some level is that look we're special entities we can think we can reflect we have emotions but ultimately you and I and everybody else were just bags of particles that are governed by physical law and so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world the inanimate stuff of the world the inanimate stuff of the heavens and us we all come from the same fundamental ingredients in the same fundamental laws now some people find that that gives them I don't know a sense of desperation a sense we're not special a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless but you know my view on this is it's spectacular that we're made of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues you have on this desk because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do what we do mm-hmm and I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity we don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity you don't need that particles can do miraculous things and that is the message that I think you can draw from a more complete understanding of where we came from and where we're going that the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant that like what is the point this sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with right yeah right that's something that you touch upon really early on that this this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're gonna die yeah yeah that that to me is the vital distinguishing feature of our species you know we can reflect on the past we can think about the future and recognize that we're not going to be here in the future these for some period of time and it's um it's an idea and it's powerful motivating influences one that has been explored throughout the ages Auto ronk was one of the early disciples of Freud who ultimately broke with Freud developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do and then when I was on and it was in my 20s or 30s I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called denial of death I'm have you ever heard of this book it was it was big in the 70s and one actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s and it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do and in many ways in my own book the one was coming out actually today until the end of time it's um it's extending this notion that Becker developed in denial of death but now seeing it in a cosmological setting because it's not just we that are going to die it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time our our best theories suggest to us that even protons the very heart of matter their quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates falls apart into its constituent particles and at that point there's no complex matter around at all what are the would timeline are we talking well pretty pretty big long timeline in fact I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved I like to use the Empire State Building and imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the previous floor so like on the ground floor it's like one year first floor 10 year second floor 100 and so forth so you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building and in that scheme of things everything from the Big Bang until today you're about at the 10th floor 10 to the 10 years 10 billion years and as you go forward you are looking at things very far in the future and to answer your question we think and i underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas protons will decay roughly and say by the 38th floor so 10 to the 38th years into the future so we can relax for a little bit you can relax for a little bit but here's here's the thing the amazing thing obviously is it sounds trite but time is relative right so any duration that seems long it's only long by comparison to another duration and on say the scale of the entire empire state building up to say ten to the hundred years into the future which is what the peak would represent 10 to the 38 years is like less than a blink of an eye I mean it's nothing on those scales so you sort of have to be careful whether you're your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need to if you're going to think about the very far future is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist yeah we anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart so if there any stars left over we believe that by the 14th floor most stars will have use up their nuclear fuel there will be dark embers just sort of you know smoky out there in the cosmos but if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor they will all just dissipate into their particular ingredients so it's hard to imagine past safe floor 38 that there's gonna be any life for any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe so the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline so impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long but yet so small like yeah in the human mind yeah it's very hard to hold these durations yeah in mind I mean I don't I don't feel like I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about in fact the Empire State Building that little analogy helps me to sort of give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen the universe but you know we're good at understanding days weeks months years the times of you know conventional experience we have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've never experienced you know and that's true not only for time it's also for a space right I mean we have very good intuition about everyday phenomena I mean if I have to take this bottle of water I throw it at you you'd catch it you know where to put your hand you wouldn't have to calculate it's Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going but if I was to do the same thing with electrons you don't have a neither do I a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves and that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics and because of that our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave in fact I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savanna who started to think about electrons in quantum mechanics they got eaten right there the whose genes didn't propagate onward and therefore those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our ancestors were good at understanding Newtonian physics but we're not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world do you anticipate that someday in the future whatever is next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts because if you stop and think about what human is we've only really been this for X amount a hundred thousand years that's right and it's a it's a good question and it's a tough one I'd like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds virtual reality or whatever augmented reality whatever version of that kind of technology takes over in the far future we might be able to experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift to change so that we grasp the quantum realm the way we grasp Newtonian physics I can at least imagine that as a possibility what it would take to actually get there and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition I don't know but it's all about experience and survival we have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world we've been programmed by evolution to survive and those are two radically different propositions because you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive it's a distinct attribute and one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value to understand black holes or the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or entropy or thermodynamics these qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us but it's not something which obviously has any survival value may someday MA what's interesting is also how relatively recently people have been pondering these ideas in a sort of a quantifiable way we can write things down and sort of express it with other scientists and try to figure out who's right and who's wrong in terms of these calculations but human beings I mean what when did we really start pondering the the scope of the universe where did that pretty recently I mean if you uh if you think about the beginnings of modern physics you know you can start with Galileo you can start with Newton but many of them were talking on the order of hundreds of years and the amazing thing in hundreds of years we've gone from a complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world actually works to the development of Newton's equations where you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses or lunar eclipses or motions of the planets and so on and then you know a couple hundred years after that we migrate from that understanding which is basically an encapsulation of the patterns that we can all discern with the naked eye we develop a whole new body of physical law called quantum mechanics which is so completely counterintuitive which describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't ever see with the naked eye but nevertheless we can use the math to make predictions and the predictions are borne out by experiment and that progression only took say a couple hundred years and that's where we've gotten so it's kind of spectacular that you know we beings who are just coming of age here in the Milky Way galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper in a calculation a pencil and we can figure out magnetic properties with particles like electrons to ten decimal places that's shocking I mean it's stunning and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of that our species has been able to accomplish that somehow or another I don't think I'm responsible feel proud yeah I don't feel like any of my people are involved you've you've contributed your part you know it really is a collective effort and that's the beauty of science in the end of the day it's not that most scientists are ever going to be remembered you stop someone in the street and ask them to name a scientist yeah they may say hawking they may say Einstein that's kind of it I think for most people and I don't think that's a bad thing per se because it's not about the personalities or the people that have pushed the frontiers of understanding it's the fact that we've got this body of insight that continues to grow and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand the natural world and I think that's really what it's all about don't you think that there are some personalities like yourself like fine men like I mean Neil deGrasse Tyson that because of their personality because they're sort of they're charismatic people it actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes more people attracted to the ideas yeah no doubt and and I think that's a that's a vital point because without that impetus from outside the traditional educational system I don't think we would have the kind of interest in science that I can feel growing you know in the world around us I mean the unfortunate thing in the educational system is that we teach toward examination we teach toward assessment and if you want to figure out how to flatten a kids interest in these ideas just teach them stuff and tell them you're going to be tested on this on Tuesday you're gonna have to spit that you know everything that you've learned so I find it kind of heartbreaking the way in which so much intrinsic interest in these ideas you can see it a five or six year old right I mean I like to say we begin as little scientists we're exploring the world but trying to figure things out and then we go into the educational system and it's not by by malice it's just by the nature of how we teach in the in the current you know approach to educational philosophy that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas is a burden hmm so god I want to have to spend time learning about parts of the cell or how to balance reactions I see with my own kids I've got 15 year old son at 12 year old daughter and all they are motivated by is next Wednesday's quiz and I'm like hey these ideas they're they're kind of exciting they're kind of wonderful at debt debt I just want to know enough so I can you know do well on the quiz and once the quiz is over they just sort of leave the ideas behind when do these ideas become attractive to you well I was I don't know not unusual for a scientist but unusual I think in the in the spectrum of kids in the world because at five or six years old I was just captivated by mathematics really yeah five or six definitely yeah my dad my dad was not an academic my dad was a composer he was a vaudevillian he was a he was a comedian you know he was in the early days would go around the country and with a harmonica group and a stage show that that's what he did you know he liked to say that he was an S PhD a Seward Park high school dropout you know so at tenth grade he just hit the road but he loved scientific ideas so he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I was about five years old and then I would ask him to set me problems and he give me these 30 digit numbers by 30 digit numbers I'd write them out in big construction paper and I'd spend the weekend just calculating away on these huge you know arithmetic Allah problems of no interest to anybody on planet Earth but to me the fact that you could learn a little piece of math and then do something that nobody had ever done before that was exciting to me as a kid and that's really what got me going so you chose the right path clearly yeah personality whatever it is that well you always wonder about that oh no if you wonder you know I was wonder how can you not what would have happened if X would have transpired instead of Y in fact I have to say when I when I graduated college I had sort of a a period of I don't know depression is too strong a word for it but a period of what have I done I went to college I could have studied all the great ideas of the world and all I did was get a technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equation and solve Einstein's equations and I felt like wow have I just like squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever had because I was so completely focused on just trying to understand physics and mathematics past that well I was lucky I was given a second chance III won a scholarship to go to England to Oxford and in ostensibly it was to study physics but when I got there I realized that I was completely free to do whatever I wanted to do at that point and so I took a year to study literature I went to the physics classes so I was sort of showing up but I wasn't focused on it at all and instead I was focused I got a you know in England it's a tutorial system so I got a tutor which is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and you write papers you literally go in and you read your paper out loud it's not something we just turned it in and it gets graded so it's a very personal experience you write something and you're actually delivering it to this individual that is going to help you in your educational journey and so that's what I did for a year and at the end of that year I kind of said to myself okay I've got it I understand now what it would mean to study these these other subjects and I sort of felt like I'll be able to do this on my own if I continue to be excited about it and I went back to physics with a vengeance and basically in that second year completed my doctorate in in that year and and moved on from there so this time that you took off this year when you didn't really take it off but you change pace yeah how beneficial was that for you do you think it helped you sort of appreciate what your original subject of interest was as well yeah hugely so because you know it's funny it's the flip side of something I often encounter with people that are interested in science but don't know the math and they always say or some say I'm never really gonna understand this body of science because I don't know the mathematics and I try to convince them look at some level that's true if you really want to do research in the general theory of relativity you've got to learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus but if you are really interested in the ideas you really can grasp the ideas without the technical background so I try to demystify something that can see impenetrable because you haven't entered the field and I think the same thing happened to me in Reverse for the more humanistic explorations it had this aura of of grandeur that I was unable to penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas and by spending a year in those ideas it didn't diminish them in any way but I felt like it brought it back down to earth as another journey toward truth another pathway toward inside and one that you don't have to have a degree in you don't have to know the ins and outs of the academic version of that subject to understand it and grasp it and and spend some time thinking about it so do you think that for people studying anything particularly those studying Science and Mathematics very rigid disciplines do you think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding their education into philosophy or art or something that that uses your mind in a different way yeah um some some there are some people in the in the physics and mathematics community who are so intensely focused that it would almost be a shame to pull their attention away from the deep dive that they're going to do for the rest of their lives and the contributions that they're going to make and have made er are substantial and and exciting but for I think for many others and certainly for me I mean look I as most people do but not all but I've learned early on that I'm not gonna be in Albert Einstein you know I can make contributions and I have had contributions to fails like string theory and in cosmology but they're never gonna be at the level of shattering our understanding of the world things that people are gonna talk about five hundred years from now that's unlikely and I think for somebody like that who's able to make contributions but pulling away from the technical work is not gonna extract some vital insight into the nature of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered I think there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying because by broadening your perspective on what the work you're doing is actually revealing it's part of the human quest for understanding and seeing it as an isolated discipline where it's all about the next equation and the better unified theory or the deeper understanding of the Big Bang to see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding I think diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do was that a part of your initial ambition yeah well is something that we have rocked the world yeah well to go back to the the comment that you made before about we being the only species that knows that we're going to die I think part of that instills in many people and certainly I see it in my own life even though at the time that I was making various decisions I wasn't literally thinking about these kinds of issues of mortality but how do you deal with that recognition of the impermanence of your own life well I think part of it is a symbolic kind of immortality you create something that will last you create something that'll have such impact that it will stick around for a long long period of time so I think yes I mean part of my motivation in doing physics was not merely to get the next decimal place in this or that physical quantity described in the natural world it was to try to have some kind of insight that would rock our understanding of the world and have reverberations that would echo out for many many years to come that's interesting did that torture you somewhat I mean is that something that would haunted you is it in your head all the time not really uh but an ultimate ambition ultimate ambition yes for sure and you know look I think when when you're doing any work whatsoever the day to day the moment to moment is a grind you know I don't know how you find it in the work that you're doing but if I'm working on a research project even if in principle the ideas are grand and wonderful and bold the moment-to-moment is calculating away it's trying to figure out that equation it's put in an equation on a computer I mean it is not sexy it is not something that has that glorious quality that you might ultimately describe when you're finished and you look back and you think about the implications of your work the moment-to-moment of almost anything that you do is a grind so so I think that's ultimately what is the driver of whatever you're doing in your life the moment-to-moment but yeah there is certainly a part of me that would have a desire a hope that the work would reverberate in a powerful way I think that's true for most physicists that that notion that you can sort of sit at a table and think and change the way we understand reality the way Einstein did the way Schrodinger did the way Niels Bohr did but like what percentage of people you have that revelation yeah I think it's I think it's pretty few and far between nobody else is sort of just contributing contributing and usually someone exactly some light bulb goes off sort of powerful new inside and you're like okay everything has suddenly changed that's so exciting though and it's what keeps going it keeps you going you know to be the person who has the light bulb yeah but I tell my students you know and especially young students who come and are still trying to figure out what they want to do if you're not satisfied with just contributing if you're not satisfied with being part of the journey but not the person at the head of the breakthroughs it's probably not the field for you because it's so unlikely because it's not just brainpower it's thinking of the right questions it's thinking of things in the right orientation it's being at the right place at the right time with the right DNA that somehow is attuned to the question that's being asked so it's not even fully under your control it's not sort of a matter of you know exercising your mind and and building up the muscles of the brain in such a way that you are the strongest person to contribute to this in this idea it's it's luck its timing it's being there when the questions being asked and you happen to see the way forward that's it's so interesting to me that there's so many people working on all this stuff and the average person that doesn't contemplate quantum physics or these equations we have no idea it's going on yeah and that this all this work that's so critical to our understanding of what the universe really is with it the very fiber of the universe itself yeah all this is going on and most people are just sort of they're reaping the residual benefits of it yeah but they're just wandering around not knowing yeah hugely so in fact there's a number that's quoted that quantum mechanics is responsible for something like 35 percent of the gross national product so so it's like it's in a very concrete way now the the problem of that number is I recently looked it up to find the source of it so I sort of went online and checked it out and apparently I'm the source of this number and I assure you that I've not done a calculation that really fully justifies this but roughly speaking you know anything that has an integrated circuit is the result a beneficiary of quantum insights so we use this stuff every moment of our technological lives and yet as you say for the most part most of us don't have a deep understanding of the reality that's responsible for the gadgetry that the sign says has given rise to and it's a strange quantum mechanics is an utterly strange reality too strange yeah I I've tried many many times to try to understand right whether it's Sean Carroll's books yeah or yours or any anyone's yeah it's just it doesn't get in right and again it goes back to you know our brains just weren't under pressure to thing quantum mechanically but I assure you you give me a couple hours I mean books are one thing because it's a one-sided conversation but you give me a couple hours in a back and forth and I will absolutely get you to place where you appreciate and have a sense of what these ideas really are telling us about the nature of the world here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you what do you think was happening before the Big Bang yeah it's a it's a it's a deep question and a subtle one and there's sort of two ways that I'd like to think about that question one is it could be that the Big Bang was an interesting event but not the first event in the totality of reality it could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space but it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part and that grander realm may have been here for a far longer period of time it may have experienced its own big bang's may be a collection of big bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past so it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is a lot of other big bangs or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality then we have direct access to however another answer is that the very question may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest we know how to parse that sentence we know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang because we know how to talk about the moment before your birth or the moment before the Civil War or the moment before any event that happened the world we fully understand the meaning of that kind of sentence but it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang the sentence actually doesn't mean anything it could be that the Big Bang was the place where time itself started and Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across he said look I'll dress it up a little bit imagine you're walking on planet Earth in you pass by someone you say hey can you point me in the direction of North I want to walk in the northward direction the point you continue to walk you pass by somebody else a hey which way is further north and they point you in that direction but when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say hey how do I go further north they look at you and say whoa that question doesn't mean anything because this is where north begin there's no notion of going further north than the North Pole and it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time talk about a billion years ago ten billion years ago but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago the Big Bang that may be where time started and you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself that freaks me out yeah see that that's one that it gets in your head you know what do you mean beginning of time yeah why would time have a beginning good and it could be it could be the time is an emergent quality of reality I give you an analogy boy what I mean by that is we all know what temperature means intuitively something's hot you feel it something is called you feel it your body understands those concepts what physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment so if the molecules are moving really quickly you've got a hot environment if the molecules are really moving slowly it's a cold environment so temperature emerges from the motion of particles so if you have like one particle you can't really talk about it being hot or cold because you need a conglomerate you need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion and in that sense temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas the molecules and atoms that make up reality maybe that's true of time maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns but fundamentally maybe there are atoms or molecules of time which when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with don't yield time as we know it time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently whoa that's a heavy one yeah that's a heavy one what also is a heavy one is what caused Big Bang yeah why would something's smaller than the head of a pin yeah become everything that we see in the cosmos yeah so there are ideas for the answer to that question look all this is tentative because it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning we have astronomical observations that we need to be sure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth so so we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas but the idea that I think most physicists are cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations the usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version you drop something toward the Earth and it moves downward because the earth and the object pull on each other that's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives but Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive it can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward and this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the earth is always the attractive variety the gravity created by the Sun again a compact object is always the attractive variety but Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a rocky object that's isolated in space but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region of space that that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity why is that important to your question if the very early universe that little tiny head of a pin that you're talking about if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy we call it the in photon field the name doesn't matter but if it was filled with that energy it would have been subject to repulsive gravity what does repulsive gravity do pushes everything apart causes everything to rush outward so the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart when this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical we observed any sort of element in the universe that it is theoretical but it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works so number one Einstein's equations have now been tested over and over again and a whole variety of circumstances the detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago it's like the crowning triumph of Einstein's math a hundred years ago the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space a hundred years later we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space so we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics and right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing you've got uniform energy in a region repulsive gravity the other thing is we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up not slowing down since the 1920s everybody thought that yes the universe is expanding but it will slow down over time why because gravity pulls things back together you throw an Apple upward it doesn't go up faster and faster it goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole it's expanding but expanding ever slower the observations in 1998 culminated in 1998 which won the 2011 Nobel Prize showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly the expansion of space is speeding up over time it's accelerating how do we explain that the best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity we believe even today the universe is suffused with a bath of energy we call it dark energy we believe it's uniformly going through space I like to think of it almost like a as a Turkish sauna it's like the steam filling the sauna of this energy filling space and that repulsive gravity we believe is responsible for the observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and faster over time so it's circumstantial but the case for repulsive gravity is quite strong and what would have caused it to coalesce caused compress and initially why would all that matter be in this tiny yeah less than a pin sized yeah so I have no idea and nobody else on planet Earth has any real idea other but we do have theories and one of the theories suggest that in the very early universe it was a highly chaotic environment very hot with all the fields fluctuating widely up and down and the idea would be that if you wait long enough where it's hard to know what weight means in this environment but don't press me on my definition of time back then just sort of intuitively if you wait long enough on rare occasions the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region become uniform and then that region explosively inflates grows large so you know it's imagine you're looking at a pot of boiling water the surface is of course widely undulating up and down but if you wait long enough very long time since you've never seen it and neither have I there will be a little patch on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out why that only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling it will happen it's rare but if you wait long enough it will occur similarly the widely undulating fields in the early universe if you wait long enough a patch will flatten out you get the uniform energy plug it into Einstein's equations that region explosively inflates and I mean explosively it can go from size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in far less than a blink of an eye in 10 to the minus 30 10 to minus 35 seconds that's how powerful repulsive gravity can be that is so baffling yeah so before that before this happens you just have in this theory you just have all of this energy sort of randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects yep yep it could have been forever that could and in fact that's the main point there's nobody who is hanging around looking at their watch saying good God when is this BIGBANG gonna finally happen you know so so you can have this cosmological pre-show you can have it last as long as you like the only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later a region flattens out and then the cosmological show begins and if we're looking at this model of the universe being this infinite universes yet with different characteristics and different qualities to them this could be happening throughout infinity yeah all over the place yeah and in fact this so-called inflation at cosmology is the technical name for the subject says that it says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit it was just one of many such events and therefore there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated but the details can be different the physical details can differ from what we are familiar with and the differences can be small temperature differences in one part of space versus another or they can be far more significant even the the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm their masses can be different their charges can be different their fundamental physical features can be different so out there in that wider cosmological landscape it can be the wild wild west of realities and they don't have to worry about proton deterioration there may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart the wild the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically and analyzing these theories you realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well many can be different but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiating curr out there and you know they're realms so you come to these crazy sounding sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms an infinite number of traps infinite number of times and moreover small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or you know maybe your name is a you know Joe Greene and I'm Brian Rogan or there's like strange realities that can be taking place and this is not an overworked theorists imagination this is the careful dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations now I should say there are some physicists who see this implication and say whoa you guys have fallen off the deep end your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them that's the kind of theory that we have been trained to avoid to excise hmm however the more you know forward thinking I'd like to describe us physicists say hey math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years and if this is where the math is taking us it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves Jesus that's the weirdest one the weirdest one it's like when people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe that you're out there or the inversion of you or infinite versions of you yeah and it can um be disturbing like what do you mean by you right if there are many of yous out there each of whom has an equal claim on being you because they've had the same experiences and they have the same memories and maybe you've made infinite very variations in the decisions that you've made through your life that's right so you could meet a Brian Greene your age somewhere out there in the universe that's made the right choices exactly become a gambling addict yeah you know it's like a star trek episode where you've got we've got like Spock and evil spa now the one that had the little beard on right so there's gonna be a little beard version of me a goatee out there yeah so yeah you know yeah and and thing I want to stress is this sounds kooky yeah and the danger of kooky sounding ideas and physics is that they're people who then jump offer it and say well if that's possible then then this is possible maybe I can with my mind you know effect what other people are so there's all sorts of crazy ideas that can be inspired by the weird insights of modern physics and you've really got to keep straight what's real and what's ridiculous if that's a problem right when people start using especially if they're articulate they start using scientific lingo to describe things that are very unscientific sort of like what the bleep yeah but that was one of those movies where a lot of people like there was all this quantum talk and yeah dr. quantum was in it a little cartoon you know particles and waves and like there's science behind this but then at the end of it really it was something that was created by someone who runs a cult yeah who believes they're channeling someone who's like a thousand-year-old alien like that that whole ramp thing yeah but let me tell you if you have a moment please so a couple years ago I was a middle of a big project in fact I describe this and toward the end of the book so you'll you'll get to this little anecdote if you choose to carry on reading I was in the middle of a big project and a speaking opportunity came in and I didn't properly vet it you know the money look good and looked like a fine thing and I signed off on it and then a few days before I'm going I realized it's to go to talk to Judy zebra Knight who channels ratha thirty-five thousand year old the Marion sage and I said to you know the folks who should have been checking in on this like the lecture agent I can't go and they're like hey Bryan it's tomorrow it's too late to back out you know I was like Jesus Christ you know so I look at some videos online and I see her on like the Merv Griffin Show where you know she she channels Ramtha on live television I know what year this was you know she snaps her head forward it goes she changes her voice it becomes like something between the Queen and Yoda you know great weird plays though you know hello peeing and she's talking to Merv Griffin you know he's talking about like an air punch goes what does airplane you know it's not that kind of thing anyway so I go you know and I show up and the first thing I see is there all these people walking around a grassy field with their arms out like this and I'm like like can they see your and I get closer they're all blindfolded and I'm saying that what what is going on here and they described that each person has a card around their neck where they've written down their life's dream and an exact copy of that card has been put out on this big field and they have to feel their way toward the matching card and if they succeed this shows that this goal or desire is gonna come to pass oh boy you know and I'm saying to these guys like so how's it going he goes like really good you know one person found their card you know in the last few minutes like you know the odds of probability of that happening you're kind of not unreasonable but that's all that this is and then they take me to the blindfolded archers oh geez yeah you know so they're taking bow and arrow and they're firing at these targets and like men I'm like standing way back on this kind of thing and they ask me you know do you want to try it and I was like you know there's a photographer that's come along I'm like no I'll avoid that and then they introduced me to this woman who is able to predict the next card in a shuffled deck and you know so she'd pull out this card and she'd say okay it's gonna be seven of clubs and it's like a three of spades and then the next one is a seven of diamonds because oh well there's the seven that I was talking about you know one card before you know so is this crazy circumstance where and then I go I go to give my talk okay because that's why I was there after all this was just like the preamble they were showing me what they do I walk into this barn and III across the threshold a barn and they all give me a standing ovation and I'm like okay I appreciate it but like why are you giving me a standing ovation and I go and I start to give my talk and I and I say to them straight out what I've seen here is nuts okay you know I say you know if you're gonna try to predict next cards in the deck you know one average four times you'll get the suit whenever 13 times they get the rank there's nothing in there but the pure probabilistic laws of mathematics you know they rise up and give me a standing ovation and I say it's appreciated but why are you applauding I'm telling you that you're wasting your time and they applaud me again and I'm like this is like so totally weird but then I go to the book signing I finished my talk in the book signing these people they conferred mean they they talk to us off they say there's a lot of crazy stuff that's happening in this place but we come here because we feel that there's something else in the world and we want to be around like-minded individuals that are searching for the deeper truth so thank you for calling out the silliness that's happening here but we'll come here anyway and spend our money because we want to be part of the journey and I have to tell you I had a degree of sympathy for them because I get the motivation I mean as a physicist what we do is we are revealing strange features of the world so I get the urge I get the desire that the problem is that the methodology that's being employed is something that will never take you closer to the truth however much you may feel that you're among like-minded individuals so I get the motivation I get this sensation I get the urge but it's tragic that these individuals feel that this kind of an undertaking is a pathway that will take them toward the deeper truth and let me just finish up so um after this they take me to the dinner and the dinners in a mansion at the top of the hill and that's where we're Judy I'm probably gonna get suit for this conversation but really yeah I don't know you know but but I've never Spence yeah you're 12 you know they're they're quite litigious aren't ya no they definitely are you know so so anyway there's just a one person's opinion you know they take me to the mansion at the top of the hill and that's where she is she doesn't come down and actually participate in the talk she's like watching it on closed-circuit television up in the mansion and I walk in and she hugs me but it was too goddamn long of a hug you know I'm saying it was like and she was like thank you it was like this big emotional thing and I was like I I don't I don't get it but I think that's the way that she brings people in to the fold and gets them to spend the big bucks to enter on this so-called journey toward truth where she's you know channeling this you know made-up fictitious sage that somehow people buy into this is this all still going on it was just a couple years ago so I imagine it is I'm imagine if she's really channeling it and we're just missing that's right that's certainly right every rule of reality of physics that I understand will not be less weird than the Big Bang itself you know no I tell you what I tell you why see when it comes to the Big Bang I can sit down with the mathematics that I understand well and I can follow the deductive chain of reasoning that gets us to some of these strange implications that we're talking about multiple big bangs of the realities and so forth when it comes to channeling a thirty five thousand year old sage I don't know what the hell that even means I don't understand the physical processes by which that could possibly happen I don't understand how there could have been a being of the sort that she's channeling alive thirty five thousand years ago because it doesn't have any agreement with the archaeological record hmm you know so there's there's a vital distinction between weirdness that emerges from careful mathematical analysis and weirdness that emerges from an overworked imagination that possibly sees a business model whereby a lot of money can be brought in if you can get people to buy into your vision of how the world works well it's sort of like what they do is they they curate ideas and then they run them through their sort of filter of woowoo yeah right exactly and then they distribute it in a very palatable way that attracts people that movie yeah I tell story I've told this before so I apologize to people who heard it there was a friend of mine at the Comedy Store had a fur and that I don't know her name but she came to the comedy store and she was so happy and I'm like she was like I'm so happy why he's so happy she goes because I found the secret and now that I know about the secret I am going to be married I am going to be this I'm going to I'm going to have this fulfilled life I'm going to reach my dreams and I'm really excited about that so you know at the time I had just seen the movie and then I was just starting to understand the criticism of the movie I was reading all these you know healthcare where scientists were breaking down all the things that were wrong and and I know I didn't - her dreams I just was like wow okay and then I saw a year later outside of another one of my shows a different comedy club and I said hey how you doing just like things are just not going the way I thought I thought because of the secret that everything would be great but my dad is still a pain in the ass and you know and that he always moved in with me doesn't have any money and I think I can't establish a good relationship but I don't have the job that I wanted I don't understand because I've been using the secret I think about it every day right and I said here's my take on this if you talk to someone who's very successful and you say to them hey how did you get very successful and they say I thought about it all the time I have a vision board I took that photo of the house that I wanted I put it in the vision board that became my house I took you know this this idea I want a beautiful wife I want a family I want sports cars and this and that and now I have those things because the mind is a powerful tool and the mind can create reality the you're just talking to someone who is successful how many people thought like that and nothing happened right I bet Millions yeah I bet there's so many but you're you have a that you have a bias in successful users your those are the ones you're talking to and just because of the fact that they've been able to have his extraordinarily successful successful lives while visualizing these things does not mean that visualizing these things creates yeah an extraordinarily successful life you have to think and you have to act and you have to do right in this trial and error and there's a lot of lessons to be learned but if you wanted to simplify it at the end once you're successful and boil it down to a philosophy that you could sell a course on yeah sure that's what it would be yeah that's exactly right look there's nothing wrong with visualizing success but that is not the causal ingredient right that will yield the success and the thing that comes to mind is you know I don't know if they do it any longer but there was certainly a time when Olympic athletes would be taught to visualize say jumping over that high ball you know and they'd run through the whole thing but that's not all that they were doing right they were doing you know 10 hours a day of training that integrated this visualization as part of the training program yeah you know so so so it's kind of tragic when people buy into these these crazy ideas and I have to tell you when they were making that film they called me to be in it and I think was the director one of the producers I was on the phone with and you know they were describing what they were doing and I probed sufficiently hard and some of my friends did not probe sufficiently hardened were in the film and regretted it yeah but but i probe sufficiently hard and I've said look what you're doing to me sounds really dangerous it sounds like a really bad thing to be doing and they took offense in that call back then a year after the film came out it was either the director producer I can't remember the gentleman's name called me up and said I want to apologize to you you were absolutely right I have finally realized what a bad film this was to be involved in and I completely regret it so that I don't think is the point of view of of you know the romp the school of enlightenment which is behind this or at least part of what was behind this but at least the director or the producer ever was saw the light and realized that this is not the kind of information that you want to put out in the world because it can change people's lives in a very negative way you know I think your comparison to Olympic athletes is is very good because the Olympic athletes are visualizing something that they already do you know but there's a great benefit in visualizing for athletics for martial arts for a lot of different things visualizing success visual potential problems failures of your process how you're going to adjust on the fly all those things are great because then when things do take place in real-life situations you've already prepared for them you know the path right that right that's all about I agree that and in fact I have to tell you know in one of the chapters later chapters in the book I describe theories about why it is that we for instance tell fictional stories I mean could there be any evolutionary value in two individuals telling each other a story that they both know is false that they know has no connection to the world around them but yet we've been doing that since the emergence of language and there are these interesting evolutionary scenarios in which what you're saying is brought to bear in that unfamiliar context we tell stories because it's the minds way of rehearsing for the real world but it's a way of rehearsing for the real world that's completely safe so you can go on all sorts of crazy journeys to the underworld up into the clouds you can engage in all sorts of battles you can fight gods or demigods all these things can take place within your imagination so you're completely safe and yet when you encounter something that's analogous to the stories that you've been told or retold or embellished or told to others through other accounts your brain is more attuned to respond in a beneficial way because it's not as novel as it would have been had you not been engaged in this fictional account of telling stories so there's value in visualizing there's value in telling stories but it's not the causal part that some individuals would want us to believe it is yeah the only thing that I would say contrary to that is some people develop expectations based on fictional accounts yeah and there's a real problem like romantic movies where some people will expect behavior that exists in these romantic movies only right and it's not indicative of human beings in the real world yeah yeah I point well-taken I mean I think the vital thing is that your brain has had sufficient experience that it can wait these fictional accounts in a way that can enhance your response to the world but not set undue expectations of things that are just you know only going to be true at a fictional setting and not in the real world it's just so strange to me that we desire those I mean here are movies right yeah like hero movies in particular especially superhero movies someone who possesses powers beyond anything known to human beings or any life-form yeah I get that yeah I mean I'm sure you love to just snap your fingers it fix everything but I actually see it in a slightly different way relevant to what we're talking about before you know I think that the whole hero worship that we have as a culture mm-hmm comes again from our recognition of how powerless we are against the forces of nature against the inevitable death that is facing us all and therefore there's something deeply seductive about the possibility of a being that can transcend the limitations that we mere mortals are always subject to so I think it's built into our DNA to respond to the way that we do them in the manner that we do when encountering a hero in the world I mean there's you know you know Joseph Campbell yeah yeah you know so you know the power of myth but is more technical version to here with a thousand faces you know he goes through the the whole notion of what it is to have a myth and it's basically an individual it's call to action to rise above the kinds of activities that mere mortals will be able to undertake resist the call at first but then Rises the challenge goes out into the world conquers comes back a changed individual and shakes up the reality from which that individual initially emerged on this journey and there is ample evidence that across cultures throughout the ages we have constantly been telling these kinds of mythological tales because they speak to us they speak to our urge and our desire to transcend the limitations that our physical form and the laws of physics necessarily constrain us to yeah it's it is fascinating when you think of how many different languages and how many different cultures share those same archetypal themes yeah yeah and I do think it all comes if you look way back into the history of the ideas it comes from this initial recognition that we are mortal and the fact that our brains are able to not just fix on the moment but can think about the entire timeline is the one that makes that a poignant realization and if we couldn't think about the future who would what would it matter if we knew that we were going to die I mean it would mean nothing right but the fact that we can innovate and the fact that we have ingenuity that allows us to you know make the wheel that allows us to build the pyramids that allows us to come up with quantum mechanics and Einstein's equations and Beethoven symphony and and Picasso's work the fact that we can undertake all of these expressions of creative will and the desire to transcend the world around us has a downside and the downside is we recognize that we are not going to be here for very long and I think that motivates a certain kind of engagement with the world and hero worship is part of it Kurzweil is a fascinating character yeah he thinks he's going to be around forever yeah I was wrapping him up yeah have you discussed any of this stuff with him you know I don't know him personally I have certainly gone to some of his talks and I think he and I had one exchange at some point in the past and I totally get where he's coming from you know he feels that we're perhaps the final mortal generation and how sad it is after you know a hundred thousand generations of humans if we could only stick around for one more generation science would come to a point where we would be immortal and that feels like a tragic state of affairs I don't think he's right and I think most people who think about this deeply don't think he's right either however many vitamins you take and however much science is progressing the notion that we are just a generation or two from immortality I think is wishful thinking this is a strange concept of immortality - because it's not necessarily you it's a downloaded version of you that will exist in some sort of computer right which is what does that mean right that sounds like hell yeah it could be yeah you know harem sleep in computers well I allow for the possibility that that maybe it would be a way of being in the world that would have upsides that are hard for us as flesh-and-blood individuals to appreciation or at this point but it raises the deep question would that be a good thing in fact if you had that opportunity to be downloaded in some form and that would allow you to hold on to all your memories build new memories on top of them have experiences maybe there's an avatar that you're able to drive but through you know your mental machinations is out there in the world would you do it I might have said yes before I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences and then from then I said I'm gonna hedge my bets let me see what's next right let's see what happens when the lights go out oh really do you think there may be something that happens when the lights go out I don't know yeah I don't know what I mean for sure your body is going to decay and you are going to become a part of the earth you're becoming part unless they cremate you or unless they write embalm you with some toxic chemicals then nothing can use your your dead tissue which is really a shame yeah it's really shame that we do that right yeah I mean unless he murders you and you have to exhume you in the past assault in the future whether to solve a murder right I I don't know what what do you think consciousness is I think consciousness is clearly just a factor of brain tissue and an energy or do you think it's possible that what our brain is is something that tunes into consciousness yeah well I spend I spent some time thinking about this question I think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or even humanity at some level and my own personal active is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head do I have any proof for that No does anybody have any proof for what consciousness is not at all at this moment but the history of the reductionist program where we've been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients in the laws of physics leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness and having said that there's a deep puzzle it's called the hard problem of consciousness which is if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world that quarks don't have an inner world how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles you can turn on the lights how can a collection of mindless thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience and that's a deep question that science has not yet answered my own feeling is when we understand the brain better that question will evaporate we'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding maybe it's a hundred years of the making maybe a thousand years in the making and we'll say aha when electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience and that to me is the likely answer that we will find but there are some very smart well respected people who go in a very different direction there are some who say electrons and protons and quarks they do have a fundamental proto conscious quality they themselves are conscious beings of a sort now it's not like you're gonna have electrons that are crying or quarks that are anguishing but if you haven't little proto element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle and then you take a lot of the particles and put them together the ideas that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with I don't buy into that but what people I do pick a position well I take a position on this because I guess my view is you look out at the world and what you do as a physicist is you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing and to move from our current understanding of the world to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious to me is such a fantastically radical move that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding there was a time back in the 1800s when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing how could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being they said that they can't you have to induce a life force you have to inject vitality have you inject a life force and that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today I think most serious scientists say yes life is wonderful life is in some sense miraculous but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA the complex cellular structures the cells come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms and that's all that it takes to have something that's alive no life force is necessary that way of thinking about the world has gone away and I'm my own feeling is that that kind of progression is gonna happen for consciousness today it's utterly mysterious how it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red and I can and I can experience the color red I don't just have sensors that can call that red I mean an iPhone can do that I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red where does that come from hard to answer that question but I think a hundred or a thousand years from now will look back and smile at how we in this era invested consciousness with such mystical quality when in the end it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics and that's all there is to it well what's interesting to to me is that as a human being my thoughts on consciousness are very deep and profound and the this this idea like what is this thing but if I really break it down objectively and animals have some sort of a consciousness I mean including they have instincts right they're try to get away from danger they try to survive and procreate and we developed something far more complex and our ability to express ourselves in language and in doing that language or during that creation of that language we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts and we've developed all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and emotions and and contemplate the future well these things are continually getting more and more complex if you go to single-celled organisms work your way up to you know early hominids and then get to human beings you just see this ever increase in form of complexity in in every way yes and in the way that the things see the world of course it makes sense that there would be more complexity right but we don't think about that when we think of a parakeet we don't think of a parakeet is being conscious but a parakeet relatively speaking is far more primitive than a chimpanzee which is relatively speaking far more primitive than a human being right and it's just going to continue to evolve or if we survive things will continue to improve due to natural selection and the end of mutation and all the other factors and will be something that makes this today look like primitive the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever yeah I can well imagine that because we're seeds you know small changes in DNA at a tiny fraction of percent yields a radical change in what the being that has that DNA is able to accomplish but at the same time you you made reference to psychedelic experience yeah and I trust you agree but tell me if you don't that those psychedelic experiences were generated by a slight change in the chemical makeup of the particles coursing through your brain and your body sometimes not even a change sometimes a lot of them the heavier ones are actually produced by the brain right so so so to me that's a great piece of data that speaks to the fact that all it is is particles and chemicals coursing through a structure because if the mind was somehow external to the physical makeup and the walls describing it then how would the injection say of some kind of foreign substance or as you say the brain producing some sort of substance that it didn't ordinarily have within its makeup why would that be able to have such radical impact unconscious experience the way I would look at it if I was trying to argue against that would be that your eyes and the organs of the human eye are taking in light and through that light are able to perceive physical objects in the world that they would not be able to do without light yes there's it's a it's something that allows you to see and it allows you to take in depth perception and understand that the human mind and particularly these glands that produce these psychedelic chemicals when experiencing these chemicals it allows the brain to experience things that might be there all the time yes but that you cannot perceive with normal human neuro chemistry that needs to be enhanced or the levels need to be changed and shifted and what's really perplexing about these chemicals is that these chemicals are produced by your brain and if you do take these like particularly dimethyltryptamine yeah it's the most potent of all the psychedelic chemicals if you take that you have these insanely profound visions right which is you know leads to a lot of people having these religious spiritual epiphanies have you done anything have you done any psychedelic experiences are you allowed to talk about yeah I I have not not many and I'm a complete lightweight in this arena because I hardly drink you know I hardly do anything that it puts foreign substance into the body but um yeah I was in I was in Amsterdam I was I was there because I was give me a lecture to the queen of Holland and I gave the lecture my wife and I were both there and after that was over we decided to do a little experimenting and for somebody like me who doesn't experiment I made a mistake haha because you eat it well well well the first night we went out and we went to one of these coffee bars and I guess I can speak about this you know I am it's legal yes totally legal exactly you know I we we took there like the the easy way in like the the the novice and the version and it did nothing to me at all that first night so the next night when we went I went right to the bottom of the list where there was something it was in Dutch or something but it had like machine guns you know pointed at a brain kind of thing yeah so so I did that version and it was the most terrifying experience of my [ __ ] life either but uh we were in a club we're in a club and all of a sudden the world changed and what started happening is my brain started manufacturing versions of myself that would converse with me and convinced me that the reality that I was experiencing was real and then that version of me would destroy that reality and the process would start over and over and over something you smoked a smoked yeah Wow definitely smoked and again I suspect that the impact was because my body has no experience oh for sure you know and and so I think that just enhanced the the impact and you know it was terrifying it was utterly I was in the hotel room and I was clinging to the bed and and I actually said to my wife tie me up not not on any night it sounds wrong I mean I mean time it cuz I'm like terrified of what I'm gonna do right you know wow you know and so instead you know she she called the doctor and I was like she was like afraid this would be like in the newspaper because I just like you have left you to the Queen you know but you know they're so used to Americans getting in over their head with this kind of experience is something that they were completely used to so no they did they sent up a doctor and the doctor basically just gives you sugar and my wife knew that this was a an extreme circumstance room because I don't eat any sugar but I was like he said eat is my I was like taking the Milky Way bars like a sheet or somehow or another sugar or something I don't know I don't know the chemistry behind this but but sugar is the the antidote caffeine is supposed to help tapping it help - yeah I guess but it lasted eight hours even flying home on the plane the next day all I did as I sat on my seat and I put on the headphones and there was a Beatles Channel and I just like listened to Beatles peripheral Ike for like seven hours and I was just you know in this in this place that I had never experienced before now now you know for our conversation you know this just made it so intuitively obvious to me that my conscious awareness is totally dependent on time on account a few chemicals that's all that's happening inside of the head so in a way it was a valuable experience it's not something that I want to ever experience again absolutely but it was something that helped align my intuitive understanding of what consciousness is with the scientific recognition that it all relies upon the stuff that's circulating inside of your mind yeah what's interesting about this these heavy-duty psychedelic experiences because what you took was by most people's idea of very mild yeah but profound psychedelic chemicals that are also produced by your brain if you just shift that ratio and not by too much really you're not talking about it even you talking about little small doses of this stuff shift that ratio it produces these profound visions it's just like ayahuasca type is just an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine okay they've figured out how to you know your brain print your gut rather produces mono Amin oxidase and it breaks down dimethyltryptamine and so they figured out how to combine an mao and with the leaves of another plant that has the dimethyltryptamine and I say but you could take it there's synthetic versions of it but the point is this is something that your brain produces your liver produces we know you we know it's produced in the lung since the body makes it yeah right but it's got it's in there let me change the shift balance and also you have these incredibly profound visions yeah it makes you think like what what we have now in terms of our balance and our chemicals must be different than what this fella must have had yes chimpanzee thing right and and primates before that as the human like when you think of human evolution do you ever stop to think what are we going to be like a million years from now if we do survive what have you ever done this sort of thought experiment we say okay if things keep going the same way right we used to be very strong and very hairy and we're getting you know progressively softer as we don't need to use our bodies as much our brains are getting larger our heads are getting bigger do you do that sort of thought experiment to see what we're gonna become and not in a systematic scientific way because the process is so fraught with incredible detail that I think it's hard for anybody even experts in evolutionary biology to really tell us anything that will hold water that's really predictive but on a general level yeah I mean because I you know people often wonder why is it that we haven't been visited by aliens right this is a thing that comes up whenever you're talking about other life inside the universe of that in a minute yeah yeah yeah but but but the answer to that could be quite straightforward nobody out there cares about us because we're so ill developed we're so young on the cosmic scene that there's nothing interesting for them to find here on planet earth so to me there's a natural explanation for why there can be stuff out of their life out there and yet they don't hang out around planet Earth it's just we don't hang around an anthill to try to have a conversation with you know what's going on inside that particular structure I buy that argument the least you do guys we're interested in butterflies butterflies are so boring we're we're interested in moles we're we're into you're interested in in whorls we're interested in them for very specific reasons alright so typically we're interested either because we want to see the evolutionary development that yields this particular life form or because there's a general curiosity about how this object is put together if these other beings are so far beyond us that those kinds of taxon and attacks on amines are no longer of any interest then hanging around here may not hold anything for them to make the journey and stick around long enough for us to notice I don't buy that again for two reasons one because why would we assume that they're so far beyond us that they wouldn't be interested in these talking monkeys with thermonuclear weapons who dominate an entire planet yeah that would be fascinating rent out some planet right somewhere where people are the politicians all lie to themselves everyone gets video through the sky if they fly in metal tubes that hurl over the stove ER the oceans right it pollute the oceans and eat all the fish like these people are [ __ ] crazy yeah we've got to go there and check this out but but imagine that this civilization the notion of lording over a planet is like us talking about you know the ant law during over a grain of sand so they may be galactic as opposed to planetary in their hegemony and the notion of some little tiny rock orbiting some nondescript star in the suburbs of this completely ordinary galaxy off there on the side may not have the kind of pole that you imagined that it does how I disagree we think it's interesting when we see a chimp use a rock to open up a nut you know we think it's interesting that you know there's there's a an amazing photograph of an orangutan that's spearfishing have you ever seen it I have seen that actually yeah yeah right no it is he learned it from people apparently but it's still interesting nonetheless right but I don't think a hundred years from now we're gonna be as interested in these kind of qualities or a thousand years from now or ten thousand years from well so we assumed that these things that come here from another planet are more than ten thousand years well that's because that's that's a very good question and I think the answer to that is we look at the history of the cosmos until today and it's say let's just call it our universe to be concrete 13.8 billion years and we look at life on planet Earth and it you know a handful of billions of years old so and a handful of billions of years you can go from some complex molecules to human beings let's say you say it like it's not that long it was it was it's not that long because you know imagine that life began a few billion years earlier in some other system you know stars and galaxies they were starting up you know a billion years after the Big Bang so it could be that life in other worlds has a headstart on us by a few billion years and we know what can happen in a few billion years it can days from single-cell to us and you can imagine from a few billion years from now into the future it could be radically different so to say it's ten thousand years ahead of us that to me would be the unexplained coincidence how unlikely that they started we started with them ten thousand years in the span of billions of years that seems unlikely it is it doesn't seem unlikely when you're talking about the infinite size of the universe and this perhaps an infinite number of Brian green show up there talking to an infinite numbers of me good good point good point so so you're absolutely right we're almost guaranteed if the spatial expanse of the universe is influenced as there are going to be places where it's within ten thousand years or more but those are going to be a very small number compared to the places where it's not ten thousand true or would it be an infinite number of them well but there are different kinds of infinity so you mean in this space the exact scope of the universe itself a small number relatively speaking to where we are yes well I would say slightly differently I'd say look at a finite size ball in this large space okay so everything's finite let's get a five billion light year all right and within that ball the number that are differing from us by ten thousand years would be very very small compared to the number differing from us by say a billion years or a couple of billion years so this simply by the law of numbers if we imagine that they're random processes that are eternal now there could be some physical principle that per Vence life from emerging before say four billion years ago hmm and if that's the case and we're not aware of that principle then you'd be absolutely right that we'd all be roughly at the same starting point and there's no reason to suspect that they would be so far ahead of us but I don't know of any such principle but yeah yeah you almost have a reductionist view of this right like you did you so if you had a guess if you had a hundred dollars to bet has alien life ever observed us you would say no well by observed you mean could they just turn a big telescope in our direction and gather some radio waves you know but but yes I would take that bet because frankly we've only been generating radio wave for the last you know seventy years so it's only a 70 light year ball around us and within that small radius very unlikely that there's been some alien world that's examining us so it would have to be something that would be able to recognize our signal and visit us right but don't we look at observable planets and solar systems and discover Goldilocks planets we didn't we examine those planets from vast distances away yes and wouldn't you assume that a life-form that is perhaps thousands of years more advanced than us with the exponential increase in yes knowledge II mean if they ever got to the point where we are that they would see these Goldilocks planets as well and recognize that Earth is one of them yes however if they are so far away they're going to be examining earth as it was hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of years ago right so if you truly want them to be examining us in the sense of human presence on planet Earth then it's a much more difficult proposition to imagine that they've actually been doing is it possible there's another way to examine things where you're not hampered by the speed of light oh not not not on that I know of I mean any signal in the world that we're aware of is restricted by a very by the speed of travel which is now look there's quantum entanglement which is a strange property of the quantum world in which distant objects can behave as if they are one yes and in some sense respond instantaneously to an influence in one location at a distant location no matter how far apart they are but that isn't really observing that more that's more realizing correlations between physical properties at widely separated locations but I'm not aware of a means of leveraging that to actually observe what's happening in some distant location even if you do have quantum entangled particles for a long time my operating theory on aliens was when I see something that's interesting that I'm gonna pay attention to it right because it just it's too attractive and it's a part of the thing of whether it's ramp or any of these wonky things there's something about woowoo stuff whether it's psychics or Chandler's that's really attractive to people yeah some sort of a weird way and so is so are aliens the idea that if we were visited by something from another world some far advanced space Daddy or whatever it is that comes down here and bright it's gonna show us the way that's that's so attractive that it I think it messes with your ordinary ability to observed and to objectively analyze what's real and what's not yeah I totally agree with that and I think it's an unfortunate feature of the human mind that we tend to look outward for weirdness that we'll inject into the world more than the everyday that we experience through through common everyday encounters we want there to be more we don't want it to be right that were just on this rock around this planet and we live for a while and then we're gone we want it to be more than that and so we imagine that there's some answer floating out there in the cosmos that maybe that will be brought down to earth through our space daddy as you refer to it and my view of that is it's much more noble to recognize that there is no answer floating out there in space there's no space data that's gonna come here and say this is what it's all about the answer is you and I and everybody else we manufacture our own meaning we manufacture our own purpose and how much better is it that we come up with the our own meaning than having it bestowed or forced upon us by some external entity I think that diminishes things I think it grande eise's them because that's coming ultimately from ourselves that makes a lot of sense I think the hope is that space daddy's gonna prevent nuclear war and figure out how to fix the ocean yeah sure no I mean and that I could that I could certainly imagine happened it so there's knowledge out there in the world that you could imagine that that we haven't yet encountered that we could make use of so fantastic but the other thing that's worth keeping in mind and this I think is surprising to some people you can do a calculation as to whether consciousness can't itself persist indefinitely in the universe you can ask yourself sure earth may go away you and I we're going to go away we recognize all this but is it possible that some kind of conscious being can continue to cogitate indefinitely far into the future or its progeny continue to cogitate and you can pretty much establish that thought itself will come to an end in this universe thought itself is a limited lifetime phenomenon in the cosmos so when at least our universe right yes so I'm gonna focus just on our lockdown of protons when we get to that point there's no room for thought no that's part of it but I'm willing to go further I'm willing to imagine that even with the breakdown of protons that there's some way that the particles that it spawns electrons neutrinos photons whatever somehow through some configuration of widely-separated particles is able to have signals going back and forth that allows this group of particles to think I'm willing to posit that in order to be as general as possible and with that assumption you can still prove that the relentless rise in entropy that we were talking about before ensures that any cogitating being that happens to still be able to persist in this unusual realm of particles will ultimately burn up in the entropic waste generated by its own process of thinking so the process of thought itself in the far future will generate too much heat for that being to be able to release that heat to the environment and to avoid up in its own waste when you think you will fry it's it's always been interesting to me when I've really stepped back and looked at it that our ideas of the importance of thought are so egocentric when we take into consideration the the vast scope of the universe and how majestic so much we see in the cosmos that there's no thought at least as far as we know whatsoever like like hyper Nova's like like give you know star nurseries all these different things that we see in the cosmos that are infinitely larger than us and responsible for life itself yeah that these processes create the very elements that are needed to create life but we're so concerned with this one animal's ability to think and ponder yeah create and and emotions and and write stories and that to us it's so egocentric how is every self-centered when you take a universe yeah I mean we are to finite beings sitting in the valley yeah you know in front of a wooden desk ya know it's really weird they don't think about it as so important everything does it is it is and it's hard to not think in those terms but uh I encourage people the part of the point of this book is to encourage people to think in a cosmic way and recognize the point that you're making yeah which are we these little tiny tiny finite beings crawling around on this planet we're here for a brief moment of cosmic time and that's all there is to it and some will feel like oh my god that's disturbing that's distressing my point is hey extol celebrate the fact that you were here for this brief I mean think about the collection of quantum events stretching back from the Big Bang until today that had to turn out exactly as they did for you and for me to actually exist each one of these quantum events and there are nearly infinitely many of them could have turned out that way instead of this yielding a universe in which neither you nor I nor anybody else would be here and yet against those astounding odds astounding odds we're here that is cause for celebration and you can further not only over here we can figure out how we got here we can create art we can write the stories that you are referring to we can create comedy we can build monuments we can create films we can do things that inanimate objects can't so this to me is where the value and purpose and meaning comes from as opposed to trying to look out and hope space daddy comes with the answer of you know flashing in neon sign saying aha that's what it's all about that's never gonna happen it isn't what it might it's possible I so every time I say it's not gonna happen I mean unlikely that it's gonna very unlike yeah I agree with that but it's it's interesting to me that that's the thing that we look forward to the most to the average person if they thinks about they think about space they think about intelligent life yeah that is far more interesting to them than the fact that there's black holes out there that are devouring planets yeah they're sucking stars into its event horizon yeah yeah this infinite point of density that we can't even really begin to imagine with our own little brains yeah yeah and and the fact that all this arose without a guiding intelligence yeah you know that there are black holes and there are active galactic nuclei and there are black holes slamming into each other creating gravitational waves that we can actually detect I mean it is a wonderfully rich reality that we are fortunate to be part of do you experience much pushback or much [Music] conflict from religious people who don't like the fact that you describe things in that way that didn't need an intelligent force yeah intelligent creator - it's an interesting question because the biological community people like Richard Dawkins and the like I think have really borne the brunt of the religious pushback because they're dealing directly with phenomena of life and that's the precious commodity that somehow we want to be sacred and therefore our religious sensibility will push back on it just being the mindless laws of physics and evolution yielding you know life on planet Earth they haven't pushed as hard on the quantum physicists and the cosmologists as they have on the biologists but I have had conversations many of them are respectful as opposed to antagonistic where the view is that I am wrongheaded that I am missing the point and some of these religious folks are fantastically accomplished scientists that's weird yeah I mean I went to a gathering I think I can talk about now his closed-door gathering you weren't meant to describe you too but yeah it was right I'm really open myself up and and I thought it was it was cyant was called science in the spiritual quest and it was a bunch of scientists that were being brought together and I thought it was going to be an interesting but ultimately OneNote meeting I thought everybody's gonna basically say the same thing there could be a god there's no evidence for a god we've got the laws of physics and we're gonna just press forward under the assumption that physics is all there is until the clouds part and God reveals him or herself or itself to us and at that point we may change our tune it was not one note I was the only person who had that perspective in the room everybody else was coming out religion from a very different way of thinking about the world in fact there's one Nobel laureate in the room who got up and sang Psalms as part of his presentation and I was sitting there and I was like what is happening here this is so unexpected to me and what it really meant was I was so close-minded into the varieties of religious engagement that happened in the world and it opened my eyes and there's one noble Lord in particular I did say to him at the end I said when you look at me and you hear my view what do you think and he kind of put his arm around me in an avuncular what and said you know you're you're a real smart guy and you don't understand the true reality and I think ultimately you will because you're open-minded and you're on a journey and I hope that your journey will finally take you to the place where I have been for for many years that was so unexpected mm-hmm that does Nobel laureate who I respected for his his concrete mathematical and experimental work saw the world completely differently now was a bactrim of belief yeah absolutely no absolutely but I was the one who was far round one I was the one who were untethered yeah I mean I came in there I was like whoa you know and and and and and and clearly they arranged the meeting to have a spectrum of perspectives I mean this is not something that was randomly designed and it just so happened but it was an eye opener now and from that I went to read you know William James's book a varieties of religious experience no maybe yeah so it's a book that William James great psychologist wrote in 1902 and it was based on a series of lectures I think he gave in Scotland and it is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion and science that I think has ever been written and yet most people don't know much about it because what he does is he goes through and he documents through his own research and through reading biographies and interviewing individuals the vastly different ways that people think about religion and why they think about religion and the value that religion has in their lives and and and when you read that book it doesn't convert me I haven't changed my views on whether or not there is a God but it has changed my views on the value of a religious sensibility the role that it plays in people's lives now look it can be you know you talk to people like sam harris and and and you know it's it's a destructive force in the world and it has been a destructive force in some ways but that's not the full story a fuller story is that for some individuals it gives a connection to a historical lineage that's deeply valued for some individuals it puts their life in a larger setting that allows them to be in the world in a more productive way so there are a whole range of roles that religious engagement can play the problem is when you start to pit it against scientific insight then you run into trouble but religion was never developed to give us factual information about the world religion will never give us the electron magnetic moment to nine decimal places that's the purview of scientific investigation and if you can keep these straight in your mind there's a definite and powerful role for a religious sensibility in the world yeah I feel like it gives people in a lot of ways of scaffolding for ethics and morality and allows them some alleviation of anxiety yeah exactly a feeling of purpose is but like you said as long as it's not conflicting with rigid scientific reality yeah like right scientific provable scientific reality yeah and I gotta tell you this if anything you know Richard Dawkins had him on the program so you know that his his MO in the world is very anti religious I think he would agree with me on that I don't want to put words into his mouth but I did a event with him in New York The Beacon Theater I don't know it's maybe a year ago or something like that and it was very interesting because in a one-on-one conversation his views were very similar to mine look we don't agree with in totality but I was saying to him there are times I go around the world and I will do things that are other ly irrational I'll knock on wood for good luck I'll speak to my dead father I know that he's not really there I'll pray to God on occasion if I think that I could use that backup not because I think there's some bearded individual in the sky it's just a behavioural tendency that I find to be comforting and useful and I said this to Richard and he said I totally got it I was like what he was like I totally get he said he said in fact he said I don't like to sleep in a house that has a reputation as being haunted you know you know and and for me it was such a beautiful human moment it was such a beautiful human moment where we were just like being human beings right and and he said and he only said we're both sinners and I agree we are both sinners in that sense because we know how the world works we know this doesn't make any sense and yes it's still part of somehow how we behave in the world and I think there's a value to recognizing that that is what it means to be human you will engage in the world in ways that are not necessarily strictly adhering to some rational perspective of how the scientific world I would love to see Richard Dawkins outside of a haunted house not going you know yeah so so you know um it's all just to say yeah that I kind of feel like there are many pathways toward insight in the world there are many ways to live a life there are many ways to come to terms with our own impermanence and it's not as though something is right or something is wrong it's a question of is it useful to you and I think that we have to be very open minded in the kinds of behaviors that that we allow to happen in the world you know you know even romp it it's nutty stuff you know but if some of those individuals who go there find that it allows them to live in the world in a more productive way alleviating anxiety feeling like they're on a spiritual quest hmm so be it yeah that's the thing that's something I mean it's hard for people to understand if you're not in that space that headspace it there you don't need this structure but for some people even Scientology or something along those lines it seems loopy on paper can provide them yeah legitimate structure and and benefit their lives yeah in a tangible ways they could describe to you yeah exactly and my feeling is that if there was and I don't know this to be the case maybe some biologists will push back on this but if there was a race of for want of a better word you know Vulcan like individuals who approached the world in a completely rational manner evaluating the data figuring out the most sensible course of action competing against a crazy group of individuals like us who will come up with wild fictional ideas gods in the heavens you know demons haunting the world I think it's the latter group that ultimately would triumph because with that kind of freedom of thought you get novelty you get ingenuity you get creativity and so I feel as though this is part and parcel of who we are and why we have survived and to sort of come at the world with a scientific club that's meant to smash away anything that disagrees with the scientific worldview is an unfortunate way of looking at the world yeah there's something about creativity that it doesn't necessarily have to abide by any laws of logic and it can still be beneficial yeah and and and and and that's why it's so stunning right when somebody comes up with something it's like where did that come from it didn't come from a rational approach to working out you know Brahms third symphony it emerged from the churning emotions of an individual who happens to be made up of trillions of particles guided by physical law responding to the environment which is impinging his senses with an incredible array of influences and through that world emerges the spectacular piece of music hmm that's breathtaking yeah utterly breathtaking yeah and it's amazing what that music can inspire yeah as it reaches out to you know X amount of people and then causes different thoughts in their mind yeah and then that causes in turn another branch of creativity another yeah new line of thinking that they might have never never pursued but yeah and that to me establishes that the notion that language is the only way that we can know about the world Vic and Stein had this perspective not the limits of my language limits of my world that seems to me uh turley wrong I mean the experience of music or the experience of cogitating about the world but not trying to overlay a narrative upon it just feeling your way in to reality reveals things about the world that I think are are beyond linguistic do you ever listen to music when you're you're pondering an equation or whether you're going over a problem it's an interesting question when I was in college I couldn't have any sound on when I was trying to say learn quantum mechanics or relativity I would find that it would capture my brain to fully and I couldn't focus on the equations that I was trying to understand but the funny thing is in writing this book for the very first time I found that there were passages that I couldn't write if it was quiet I needed to have music playing because in some sense by focusing too directly on what I was trying to say I couldn't say it hmm I only found that I could make progress in certain kinds of descriptions by allowing my brain to fly off through whatever musical experience I was playing and allowing the freedom of thought to then emerge within that unusual for me environment what kind of music well it varied incredibly a lot of slayer no but uh so some of it was classical I remember there's one vital of passage I was writing words do you know pentatonix the they are a spectacular acapella group who are able to take songs that you have heard and transform them into sort of transcendent performances so you should check these guys out but other times you know it would just be loud rock lud beatles loud Rolling Stones the soundtrack from the greatest showman you know just blaring that thing and and somehow it just allowed me a certain kind of linguistic freedom that I could not acquire in my normal way of being in the world which is everyone's quiet let me just work out my equations and I need total focus and no distraction so is this something that you sort of evolved over the course of your career absolutely absolutely it was not there early on and you know there's this phenomenon I don't know if this is anything more than a metaphor or an analogy but whatever you know there's certain things in the night sky that you can't see if you look at them directly but by looking off axis you're able to invoke other qualities of the eye that are able to sense those features of the night sky and I kind of feel like it's the same thing sometimes by focusing directly on what you want to do you can't do it and you've got to look Oh bleep you got a off-axis metaphorically and that's the only way that you can accomplish what you set out to do and certainly music is one of the ways to take one's attention and shift it in a different direction to get that oblique view of what it is that you're trying to do and I have found that it allows for progress that otherwise is unattainable and is that the case also when you were writing this book it absolutely was a case right in this book you know there you know I have a very a wife is very understanding so we have a house ups and we live in Manhattan you know I'm at Columbia but she would let me go up to our house upstate with the dogs and by myself and I would disappear for weeks on end and I'd hold myself up in this cabin in the woods and I would sometimes write deep into the night and there were no neighbors around so I could turn on the music at whatever volume I found useful and I would do it and I would find you know that it freed up a certain kind of creative thought process that to me was striking because I had never approached work in that way before and it was really deeply interesting so how did you come to this idea of doing it that way of I I was struggling on certain things and I felt as though I am approaching this in a very flat-footed way I want it right about this you know say what about right about human creativity or want to write about religious engagement and I am just doing what I've always done which is I have this equation and I want to solve it so I'm going to bring the tools of mathematics to bear to solve it and I was approaching this writing project in exactly the same mind frame and as it wasn't working I said let me smack my brain around a little bit and and so one way of you know it could be psychedelics I didn't go that direction but I smacked it around by forcing myself to be subject to a great deal of distraction in the environment around me and it really made a difference it's interesting that you did it in a calculated manner yes yes yes oh sorry I can't break free Foley from my physicist training you know but it's wise I mean that that way of doing it is well and it's also a time-tested you know from right from Thoreau to you know yeah and the funny thing is you never worked for me in the past because the focus I think when I'm doing mathematics it does need at least for me personally to be that kind of non distracted total focus on what's going on as a right writer it's a very romantic notion to you have to go to the woods and a cabin that's what's up right that's what everybody wants to do Yeah right right exactly you know and I'm missing is whisky I'm supposed to get drunk out there like I said I are hardly ever drink you know but um it was an unusual creative experience which to me opened up a different way of going about trying to create things in the world as you write more and more books you find it to be more more difficult or do you find it to be easier well my early books were all focused on trying to bring scientific ideas out to the general public now the elegant universe was about string theory that but the cosmos space and time hidden realities about multiple universes and so in that role I'm basically trying to translate from the cutting-edge research into ordinary human language so that people who don't want to go to graduate school can get the basic idea of what's going on in this book is a very different proposition i I feel like I've moved in a significantly different direction through this book because yes there's science you know entropy evolution the history of the universe from the beginning to the end but the focus on why we humans do what we do why we tell stories the emergence of language why we tell myths why we engage in religious experience why creative expression is so important to us this felt like it was drawing upon things I've been thinking about for decades but never put into to writing so it was a harder exercise than anything that I did before because it was a different exercise but in the end one that I felt was even more gratifying because it was making clear why these ideas matter as opposed to just trying to tickle the brain of the reader I'm trying to actually if you will touch the heart and soul of the reader and something which if it's successful feels very gratifying I would imagine that would be very hard to end to feel how like to put the cover on it and to go that's it yeah right it is and I thought that's true almost with with all books you know the the famous adage is that you never finish a book you abandon them you know that that's all that ever happens and that was true in spades in this particular case because the subject was so big you know and you can always imagine going further in this direction or enhancing that description but at some point you recognize that you know life is an ongoing process and a book is ultimately a snapshot of where the author was at the moment that the book was written and that to me is really what happens here this is a snapshot of my view of the human condition set against the cosmological unfolding and how much of your perceptions of these things has evolved you know as an educator and as a scientist and as a person who's in the public eye how much how much of your perceptions on these ideas have changed over the course of your career huge huge I think I was a very hard-nosed science thinker when I started I think part of this may have been I became a professor at a relatively young age I think it was 27 when I got my first faculty job so many of the graduate students were the same age as me so I think I felt the need to have a very rigid scientific outlook on the world peak because of that and you know as I've gotten older that has changed and my willingness to entertain a broader range of thought and experience and ways of being has absolutely grown the other thing that's had a vast and vital impact on me our students you know for 30 years the only thing I really taught was technical physics courses quantum mechanics or relativity you know thermodynamics and what do you do there you're at the blackboard you're putting equations up there you're trying to get the kids to be able to solve problems and understand what the mathematics is all about so the only thing you're really ever doing is touching the cognitive part of their brain for the last few years I've been of course the students didn't know it that's actually based on this book so I wanted to try out the ideas with young minds so I taught a course at Columbia Laura jhin's and meaning and in that course I had students from across the campus not just the physics students at the neuro students the anthropology students the linguistic students the theological orange yeah so there's a whole range of students and to see how their understanding of how their major or subject fits in to the cosmological unfolding changed many of their perspectives on what it is that they're studying and what they're doing and to have students come to my office and to feel shooken up shaking up whatever the right form of that verb is where they're saying you know I've lived my life in such a way but now I'm gonna think about religion as perhaps an evolutionarily interesting and useful development as opposed to something from on high or when I think about creative expression as something that might seed ingenuity and innovation as opposed to something that is just pure inspiration coming from the outer world I'm thinking about my life differently and some of them frankly would be upset I've had students come in tears and I'd never had that when I teach quantum mechanics you know yeah more than one more than one because they'd say this course is kind of shaking my sense of who I am and what I am in the world what was the key aspect of it that was shaking them well for some students it was the it was the notion of religion mm-hmm because many of them or at least some of them had a traditional religious upbringing and their academic life and their religious life were completely separate and now when you have a course in which you're focusing upon how it would be that this institution of religion might naturally evolve on planet earth based upon what we know about humans and human brains and the evolutionary pressures that we've been under some of them began to think about religion as a very different proposition than the one that they had when they were growing up and I was in a position that I'd never been before of basically counseling of student and saying hey it's okay to have your world shake a little mint it's okay to think about these you may come back to exactly where you were before this course but if a collection of ideas can make you rethink your life at least it'll cast it in a different light it illuminated differently go with it see what happens and I never had a conversation like that one teaching Schrodinger's equation you know and for me is the most gratifying pedagogical experiences that I've ever had because you're reaching the whole person as opposed to just reaching this cognitive technique of solving equations if you can talk religion with a really intelligent person whose objective who has a belief it's it's such an interesting subject because it's it requires suspension of disbelief in order to absorb some of the stories but there is clearly a history behind this of thousands of years of translations and yeah you trying to get to the what did they mean when they wrote this down yeah how much did they know and what were they trying to do what they're just trying to get everybody to calm down and stay in line right or were they trying to find some means of gluing the group together by a sheriff yes or you know their folks who basically say that there are qualities of the human brain that naturally leave it open to a religious sensibilities yeah I mean for instance we have agency detection systems in our brain where we look around the world and we tend to assign agency to things that happen that's useful right because you know if you mistake a wind blown branch for a Jaguar yeah it's fine you thought with Jaguar but it's just a branch but if the reverse happens you think it you know was a Jaguar and you think it's a wind blown Brent you're gonna get eaten so we tend to over endow agency into the world there is evolutionary value to that so when the wind blows we tend to think there's a mind up there when the river gurgles we tend to think that there's a mind in there and this is sort of the seed for the kinds of perspectives that you find in many of the world's religions so there's there's natural course of events that can lead to the arising of the institution or at least the ideas behind the institution of religion and for students that have never encountered that idea before it can really shake things up and I think in a very valuable way you know so so I think are absolutely right having a conversation with somebody who has a religious perspective is deeply interesting yes to understand where that mine came to the place that it got to and from a personal Sensibility I give you you know I just give you one little anecdote you know my dad died I was 23 years old and unexpectedly I've been visiting home or I was at Harvard at the time I was visiting from Cambridge and we had a nice weekend and by the time I got back to Cambridge on the bus my mom called me said dad's dead it was so so shocking it was like so sudden it was so complete and I remember I went back home and my dad was not a religious man but we knew that he would want to have a religious ceremony and we and we did it and we had you know a minyan of Jews coming to the house to recite the Kaddish prior because we weren't religious we didn't know what we were doing you know and I had no idea what these men were saying but it was deeply comforting in fact I didn't want to know what they were saying to me was just a collection of ancient sounds but this sounds connected me across the generations to a culture that had been extended back 5000 years and in a moment of crisis that was a very comforting and useful connection to have yeah that that is where I find people get the most out of religion in in the fact that it brings communities together in this sort of cohesive ritual yeah everybody acts together and everybody you feel like there's completion to it yeah like you're putting someone you know yeah putting someone into perspective and you're doing so with this religious ceremony and when large groups of people get together and engage in a ritual behavior something magical happens you know I've spoken to evolutionary psychologists like Steve Pinker who's a wonderful thinker yeah okay and and you know Steve is skeptical that this kind of ritual behavior can yield the kind of cohesive bonding that some people suggest that it does but you know you probably have but I have the on occasion engaged in these ritual behaviors you know mass drumming and movements you know and I got to tell you you are quickly I find transported to a place where you are now part of a collective and you feel yourself melting into the group and you are one and if you've never had that experience I think it's something that you should have because I think it's a vital part of our heritage it is part of how we got to be who we are yeah there's something about group acceptance and a group of people acting and doing something together that does create this very strange bond yeah it doesn't necessarily exist amongst individuals it's a it's a weird bond is a very weird bond because it has nothing to do with the individuals nothing to do with the personality of Jim or Mary it's it's irrelevant at that point it's somehow joining you together into this massive humanity that's all engaged in the same practice and somehow you feel as though your identity melts into the larger whole I don't know why it happens there's negative aspects to that sort of course with that you know mob mentality of course I give you ever been in a situation where things got chaotic and you really had this feeling like anything can happen in a moment I've seen it happen I've never been part of it but alright weird but I have a feeling in the air yeah I have an analogous one which is you know my brother is a Hari Krishna well you know and so you know he is 13 years older than me and and left college in the 60s which was a tumultuous time and and went to Europe and ultimately joined into what many people think of as some kind of cult ish activity yeah and and so but but he's not a cult thinker he's an original thinker he's a brilliant thinker and yet within this group mentality you can imagine a certain kind of groupthink can take over at least people imagine that this happens so yes it has positive aspects and it can have negative aspects but in the end I think there is a long Lin age in which those of our forebears who survived were the ones who could join together into these more potent these more powerful groups and that way were able to triumph over other groups you know in the ancestral environment you know there-there's different readings of the archaeological record whether it was a dangerous place in the hunter/gatherer past or a sort of placid place but one reading says it was a very dangerous place and therefore those groups that survived were the ones who were able to establish this kind of allegiance to the whole yes and certainly I think this kind of ritual behavior may have been part of that bond together through shared experience yes yeah and belief yeah and if you're all believing in the same supernatural entity that's a powerful and principled powerful glue do you find that there's I mean I don't want to say in arrogance in some academics that maybe that's not the right word but this being too quick to dismiss any positive benefit at all about religion yes it's the knee-jerk reaction you know among a certain group of academics and it feels deeply unfortunate to me it almost feels like a religion of its own sort when it's just the response as opposed to a careful thoughtful heartfelt analysis of the situation I frankly wish that more people would read William James's book because I do think that it's the kind of because here's a scientist right a deeply thoughtful scientist who knows how to analyze data knows how to rationally engage with the world who was plumbing the depths of religion in a very very meaningful and sensitive way you know and by the end of these lectures though I think is lecture number twenty or something he describes religion as this as something that helps the journey toward the the terror and the beauty of phenomenon he describes it as the the voice of the Thunder the gentleness of the summer rain he described it in terms of the sublimity of the stars and this kind of transcendent approach to the religious experience I think brings it out of the academic guise that is often thrown upon it which is something that is contravening everything we know about the world it's causing people to think in ways that are irrational I mean this whole trope that you hear it's not that there isn't some truth to that but it's an incomplete truth and if you're willing to approach religion in a way where you discard the pieces that offend you throw away the parts that you think are utter nonsense only keep those aspects that are useful to you in your life then there is a place for it I think therein lies the problem with a lot of people they're not willing to do that right so this need for suspension of disbelief troubles them so much that they feel like fools if they buy into something right and we're also dealing with all religions except the ones that are super questionable like Scientology or Mormonism right that are very old and the idea of maybe it would be better if we came up with something that we could all agree on in 2020 right maybe it would be wonderful if we have something that maybe has science in it maybe something that has our a genuine understanding of how human beings react and what what the benefits of community yeah and having these in environments were loving conscious people communicate with each other in a very positive way that this could be a new form of this thing that we seem to desire so greatly yeah and I agree and I have to say I make this point in the book because the point that I make there is that to truly engage with the world you have to use a variety of stories we're fundamentally storytellers that's what human beings are now there's the reductionist story that physicists are well-equipped to talk about with particles and laws of physics on top of that you've got the chemists story the complex molecules you got the biologists story that begins to talk about cells in life you got the psychological story the neurophysiological story that brings a mind in consciousness and within that you then have all of the activities that conscious beings undertake which includes religion and includes telling other kinds of stories and includes creative expression you need them all and to sort of say that the scientific account is the only account by which you're ever going to gain true qualities of the is a very in my view limited description of what truth is there is objective truth in the world that we can measure that we can describe the equations of so forth but there's also internal truth spiritual truth that you get to by self-examination it's real in the sense that you are understanding how you respond to the world and that is something which is deeply personal but utterly real and whether it's through psychedelics whether it's through ayahuasca whether it's through a spiritual journey whether it's through religion regardless all of this adds color to the story of what it means to be a human being do you spend any time meditating I do I'm not particularly effective at it and so most people are that way yeah you know but you know years ago defective ones well years ago a friend of mine bought me one of these transcendental meditation courses and I was like okay I'll just try it he BC he spent the money I'm gonna actually go and do it and it was kind of eye-opening there was a lot of what you might call woo woo stuff that was happening in the lectures and in fact the funny thing is the guy giving the lecture he did recognize me and you could I could tell how uncomfortable he was giving his normal description because he kept looking at me sheepishly as he invoked quantum physics and things of that you know but I was I told my dude you know whatever this I'm not here to judge you I'm just here to sort of see what's going on but the idea of allowing the mind to be in a different mode of operation which is sort of how I summarized the experience you know if you're if you're reciting the mantra in your mind and allowing that to be a sort of pedal point a driver of how your mind is behaving at that moment that's a very different way of being in the world from thinking about grocery shopping or solving Einstein's equations and I think that to me is the the value of it it's a systematic way to put your mind in a different mode of operation and at times I find it very useful to move into that place hmm-what when when you started doing transdermal meditation what about it was weird well what was weird with number one was doing this in this in this group setting which is how you start on this course and moreover it being framed in a manner that I had trouble aligning with my understanding of how the world works by virtue of the lectures that were given to us for what it is what we were doing but through the practice I sort of found I'm sure I'm just translating from what they were saying in the lecture into a language that I'm more comfortable with and that made it less weird for me because like what you were talking about religion just kind of cutting out the thing cutting on the thing that didn't make any sense to me and saying hey what is this really about what this really is about is breaking the usual chain of thought that is 99.9% of the time of how I live in the world and allowing my brain to have a chain of thought that is artificial because I'm sitting here forcing myself to recite this mantra inside my mind but that's a very useful way of being because it's unfamiliar and it's novel and it allows my brain to operate in a different way so when I translated it into that language it all of a sudden made a lot more sense to me and became not weird at all it became an interesting practice and do you still do it I do it when I feel I need it so either friends of mine who say I cannot live in the world if I don't do my 20 minutes in the morning simply you know that that's part of my routine I don't feel that way but there are moments when I say whoa I need to do it and based on circumstance based on what's happening in a given moment it allows a kind of mental reset if if that's a language that makes sense and that reset I consider to be a valuable thing to do now should you do you do do you do this I do I don't do TM yeah but I do meditate and a regular basis yeah a regular basis and I also have a float tank yeah oh you don't use really like a deprivation yeah yeah in this building yeah that's whatever they I'll show it to you after we're done Wow yeah all right can I do it sure you could you I have you done I've never done it before I I find it a little bit terrifying you haven't say I do yeah there's plenty of them there's a bunch of different flow place not terrifying at all really yeah you just float relax and but it's complete darkness oh yeah yes because I have the little I have some claustrophobia yeah and that's like for instance I can't go into an MRI machine oh really yeah yeah totally I'm smart why why don't you get that out of your head I tried I gotta tell you I trained so I have a desk in my office where it's only about like one foot high and I'd slide my body underneath the desk clock the door could look too weird and I'd stay under there as long as I possibly could how long myself like 15 20 the minute but I get into the real machine and really yeah my wife's mom was like that yeah like she did an MRI and she's like it was the worst experience of my wife I'm like I did two of them last week I thoughtlessly I totally understand her I don't really yeah I don't understand why someone as smart as you would not recognize well there's just sitting around me and I do I do but it's it's like the irrational part of being I get in there my heart starts to pound when I think that comes from I don't know it because it wasn't always there and in it and it has gotten worse in certains there was a time again it's gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna come across like a nutcase it was that trip to Amsterdam now there's actually times when I couldn't even go in a tunnel in a car the claudia was that bad really yeah I was in a taxicab I had to go to New Jersey you know in Manhattan so I had to take a Lincoln Tunnel and as the taxis approached in the tunnel I said to the guy I can't do it I can't do it and the guy says boy I can't let you out it's illegal to let you out I said you got to let me out I can't do it and I just opened the door and it got out oh my god that's so crazy but now I'm fine with tunnels so I don't I don't know what it is that that maybe you're to smaller senshu ated it there may be you to say yeah and maybe you're a is playing tricks with you and giving you anxiety to sort of shake it up the world and yeah maybe your maybe currently contemplating the gigantic picture yeah actual scope of the universe and yeah but now I'm pretty stable about these things so it's just a mirage machine so it's really close into you but you gotta just do a lot of MRIs you know exactly I'm sure that would do it that would absolutely do probably right if you have MRIs on a regular basis and I'm sure you get used to it but yeah I just I just do a real simple type of meditation when I probably we eventually gonna take a TM course cuz my friend Tom Papa he's really into TM and he raves about it yeah but I just sit down and I breathe I just concentrate only on my breath and I and it comes and goes but I concentrate only on my breath and I find really good relief from that yoga is the same thing I do yoga I try to do it at least twice a week when I know you yeah that there's a lot of benefit in that in the same way in that it's so difficult and in the poses if you can only concentrate on your breath just balance and concentrate on your breath you'll be filled with activity enough with the with things to concentrate on with the balancing of the posture and then the breath that it acts as a almost brain scouring it cleanses the mind of unnecessary anxiety and a lot of other just by even doing that for a long time yes sir I know yoga's been I've been pretty steady for the last four years right right and my wife does a lot of yoga she keeps telling me that I need to do it it's great you know it's great it's great for the body as well and I think the more comfortable your body is the better your at least for me better my mind got a little doubt that you know last for the last you've been doing peloton bike you know but then I herniated a disc in my man and for last two months I've basically been unable to move so how did you do that well you know I I think it was throwing out the Christmas tree oh you know Mandy Andy and you know my 92 year old mother has used this opportunity to say because we're Jewish guys we weren't allowed to have a Christmas tree going up yeah this is this is this is meaningful right here you know you know but my my Christian wife is all too happy that that I'm flexible on that count for sure what is going on with your back now yeah well it's it's bad it's bad did you get an MRI I did get MRI one thing sort of see it yeah so I'm just pushing it's the nerves pushing against a nerve yeah have you heard of something called regeni keen do you know what no I don't regeni keen is something that I used for a bulging disc and it's incredibly beneficial it's it was created by a doctor in Germany and it was illegal States until a few years back they move the process of here it's not covered by insurance but it's very very beneficial for that and what they do is it's essentially a more advanced version of platelet-rich plasma so they take your blood out they do this process it takes about 12 hours and then they react this serum they take the serum out of the blood looks like this yellow serum and they inject it directly into the areas and it's a right into the spine right into the area where the spine is bulging so although and it allows it to relax it's the most potent anti-inflammation drug that they can they can use it's like instead of cortisone which is talking about exactly what's cortisone can help you as well guineas provide temporary relief but what this does is actually heals the area really yeah it's very beneficial I had a real bad bulging disc in my neck that was making my hands go numb so my toes are numb yeah yeah yeah but they can give you relief and it's in Santa Monica there's a place called lifespan medicine I'll connect you to the I'm so curious about what I just said friend of mine there he had a real problem with his neck within two weeks it was better he got hit by a car when he was on his motorcycle my friend in Del Rey and he was really [ __ ] up his his back was so bad that like we were at the comic store and I'm like people came near me he tensed up but what's Mady goes dude my neck is so messed up so many bumps into me I'm in sharp pain yeah and I'm like real and then he started describing to me so I said I've got the thing for you and I said him to place Regina Kane is amazing I've had it done several to genican I gotta check it yeah I've had it done on my lower but well a lot of like athletes like Peyton Manning and I'll Kobe Bryant they've they flew to Germany to get this procedure done because it's exactly yea legal there including the UFC president Dana White which is where I found out about it and then I found out that they were opening offices in America and Dallas they have one they have one in Santa Monica and I think somewhere else maybe New York maybe maybe yeah but it's an amazing procedure I mean it really is super beneficial particularly for that kind of in here because it's been it's been tough for instance I can't sleep because there's no position yeah yeah now the value of that is I have done so much reading over the last two months because I'm like up half the night and I only out when it's like utter utter exhaustion but hey you spinal decompression have you ever done any of that I did I went to this physical therapy place where they put me up on pulleys uh-huh and it kind of pulled the feet I guess away from the Mack it wasn't like being stretched fully but your own weight was causing the the vertebrae to separate did that help huge relief yeah you can get a small inversion table yeah thinking about that yeah well I can have one out here you could yeah right here there's another thing called the reverse hyper machine and the reverse hyper machine was created by this he's a very famous power lifter named Lois Simmons and Lois had this idea he's a very brilliant guy and he had this idea that they were trying to fuse his discs he had a balding death right he said well a disc is compressed like how do you get it to decompress and he developed this machine that strengthens the back when you lift up the legs but then in the lowering of the legs and actively it provides active decompression and it alleviated his problem dude you wear this I'll show it to you afterwards it's a machine yeah that you get but we are we are physical beings right now we have a mind that can sort of the edge of the cosmos man but you got a bulging disc it doesn't matter oh yeah pain is real I mean you have to deal with it and you have to be really careful and for me what's really critical is physical maintenance and I'm very dedicated to physical maintenance even if there's nothing wrong so called building the core yeah there's a lot of chin ups sit ups a lot of lower back exercises hyper like back extensions anything to keep things strong squats making sure that the the more tissue you have the more strength you have in that tissue around particularly protecting your joints and your spine the healthier you're going to be yes now it's absolutely vital because the last few months have been hell I have to say I'll show you listen we've already talked for two and a half hours so I'll take you back I'll show you yeah Brian thank you very much for being here I really appreciate your work and and tell people your book one more times the title until the end of time today it's out today a mind matter in our search for meaning in an evolving universe yeah well thank you for being here make it my pleasure bye everybody yeah I'd love to thank you [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 5,922,747

Rating: 4.8241539 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: r4wQsmAtZoc

Length: 146min 41sec (8801 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Passenger_Commander]

I think its interesting when he explains most ETs would be 10k years or more ahead of us technologically. The question is how would we even perceive what technology 10k years ahead of us is? Would a group of humans 10k years old recognize a common cell phone as a piece of technology? Perhaps; but what about humans 20k or 50k years ago?

I'm with Rogan on the questioning the assumption that advanced ETs wouldnt be interested in us. I think they would. Joe gave the example of how we examine butterflies even though they are so far beneath us intellectually. Greene replied by saying something to the effect of "well, we're only interested in them for a very specific reason." As if ETs wouldnt be interested in us for very specific reasons too.

I think as science continues to develop our understanding of the quantum world and the building blocks of reality it holds a lot of promise for the future. 10k years from now who knows what our knowledge of reality would allow. I think one thing that really limits scientists in relation to the belief in ETs is that they think we are just too far for contact to ever happen or be realistic. To a vastly advanced species with vastly superior knowledge of science and reality distance is possibly no object.

Rather than ask "why would ETs come here" you have to ask why they wouldnt? Right now the only answers I recall are 1)distance and/or a 2)lack of interest.

1) If most ETs are likely to be 10k years or more advanced than us I think its highly likely distance isnt a huge obstacle for them. 2) If there are numerous advanced civilizations it's not unreasonable to assume at least one or a few would be interested in us.

I think the Fermi Paradox, Drake equation, and Copernican principal are the strongest cases we have for ET existence and visitation. I think we just need to reassess what an advanced civilization would look like and how it might interact with us. Science has been right about countless astronomical predictions. I see no reason why it would be wrong in this case. I think we just need to pass it along to other fields of academia to determine what an advanced civilization would look like and where it might exist. AI seems to be going trend but I think we can look beyond that. We realize biological life is limiting to we look to AI as the future. It may be that physical life is also too limiting and we need to look beyond to the quantum and non physical for highly advanced intelligence.

[u/TheLindoBrand]

I love the fact that Brian Greene makes it an absolute point to explain insanely complicated physics in a way us mere mortals understand. Regardless of UFO content this podcast was awesome.

[u/tea_bagicuss]

I wonder why scientists like Brian Greene, Neil Degrass Tyson, and Bill Nye will not even entertain the idea of the possibility of visitation, even though there appears to be more and more significant evidence as time goes by. Joe won’t even discuss it with them. I wonder if it has to do with a fear of being discredited with their peers.

[u/[deleted]]

is there a timestamp for them seriously talking about UFOs? i lost interest when he brought up 'fermi's paradox' (aka, ignoring or unaware of 70+ yrs of ufo sightings/reports/data)

[u/[deleted]]

I found it interesting that he referenced our solar system as being on the edge of the Milky Way instead of towards the middle.

[u/NewbutOld8]

Joe's got a freakin huge roid gut