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I can't convince you that we're not in the matrix.

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Why?

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We could be.

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Is this table real?

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Am I really here?

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Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer?

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Maybe there's a kid.

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On 29th century Earth, and they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table.

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And here's a big assumption.

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Can you create a computer program that has consciousness?

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Nobody knows the answer to that, but I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious.

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And in the back of my mind, I do think it's possible.

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But if we considered robots to be conscious, would they then get rights?

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I think that's something we should think about now, actually.

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Professor Brian Green, what is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer?

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We find ourselves thrust on this planet.

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We're trying to figure out why we're here.

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Is there some ultimate purpose?

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We're a little dot on planet Earth, and you begin to see our sun, one of many stars within the galaxy.

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You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe.

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And what's beyond?

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Well, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there.

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There's a version out there of me that just loves wine.

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Ha ha, there you go.

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So should I feel insignificant?

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I would urge you not to.

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Because the fact that we can understand that we are so small, that's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger.

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Do you think it could lead us to God?

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If you mean the kind of God our forebears often have spoken, that feels to me very much a human creation.

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I will tell you why I'm skeptical of that.

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But another thing we should think about is the end of the Earth.

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Because if we go arbitrarily far into the future, the Earth is going to spiral.

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It's not going to get scary.

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Well, it's scary the whole way.

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Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.

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So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know.

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And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

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But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better.

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And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.

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Thank you so, so, so much.

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Professor Brian Green.

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What is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer?

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The ultimate question I would say is, what is the true nature of reality?

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We find ourselves thrust on this planet.

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And we look out and we're trying to figure out why we're here, what it's made of.

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Is there some ultimate purpose?

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Or is it just some interesting accident that allowed us to have self-awareness and ask these kinds of questions about the nature of the world?

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And I think that, to me, is the deepest kind of question that we humans can ask.

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Do you feel like over the last 30 years of your career, you've gotten closer to understanding the answer to that question?

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Yes, but you know, it's kind of like picking up grains of sand on a beach, right?

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You pick up more and more, and that pouch of sand gets heavier, so your understanding is deeper, it's weightier, but you look out and there's just almost infinitely more grains of sand that are out there.

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We understand the world better than we once did.

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But does that really take us some significant way toward assessing the big, deep questions of, say, why is there something rather than nothing?

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Maybe that's the deepest question of all, but which I don't mean empty space.

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I mean nothing, nothing at all.

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Well, we'll, in this conversation, go in the pursuit of that answer.

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To tell people who you are and to let them understand the journey you've been on academically and through your career, where did you study?

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Where have you worked over the last couple of decades?

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Yeah, sure.

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Well, I grew up in Manhattan, right across from the Hayden Planetarium.

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I would wander the hallways of the planetarium and come upon a meteorite.

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And the universe was sort of my backyard because of that.

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And that

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really set me on a trajectory that I continued following when I went to college, went to Harvard and studied mathematics and physics.

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Then from there was to Oxford, where I got my doctorate pursuing work in a field called string theory.

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And then through the academic ladder, Cornell and ultimately Columbia, where I've been a professor now for three years.

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30 some odd years, you know, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University.

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If you were to explain string theory to me like I was 12, how would you do it?

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Yeah, I would simply say this.

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Your 12-year-old self probably knew that matter was made up of stuff called molecules that themselves are made up of atoms that are stuck together.

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And the atoms are made of smaller things.

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electrons in orbit around a nucleus that has neutrons and protons, and neutrons and protons, they even have smaller particles, particles called quarks.

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The question is, is that the end of the story?

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Is it electrons and quarks and you're done?

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Everything is made up of them.

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Or might there be a finer level of structure inside the electron, inside the quark?

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You take a powerful microscope and you look deeply, would you see anything else?

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And the idea of string theory is, yeah, you would.

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inside an electron or inside a quark, you'd see a little tiny vibrating filament.

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And the different vibrations of the string yield the different particles.

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So much like a string on a violin, when it vibrates in one pattern, you hear it as a C or an A sharp.

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The different vibrations of the strings in string theory, they don't produce different musical tones.

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They produce different particles.

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So a string vibrating one way, electron.

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A string vibrating another way, a quark.

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So matter at its most fundamental level, if you were to take a powerful microscope and look deeply inside of any piece of matter, you'd see all these little vibrating filaments, these vibrating strings.

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That's the idea of the theory.

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So two questions come to mind when you say that, which is how do you know?

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And the second one is what if you zoomed in even further?

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Yeah, good.

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Both good questions.

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How do we know we don't?

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Everything I just said could be utter nonsense.

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I don't think it is.

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But the only way that you know if an idea in science is correct is you need to make predictions that you can go out and test, measure, and see whether you can confirm the ideas.

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We don't have the technology to look sufficiently correct.

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deeply into matter to see the strings.

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We don't have the particle accelerators, the particle colliders with enough power to slam things together to access this finer level of structure that the theory is suggesting.

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So you might say then, where do these ideas come from, right?

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Answer, mathematics.

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The power of mathematics is that it can take us to places that we can't yet

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of quantum mechanics, the mathematics of general relativity, and we put that math inside the math of string theory, all of a sudden the equations work.

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They come together harmoniously.

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And we're like, whoa, the math of quantum mechanics, we are confident in that.

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We have predictions and observations.

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The math of general relativity, we're confident in that.

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It makes predictions we've confirmed through observations.

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Now we're willing to go where the math takes us.

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And the math takes us in this approach to these vibrating filaments.

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These vibrating strings.

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These vibrating strings.

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So if you pass me the string.

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Yeah, sure.

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So essentially, if you zoom into every cell on my body, you will find that there's different shaped strings vibrating.

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That's the prediction.

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That's the prediction.

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Correct.

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And what is causing them to vibrate in a certain way?

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Yeah.

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Who's telling them?

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Yeah, yeah.

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The idea is...

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We recognize that the universe has energy.

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If you're to ask me, where does the energy come from?

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Nobody can answer that.

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That is the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

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The something is a fundamental currency called energy.

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If string theory is correct...

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then that energy manifests as these vibrational patterns of the strings themselves.

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If the theory is wrong, then the energy manifests through other things, like motions of particles and the way in which space-time warps and curves.

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But if string theory is correct, the energy of the universe is manifested in the vibrational patterns of strings.

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Now, when you say, like...

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Who mandates that that string vibrates in one pattern and that string vibrates in a different pattern?

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If we go back to the Big Bang, the energetic explosion that resulted in space expanding, the detailed way in which that happened ultimately dictates how this or that string vibrates in the aftermath of that rapid cosmological explosion.

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Does this string theory idea

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tell us anything about why we're here?

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I would like to think that it does.

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It's very indirect.

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And we are aggregates of a huge number of particles, or if string theory is correct, a huge number of strings.

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I mean, inside your body, you've got something like a billion, billion, billion particles.

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And if string theory is correct, each of those particles is a vibrating filament.

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It is a gargantuan challenge to understand why those billion, billion, billion particles came together to yield you or me or somebody else.

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But again, that's a historical progression.

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And I think we understand the broad outlines of that narrative, that there was some initial event called the Big Bang that resulted in space expanding.

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The energy of that Big Bang ultimately transmuted into particles.

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Those particles were wafting through space.

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Gravity caused collections of those particles to clump together.

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Some of them clumped together into stars.

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like our sun.

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Some of them clumped together into planets like our Earth.

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And on our Earth, some of those particles began to coalesce into more exotic and refined forms, giving rise to atoms, giving rise to molecules.

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And over the course of billions of years on our planet, those little molecules grew into more complex structures, ultimately giving first cells.

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And once you have a cell, cells divide and they come together into larger multicellular aggregates that give rise to the beginnings of life in the ocean.

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And those life forms evolve further until they can walk out of the ocean and begin to live on land.

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And they begin to stand upright.

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And after a billion more years, you and I are sitting here at this table.

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And so, yeah, there is a story.

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That's the brief version that takes us from the Big Bang to us on planet Earth.

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Is it theoretical that this is all just a, I was going to say perception, but the other word might be a simulation of sorts.

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Theoretically, we don't even know if yesterday exists or if it was just, we were just implanted with the memory of it.

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Absolutely right.

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We're in this age of AI now.

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And I wondered if this insurgence of AI and how powerful it is.

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It is.

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And if you imagine it on a sort of an exponential curve, has it made you question some of your like fundamental assumptions about that overarching question of why we're here?

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Well, yeah.

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In fact, even before AI, we were tussling with the very notion that you mentioned, which is all we ever have access to is now, right?

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We can try to remember yesterday's now, but as you say, that's happening right now through patterns that are in my brain or yours that we think reflect something that happened yesterday or the day before.

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But that's a leap of faith.

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right?

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So there's a kind of, you know, skeptical nightmare scenario where we begin to question everything.

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You know, is this table real?

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Am I really here?

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Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer right now?

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Are we in the matrix right now?

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These are the kinds of things which you naturally can come to when you take a deeply skeptical attitude to the nature of reality.

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Bottom line is,

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I can't convince myself and certainly I can't convince you that we're not in the Matrix.

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Why?

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We could be.

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It is logically consistent and sensible to imagine that you and I are sitting in some computer.

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Maybe it's not some dark dystopian computer the way it was in the Matrix.

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Maybe there's a kid.

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in 29th century Earth, who's in his or her garage right now, and they came up this wonderful computer program, and they're simulating historical episodes in the past, and they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table.

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I don't know how to prove that that's not the case.

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What I can say is, if I'm willing to buy into that, everything falls apart.

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I can't trust any.

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I can't trust my reasoning.

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I can't even trust my thinking that it's logical to imagine that individual, because that individual may have implanted the false reasoning that it could be logical for us to be sitting here.

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What do I do at that point?

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And so as a scientist, what I say is, I'm going to allow that as a possibility, and then I'm going to park it right over here.

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I allow it, I look at it every so often, and I say, that's scary, that possibility, that we're in a simulation, but I'm not going to let it overwhelm me, because then I'll be stuck.

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The simulation argument popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom relies on probability.

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It essentially says that if an advanced civilization, which I would argue were an advanced civilization,

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Ever develops the technological capacity to run conscious, high-fidelity computer simulations of their ancestors, they will likely run millions or billions of them.

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And because these simulated realities would vastly outnumber the single, raw, physical universe, any given conscious observer is statistically, almost certainly, living inside a software code rather than base reality.

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The big assumption is, can you create a computer program that has self-awareness, that has consciousness?

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You know, nobody knows the answer to that.

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I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious, who think that Claude is conscious.

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Now, I talk to them and I'm respectful.

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That's the kind of person I am.

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But in the back of my mind, I'm like, are you kidding me?

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You really think that chat GPT has feelings?

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That it thinks about its own existence and has anxieties?

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I think it can simulate that, but regardless, I don't think today's technology is there.

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Is it possible that tomorrow's technology, broadly defined, a year, five years, 100 years, really will yield self-aware, sentient, artificial systems?

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Yeah, I do think it's possible.

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Now, not everybody agrees with that.

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I mean, no one knows, right?

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It's a logical possibility, but you don't know.

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Let us assume, following Nick Bostrom, that consciousness can be created in a mechanical box.

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If that's possible, then Nick simply says, look, our progeny in the future, they're going to be fascinated with creating sentient systems.

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And so they're going to create millions and billions and trillions of sentient systems in the box.

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And they're going to get really elaborate and create a version where the sentient beings are led to think that they're on a planet.

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And in fact, they're going to do it a thousand billion, trillion different ways.

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Some are going to be a planet like Earth.

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Some are going to be on a planet like Mars.

219
00:16:34.404 --> 00:16:38.427
Some are going to be a planet like around some star in the Andromeda galaxy.

220
00:16:38.807 --> 00:16:46.493
They're going to be an enormous number of simulated beings, enormous number of universes that are simulated.

221
00:16:46.513 --> 00:16:51.097
So the question is, if we have one real universe, let's say this is real.

222
00:16:52.237 --> 00:17:01.733
and a gazillion artificial ones that are created in various laptop computers of the future, we're one of a billion, trillion, zillion computers.

223
00:17:02.925 --> 00:17:05.947
instantiations of people who think that they're real.

224
00:17:06.647 --> 00:17:08.669
Now, one truly is real.

225
00:17:09.229 --> 00:17:10.390
The other are not real.

226
00:17:10.770 --> 00:17:16.574
So if you're just talking about odds, the odds are anybody who thinks they're real is not.

227
00:17:17.014 --> 00:17:22.558
The odds are anybody who's got a self-aware sense of the world is probably in a simulation.

228
00:17:22.958 --> 00:17:27.881
You used anxiety as a sort of proxy for consciousness almost, like being able to feel these things.

229
00:17:27.941 --> 00:17:28.262
Yeah.

230
00:17:28.442 --> 00:17:30.683
I guess the question then becomes, what is it?

231
00:17:31.024 --> 00:17:31.764
What is anxiety?

232
00:17:31.924 --> 00:17:32.304
Yeah.

233
00:17:32.485 --> 00:17:35.407
Is it an electrical signal going through it from- I do think it is.

234
00:17:35.747 --> 00:17:44.793
I think that love and hate and anxiety and jealousy and gratitude and grief and all human emotion is nothing but anxiety.

235
00:17:44.933 --> 00:17:47.675
electrical impulses going through our brains.

236
00:17:48.155 --> 00:17:53.639
And an electrical impulse is just particles moving or strings moving along various connections.

237
00:17:54.099 --> 00:17:55.560
I think that is all that it is.

238
00:17:55.580 --> 00:17:59.583
Now, some people hear it and they're like, wow, that is a pretty bleak way of looking at

239
00:18:00.363 --> 00:18:06.407
We're these wondrous beings who can have all this emotion, right?

240
00:18:06.487 --> 00:18:10.569
The emotion captured by Shakespeare in the sonnets, right?

241
00:18:10.589 --> 00:18:13.991
The emotion captured by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony.

242
00:18:14.011 --> 00:18:17.753
You can't reduce that to electrical signals in the brain.

243
00:18:17.773 --> 00:18:19.755
And I say, yeah, you can.

244
00:18:20.455 --> 00:18:21.696
I really do think that you can.

245
00:18:21.756 --> 00:18:34.268
I don't think that diminishes the wonder of what we can feel and sense and articulate and express through the various ways that we have, be it through music or theater or art or literature or poetry.

246
00:18:34.948 --> 00:18:42.455
Yeah, I am as awestruck by our capacity to create as anybody else, but in the end, I

247
00:18:43.274 --> 00:18:53.566
I think it all does reduce to electrical impulses going through this gray piece of meat in this bone cage that's sitting on our shoulders.

248
00:18:53.907 --> 00:19:00.434
And if you imagine any rate of improvement from today, presumably at some point in the future, our future progeny, you called them?

249
00:19:00.474 --> 00:19:00.634
Yeah.

250
00:19:02.056 --> 00:19:03.257
would be able to create.

251
00:19:04.198 --> 00:19:04.638
Why not?

252
00:19:04.798 --> 00:19:05.699
That's my view.

253
00:19:05.859 --> 00:19:09.122
I don't think there's something special about the brain as a substrate.

254
00:19:09.723 --> 00:19:23.534
I think as long as you have the same electrical impulses, if they're housed in silicon inside a metallic box, I don't think that makes them fundamentally different than what's happening inside of our heads.

255
00:19:23.594 --> 00:19:25.456
Now, philosophers argue this.

256
00:19:25.636 --> 00:19:27.177
You know, psychologists argue this.

257
00:19:27.898 --> 00:19:28.998
They say, no, no, no, no.

258
00:19:29.319 --> 00:19:30.439
It's not just the brain.

259
00:19:30.499 --> 00:19:31.079
It's the brain.

260
00:19:31.139 --> 00:19:32.440
It's the connection to the body.

261
00:19:32.580 --> 00:19:34.601
It's the tactile sense of the world.

262
00:19:34.641 --> 00:19:36.501
It's the olfactory sense of the world.

263
00:19:36.561 --> 00:19:37.462
It's the visual sense.

264
00:19:37.762 --> 00:19:44.524
It's only when you put it all together that you get the full experience of what it means to be self-aware, a self-aware human being.

265
00:19:44.945 --> 00:19:47.045
And my view is, well, maybe that's true.

266
00:19:47.145 --> 00:19:48.066
But if so...

267
00:19:48.786 --> 00:19:55.131
give the artificial version tactile sense and olfactory sense and visual sense.

268
00:19:55.631 --> 00:19:58.673
We will have the capacity to do this.

269
00:19:59.374 --> 00:20:08.641
At that point, I just don't see a fundamental difference between the artificial version and shall we call it the organic.

270
00:20:08.921 --> 00:20:15.446
And so, yeah, I think there's a really interesting argument to be made that simulations will outnumber things.

271
00:20:15.866 --> 00:20:16.687
real worlds.

272
00:20:17.207 --> 00:20:23.392
And therefore, there's a chance that right now we are in one of those simulated worlds.

273
00:20:25.793 --> 00:20:27.415
Does it change anything, even if that's true?

274
00:20:27.795 --> 00:20:29.036
No, I don't think it does.

275
00:20:29.076 --> 00:20:30.116
And I think that's the beauty.

276
00:20:30.977 --> 00:20:35.941
If I'm in a simulation, I'm going to live out my life in this simulation to the fullest.

277
00:20:36.641 --> 00:20:42.646
Now, I'd like to think that as a physicist, what I do, what my colleagues do is try to figure out

278
00:20:43.326 --> 00:20:45.489
the laws of the universe writ large.

279
00:20:45.929 --> 00:20:58.625
But if we're in a simulation and all we're doing is figuring out the laws that the 15-year-old futuristic kid decided to impose on this artificial world, hey, that's not a bad way to spend your time too.

280
00:20:59.506 --> 00:21:00.507
On this subject of AI...

281
00:21:01.348 --> 00:21:10.595
Do you, I mean, a lot of people that have sat here, people like Jeffrey Hinton have told me that it's quite inconceivable that when there is a more intelligent life form on this planet, i.e.

282
00:21:10.695 --> 00:21:18.941
AI, which is accelerating in its intelligence towards superintelligence and AGI and all these terms that these smart people use, it's inconceivable that we will remain in control.

283
00:21:19.901 --> 00:21:21.282
Logically, that kind of also stacks up.

284
00:21:21.763 --> 00:21:22.223
It does.

285
00:21:22.443 --> 00:21:23.384
But I think there are...

286
00:21:24.004 --> 00:21:29.749
Alternatives, we tend to speak very much at the extremes, right?

287
00:21:30.149 --> 00:21:31.610
Humans are in control.

288
00:21:32.191 --> 00:21:33.572
AI is in control.

289
00:21:34.193 --> 00:21:36.795
AI wipes us out for things.

290
00:21:37.815 --> 00:21:41.996
reasons that might be benign or might be dystopian.

291
00:21:42.636 --> 00:21:53.339
It seems to me that what will likely happen is something more in the middle, which is we are going to work with artificial systems.

292
00:21:53.459 --> 00:21:54.839
We're doing it right now.

293
00:21:54.899 --> 00:22:01.941
And look how quickly we have acclimated to a world that would be unthinkable in 2021.

294
00:22:02.301 --> 00:22:04.681
There are many examples now, but there's a beautiful one that's on my mind,

295
00:22:07.882 --> 00:22:17.325
It's called the Jacobian conjecture, was solved very recently by a mathematician using AI.

296
00:22:17.705 --> 00:22:24.928
I see us blending with AI, not necessarily that we have implants, but maybe we will.

297
00:22:25.488 --> 00:22:33.711
But there will not be a sharper distinction between the biological intelligence and the artificial intelligence.

298
00:22:37.812 --> 00:22:43.261
new life form that no longer can be called human.

299
00:22:44.484 --> 00:22:47.145
That may be the way things evolve.

300
00:22:47.906 --> 00:22:54.709
And so evolution is something that is inherent to how we got here.

301
00:22:56.330 --> 00:23:01.412
Why would we think that this moment in the evolutionary progression was the end of it all?

302
00:23:01.892 --> 00:23:04.534
We weren't going to continue to evolve.

303
00:23:05.094 --> 00:23:13.258
And maybe the continuation of our evolution is in partnership with the artificial intelligence systems that we ourselves create.

304
00:23:13.993 --> 00:23:14.853
That we give birth to.

305
00:23:14.914 --> 00:23:15.174
Yeah.

306
00:23:16.074 --> 00:23:17.235
It's us, right?

307
00:23:17.255 --> 00:23:18.435
It's our creation.

308
00:23:18.455 --> 00:23:20.016
You know, it's not an alien.

309
00:23:20.036 --> 00:23:21.437
We haven't been taken over.

310
00:23:22.077 --> 00:23:27.160
And so, yeah, I think that is a real possible way that this story plays out.

311
00:23:28.181 --> 00:23:30.322
How do you feel about it?

312
00:23:30.342 --> 00:23:32.103
I am fine with it.

313
00:23:32.963 --> 00:23:35.085
You know, I think that we tend to...

314
00:23:36.052 --> 00:23:39.674
become very attached to the way things are.

315
00:23:40.555 --> 00:23:46.499
And we gain a sense of the way things are is the way it will always be.

316
00:23:46.959 --> 00:23:51.742
I think that's a natural way that we humans have lived our lives.

317
00:23:51.822 --> 00:23:52.182
Why?

318
00:23:52.562 --> 00:23:56.385
Because the timescales for change in our past –

319
00:23:56.905 --> 00:23:59.126
have been relatively slow, right?

320
00:23:59.187 --> 00:24:03.449
We lived, what, 30, 40, 50, call it 80 years, 100 years, whatever.

321
00:24:03.889 --> 00:24:07.712
But the timescales for change were typically much larger than that.

322
00:24:07.972 --> 00:24:12.755
The timescales for political change and the timescales for technological change, much larger.

323
00:24:13.175 --> 00:24:17.118
So as a species, we've grown accustomed to the thought that, yeah,

324
00:24:17.718 --> 00:24:19.819
What we see is how it will always be.

325
00:24:20.079 --> 00:24:23.081
But of course, as we look back through history, we can see the changes.

326
00:24:23.321 --> 00:24:33.746
And so we're uncomfortable with change because we're unused to living through that kind of change at the kind of speed that we are and will continue to encounter.

327
00:24:34.507 --> 00:24:36.668
But I think we just have to get with it.

328
00:24:37.646 --> 00:24:41.488
Now, look, I don't want AI system to wipe us out.

329
00:24:41.528 --> 00:24:42.409
Don't get me wrong.

330
00:24:42.429 --> 00:24:56.757
But I think if we recognize that change is happening, will happening, we can embrace it in a way that will have an outcome that will be acceptable, that will in fact be wonderful in the things that it will allow us to do.

331
00:24:57.217 --> 00:24:57.717
I'm quite curious.

332
00:24:57.737 --> 00:25:00.939
You talked about AI being able to solve that complex problem.

333
00:25:01.479 --> 00:25:01.579
I'm

334
00:25:03.023 --> 00:25:10.870
with accelerating ever more intelligent AI, there's a bunch of other things within physics that you think might become possible in the near term.

335
00:25:10.930 --> 00:25:17.796
I mean, one of them I was thinking about, we can talk about some of the others that I have in my mind, and any others that you think are interesting, but one of them is us being able to live forever.

336
00:25:19.177 --> 00:25:21.019
Do you think we're going to be able to live forever?

337
00:25:21.379 --> 00:25:22.820
Yeah, that would be a good one.

338
00:25:23.141 --> 00:25:27.685
I don't think that death is inevitable in the sense that...

339
00:25:28.854 --> 00:25:35.883
death can be thought of as the increase in entropy, the increase in disorder in a physical system.

340
00:25:36.464 --> 00:25:41.430
And when the entropy gets too large, the system can't function the way it once did.

341
00:25:42.191 --> 00:25:45.336
And that's really what we call death, right?

342
00:25:45.376 --> 00:25:46.838
That's really what it means.

343
00:25:47.398 --> 00:26:02.272
And so in principle, we can imagine harnessing some of the processes that have caused the degradation in the human body that have naturally resulted in us typically not living more than 100 or 120 years.

344
00:26:02.292 --> 00:26:05.875
I mean, people like David Sinclair, who I've spoken to about things like this.

345
00:26:05.895 --> 00:26:06.156
Yeah.

346
00:26:06.476 --> 00:26:10.500
You know, I think we can forestall the kinds of degradation.

347
00:26:11.040 --> 00:26:12.582
Now, if you're talking to me, I'm.

348
00:26:13.242 --> 00:26:17.085
I think on timescales that are so much longer than a human life.

349
00:26:17.645 --> 00:26:29.232
I think about timescales that speak to the entire time frame of the cosmos from beginning to the closest that science can take us to the very end.

350
00:26:29.973 --> 00:26:34.876
And on those scales, I don't think that we will be able to forestall death.

351
00:26:35.436 --> 00:26:38.779
But please note, the timescales I'm talking about are ludicrous, ludicrous,

352
00:26:39.790 --> 00:26:44.372
compared to any timescale that we are familiar with.

353
00:26:44.452 --> 00:26:47.993
100 more years, 200 more years, maybe 500 more years.

354
00:26:48.053 --> 00:26:49.954
I don't think anybody can really say for sure.

355
00:26:50.434 --> 00:26:59.297
I do think that is within the possible range of what science and medicine will ultimately be able to accomplish.

356
00:26:59.617 --> 00:27:00.598
And I will say, though...

357
00:27:01.518 --> 00:27:07.639
You know, I read a book, I don't know, it was about in my 20s called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.

358
00:27:07.879 --> 00:27:21.622
He was a social psychologist, I guess sociologist, who believed strongly that so much of what we do in our lives is driven by our awareness of our own mortality.

359
00:27:22.122 --> 00:27:25.943
And as I began to think more and more about that, it made more and more sense to me when

360
00:27:26.743 --> 00:27:28.424
which had a dual effect on me.

361
00:27:28.944 --> 00:27:36.086
Very interesting framework to think about your life within the context of recognizing its finite nature.

362
00:27:36.366 --> 00:27:43.328
But the flip side of that is you're constantly thinking about your own death, you know, which, you know, is a curious way to go about your life.

363
00:27:43.368 --> 00:27:47.970
But I don't think the denial of death, that human motivation, would go away.

364
00:27:48.630 --> 00:27:53.994
If we lived 200 years or 300 or 500, yeah, we'd have longer lifespans.

365
00:27:54.054 --> 00:27:55.936
We'd be able to do more things.

366
00:27:56.396 --> 00:28:08.105
But, you know, if we lived to 500, you know, as we approach 450, 475, we'll be thinking the exact same thoughts that we think now as we approach 70 or 80.

367
00:28:08.486 --> 00:28:09.646
It'll be no different.

368
00:28:10.127 --> 00:28:16.612
And so from a fundamental perspective, yeah, I would choose to live longer, but I don't think it changes anything fundamentally.

369
00:28:17.457 --> 00:28:18.638
I find it quite interesting.

370
00:28:18.658 --> 00:28:28.942
I was actually writing a letter about this, sort of an article to myself really about this yesterday, about this idea of long-termism and how when you just change the time horizon of something, the decisions you make today are different.

371
00:28:29.222 --> 00:28:29.362
Yeah.

372
00:28:29.502 --> 00:28:38.987
And a simple way of explaining this through the context of like business would be, if I told you to build a business, then I gave you one year and unlimited resources, but you had to build it as big as you could.

373
00:28:39.687 --> 00:28:43.590
you would take certain shortcuts and you would maybe not think about the foundations.

374
00:28:44.130 --> 00:28:49.434
But if I gave you 20 years, you'd really make great foundations and then you'd build up from there.

375
00:28:49.494 --> 00:28:53.617
And I think about the same in our lives because we do have this sort of inbuilt time horizon.

376
00:28:53.637 --> 00:28:58.700
Okay, I'm going to live maybe 80 years and then I'm 30 and then 40 and then kids and then I start to change.

377
00:29:00.141 --> 00:29:04.804
Maybe at some deeper level, we are making a certain set of decisions based on that time horizon that we wouldn't make otherwise.

378
00:29:04.984 --> 00:29:05.165
Yeah.

379
00:29:05.325 --> 00:29:07.206
I mean, when I was 20 or 30,

380
00:29:08.895 --> 00:29:24.410
You know, even though I had this mindset that was inculcated by reading Becker's book, there was a certain sense of an infinite horizon that somehow was infusing your decisions, you know, to write a book.

381
00:29:24.610 --> 00:29:26.672
Well, that's like a four-year undertaking.

382
00:29:26.712 --> 00:29:27.473
But, you know, when you're...

383
00:29:28.253 --> 00:29:29.674
30, you're like, yeah, sure.

384
00:29:29.694 --> 00:29:31.274
Yeah, I'm going to do that.

385
00:29:31.814 --> 00:29:35.935
Now, I'm going to choose those books with a certain kind of care, right?

386
00:29:36.216 --> 00:29:40.457
You know, there's a different kind of mindset that is brought to bear.

387
00:29:40.717 --> 00:29:50.180
So I certainly agree that the time horizon has a profound impact on the moment-to-moment choices, but the pattern...

388
00:29:50.680 --> 00:30:08.028
that we humans go through from birth to adolescence, adulthood, middle age, to ultimately old age, if we're lucky, and then we disappear, that pattern will persist regardless of what the ultimate scale of it is, whether it's 80 years or 800 years.

389
00:30:08.308 --> 00:30:15.111
I think that we would go through a very similar kind of rhythmic variation in how we approach the world.

390
00:30:15.951 --> 00:30:17.312
If we were immortal,

391
00:30:18.460 --> 00:30:20.521
That would change a lot.

392
00:30:20.961 --> 00:30:23.721
But I don't see immortality in our future.

393
00:30:24.601 --> 00:30:30.463
What is the sort of the least inspiring possibility of the sort of answer to the big question of why we're here?

394
00:30:30.483 --> 00:30:33.324
And then I'll ask you the most optimistic possibility.

395
00:30:33.744 --> 00:30:38.885
Yeah, I think the least inspiring would be if, what if in the end of the day,

396
00:30:39.955 --> 00:30:41.256
it's all just an accident.

397
00:30:41.777 --> 00:30:47.062
There is no deep explanation for why the world is the way it is.

398
00:30:47.102 --> 00:30:50.506
There's no deep explanation for why there's something rather than nothing.

399
00:30:50.966 --> 00:30:51.887
And if that's the truth,

400
00:30:52.922 --> 00:30:53.522
I'm on board.

401
00:30:54.463 --> 00:31:00.346
But it wouldn't feel as enriching as it might be if I can now jump to the other side of your question.

402
00:31:00.786 --> 00:31:15.233
You know, if there is a true fundamental answer to the question of why there is anything at all, and I recognize that that answer dovetails with everything else that we've been developing, that answer ultimately yields quantum mechanics.

403
00:31:15.753 --> 00:31:19.200
and yields the general theory of relativity, and maybe even yields string theory.

404
00:31:19.922 --> 00:31:22.788
That would feel deeply satisfying.

405
00:31:23.169 --> 00:31:24.271
Why did our brain evolve?

406
00:31:24.892 --> 00:31:25.955
So we could get the next meal.

407
00:31:26.882 --> 00:31:27.922
So we could get shelter.

408
00:31:28.463 --> 00:31:36.546
So we could get a mate and have progeny, allowing our genetic material to propagate into our descendants, right?

409
00:31:36.826 --> 00:31:39.667
This is what the brain was meant to do.

410
00:31:39.827 --> 00:31:42.668
And yet, this brain can do so much more than that.

411
00:31:43.329 --> 00:31:45.610
It can figure out the equations of physics.

412
00:31:45.810 --> 00:31:47.330
That's a miracle right there.

413
00:31:47.750 --> 00:31:51.032
And so the deep gratification would come from this brain.

414
00:31:51.832 --> 00:32:05.426
being able to figure out some stuff, and then it dovetails with the deep explanation for why there's anything at all, giving us a coherent narrative from the beginning until today and perhaps on into the far future.

415
00:32:07.168 --> 00:32:07.449
Yeah.

416
00:32:08.209 --> 00:32:09.230
Do you think it's going to happen?

417
00:32:09.250 --> 00:32:10.472
Do you think we're going to answer that question?

418
00:32:10.772 --> 00:32:11.353
I don't know.

419
00:32:12.474 --> 00:32:13.215
Nobody does.

420
00:32:14.658 --> 00:32:22.333
I think all vectors are pointing in a direction that suggests that there are real explanations, that it's not just happenstance.

421
00:32:22.694 --> 00:32:25.299
There are these particles we mentioned before called electrons.

422
00:32:26.360 --> 00:32:28.080
Here it is, my spinning electron, right?

423
00:32:28.641 --> 00:32:39.404
And so when an electron spins, it can rise to a little magnetic field, sort of like a trillionth of the strength of the magnetic field of a magnet on your refrigerator.

424
00:32:40.244 --> 00:32:44.545
We can use the math of quantum mechanics to predict the strength of that magnetic field.

425
00:32:44.945 --> 00:32:49.867
And we can do it, and it comes out two point, blah, blah, blah, 15 decimal places long.

426
00:32:49.947 --> 00:32:50.907
We can do the math.

427
00:32:51.407 --> 00:32:53.428
We then can measure the magnetic field.

428
00:32:54.208 --> 00:32:59.137
And it agrees digit by digit by digit by digit by digit with what we calculate.

429
00:33:00.299 --> 00:33:04.767
Our prediction is borne out by our observations to 15 decimal places.

430
00:33:04.787 --> 00:33:05.088
Okay.

431
00:33:05.881 --> 00:33:07.082
I mean, that's breathtaking.

432
00:33:07.842 --> 00:33:18.088
We should not have been able to do that in some sense, to understand the world that deeply with the brain that really was focused upon, you know, getting the bison.

433
00:33:18.348 --> 00:33:26.813
And so the fact that we can do that suggests to me that there are these deep patterns in the world that...

434
00:33:27.874 --> 00:33:32.304
will ultimately stitch together into a coherent story.

435
00:33:32.845 --> 00:33:35.231
Do you think it could lead us to God?

436
00:33:35.912 --> 00:33:37.997
Well, yeah, it depends what you mean.

437
00:33:39.059 --> 00:33:39.720
By God.

438
00:33:40.240 --> 00:33:57.175
You know, if you mean the kind of God that our forebears often have spoken of and people today as well, a kind of anthropomorphized being, you know, sitting on the throne in some heavenly place, I suspect not.

439
00:33:58.100 --> 00:34:03.962
That feels to me very much a human creation and a wondrous human creation.

440
00:34:04.042 --> 00:34:12.145
I'm not of the mindset, as some of my science colleagues are, that religion is an enemy of science and needs to be wiped.

441
00:34:12.245 --> 00:34:15.186
It can be, but anything can be an enemy of anything else.

442
00:34:15.226 --> 00:34:16.287
It depends how you use it.

443
00:34:16.767 --> 00:34:23.850
I see religion not as a structure that tries to explain the world in terms of its workings.

444
00:34:23.910 --> 00:34:27.451
I see it as a structure that tries to quell science.

445
00:34:27.971 --> 00:34:30.933
Our anxiety, our existential anxiety.

446
00:34:30.953 --> 00:34:32.193
Where did religions come from?

447
00:34:32.774 --> 00:34:36.876
They came from our forebears recognizing that they would die.

448
00:34:37.456 --> 00:34:42.679
So, you know, our forebears had these elaborate rituals of burying their dead.

449
00:34:43.219 --> 00:34:54.022
There are these wonderful caves in various parts of the world that have been excavated where the grave goods, as they call it, involving, you know, animal teeth stitched together.

450
00:34:54.862 --> 00:35:01.644
It would take a single individual years to create the grave goods that are buried with an individual.

451
00:35:01.784 --> 00:35:03.565
Why would they spend the time on that?

452
00:35:03.985 --> 00:35:07.046
Well, they were imagining that death is not the end.

453
00:35:07.886 --> 00:35:12.650
that that individual needed those grave goods for their next journey into the afterlife.

454
00:35:13.210 --> 00:35:14.671
And why were they thinking about that?

455
00:35:14.991 --> 00:35:19.615
Because it's too terrifying to imagine that death is truly the end.

456
00:35:20.436 --> 00:35:31.244
And so from that, you can see the glimmers of a religious sensibility emerging, where we want to have something that suggests that death is not the end.

457
00:35:32.164 --> 00:35:35.667
So we invent these beautiful structures called religions.

458
00:35:35.687 --> 00:35:36.268
Religions.

459
00:35:36.988 --> 00:35:44.173
And I say that even from a personal standpoint, I don't believe in any of the traditional religious practices, right?

460
00:35:44.233 --> 00:35:44.734
I'm Jewish.

461
00:35:45.014 --> 00:35:48.156
I was raised sort of Jewish more culturally than religiously.

462
00:35:49.157 --> 00:35:50.718
Do I pray on occasion?

463
00:35:50.738 --> 00:35:52.279
Yeah, I do.

464
00:35:52.899 --> 00:35:55.321
Do I believe that I'm praying to an actual God?

465
00:35:55.541 --> 00:35:56.282
I do not.

466
00:35:57.203 --> 00:35:59.004
But the act of praying,

467
00:36:00.287 --> 00:36:12.634
going through the kind of ritual that our ancestors did and giving yourself over momentarily to something that you imagine as being more powerful, I think it's deeply in our nature.

468
00:36:12.894 --> 00:36:13.755
So who are you praying to?

469
00:36:14.035 --> 00:36:27.263
I am praying to the universe, if I have to give a word to it, recognizing that this prayer is going to fall on deaf ears because there's nothing else out there to hear it, but it makes me feel better.

470
00:36:27.823 --> 00:36:40.754
And so there's a part of my mind that's willing to allow the scientific understanding to have its place, but the irrational human side to have its place too.

471
00:36:41.775 --> 00:36:49.542
What is the most compelling argument or idea or experience you've ever encountered for a God, like the ones we read about in the Bibles?

472
00:36:49.562 --> 00:36:50.002
Very little.

473
00:36:50.022 --> 00:36:50.403
Very little.

474
00:36:51.215 --> 00:36:51.815
Very little.

475
00:36:52.175 --> 00:37:00.799
You know, somebody died in the operating room and they were able to leave their body and see things that they could not possibly have seen.

476
00:37:00.859 --> 00:37:05.800
And then they reported back when they were revived and people said, oh, you must have died and left your body.

477
00:37:05.840 --> 00:37:06.341
That's the only.

478
00:37:06.641 --> 00:37:06.861
No.

479
00:37:07.381 --> 00:37:07.821
No, no, no.

480
00:37:08.062 --> 00:37:15.088
The human brain has this wonderful imaginative capacity to see things inside of its head that it doesn't literally see.

481
00:37:15.348 --> 00:37:16.829
That's what we can do.

482
00:37:17.229 --> 00:37:27.498
And so I've never seen a single example where I couldn't feel that I could give a logical explanation, which was more compelling than the supernatural explanations.

483
00:37:27.618 --> 00:37:28.558
What about the Big Bang then?

484
00:37:28.678 --> 00:37:28.898
Good.

485
00:37:29.178 --> 00:37:34.340
So the Big Bang is a question of how it got started.

486
00:37:34.940 --> 00:37:40.021
And over time, we have been able to push our understanding ever further back.

487
00:37:40.661 --> 00:37:48.963
So in about 19, call it 29 or so, Edwin Hubble, who was a great astronomer,

488
00:37:50.063 --> 00:37:59.369
noticed through powerful observations through the telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, that the distant galaxies all seem to be moving away.

489
00:38:00.090 --> 00:38:00.570
Interesting.

490
00:38:01.230 --> 00:38:12.618
Others, Georges Lemaitre, who is a Belgian priest, as it turns out, who also knew Einstein's general relativity, said, well, look, if all the galaxies are moving away, just wind that cosmic film backwards.

491
00:38:12.638 --> 00:38:13.118
Interesting.

492
00:38:13.238 --> 00:38:16.721
Back in time, they must have been closer and closer and closer together.

493
00:38:17.441 --> 00:38:20.464
Way back in the beginning, they must have all been on top of each other.

494
00:38:20.844 --> 00:38:26.729
And then everything running the film forward must have swelled outward in a Big Bang-like explosion.

495
00:38:26.949 --> 00:38:27.670
Let there be light.

496
00:38:27.730 --> 00:38:28.851
Let there be light, yeah.

497
00:38:29.231 --> 00:38:35.356
And so starting in 1929, we began to have a scientific account where...

498
00:38:35.656 --> 00:38:40.240
of how it is that the universe may have been billions of years ago.

499
00:38:40.700 --> 00:38:54.311
And in our era, other scientists took the story even further, suggesting that there was an earlier era when the universe was just infused with a kind of uniform energy.

500
00:38:54.511 --> 00:38:55.913
You could say, where did the energy come from?

501
00:38:55.933 --> 00:38:56.413
I don't know.

502
00:38:56.753 --> 00:38:59.876
But if it was infused with this uniform energy, they showed that the math...

503
00:39:00.376 --> 00:39:05.321
required that the universe underwent this rapid swelling, the Big Bang.

504
00:39:05.942 --> 00:39:14.911
And so, era by era by era, my point is we can push our understanding ever more deeply, trying to get at cosmic origins.

505
00:39:15.371 --> 00:39:23.680
We have not been able to push back to time zero itself, but because we're able to push our understanding further back and make predictions—

506
00:39:24.260 --> 00:39:28.682
about, for instance, what's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

507
00:39:29.182 --> 00:39:35.005
This is heat that we can observe today that was left over from the Big Bang.

508
00:39:35.025 --> 00:39:35.985
Big Bang was very hot.

509
00:39:36.725 --> 00:39:40.307
The universe has cooled ever since for 13.8 billion years.

510
00:39:40.867 --> 00:39:45.129
We can detect the residual heat from the Big Bang.

511
00:39:46.098 --> 00:39:53.739
And so this gives me confidence that we're inching toward the answer to the question that you asked.

512
00:39:54.080 --> 00:39:56.400
Now, will we require God at some point?

513
00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:00.881
By which I mean, will we say, we've gone as far as we can?

514
00:40:01.541 --> 00:40:03.301
Will we have to invoke something else?

515
00:40:03.981 --> 00:40:12.023
I can't say no, but I don't see any reason at this point to envision that we won't be able to push all the way to a full understanding.

516
00:40:12.780 --> 00:40:25.193
Most of us don't really understand, I guess, how scale and time have a relationship, which means that, you know, I've been alive for 33 years now and it feels like a long time.

517
00:40:25.374 --> 00:40:25.534
Yeah.

518
00:40:26.355 --> 00:40:34.285
But I'm presuming the further and further you zoom out and the sort of the bigger, the wider the scale gets, time is experienced differently.

519
00:40:34.505 --> 00:40:39.351
So actually I could have been here for a second in a toddler's universe who's created the simulation.

520
00:40:39.451 --> 00:40:42.735
Yes, all of this is possible when simulations are part of the story.

521
00:40:43.116 --> 00:40:44.277
But if you put that to the side,

522
00:40:45.123 --> 00:40:46.644
And just look at our universe.

523
00:40:46.684 --> 00:40:46.924
Yeah.

524
00:40:47.644 --> 00:40:50.846
The timescales even there are shocking.

525
00:40:51.026 --> 00:40:53.748
I mean, Carl Sagan used an analogy.

526
00:40:53.868 --> 00:41:04.154
He said, look, if you want to understand the timescales of the universe from the beginning until today, which is billions of years, like 13.8 billion years, he said, here's one way to do it.

527
00:41:04.694 --> 00:41:10.858
Imagine that all of cosmic history from the beginning until today, you compress it down to one year.

528
00:41:11.438 --> 00:41:11.618
Right.

529
00:41:12.883 --> 00:41:17.027
Now, in that scheme, that means each day is about 40,000 years.

530
00:41:17.547 --> 00:41:23.832
But you can then put all of the milestone moments in the evolution of the universe on the calendar.

531
00:41:24.513 --> 00:41:26.475
So imagine you have the Big Bang as January 1st.

532
00:41:27.612 --> 00:41:33.973
Then the Milky Way galaxy forms like something around, you know, March 15th or something like that.

533
00:41:34.353 --> 00:41:38.454
And the sun and the earth form sometime, you know, in May, you know.

534
00:41:38.794 --> 00:41:43.795
And then the first, you know, life on earth is sometime in December, like December 2nd.

535
00:41:44.276 --> 00:41:49.997
And then, you know, the first modern humans, they appear like on New Year's Eve, right?

536
00:41:50.017 --> 00:41:50.497
Really?

537
00:41:50.617 --> 00:41:54.978
And then all of civilization takes place in the last 10 seconds.

538
00:41:56.038 --> 00:42:01.461
So at 1155, it's the rise of the Buddha.

539
00:42:01.541 --> 00:42:02.922
1156, the fall of Rome.

540
00:42:02.962 --> 00:42:05.223
1158, the Renaissance.

541
00:42:05.724 --> 00:42:10.226
1159, like one second to the stroke of midnight, you get modern science.

542
00:42:10.626 --> 00:42:15.329
So modern science is like one second in this cosmic calendar.

543
00:42:16.414 --> 00:42:23.477
And so that helps you get a feel for the timescales that are involved when you're talking cosmologically.

544
00:42:23.737 --> 00:42:30.721
Because you're right, 33 years in a lifetime, you know, I'm going to posit you're going to live to 99, let's say.

545
00:42:30.741 --> 00:42:31.861
That's one third of your life.

546
00:42:32.281 --> 00:42:36.063
You know, that's not small, it's not big, but, you know, it's a significant part of it.

547
00:42:36.563 --> 00:42:37.744
On cosmic terms?

548
00:42:38.524 --> 00:42:39.545
33 years?

549
00:42:40.106 --> 00:42:40.666
It's zero.

550
00:42:41.227 --> 00:42:42.087
It doesn't register.

551
00:42:42.628 --> 00:42:47.492
That's how tiny it is on the scales that we're talking about cosmologically.

552
00:42:49.013 --> 00:42:50.735
So should I feel insignificant?

553
00:42:50.995 --> 00:42:51.515
You can.

554
00:42:52.216 --> 00:42:53.237
I would urge you not to.

555
00:42:53.597 --> 00:42:58.602
One of the reactions to all this certainly can be, look, we're a little tiny speck.

556
00:42:59.654 --> 00:43:00.535
In space, right?

557
00:43:00.575 --> 00:43:06.119
I mean, you can give the same kind of context for space itself, right?

558
00:43:06.199 --> 00:43:08.701
Because we're on a planet around the sun.

559
00:43:08.741 --> 00:43:14.385
The sun is one star of 100 billion others or so in the Milky Way galaxy.

560
00:43:14.966 --> 00:43:21.411
Have you got a... Yeah, I think there's a little version of this thing here, if we can get this guy to go on.

561
00:43:21.451 --> 00:43:21.831
Right, yeah.

562
00:43:21.871 --> 00:43:24.093
So if you sort of start like here, right?

563
00:43:24.133 --> 00:43:25.714
Here we are in the studio, right?

564
00:43:25.994 --> 00:43:27.496
And if here we then begin to...

565
00:43:28.555 --> 00:43:29.795
pull out to planet Earth.

566
00:43:29.835 --> 00:43:32.196
Like we're a little dot on planet Earth.

567
00:43:32.236 --> 00:43:36.397
And then if you pull out from there, this is Earth within the solar system.

568
00:43:36.417 --> 00:43:40.618
You begin to see how tiny we look even on the scale of the solar system.

569
00:43:40.898 --> 00:43:47.219
But of course, here you can pull out further and you begin to see our sun, one of many stars within the galaxies.

570
00:43:47.239 --> 00:43:52.301
You only see a few here, but there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy.

571
00:43:52.341 --> 00:43:54.121
And then you can go even further than that.

572
00:43:54.521 --> 00:43:56.962
You can look at our Milky Way galaxy

573
00:43:58.682 --> 00:44:03.726
the setting of the entire universe that has at least 100 billion other galaxies.

574
00:44:04.747 --> 00:44:13.974
So we, as a little tiny speck around our star, our star is one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that's one of 100 billion galaxies.

575
00:44:14.954 --> 00:44:17.917
That can certainly make you feel small in space.

576
00:44:19.158 --> 00:44:21.719
The beauty, though, is that our minds...

577
00:44:22.524 --> 00:44:24.527
can reach out to the edge of the cosmos.

578
00:44:24.968 --> 00:44:29.955
The fact that we can understand that we are so small is what gives us heft.

579
00:44:30.576 --> 00:44:34.181
That's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger.

580
00:44:34.522 --> 00:44:38.387
I imagine that fish don't realize

581
00:44:39.771 --> 00:44:43.974
that they're like in one ocean of many oceans on the earth.

582
00:44:44.014 --> 00:44:45.175
That's one planet.

583
00:44:45.195 --> 00:44:46.716
I don't think maybe I'm wrong.

584
00:44:46.777 --> 00:44:54.422
And maybe the fish are like, ah, yeah, yeah, you know, but, but assuming that the fish don't know that they don't know that they're insignificant.

585
00:44:54.442 --> 00:45:03.049
They don't even really think in those terms per se, but the fact that we can do that, the fact that we can realize how insignificant we are.

586
00:45:03.109 --> 00:45:08.553
When you talk about the expansive space, you realize that there are other measures of significance and,

587
00:45:08.765 --> 00:45:13.086
And one measure of significance is your ability to understand your own predicament.

588
00:45:14.467 --> 00:45:18.668
And the fact that we can do that is what, to me, is wondrous.

589
00:45:18.848 --> 00:45:26.030
How do we know we're not just, that whole universe there isn't just a, we're just a microbe in the gut of a fish?

590
00:45:26.490 --> 00:45:27.430
Yeah, we could.

591
00:45:27.530 --> 00:45:30.271
And again, that's much like this simulation argument.

592
00:45:30.551 --> 00:45:34.672
But let me give an example in here that helps give you a sense of

593
00:45:35.838 --> 00:45:37.199
why we believe this stuff.

594
00:45:37.299 --> 00:45:41.521
This here is the cosmic microwave background radiation.

595
00:45:41.561 --> 00:45:44.543
This is the heat left over from the beginning.

596
00:45:45.163 --> 00:45:46.284
Now it's color coded.

597
00:45:46.664 --> 00:45:49.846
The different colors correspond to different temperatures in space.

598
00:45:50.266 --> 00:45:58.011
This is a picture of space with a device that measures the temperature at each location and assigns it a color.

599
00:45:58.291 --> 00:45:59.632
How much of space were just a segment

600
00:45:59.812 --> 00:46:03.875
This is a segment of the observable universe, the segment that we can see.

601
00:46:03.915 --> 00:46:06.657
Now, space can be much larger than things that we can see.

602
00:46:06.697 --> 00:46:08.078
That's absolutely the case.

603
00:46:08.458 --> 00:46:15.182
But my point is, these tiny color variations correspond to tiny temperature differences.

604
00:46:15.703 --> 00:46:20.506
We can use mathematics to predict the pattern of the temperature variations.

605
00:46:21.627 --> 00:46:26.270
And what we predict matches this image to incredible precision.

606
00:46:27.372 --> 00:46:41.079
And so the fact that we can do a calculation right at this table with a piece of paper, a pencil, and a computer, and generate an image that agrees with what we see, we say, look, yeah, we can be skeptical.

607
00:46:41.599 --> 00:46:43.360
Maybe we don't have the full answer.

608
00:46:43.900 --> 00:46:49.763
But that agreement gives us confidence that we've got something in the direction of truth.

609
00:46:50.223 --> 00:46:52.725
And that, to me, is what gives us confidence.

610
00:46:53.868 --> 00:46:58.370
something that counteracts the feeling of insignificance.

611
00:46:58.971 --> 00:47:00.351
And on that, if you just pull it up again.

612
00:47:00.431 --> 00:47:02.392
So this is the observable universe.

613
00:47:02.432 --> 00:47:02.612
Yeah.

614
00:47:02.733 --> 00:47:03.953
Which is, I mean, how big is that?

615
00:47:04.273 --> 00:47:07.355
The universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

616
00:47:07.375 --> 00:47:08.676
So you'd think that the...

617
00:47:10.259 --> 00:47:16.348
The distance we could see would be about 13.8 billion light years, the distance light can travel in one year.

618
00:47:16.368 --> 00:47:20.454
We can actually see a little bit further, more like 45 billion light years.

619
00:47:20.854 --> 00:47:23.378
So you can think about this as here we are.

620
00:47:23.658 --> 00:47:24.700
We look out different.

621
00:47:24.740 --> 00:47:25.981
Billions of light years that way.

622
00:47:26.221 --> 00:47:27.421
Billions of light years that way.

623
00:47:27.681 --> 00:47:29.442
Billions of light years in every direction.

624
00:47:29.802 --> 00:47:32.543
And this is like a big sphere that surrounds us.

625
00:47:32.603 --> 00:47:41.407
And we're measuring its temperature, the temperature of space, the photons that have traveled to us from about 300,000 years after the beginning.

626
00:47:42.047 --> 00:47:53.492
So this picture is a snapshot, in essence, of what the universe was like a mere moment in cosmological terms, 300,000 years after the beginning.

627
00:47:54.152 --> 00:47:55.973
That is an amazing picture.

628
00:47:57.633 --> 00:47:58.474
And what's beyond?

629
00:47:59.494 --> 00:47:59.954
I don't know.

630
00:48:00.274 --> 00:48:08.497
I don't have any reason to suspect that reality radically changes just beyond the place that we can see.

631
00:48:08.797 --> 00:48:18.281
I think it's incredibly unlikely that the world is so consistent with our scientific understanding for it to all be a ruse.

632
00:48:19.381 --> 00:48:20.723
So is it infinite?

633
00:48:21.344 --> 00:48:21.764
It could be.

634
00:48:22.405 --> 00:48:26.430
And if it is infinite, there are some really weird things.

635
00:48:26.890 --> 00:48:29.734
If what we have been talking about isn't weird enough, right?

636
00:48:30.154 --> 00:48:36.682
You know, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed.

637
00:48:36.702 --> 00:48:36.822
Right.

638
00:48:37.438 --> 00:48:46.161
to find a copy of yourself out there and a copy of the earth out there and a copy of our galaxy out there.

639
00:48:47.041 --> 00:48:52.964
It's virtually impossible to imagine a universe that goes on infinitely far and doesn't repeat.

640
00:48:53.404 --> 00:48:55.164
You know, in fact, I see a prop here.

641
00:48:55.224 --> 00:48:57.025
I can sort of tell you why, right?

642
00:48:57.105 --> 00:48:58.966
So here's a deck of cards, right?

643
00:48:59.766 --> 00:49:01.467
And I think it's a new deck, yeah.

644
00:49:01.487 --> 00:49:03.067
So everything is in order, right?

645
00:49:03.107 --> 00:49:04.928
It's all perfectly ordered like that.

646
00:49:05.588 --> 00:49:09.790
Now, if I was to take this deck of cards and I start to shuffle it, right?

647
00:49:10.191 --> 00:49:13.933
So I'm not a particularly good shuffler, but you get the basic idea.

648
00:49:14.533 --> 00:49:15.834
You know, I keep shuffling.

649
00:49:16.094 --> 00:49:19.255
And of course, the order changes every time, right?

650
00:49:19.536 --> 00:49:21.597
So if I now, you know, I'm not a great shuffler.

651
00:49:21.637 --> 00:49:25.359
So there's probably still, you know, some things that are still, you know, in numerical order.

652
00:49:25.639 --> 00:49:27.940
But it's more mixed up than it was before.

653
00:49:27.980 --> 00:49:29.261
And I can keep on doing this.

654
00:49:29.861 --> 00:49:31.182
Now, sooner or later.

655
00:49:32.497 --> 00:49:41.242
I continue to shuffle these cards over and over and over and over and over and over again, sooner or later it will get back to the completely ordered arrangement.

656
00:49:41.902 --> 00:49:42.162
Why?

657
00:49:42.242 --> 00:49:46.705
Because there aren't enough different arrangements to go around, right?

658
00:49:47.205 --> 00:49:50.126
That idea applies in the universe in the following way.

659
00:49:50.607 --> 00:49:52.568
In any region of space, there are particles.

660
00:49:53.348 --> 00:49:56.389
Those particles can be arranged in a variety of different ways.

661
00:49:56.909 --> 00:50:01.290
Here they're arranged so that you and I are sitting at this table and we've got the cameras and everything.

662
00:50:01.330 --> 00:50:02.850
This is just a particle arrangement.

663
00:50:03.650 --> 00:50:08.091
There are only a finite number of arrangements of particles in any given region of space.

664
00:50:08.131 --> 00:50:10.492
This is you can establish from the laws of quantum physics.

665
00:50:11.012 --> 00:50:19.534
So if you go out far enough in space, region by region by region, the particles will have different arrangements, but they have to repeat much like the order of the cards has to repeat.

666
00:50:20.334 --> 00:50:22.016
So there has to be a place out there.

667
00:50:22.036 --> 00:50:27.782
In fact, if it goes on infinitely far, if you imagine that I shuffle these cards infinitely many times...

668
00:50:28.836 --> 00:50:32.900
I'll get that nice ordered arrangement infinitely many times too.

669
00:50:33.140 --> 00:50:40.988
Similarly, there are infinitely many copies of you, of me, of everything we're familiar with out there in the cosmos.

670
00:50:41.668 --> 00:50:47.574
And so if the universe is infinite, it kind of challenges a little bit our sense of self, right?

671
00:50:47.594 --> 00:50:53.840
Like what does it mean to be who you are if there are other versions of you having the exact same thoughts that...

672
00:50:54.271 --> 00:50:55.533
They had the same childhood.

673
00:50:56.214 --> 00:51:03.003
They had the same history because, again, that's just an arrangement of particles over time, and it has to repeat.

674
00:51:03.023 --> 00:51:06.267
There's a version out there of me that just loves wine.

675
00:51:07.778 --> 00:51:08.879
There you go, right?

676
00:51:09.339 --> 00:51:18.863
In fact, it's even easier, I should say, for the particle arrangement to almost, but not quite exactly replicate what we're familiar with.

677
00:51:19.464 --> 00:51:24.206
Which would mean there's a universe out there in which you and I are interchanged.

678
00:51:24.806 --> 00:51:28.328
Or you grew up in New York City and I grew up something.

679
00:51:28.348 --> 00:51:31.210
Because those are, again, almost replications.

680
00:51:31.230 --> 00:51:39.094
You've got the Earth, you've got the sun, but the detailed particle arrangement is close to but not identical to what we are used to.

681
00:51:39.354 --> 00:51:44.437
So, yeah, an infinite universe brings in some fairly strange ideas.

682
00:51:45.807 --> 00:51:51.509
But even in the observable universe, I mean, this transitions nicely to the subject of aliens, which people are very obsessed about.

683
00:51:51.529 --> 00:51:56.771
I guess there's two questions here, which is why do we care so much, I guess, philosophically about aliens?

684
00:51:57.251 --> 00:52:03.713
You know, I think we, at least in this country and elsewhere too, we love the idea of conspiracy.

685
00:52:04.033 --> 00:52:08.415
We love the idea that the deep state is hiding things from us.

686
00:52:08.495 --> 00:52:09.695
And by we, I don't mean me.

687
00:52:09.755 --> 00:52:13.397
I sort of mean the zeitgeist, you know, loves the idea of this Area 51.

688
00:52:14.457 --> 00:52:21.664
You know, so I think there's a desire for there to be more than what's apparent on the surface.

689
00:52:22.305 --> 00:52:31.334
And wouldn't it be exciting if, you know, we've long known that there are these aliens, they visited us and it's been kept under wraps.

690
00:52:31.454 --> 00:52:37.560
That's like the deep conspiracy that feeds that hunger for there to be something that is being hidden from us.

691
00:52:38.149 --> 00:52:43.871
Now, I think the other reason is we're deeply lonely as a species.

692
00:52:44.251 --> 00:52:54.775
Sure, we've got people around, but, you know, I think this sense, the desire for a god, I don't think is that much different from the desire for there to be other life out there.

693
00:52:54.815 --> 00:52:56.956
It's the desire to be part of something bigger.

694
00:52:57.656 --> 00:53:03.078
Now, if you ask me, do I think there are actually other life forms out there, I don't

695
00:53:03.378 --> 00:53:04.739
I'd like to think of it in two ways.

696
00:53:04.979 --> 00:53:08.540
One, yeah, I think it's hard to imagine that we're the only life.

697
00:53:08.600 --> 00:53:13.701
I mean, the more we look, the more we find the organic molecules necessary for life.

698
00:53:13.761 --> 00:53:18.363
You know, amino acids, nucleic acid, you know, the raw material.

699
00:53:19.043 --> 00:53:22.647
seems to not be too hard to come by in the cosmos.

700
00:53:23.268 --> 00:53:32.658
So to imagine that there's other bacterial life or viruses out there, that seems to me a reasonable working hypothesis.

701
00:53:33.359 --> 00:53:35.782
But if you then say, but what about intelligent life?

702
00:53:36.162 --> 00:53:38.124
And by intelligent life, let's just call us.

703
00:53:38.925 --> 00:53:39.525
intelligent.

704
00:53:39.685 --> 00:53:41.426
It's debatable, but let's just say that.

705
00:53:42.386 --> 00:53:43.847
That is a harder question.

706
00:53:44.447 --> 00:53:59.833
I mean, even on our planet, right, it was an asteroid 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and in that way opened up the evolutionary pathway by which we came to dominate in the way that we do.

707
00:53:59.873 --> 00:54:06.515
Without that, it could still be the dinosaurs are grazing around on various plant life and other life

708
00:54:06.835 --> 00:54:08.837
forms on the surface of this earth.

709
00:54:09.318 --> 00:54:17.267
And without that kind of accident on some other world, maybe intelligent life is rare or even so rare that we're the only example.

710
00:54:17.367 --> 00:54:25.456
So I don't consider that an absurd perspective as well, that there is life, but there may not be any intelligence beyond us.

711
00:54:27.138 --> 00:54:34.482
Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very, very busy.

712
00:54:34.863 --> 00:54:41.607
And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post.

713
00:54:41.987 --> 00:54:43.027
What people will think of you?

714
00:54:43.308 --> 00:54:44.228
Am I doing this right?

715
00:54:44.308 --> 00:54:46.309
Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid?

716
00:54:46.770 --> 00:54:51.713
All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare and

717
00:54:52.433 --> 00:54:55.934
I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about.

718
00:54:55.974 --> 00:55:07.278
And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you.

719
00:55:07.358 --> 00:55:09.759
You can also just use it for inspiration.

720
00:55:09.779 --> 00:55:13.120
And sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels

721
00:55:13.660 --> 00:55:14.620
is inspiration.

722
00:55:14.880 --> 00:55:18.722
Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too.

723
00:55:19.082 --> 00:55:23.243
So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think.

724
00:55:23.423 --> 00:55:27.025
All you have to do is search coach.stan.store now to get started.

725
00:55:27.045 --> 00:55:33.007
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726
00:55:33.447 --> 00:55:33.787
It's not.

727
00:55:33.967 --> 00:55:42.492
The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team, because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture.

728
00:55:42.632 --> 00:55:43.152
And I get it.

729
00:55:43.412 --> 00:55:49.155
When you're starting out, you need A players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews.

730
00:55:49.375 --> 00:55:53.337
So you hire fast to fill the seat, but this ends up costing you even more in the long term.

731
00:55:53.537 --> 00:55:58.400
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732
00:55:58.520 --> 00:56:02.282
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733
00:56:02.482 --> 00:56:10.027
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734
00:56:10.207 --> 00:56:15.310
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735
00:56:15.470 --> 00:56:17.112
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736
00:56:17.252 --> 00:56:22.015
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737
00:56:22.135 --> 00:56:24.376
That's linkedin.com slash DOAC.

738
00:56:24.456 --> 00:56:25.577
And terms and conditions apply.

739
00:56:26.748 --> 00:56:31.550
If one of your children came to you and said, Dad, what is the meaning then of this life?

740
00:56:31.610 --> 00:56:37.432
If we're alone in this universe, it's a gazillion miles away from anything interesting in the cosmic spectrum of things.

741
00:56:37.652 --> 00:56:38.972
What is the meaning of all of this, Dad?

742
00:56:39.413 --> 00:56:40.513
Yeah, well, they do.

743
00:56:40.833 --> 00:56:41.253
Oh, they do.

744
00:56:41.513 --> 00:56:50.377
You know, unfortunately or fortunately, because I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and writing about it, it's sort of in the familial zeitgeist at home, if you will.

745
00:56:50.937 --> 00:56:53.498
But my answer generally is,

746
00:56:54.618 --> 00:57:00.445
I don't think that hovering out there in the depths of space, there is the answer.

747
00:57:01.326 --> 00:57:09.075
You know, I think, you know, this urge to look out and have the answer brought to us, I think that's...

748
00:57:10.258 --> 00:57:11.078
needs to be inverted.

749
00:57:11.718 --> 00:57:16.119
I think that we need to come to the universe with our answer to that.

750
00:57:16.760 --> 00:57:33.383
And I think the charge of every sentient living being is to come to their own rationale for their life, their own answer to your question, their own set of activities and desires and achievements

751
00:57:41.126 --> 00:57:48.072
One of the things that does make me feel connected is just knowing that the particles that I'm made out of existed at the Big Bang.

752
00:57:48.112 --> 00:57:49.954
Yes, exactly.

753
00:57:50.554 --> 00:57:51.555
Isn't that wondrous?

754
00:57:52.796 --> 00:57:53.096
You...

755
00:57:54.226 --> 00:58:00.770
Are the universe constructed in a way that you can reflect on the universe?

756
00:58:01.190 --> 00:58:04.171
Now, some would say, no, no, no, we're special.

757
00:58:04.772 --> 00:58:09.314
We're like these divine offspring, you know, made in the image of God.

758
00:58:09.954 --> 00:58:16.578
And sure, I mean, I like the way that that sounds, but I find it much more satisfying to describe it the way you did.

759
00:58:17.344 --> 00:58:29.613
There were particles that emerged from the Big Bang that coalesced into a form that allowed us to momentarily, because we're here for a brief flicker of cosmic time, to momentarily reflect on our own existence.

760
00:58:29.913 --> 00:58:30.894
That's a connection.

761
00:58:31.294 --> 00:58:34.016
One of the things that actually helped me a lot through my life, funnily enough, is...

762
00:58:34.536 --> 00:58:40.701
is kind of watching what you just showed on the screen there, which was, I watched a video when I was younger of them just zooming out from Earth.

763
00:58:40.861 --> 00:58:41.121
Yeah.

764
00:58:41.561 --> 00:58:44.283
And we talked about feeling insignificant earlier.

765
00:58:44.303 --> 00:58:45.804
I mean, there's some of them here.

766
00:58:45.824 --> 00:58:47.746
I'll just pick one at random, like this one here.

767
00:58:48.046 --> 00:58:52.709
Well, it's just a lady sat on some grass, and she zooms out further and further and further.

768
00:58:52.729 --> 00:58:54.050
And when I saw this, I must have been...

769
00:58:55.091 --> 00:58:56.052
It was a video like this one.

770
00:58:56.132 --> 00:58:57.753
I must have been about 14 years old.

771
00:58:58.173 --> 00:59:01.756
And at first, I had the thought that a lot of people might have, which was, oh, like, none of this matters.

772
00:59:01.776 --> 00:59:02.296
Yeah.

773
00:59:02.376 --> 00:59:06.781
Because we're so insignificant on the grand scheme of things that, like, what's the point?

774
00:59:07.282 --> 00:59:10.526
And then I had this other thought, which has stayed with me ever since, which is...

775
00:59:13.849 --> 00:59:15.251
It liberated me from worry.

776
00:59:15.471 --> 00:59:15.652
Yeah.

777
00:59:16.322 --> 00:59:27.207
Because if all of my worries are just a speck in this bigger thing, which are a speck in a bigger thing and a speck in a bigger thing, it meant that I could take more risks in my life.

778
00:59:27.387 --> 00:59:27.528
Yeah.

779
00:59:27.928 --> 00:59:36.072
And not be encumbered by what will happen if and what will people think and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which kind of liberates one to go and pursue whatever they want to pursue.

780
00:59:36.232 --> 00:59:36.412
Yeah.

781
00:59:36.592 --> 00:59:55.577
Carl Sagan with the pale blue dot, you know, if you're familiar with that terminology, he had the Viking spacecraft when it was going by Saturn, turn around and take a shot of planet Earth through the gossamer rings of Saturn.

782
00:59:56.217 --> 01:00:03.821
And in that photo, the Earth is this little tiny pale blue speck, sort of as we saw in the film as it went by there.

783
01:00:04.361 --> 01:00:20.790
And he, in this wonderfully poetic passage, described how everything we care about, everything we love, everything we fight, the rivers of blood that has been spilled to conquer a tiny little fraction of a pixel in space, right?

784
01:00:21.090 --> 01:00:35.706
That gives you a setting where the concerns that you're mentioning of an individual human life, of countries, of nations, you realize how utterly small it is in the cosmological setting.

785
01:00:35.746 --> 01:00:39.049
And again, that to me isn't insignificance.

786
01:00:39.230 --> 01:00:40.971
As you were saying, it's liberation.

787
01:00:40.991 --> 01:00:41.452
Right.

788
01:00:41.672 --> 01:00:46.635
We have this spectrum of, I guess, confidence in front of us here.

789
01:00:46.675 --> 01:00:48.777
And on one end of it, it says low confidence.

790
01:00:48.797 --> 01:00:50.098
On this end, it has high confidence.

791
01:00:50.558 --> 01:00:54.741
And there's five little figurine-type things there next to you.

792
01:00:54.761 --> 01:00:59.904
And what I would like you to do is to place them in line with your confidence that the thing is real.

793
01:01:00.044 --> 01:01:03.807
So the first one I'm going to ask you to place is those mini scales which represent free will.

794
01:01:04.127 --> 01:01:05.168
This guy here, free will.

795
01:01:05.188 --> 01:01:05.268
Yes.

796
01:01:05.408 --> 01:01:06.049
That's free will.

797
01:01:06.230 --> 01:01:08.113
Do you think humans have free will?

798
01:01:08.133 --> 01:01:09.616
Are you low confidence or high confidence?

799
01:01:09.636 --> 01:01:15.066
I'll push over further towards you so you can... Well, I do not think we have free will.

800
01:01:15.847 --> 01:01:16.268
And I...

801
01:01:17.113 --> 01:01:23.037
have high confidence in that assessment, which I guess means low confidence that we have free will.

802
01:01:23.097 --> 01:01:23.798
What is free will?

803
01:01:24.078 --> 01:01:43.372
To me, free will is really just the everyday sense that you are the ultimate author of your actions, that the buck stops with you when it comes to the decisions that you make for how you are going to respond one way or another in the moment-to-moment existence of life.

804
01:01:44.172 --> 01:01:47.794
I don't think that freedom of the will is real.

805
01:01:48.494 --> 01:01:51.435
And I can give you a quick sense why.

806
01:01:51.455 --> 01:01:59.379
It really is an extension of everything that we've already spoken about, which is, you know, when I look at you, I see a man.

807
01:02:00.780 --> 01:02:04.862
But I also imagine that I'm looking inside you and I see your particles.

808
01:02:05.753 --> 01:02:09.015
And so you are a man-shaped collection of particles.

809
01:02:09.595 --> 01:02:10.815
That is what you are.

810
01:02:11.656 --> 01:02:19.239
And each of those particles and the agglomeration of those particles are fully governed by the laws of physics.

811
01:02:19.339 --> 01:02:21.340
I don't say that we have those laws yet.

812
01:02:21.640 --> 01:02:25.082
We have an approximation to them with Schrodinger and Einstein and all those folks.

813
01:02:25.342 --> 01:02:32.185
But I do believe that there is an ultimate set of principles that guide how your particles behave.

814
01:02:36.128 --> 01:02:39.670
to intercede in the lawful progression of your particles.

815
01:02:40.070 --> 01:02:44.633
So if you raise your hand, it is not you who's doing that.

816
01:02:44.853 --> 01:02:54.499
It is the laws of physics guiding the particles in your brain, sending an electrical signal down your arm, causing your muscle to contract or expand, resulting in your hand going up.

817
01:02:55.419 --> 01:02:59.022
You don't control the laws that govern those particles.

818
01:02:59.302 --> 01:03:00.262
I did make the decision.

819
01:03:00.462 --> 01:03:01.023
You did not.

820
01:03:01.563 --> 01:03:02.504
You felt that you did.

821
01:03:03.104 --> 01:03:04.205
And so the feeling...

822
01:03:04.765 --> 01:03:10.787
that you and I and everyone else have, that we make decisions and those decisions result in our action.

823
01:03:10.847 --> 01:03:14.168
It's a powerful, it's a seductive sensibility.

824
01:03:14.568 --> 01:03:21.250
But no, I do not think that you are the place where that choice, if you will, occurred.

825
01:03:21.830 --> 01:03:26.171
The choice is actually within the lawful unfolding of the particles.

826
01:03:26.552 --> 01:03:29.092
And I can't control that particle motion.

827
01:03:29.572 --> 01:03:31.693
Therefore, I can't control the decision.

828
01:03:31.953 --> 01:03:34.514
Therefore, I don't control the motion of my arm.

829
01:03:34.654 --> 01:03:35.754
Therefore, I don't control my life.

830
01:03:35.914 --> 01:03:37.115
You don't, in some sense.

831
01:03:37.695 --> 01:03:41.716
If you buy into it fully, it can be paralyzing.

832
01:03:42.256 --> 01:03:44.537
Or you can recognize it, which I do.

833
01:03:45.197 --> 01:03:51.319
And I say, okay, within that structure, I'm going to live my life as fully as I can.

834
01:03:51.779 --> 01:03:59.982
And I am able, not always, because I'm a human being, but in the best of moments, I can pull back and have a certain objectivity.

835
01:04:00.800 --> 01:04:03.922
about the things that happen in my life.

836
01:04:04.642 --> 01:04:12.947
And I observe them at a remove, as opposed to being completely wrapped up in the moment to moment.

837
01:04:13.307 --> 01:04:15.408
Now that doesn't make me an aloof person.

838
01:04:15.448 --> 01:04:19.851
It doesn't make me somebody who somehow is detached, no.

839
01:04:20.511 --> 01:04:23.373
It's just, I can analyze the world at multiple levels.

840
01:04:24.483 --> 01:04:28.766
So who is and what is guiding those particles to make the decisions that those particles are making?

841
01:04:28.966 --> 01:04:36.291
The best I can say, and I think the best that we can say right now, is that there is some body of law.

842
01:04:36.872 --> 01:04:38.613
Now, what does that mean, a body of law?

843
01:04:39.013 --> 01:04:40.414
There is some...

844
01:04:41.698 --> 01:04:44.881
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Patterns that repeat in the world.

845
01:04:45.341 --> 01:04:50.425
Now you drop an apple and it falls on Newton's head repeatedly.

846
01:04:50.445 --> 01:04:56.750
You can rely upon certain kinds of particle motion because there's certain regularities in the world.

847
01:04:57.350 --> 01:05:01.273
And the regularities in the world are what I mean by the laws of physics.

848
01:05:02.134 --> 01:05:04.016
They may be articulated mathematically.

849
01:05:04.156 --> 01:05:10.744
Our best guess is, as of today, that math is the best language we have for describing those laws.

850
01:05:10.824 --> 01:05:14.047
But out there, I think there are some fundamental patterns.

851
01:05:14.948 --> 01:05:19.454
And those patterns ultimately are what determine how the particles move.

852
01:05:20.542 --> 01:05:22.584
And so that's all that we are.

853
01:05:22.684 --> 01:05:24.666
We are a body of particles that move.

854
01:05:25.126 --> 01:05:28.309
And that's responsible for why things do what they do.

855
01:05:28.369 --> 01:05:35.656
And remarkably, our brains allow us to self-reflect, to look at what we do and analyze it.

856
01:05:35.716 --> 01:05:38.518
And when we do that, we tend to ascribe authorship

857
01:05:39.299 --> 01:05:40.299
to ourselves.

858
01:05:41.100 --> 01:05:43.601
But that's a story that we tell ourselves.

859
01:05:43.621 --> 01:05:44.661
It makes us feel good.

860
01:05:45.242 --> 01:05:47.863
It makes us feel part of the unfolding.

861
01:05:48.423 --> 01:05:55.586
It perhaps has an evolutionary utility that if you feel responsible for what you're doing, maybe it helps you to survive.

862
01:05:55.886 --> 01:06:00.788
Maybe that's why this way of thinking was inculcated over the course of generation upon generation.

863
01:06:00.808 --> 01:06:02.429
Maybe there's an evolutionary explanation.

864
01:06:02.809 --> 01:06:04.930
But fundamentally speaking, I don't think it's real.

865
01:06:05.310 --> 01:06:06.251
I was going to say then, well,

866
01:06:07.491 --> 01:06:11.352
the particles are trying to survive in this form.

867
01:06:11.892 --> 01:06:23.714
But even as I thought about that, I thought, so maybe my particles are making the decisions they make to raise my hand, to go on a holiday with my fiancé, to have kids because they want to survive in this form.

868
01:06:24.115 --> 01:06:26.315
But actually, I disappear at some point.

869
01:06:26.535 --> 01:06:26.775
Yes.

870
01:06:26.855 --> 01:06:27.795
But my particles don't.

871
01:06:28.095 --> 01:06:28.335
Right.

872
01:06:28.496 --> 01:06:31.636
They then become dirt or someone else or whatever, or a child.

873
01:06:31.716 --> 01:06:34.477
It doesn't seem that they care much about necessarily being in this form.

874
01:06:34.677 --> 01:06:35.077
They don't.

875
01:06:35.577 --> 01:06:36.338
I don't think they do.

876
01:06:36.698 --> 01:06:38.299
So I don't think they care.

877
01:06:38.340 --> 01:06:41.282
I don't even think the word care is applicable to them.

878
01:06:41.843 --> 01:06:54.273
The notion of caring is a high-level construct that only emerges when the particles are configured sufficiently to yield a complex information processing system called the human brain.

879
01:06:54.293 --> 01:06:54.794
And consciousness.

880
01:06:54.814 --> 01:06:55.254
And consciousness.

881
01:06:55.294 --> 01:06:55.915
And consciousness.

882
01:06:56.155 --> 01:06:59.900
Now, if you ask me where consciousness comes from, I don't know, sort of as we discussed before.

883
01:06:59.940 --> 01:07:01.542
I think it's just physical processes.

884
01:07:01.562 --> 01:07:02.362
Let's go with that.

885
01:07:02.883 --> 01:07:08.129
Assuming that's the case, this conscious self-awareness invents the idea of caring.

886
01:07:09.031 --> 01:07:14.213
because it's a useful concept for us to organize our lives and our experiences.

887
01:07:14.713 --> 01:07:18.094
This conscious self-awareness invents all the other words.

888
01:07:18.515 --> 01:07:25.317
Happy, sad, meaning, purpose, morality, activity, action, choice, decision, freedom, will.

889
01:07:25.997 --> 01:07:27.118
All human-made.

890
01:07:27.658 --> 01:07:30.999
These concepts don't exist out there in the universe.

891
01:07:31.600 --> 01:07:37.422
There's no notion of freedom of the will floating in space outside the Andromeda galaxy.

892
01:07:38.142 --> 01:07:51.153
This is a selection of ideas that we humans as a species have found to give us utilitarian advantage in organizing our experiences.

893
01:07:51.574 --> 01:07:52.634
That's all that it is.

894
01:07:53.075 --> 01:07:54.176
That doesn't diminish it.

895
01:07:54.736 --> 01:07:59.560
I don't go around trying to erase my sense of self.

896
01:08:00.241 --> 01:08:05.025
I accept my sense of self, but I also see it for what it is, a human construct.

897
01:08:06.147 --> 01:08:17.135
Does that mean that consciousness and everything that I am could theoretically just be, as you said earlier in the sort of pessimistic version of events, random, totally random.

898
01:08:17.155 --> 01:08:22.699
Like consciousness itself was just the particles came together over a long enough period of time and then they found this form and now I can...

899
01:08:22.859 --> 01:08:23.219
It could.

900
01:08:23.499 --> 01:08:28.381
And maybe it was random and happened only once on this planet, right?

901
01:08:28.421 --> 01:08:35.924
I mean, again, maybe there is life out there and maybe there's even complex life out there, maybe even like as big as us or bigger.

902
01:08:36.344 --> 01:08:38.605
But maybe when we encounter those life forms...

903
01:08:39.539 --> 01:08:43.820
They have no idea of what it means to have an inner world.

904
01:08:44.360 --> 01:08:52.363
I think it was a physicist who said to me that it was a bit of a spiritual, esoteric idea, but they basically said to me that they think consciousness could be.

905
01:08:52.583 --> 01:08:54.263
It could come from this sort of original source.

906
01:08:54.704 --> 01:08:59.065
And it's divided itself up into the humans, the bees, the birds, to...

907
01:08:59.785 --> 01:09:01.806
go out there and understand the nature of the universe.

908
01:09:02.346 --> 01:09:04.086
And then when we die, we kind of return to the source.

909
01:09:04.106 --> 01:09:05.907
But, you know, I'll give birth to a baby.

910
01:09:05.927 --> 01:09:11.129
They'll go off into different corners of the earth and look at different things and have different experiences.

911
01:09:11.149 --> 01:09:15.810
And it's all feeding back into the central consciousness, which is sole objective is to understand itself.

912
01:09:15.890 --> 01:09:18.311
And it's funny because I heard this idea from this physicist.

913
01:09:18.651 --> 01:09:25.453
And then I was somewhere in Europe and I was driving down the road and I saw all of these tourists just like looking up at a mountain.

914
01:09:26.515 --> 01:09:27.856
And they're just like looking out at the sea.

915
01:09:28.236 --> 01:09:29.997
And they were looking at things that were interesting.

916
01:09:30.017 --> 01:09:30.217
Sure.

917
01:09:30.377 --> 01:09:31.378
Which is what we do as humans.

918
01:09:31.398 --> 01:09:31.578
Yeah.

919
01:09:31.778 --> 01:09:33.119
I thought it kind of makes sense.

920
01:09:33.139 --> 01:09:33.679
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

921
01:09:33.839 --> 01:09:36.321
That we're like, we're actually just like consciousness.

922
01:09:36.341 --> 01:09:39.403
There's a philosophical position called idealism.

923
01:09:39.963 --> 01:09:46.687
And idealism holds that the fundamental truth of reality is consciousness.

924
01:09:47.168 --> 01:09:53.331
But fundamentally, everything that I've seen throughout my life suggests to me that that's not how it is.

925
01:09:53.351 --> 01:09:53.932
I can't prove it.

926
01:09:54.777 --> 01:09:55.477
I hope it's true.

927
01:09:55.897 --> 01:10:11.083
But if you ask me what I think is really true, I think that consciousness is something that emerges when there's a sufficient amount of information processing that itself is carried by the motion of particles through various interconnected structures.

928
01:10:11.363 --> 01:10:12.243
Is my dog conscious?

929
01:10:12.543 --> 01:10:15.744
It is, but I think it's got a different level of consciousness.

930
01:10:16.205 --> 01:10:17.465
You can tell consciousness.

931
01:10:17.525 --> 01:10:26.149
When they're feeling good, happy or sad or frustrated or intrigued, the ears change, the eyes change, the shape of the face.

932
01:10:26.429 --> 01:10:29.490
You can't help but ascribe an inner world to that.

933
01:10:29.830 --> 01:10:36.073
And again, I always worry that the dogs like the fish are like, these humans think they're so damn special, but we actually are.

934
01:10:36.433 --> 01:10:39.036
well-developed, well beyond them, and we're just playing along.

935
01:10:39.336 --> 01:10:41.778
In fact, in New York City, who picks up the poop, right?

936
01:10:42.058 --> 01:10:48.644
We pick up the poop, so the dog walks along as like this king-like being, and we're behind them in these little plastic bags.

937
01:10:48.664 --> 01:10:49.826
So who's really in charge?

938
01:10:49.886 --> 01:10:59.414
But putting that to the side, I do think that the dogs and the cats have a level of conscious awareness, and I think you go down through the animal kingdom.

939
01:10:59.835 --> 01:11:01.717
If you were to ask me, does an insect exist,

940
01:11:02.297 --> 01:11:04.859
have consciousness, then I'm less clear.

941
01:11:05.059 --> 01:11:06.540
I suspect not.

942
01:11:06.920 --> 01:11:11.983
If you ask me whether a virus or a bacterium has consciousness, I don't think so.

943
01:11:12.223 --> 01:11:22.009
I don't think there's adequate information processing capacity in those structures to have the kind of rich inner world that we would normally ascribe to a conscious being.

944
01:11:22.490 --> 01:11:23.751
But that's all that I think it is.

945
01:11:24.231 --> 01:11:25.392
I don't think that there's some

946
01:11:26.590 --> 01:11:30.914
uber universal consciousness that's out there that we go back to when we die.

947
01:11:31.534 --> 01:11:32.655
Not that I wouldn't like it.

948
01:11:32.975 --> 01:11:34.437
I just don't think it's true.

949
01:11:34.857 --> 01:11:38.540
Moreover, I can understand why humans would introduce this idea.

950
01:11:38.840 --> 01:11:41.423
Again, it's Ernest Becker in the denial of death.

951
01:11:41.503 --> 01:11:47.748
How wonderful to say, yeah, our bodies die, sure, but our consciousness, it doesn't die.

952
01:11:48.388 --> 01:11:52.952
Our consciousness, it floats off and it rejoins the universal.

953
01:11:52.972 --> 01:11:53.933
Wow.

954
01:11:55.056 --> 01:11:56.357
that makes you feel good.

955
01:11:56.717 --> 01:12:01.019
And we tell these stories that make us feel good and there's nothing wrong with that.

956
01:12:01.440 --> 01:12:10.925
However, I do think it's important that we see them from what they are, which are human authored stories to compat our own recognition that we are mortal beings.

957
01:12:12.255 --> 01:12:16.377
Moving on to the next one is the universe there on the little card.

958
01:12:16.477 --> 01:12:20.340
We talked about this a little bit, and you've given your answer already, but do you think the universe is infinite?

959
01:12:21.060 --> 01:12:25.162
I don't know, but I'm going to put it sort of around here.

960
01:12:25.623 --> 01:12:31.926
You know, in fact, lately, I should tell you, the work that I've been doing has imagined that the universe is not infinite.

961
01:12:32.247 --> 01:12:41.132
So I've been doing a lot of scientific exploration with mathematics with a handful of colleagues and the kind of weird things that can happen if it's not infinite.

962
01:12:41.832 --> 01:12:43.193
And it's very interesting.

963
01:12:43.233 --> 01:12:53.096
There's a lot of mileage that you can extract from a universe that you go off in that way and you wind up coming back to your starting point, much like you would on the surface of the earth.

964
01:12:53.336 --> 01:12:54.537
It's a finite extent.

965
01:12:55.137 --> 01:13:02.620
But if you ask me, in my heart of hearts, if I was forced to make a choice, I would say infinite with a medium level of confidence.

966
01:13:02.640 --> 01:13:08.385
What about, do you think life could exist outside of Earth?

967
01:13:08.445 --> 01:13:09.546
And I'll say intelligent life.

968
01:13:09.626 --> 01:13:10.247
Intelligent life.

969
01:13:10.407 --> 01:13:12.509
Do you think intelligent life exists outside of Earth?

970
01:13:12.809 --> 01:13:18.754
Yeah, so for intelligent aliens, I'm going to definitely go a little bit more over here.

971
01:13:19.034 --> 01:13:21.777
You know, I put it as, it's possible.

972
01:13:22.417 --> 01:13:25.019
Obviously, it happened once, therefore it could happen again.

973
01:13:25.699 --> 01:13:30.563
Obviously, intelligence is not somehow contradictory to the way the universe evolves.

974
01:13:30.643 --> 01:13:35.386
It can support conscious and intelligent beings, but I think it may be special.

975
01:13:35.606 --> 01:13:40.249
Is there not a bit of a contradiction here, though, with these two things, that you think the universe is infinite?

976
01:13:40.429 --> 01:13:42.051
Oh, when I say this, I should say...

977
01:13:43.015 --> 01:13:44.316
Within the observable universe.

978
01:13:44.636 --> 01:13:45.036
Oh, okay.

979
01:13:45.096 --> 01:13:45.316
Yeah.

980
01:13:45.556 --> 01:13:59.624
So in the entire expanse of the universe, as opposed to the observable part, which again is a part that even in principle we could have connection with, then yeah, I would absolutely put in exactly the same place because there'd be copies of us out there.

981
01:13:59.964 --> 01:14:04.507
But if we talk instead about, are we going to get a signal?

982
01:14:05.727 --> 01:14:07.008
Are we going to be visited?

983
01:14:07.728 --> 01:14:10.310
Then I put that at much lower confidence.

984
01:14:10.920 --> 01:14:17.489
And in fact, I would say one thing about the visitation, because you mentioned the interest that people have on aliens.

985
01:14:18.110 --> 01:14:23.958
I find it really odd that people are taken with these photographs.

986
01:14:24.783 --> 01:14:29.465
that are meant to sort of just catch the alien ship as it was racing.

987
01:14:29.966 --> 01:14:47.415
If an alien could travel across the galaxy, say, to reach us, they are so technologically advanced that the idea that our archaic airplanes and their cameras could capture a photograph of them is ludicrous.

988
01:14:47.835 --> 01:14:49.476
They will be able to evade us totally.

989
01:14:50.076 --> 01:14:56.479
And so simply that the idea that we just barely caught them on our cameras is absolutely ridiculous.

990
01:14:57.059 --> 01:15:04.023
Moreover, if they could travel to us, again, I'm talking about traveling across light years, right?

991
01:15:04.043 --> 01:15:08.585
I mean, our galaxy, 100,000 light years end to end, right?

992
01:15:08.625 --> 01:15:16.089
To be able to traverse that requires a level of technological sophistication that is so beyond anything that we can do.

993
01:15:16.689 --> 01:15:18.710
To imagine that being that advanced...

994
01:15:19.527 --> 01:15:20.749
would be interested in us?

995
01:15:22.031 --> 01:15:24.835
So interested that they would, like, kidnap us?

996
01:15:25.756 --> 01:15:29.642
That'd be like saying, I was walking to the park yesterday

997
01:15:30.870 --> 01:15:33.911
Don't tell anyone, but I kidnapped an ant.

998
01:15:34.611 --> 01:15:39.312
There's an ant walking along and nobody was looking and I sort of kidnapped it.

999
01:15:40.092 --> 01:15:42.453
We don't do that because it's not interesting.

1000
01:15:42.933 --> 01:15:52.916
Similarly, we would not be of interest to the aliens because they're so incredibly advanced that this idea that they're abducting us is just ludicrous.

1001
01:15:54.940 --> 01:15:55.780
Is it going to be possible?

1002
01:15:55.800 --> 01:15:59.782
You know, we were talking earlier on about the possibilities that artificial intelligence is going to unlock.

1003
01:16:00.142 --> 01:16:08.385
Is it possible within the laws of physics for us at some point when we get sufficiently intelligent to travel across the universe?

1004
01:16:08.405 --> 01:16:10.066
That's a great question.

1005
01:16:10.086 --> 01:16:10.886
It's a tough one.

1006
01:16:11.386 --> 01:16:13.247
So if...

1007
01:16:14.265 --> 01:16:18.147
The technological advancement was simply making our ships faster?

1008
01:16:18.627 --> 01:16:18.807
No.

1009
01:16:19.168 --> 01:16:32.374
Because even if you travel near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed limit, you know, to go to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take you four years, even at the speed of light, to get there, right?

1010
01:16:32.655 --> 01:16:40.759
And then if you actually want to go not just to the nearby star, but to actually across the galaxy, again, you're talking 100,000 years to do that.

1011
01:16:41.319 --> 01:16:42.180
So that...

1012
01:16:43.152 --> 01:16:46.173
brute, straightforward approach will not succeed.

1013
01:16:46.814 --> 01:16:51.996
However, there are exotic ideas of things called wormholes you've probably encountered.

1014
01:16:52.016 --> 01:16:55.177
These are these ideas of a wormhole is like a tunnel.

1015
01:16:55.738 --> 01:16:56.418
What is a tunnel?

1016
01:16:57.078 --> 01:17:03.001
On Earth, a tunnel is a shortcut that gets you from here to here without having to go over the mountain, right?

1017
01:17:03.421 --> 01:17:04.482
Tunnel it right through.

1018
01:17:05.142 --> 01:17:11.465
There's an analogous idea that people floated in the universe where to get from here to there, there may be a shortcut

1019
01:17:12.105 --> 01:17:17.129
a kind of tunnel that connects them and is a quicker way of getting from point A to point B.

1020
01:17:17.809 --> 01:17:19.891
We don't know if these tunnels through space exist.

1021
01:17:20.431 --> 01:17:23.773
We don't know if they existed, whether we could actually get through them.

1022
01:17:24.354 --> 01:17:26.715
And so it's a highly speculative idea.

1023
01:17:27.136 --> 01:17:38.464
But if they do exist, and if we one day can create them and manipulate and control them, then at least in principle, we could take two distant locations like this corner and this corner.

1024
01:17:38.884 --> 01:17:48.470
But imagine that we could manipulate this surface, fold it together to bring the two corners next to each other and build a little tunnel between them.

1025
01:17:48.910 --> 01:17:52.312
Then we can go from one end to the other by going through that shortcut.

1026
01:17:52.892 --> 01:17:53.253
That's...

1027
01:17:54.073 --> 01:17:55.894
A very far out idea.

1028
01:17:55.914 --> 01:17:56.674
But there's no evidence.

1029
01:17:56.694 --> 01:17:57.934
There's no evidence at all.

1030
01:17:57.994 --> 01:18:07.017
Now, let me just say again, much as we discussed earlier, this idea is not just some wild late night musing of a physicist.

1031
01:18:07.717 --> 01:18:12.779
It comes out of the math of Einstein's general relativity, that these wormholes could exist.

1032
01:18:12.819 --> 01:18:22.562
In fact, Einstein himself, in 1935, wrote a paper with a colleague, Nathan Rosen, where they introduced this idea that we now call wormholes.

1033
01:18:22.742 --> 01:18:27.123
We're no further along in knowing whether wormholes are real than Einstein was back then.

1034
01:18:27.463 --> 01:18:28.244
We've analyzed them.

1035
01:18:28.264 --> 01:18:29.524
We've developed the mathematics.

1036
01:18:30.004 --> 01:18:35.706
You know, science fiction has taken this idea, you know, an interstellar.

1037
01:18:35.946 --> 01:18:38.566
I believe Matthew McConaughey goes through a wormhole.

1038
01:18:38.906 --> 01:18:42.007
Jodie Foster went through one in contact.

1039
01:18:42.367 --> 01:18:47.909
You know, they're a ubiquitous feature of science fiction trying to allow for the kinds of

1040
01:18:48.550 --> 01:18:51.440
travel across the galaxy that otherwise would be impossible.

1041
01:18:51.721 --> 01:18:54.490
But whether this is actually real, nobody knows.

1042
01:18:55.648 --> 01:18:56.728
What about time travel?

1043
01:18:56.889 --> 01:18:57.209
Yeah.

1044
01:18:58.029 --> 01:19:01.450
Can we travel backwards in time within the laws of physics?

1045
01:19:01.671 --> 01:19:03.851
Yeah, that is the way of phrasing it.

1046
01:19:04.532 --> 01:19:08.093
Because if you ask me the reverse question, can we travel to the future?

1047
01:19:08.914 --> 01:19:13.296
I would say, yeah, that kind of time travel we're highly confident of.

1048
01:19:13.316 --> 01:19:14.876
So I don't have a little thing for that.

1049
01:19:14.896 --> 01:19:18.138
But let's call, you know, this is time travel to the future, right?

1050
01:19:18.178 --> 01:19:20.619
I put it very, very high confidence for that.

1051
01:19:20.939 --> 01:19:22.239
You think we can travel to the future?

1052
01:19:22.379 --> 01:19:23.360
Yes, in principle.

1053
01:19:24.040 --> 01:19:25.801
Executing it, a different story.

1054
01:19:26.282 --> 01:19:41.994
But one of the things that emerges from Einstein's special and general relativity is that the way time elapses for you and for me is variable, depending upon how fast we move and the strength of the gravity that we experience.

1055
01:19:42.054 --> 01:19:47.658
So, for instance, if I want to see what your life would be like 60 years from now,

1056
01:19:48.780 --> 01:19:51.761
Einstein laid out a blueprint for how I could do that.

1057
01:19:51.781 --> 01:19:52.642
I build a spaceship.

1058
01:19:53.322 --> 01:19:55.703
I travel out into space near the speed of light.

1059
01:19:56.524 --> 01:19:59.165
I go for a certain period of time, maybe about six months.

1060
01:19:59.605 --> 01:20:00.285
I turn around.

1061
01:20:00.405 --> 01:20:01.786
I come back six more months.

1062
01:20:02.046 --> 01:20:02.486
I come back.

1063
01:20:02.546 --> 01:20:04.467
I'm one year older, six months, six months.

1064
01:20:05.027 --> 01:20:12.531
But you will be 60 years older if I traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light because my clock...

1065
01:20:13.131 --> 01:20:15.613
would be ticking off slow compared to your clock.

1066
01:20:16.053 --> 01:20:21.358
Your clock went through 60 years, while my clock went through one year.

1067
01:20:22.038 --> 01:20:26.782
There is no physicist who knows what they are talking about who disputes this.

1068
01:20:27.503 --> 01:20:35.449
Now, it's not controversial, but if you then say to me, well, do it, I'd say, I don't know how to build a spaceship that goes that fast, at least not yet.

1069
01:20:35.770 --> 01:20:36.991
You would only have aged one year.

1070
01:20:37.051 --> 01:20:37.311
Correct.

1071
01:20:37.331 --> 01:20:38.292
But I would have aged 60 years.

1072
01:20:38.332 --> 01:20:38.752
Correct.

1073
01:20:39.152 --> 01:20:40.033
Could you then go back?

1074
01:20:40.554 --> 01:20:41.574
Ah, I don't know.

1075
01:20:41.594 --> 01:20:42.175
Okay.

1076
01:20:42.640 --> 01:20:48.042
And if you were to ask me to give my confidence on going back, I would say it's pretty low.

1077
01:20:48.763 --> 01:20:52.944
People have written proposals for how you could go back.

1078
01:20:53.525 --> 01:20:55.486
They do involve things like wormholes.

1079
01:20:55.846 --> 01:20:57.566
That is one possibility.

1080
01:20:57.767 --> 01:20:58.487
Because if you have a...

1081
01:20:59.027 --> 01:21:06.949
have a tunnel from one point in space to another, if you then move the openings at different speeds, their clocks will tick off at different rates.

1082
01:21:07.410 --> 01:21:09.510
This clock may be before this clock.

1083
01:21:09.850 --> 01:21:12.251
So if I travel this way, I'm going one way in time.

1084
01:21:12.311 --> 01:21:14.692
If I'm traveling that way, I'm going the reverse way in time.

1085
01:21:15.092 --> 01:21:17.532
But again, like we said before, we don't know if wormholes are real.

1086
01:21:18.293 --> 01:21:21.194
If they are real, you might in principle be able to travel back.

1087
01:21:21.234 --> 01:21:25.915
But if you ask me, do I think that you can blow low confidence that you can travel back?

1088
01:21:26.213 --> 01:21:27.934
You've used the word Einstein a few times.

1089
01:21:28.074 --> 01:21:28.174
Yeah.

1090
01:21:28.194 --> 01:21:37.400
And I think this generation, you know, we exist with AI now and calculators and all this incredible knowledge that has come from sort of standing on the shoulders of so many of these giants.

1091
01:21:38.120 --> 01:21:41.402
Who do you think is the smartest person to have ever lived in your estimation?

1092
01:21:41.743 --> 01:21:42.543
It's a tough one.

1093
01:21:42.683 --> 01:21:48.567
People often make it an easier question by saying, who's smarter, Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein?

1094
01:21:49.615 --> 01:21:53.858
And first, my answer is, when you're talking about that level, it doesn't matter who's smarter.

1095
01:21:53.898 --> 01:22:04.465
But if you really press me, I think I'd say Isaac Newton, because Newton kind of went from nothing to develop the laws of physics.

1096
01:22:04.825 --> 01:22:08.448
There were people before, but there wasn't really a mindset that...

1097
01:22:09.108 --> 01:22:13.974
that the universe should be articulable in a few mathematical equations.

1098
01:22:14.515 --> 01:22:27.211
And yet here comes along Isaac Newton, and he writes down the equation that we teach high school kids, F equals MA, force equals mass times acceleration, which governs just about everything in the world around us, non-quantum mechanically.

1099
01:22:27.912 --> 01:22:35.575
He writes down the law of gravity, F equals G, M1, M2 over R squared, articulating how the gravitational force works.

1100
01:22:35.615 --> 01:22:44.658
And he was sort of doing this on, he invents calculus in order to be able to use that as a tool for articulating the laws of physics.

1101
01:22:44.798 --> 01:22:54.261
I mean, he kind of went from no real architecture of physics to a solid mathematical formulation.

1102
01:22:57.742 --> 01:22:58.442
of physics.

1103
01:22:59.063 --> 01:23:04.225
I think going from nothing to the first step, that's hard to imagine.

1104
01:23:04.526 --> 01:23:08.127
Was Newton to some degree like neurodivergent?

1105
01:23:08.167 --> 01:23:09.168
How could he be so genius?

1106
01:23:09.714 --> 01:23:12.016
I wish I knew the answer to a question like that.

1107
01:23:12.317 --> 01:23:20.605
Like, you know, what is it inside their heads that allows them to do the things that just are superhuman or feel superhuman to us?

1108
01:23:20.765 --> 01:23:21.906
I have no idea.

1109
01:23:22.467 --> 01:23:25.089
Now, Newton was a kind of weird fella, right?

1110
01:23:25.189 --> 01:23:28.212
He was deeply religious, as makes sense for the time.

1111
01:23:28.232 --> 01:23:28.332
Yeah.

1112
01:23:29.053 --> 01:23:34.938
He was ultimately, you know, in the government tracking down counterfeiters and hanging them.

1113
01:23:35.539 --> 01:23:42.685
I mean, there seems to be a certain curmudgeonly side of him that was also part of his genius.

1114
01:23:43.846 --> 01:23:50.432
He once reportedly took a knitting needle and stuck it in his eye between the

1115
01:23:51.153 --> 01:23:51.754
Paul Krugman

1116
01:24:05.507 --> 01:24:10.791
You know, and as you said, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, and there was a certain humility that came through him.

1117
01:24:10.811 --> 01:24:27.445
There's a beautiful quote where he describes himself as a boy playing on the seashore, having found a smoother shell and prettier pebble than most, while the great ocean of truth, he said, lay before me all undiscovered.

1118
01:24:28.045 --> 01:24:36.566
He knew that we were just on the shore, and we'd taken our first baby step into the cosmic ocean, and there was much more to be discovered.

1119
01:24:37.775 --> 01:24:43.860
Is it conceivable that the next Newton or Einstein is going to be an artificial intelligence?

1120
01:24:43.880 --> 01:24:44.640
Could it be Claude?

1121
01:24:44.980 --> 01:24:46.441
Yes, it could absolutely be.

1122
01:24:46.481 --> 01:24:53.186
Look, I like to think of scientific creativity or creativity in general in sort of three main buckets.

1123
01:24:53.687 --> 01:24:55.988
It's a coarse organization, but I think it's helpful.

1124
01:24:56.809 --> 01:25:05.375
One bucket of creativity is the ability to see the landscape of possibilities more fully than science.

1125
01:25:06.197 --> 01:25:07.530
"'a mortal human being.'

1126
01:25:08.324 --> 01:25:12.685
And there's a lot that emerges from the ability to do that.

1127
01:25:13.225 --> 01:25:22.007
For instance, you know, if you're a chess player, you can see the spectrum of allowed moves that are available to you more than the ordinary chess player.

1128
01:25:22.067 --> 01:25:30.929
You know, if you're a scientist, you can sort of see the landscape of ideas and equations that you might bring to bear on a puzzle more than somebody else.

1129
01:25:30.969 --> 01:25:33.170
And that is what allows you to achieve greatness.

1130
01:25:33.970 --> 01:25:37.691
Artificial systems, they have the entire landscape.

1131
01:25:38.291 --> 01:25:38.531
Right.

1132
01:25:38.751 --> 01:25:40.693
They've read the entire Internet.

1133
01:25:40.733 --> 01:25:42.094
They've read every textbook.

1134
01:25:42.434 --> 01:25:45.276
They know everything that we have ever developed.

1135
01:25:45.356 --> 01:25:50.079
So in that kind of creativity, obviously, they're going to excel.

1136
01:25:50.119 --> 01:25:53.501
And we've seen that a human can't beat an A.I.

1137
01:25:53.601 --> 01:25:54.742
any longer in chess.

1138
01:25:55.222 --> 01:25:56.383
A human can't beat an A.I.

1139
01:25:56.403 --> 01:25:57.283
system in Go.

1140
01:25:57.824 --> 01:25:58.044
Right.

1141
01:25:58.144 --> 01:26:01.546
I mean, this famous example with AlphaGo.

1142
01:26:01.566 --> 01:26:01.746
Right.

1143
01:26:02.106 --> 01:26:02.327
Right.

1144
01:26:03.047 --> 01:26:12.038
Move 37 has become this sort of iconic move where, you know, Lee Sedol, the world champion, is playing and you can see it on his face.

1145
01:26:12.078 --> 01:26:17.984
The AI makes a move and he smiles momentarily and he's like, oh, it messed up.

1146
01:26:18.966 --> 01:26:20.527
And then his face changes.

1147
01:26:21.483 --> 01:26:24.064
Because he slowly realizes that wasn't a mistake.

1148
01:26:24.144 --> 01:26:28.324
Even the commentators, if you listen, they're like, oh, my God, the AI has made a mistake.

1149
01:26:28.445 --> 01:26:30.345
What a blunder the AI has made.

1150
01:26:30.725 --> 01:26:36.206
And then within 20, 30 seconds, you're like, oh, oh, that was genius.

1151
01:26:36.766 --> 01:26:37.146
Why?

1152
01:26:37.526 --> 01:26:40.647
The AI could see the spectrum of possibilities more than a human being.

1153
01:26:40.987 --> 01:26:44.128
So at that level of creativity, AI will win.

1154
01:26:44.808 --> 01:26:55.356
Second bin of creativity, second bucket is putting together divergent ideas in a way that no one has thought of before and in that way making progress.

1155
01:26:55.857 --> 01:26:58.258
You know, that's kind of what Einstein did in general relativity.

1156
01:26:58.559 --> 01:27:03.823
Put together Ramanian geometry and Newtonian gravity yielded the general theory of relativity.

1157
01:27:04.243 --> 01:27:09.027
But again, AIs, since they know everything that we've ever developed...

1158
01:27:09.853 --> 01:27:13.959
can combine things in a way that we would never have thought of.

1159
01:27:14.721 --> 01:27:22.493
The final domain is the one where somebody comes up with something that nobody has ever imagined, ever thought of.

1160
01:27:22.533 --> 01:27:23.895
It's not just putting things together.

1161
01:27:23.955 --> 01:27:25.017
It is radically new.

1162
01:27:26.657 --> 01:27:27.498
That's a tough one.

1163
01:27:27.998 --> 01:27:30.420
We're still able to win in that category.

1164
01:27:30.440 --> 01:27:36.004
There are examples where people just come up with things that, where did it come from?

1165
01:27:36.064 --> 01:27:37.185
How do they think of that?

1166
01:27:37.805 --> 01:27:44.130
If you develop an artificial system and allow it to have a life, allow it to grow up,

1167
01:27:44.933 --> 01:27:52.963
Put it in an environment where it actually has experiences of the sort that an Isaac Newton had.

1168
01:27:53.083 --> 01:28:01.253
Could it be that that system then develops to a place where it can do the things that we like to think are exclusively human?

1169
01:28:01.794 --> 01:28:09.602
Coming up with something that is not previously represented in the database on which the AI system has trained.

1170
01:28:09.962 --> 01:28:18.810
And so even this third, more difficult or more pristine bucket of creativity, could an artificial system do that?

1171
01:28:18.870 --> 01:28:20.312
I don't think there's a barrier.

1172
01:28:21.710 --> 01:28:25.612
I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world.

1173
01:28:25.692 --> 01:28:31.135
And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection.

1174
01:28:31.155 --> 01:28:36.058
And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them.

1175
01:28:36.178 --> 01:28:42.422
And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO.

1176
01:28:42.502 --> 01:28:45.023
We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO.

1177
01:28:45.164 --> 01:28:47.025
We have put the question...

1178
01:28:47.845 --> 01:28:50.949
here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it.

1179
01:28:51.069 --> 01:28:55.634
So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life.

1180
01:28:55.954 --> 01:29:02.602
Whenever we get a minute, we play the Diary of a CEO conversation cards and it is incredible what happens.

1181
01:29:02.682 --> 01:29:06.166
These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you wanna connect your partner more.

1182
01:29:06.266 --> 01:29:09.669
These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together.

1183
01:29:09.889 --> 01:29:20.516
And I have to say they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human.

1184
01:29:20.757 --> 01:29:24.880
It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do.

1185
01:29:25.060 --> 01:29:29.043
Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards

1186
01:29:31.113 --> 01:29:33.374
this comes to one of our questions, which is the skull there.

1187
01:29:33.534 --> 01:29:33.714
Yes.

1188
01:29:33.854 --> 01:29:37.776
Which is, do you believe it will be possible to live forever?

1189
01:29:38.036 --> 01:29:42.258
And again, I think about this in the context of AI, where you said it will be able to understand that, take us to the limit.

1190
01:29:44.414 --> 01:29:48.535
It's hard to understand how that isn't a solvable problem.

1191
01:29:48.715 --> 01:29:57.118
In fact, a lot of the smartest people on Earth, including I think Elon Musk said it recently, that living another 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 years seems to be within the laws of physics.

1192
01:29:57.258 --> 01:30:01.079
Yes, I think that is absolutely within the realm of possibility.

1193
01:30:01.119 --> 01:30:04.620
But 500 years is so different from forever.

1194
01:30:05.460 --> 01:30:09.021
Like when I hear forever, I'm taking it kind of literally.

1195
01:30:09.041 --> 01:30:09.141
Yeah.

1196
01:30:10.577 --> 01:30:18.347
And so if forever doesn't mean 500 or 1,000, if it means never ceases, then I have...

1197
01:30:19.456 --> 01:30:24.898
No confidence that that kind of existence will be possible.

1198
01:30:25.058 --> 01:30:26.358
What about 500 years?

1199
01:30:26.398 --> 01:30:31.100
500 years, yeah, I would say, again, not in our lifetime, which is sad.

1200
01:30:31.420 --> 01:30:38.002
I would put that at reasonably high confidence that, you know, hundreds of years will be within our ability.

1201
01:30:38.242 --> 01:30:40.343
If we are on this sort of exponential of intelligence...

1202
01:30:41.103 --> 01:30:48.165
Then it, you know, and if 2021, we couldn't solve that math equation we're talking about, but in 2026, we can.

1203
01:30:48.805 --> 01:30:53.686
And you've got trillions of dollars now pumping into these artificial intelligence systems to make them smarter and more powerful.

1204
01:30:54.446 --> 01:31:05.009
It is conceivable that if we're on an exponential curve here, it could be within our lifetimes that there is a discovery made about telomeres and whatever else it might be that the guests on my show have talked about.

1205
01:31:05.029 --> 01:31:06.369
That means we can theoretically.

1206
01:31:06.389 --> 01:31:09.490
But let me tell you why I'm skeptical of that.

1207
01:31:09.590 --> 01:31:10.250
Number one...

1208
01:31:11.347 --> 01:31:14.828
Right now, we have a certain kind of artificial intelligence.

1209
01:31:14.888 --> 01:31:16.429
It's basically large language models.

1210
01:31:17.449 --> 01:31:26.652
And that's a certain paradigm where the system is trained on an enormous number of tokens, an enormous number of words, basically the entire Internet.

1211
01:31:27.252 --> 01:31:40.957
And based upon the statistics and the statistics of the statistics of the statistics of how the words are arranged, the system is able to provide answers to questions that are coherent and insightful and so forth.

1212
01:31:41.873 --> 01:31:51.123
There isn't necessarily an unlimited capacity of that kind of artificial intelligence to continue to improve, right?

1213
01:31:51.504 --> 01:32:00.133
And so it's not obvious to me that it's just a matter of pumping billions and billions of dollars, building ever larger data centers, putting them in space, whatever you're going to do.

1214
01:32:00.153 --> 01:32:03.257
And the more money you put in and the more data you have and the more...

1215
01:32:03.697 --> 01:32:06.078
computer power you have, the better it's going to be.

1216
01:32:06.118 --> 01:32:08.859
That's not obvious to me that that will continue up that exponential curve.

1217
01:32:09.199 --> 01:32:12.720
And that's why I'm hesitant to say in our lifetime.

1218
01:32:13.001 --> 01:32:23.004
It may take a number of lifetimes to develop the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to advance the kinds of scientific problems that you're talking about.

1219
01:32:23.244 --> 01:32:25.705
But look, I'd be thrilled if it's our lifetime.

1220
01:32:25.765 --> 01:32:29.607
I'd be thrilled if I'm wrong and these systems are up to the task.

1221
01:32:30.007 --> 01:32:35.669
One of the terms that has emerged in the world of AI recently is this term recursive self-improvement.

1222
01:32:35.689 --> 01:32:35.889
Yeah.

1223
01:32:36.390 --> 01:32:44.593
Recursive self-improvement is the concept where an AI becomes intelligent enough to write its own software, design its own hardware, or train its own successes without human intervention.

1224
01:32:44.873 --> 01:32:49.955
And once this loop begins, the upgraded AI uses its superior intelligence to build an even smarter version of itself,

1225
01:32:50.275 --> 01:32:52.576
which then builds an even smarter version and so on.

1226
01:32:52.696 --> 01:33:05.780
Because computer systems operate in seconds rather than human evolutionary timescales, this feedback loop could trigger an exponential, quote, intelligence explosion, rapidly taking AI from human-level capability to superintelligence within days or hours.

1227
01:33:05.800 --> 01:33:06.180
Yeah.

1228
01:33:06.360 --> 01:33:12.903
And the big AI leaders, Dario at Anthropic, has recently published an article warning that we're edging closer to that.

1229
01:33:13.424 --> 01:33:14.484
Sam Altman has said the same.

1230
01:33:14.564 --> 01:33:15.685
Demis has said the same.

1231
01:33:16.105 --> 01:33:17.826
Elon has talked about this as well recently.

1232
01:33:18.126 --> 01:33:25.070
And their timelines for this explosion in intelligence, because of the AIs being able to train themselves, ranges from two years to five years.

1233
01:33:25.490 --> 01:33:27.931
placing them between 2026 and 2029.

1234
01:33:28.431 --> 01:33:38.793
And Dario, who's the CEO of the biggest model called Anthropic Claude, has stated that AI systems outperforming most humans across all human tasks, including software engineering, could arrive within two to three years.

1235
01:33:38.813 --> 01:33:46.075
And Anthropic has been warning that full recursive self-improvement could arrive by 2027 to 2028.

1236
01:33:46.875 --> 01:33:53.397
Demis at Google is citing 2029 as a real possibility, and Sam Altman says this decade.

1237
01:33:54.117 --> 01:34:00.860
I mean, Brian Johnson tweeted yesterday, pace yourself as if you'll live to 500, because you may.

1238
01:34:01.400 --> 01:34:01.960
Because you may.

1239
01:34:02.140 --> 01:34:12.145
Look, I'm all for the possibility that these systems will take off in a way that hopefully we are... Hopefully.

1240
01:34:12.265 --> 01:34:19.548
Hopefully working in a way that allows the kinds of future that you're envisioning, that we are here and... Would it be a good thing?

1241
01:34:19.848 --> 01:34:20.088
Well...

1242
01:34:20.448 --> 01:34:22.730
You know, it would be seductive.

1243
01:34:23.210 --> 01:34:31.435
I mean, if someone was to present you with the opportunity to live to 500 years, I think many people would opt in for that.

1244
01:34:31.515 --> 01:34:35.318
It's very hard to say, you know, 100 years is enough.

1245
01:34:35.578 --> 01:34:41.122
And I just, you know, there are people who do that, who will look at the world and say, it's enough.

1246
01:34:41.622 --> 01:34:42.783
You know, I'm done.

1247
01:34:43.243 --> 01:34:46.585
But back to the prognostications that are being made.

1248
01:34:47.025 --> 01:34:53.649
Look, it's absolutely the case that the AIs will self-improve through the very process that got us here.

1249
01:34:54.290 --> 01:34:58.592
But on a timescale that's tiny compared to the timescale that got us here.

1250
01:34:59.453 --> 01:35:04.656
I'm skeptical that by 2029, this will really be the case.

1251
01:35:06.509 --> 01:35:07.650
Let's see, right?

1252
01:35:07.830 --> 01:35:10.291
I mean, this is a very short term, right?

1253
01:35:10.331 --> 01:35:13.492
So we will know in a few years whether this is the case.

1254
01:35:14.033 --> 01:35:21.576
How many years has it taken living organisms to get from a single cell microbe or whatever to understanding string theory?

1255
01:35:21.596 --> 01:35:21.876
Yeah.

1256
01:35:21.936 --> 01:35:26.759
So, you know, the first life on our planet formed roughly within the first billion years.

1257
01:35:27.099 --> 01:35:29.680
You know, people debate exactly where that is.

1258
01:35:30.140 --> 01:35:33.262
And, you know, we're now roughly, call it, you know, five billion years in.

1259
01:35:33.482 --> 01:35:35.603
So call it roughly four billion years.

1260
01:35:35.943 --> 01:35:40.125
And a computer going from zero to being smarter than every human on Earth has taken decades.

1261
01:35:40.305 --> 01:35:44.146
Yeah, well, it depends where you start the gun, right?

1262
01:35:44.246 --> 01:35:56.551
Because, again, if you think about these systems as they needed us, without the internet and all the data, what would they have trained on, at least this version of artificial intelligence?

1263
01:35:57.011 --> 01:36:00.873
If it's the computer, the artificial system that's self-tinkering,

1264
01:36:01.633 --> 01:36:05.815
then yeah, there's this feedback that will yield an exponential growth.

1265
01:36:05.895 --> 01:36:12.597
And if there's no barrier, and there may be, right, there may be a barrier to the kind of artificial intelligence systems that we have.

1266
01:36:13.038 --> 01:36:18.500
We may allow it to iterate and it iterates and it sure it improves, but doesn't improve like this.

1267
01:36:19.040 --> 01:36:20.461
It improves like this.

1268
01:36:21.121 --> 01:36:22.261
It could asymptote.

1269
01:36:22.681 --> 01:36:26.603
It could approach a maximal intelligence system.

1270
01:36:26.663 --> 01:36:29.306
compatible with this version of the artificial system.

1271
01:36:29.607 --> 01:36:31.309
And so it won't skyrocket.

1272
01:36:31.709 --> 01:36:32.370
It could do this.

1273
01:36:32.410 --> 01:36:33.632
And we don't know the answer.

1274
01:36:34.032 --> 01:36:35.454
Which curve is the right one?

1275
01:36:35.654 --> 01:36:36.936
Give me a rebuttal to that.

1276
01:36:38.077 --> 01:36:40.320
A rebuttal to it being the exponential curve?

1277
01:36:40.881 --> 01:36:41.662
Give me a rebuttal.

1278
01:36:41.702 --> 01:36:42.763
Oh, you're asking the system.

1279
01:36:43.043 --> 01:36:44.785
That was Brian saying one of that.

1280
01:36:44.805 --> 01:36:45.827
Give me a rebuttal to that.

1281
01:36:48.811 --> 01:36:53.554
The rebuttal to the idea of an asymptote is that AI isn't just improving one thing.

1282
01:36:53.874 --> 01:37:01.398
It's exploring an astronomically vast solution space of algorithms, data, and hardware configurations that humans can't even conceive of.

1283
01:37:01.818 --> 01:37:11.444
Furthermore, each marginal gain in intelligence could instantly be reinvested into solving the very bottlenecks that might cause a slowdown, effectively breaking through the wall rather than hitting it.

1284
01:37:12.144 --> 01:37:12.464
Maybe.

1285
01:37:13.825 --> 01:37:17.007
But if all of these incremental improvements...

1286
01:37:17.973 --> 01:37:28.686
ultimately are limited by the kind of artificial intelligence that we are working within, then none of that will necessarily be able to break through.

1287
01:37:28.946 --> 01:37:31.709
And I think this is something that we're just going to have to see over time.

1288
01:37:33.211 --> 01:37:33.612
Fight back.

1289
01:37:34.650 --> 01:37:39.133
That points to a crucial distinction about whether the current paradigm has a hard limit.

1290
01:37:39.533 --> 01:37:48.559
While it's possible there's an invisible ceiling, it's also true that we haven't yet mapped out where that boundary lies, meaning any predictions about a plateau remain speculative for now.

1291
01:37:49.259 --> 01:37:55.803
Yes, and all I'm saying is there is a possible limiting ceiling exactly as you just admitted.

1292
01:37:56.103 --> 01:37:56.904
Rebuttal that as well.

1293
01:37:57.788 --> 01:38:05.729
The counter to that is the idea that an intelligent system could innovate beyond the current framework by recursively redesigning its own architecture.

1294
01:38:06.069 --> 01:38:14.411
By altering its fundamental rules, it might not just reach the ceiling, but raise it altogether or bypass it into an entirely new domain of capability.

1295
01:38:15.311 --> 01:38:20.352
But you do agree that the system that we're starting with may be self-limiting.

1296
01:38:20.632 --> 01:38:27.273
I'm simply positing that as a logical possibility and therefore will have that natural inbuilt ceiling.

1297
01:38:29.176 --> 01:38:30.218
Yeah, absolutely.

1298
01:38:31.199 --> 01:38:31.980
Okay, stop.

1299
01:38:32.040 --> 01:38:32.461
I'm done.

1300
01:38:32.701 --> 01:38:36.446
Isn't that crazy?

1301
01:38:36.526 --> 01:38:37.287
Yeah.

1302
01:38:37.568 --> 01:38:38.369
It's totally insane.

1303
01:38:41.093 --> 01:38:44.055
Because even five years ago, we never would have thought that was possible.

1304
01:38:44.075 --> 01:38:44.275
Yeah.

1305
01:38:44.335 --> 01:38:45.797
Would have been this, I doubt it.

1306
01:38:45.997 --> 01:38:46.937
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1307
01:38:47.098 --> 01:38:47.738
Totally crazy.

1308
01:38:48.399 --> 01:38:54.963
And again, you know, just the flip side, even though I'm saying that there may be a ceiling, I also would say there may not be a ceiling.

1309
01:38:55.404 --> 01:39:02.089
And again, it's both exciting and frightening at the same time, because it's not obvious that we would be prepared for that, you know.

1310
01:39:02.929 --> 01:39:03.790
Why frightening?

1311
01:39:03.810 --> 01:39:04.511
What would that mean?

1312
01:39:05.091 --> 01:39:09.795
Well, you know, they're the usual doomsday scenarios that many people have articulated.

1313
01:39:09.815 --> 01:39:10.335
Yeah.

1314
01:39:10.702 --> 01:39:20.504
You know, from these systems just having a single-minded focus on some particular outcome that may not ultimately involve us.

1315
01:39:21.224 --> 01:39:30.785
Or that these systems may have a self-preservation instinct that prevents us from stopping them if they head in a direction that we're not happy with.

1316
01:39:31.085 --> 01:39:33.306
I mean, Jan LeCun, who's a, you know, he's a...

1317
01:39:33.526 --> 01:39:34.706
He's one of the godfathers of AI.

1318
01:39:34.746 --> 01:39:35.326
Yeah, yeah.

1319
01:39:35.346 --> 01:39:40.267
And his view is much more of the sort, just pull the plug.

1320
01:39:41.435 --> 01:39:44.178
If something's going in the wrong direction, just pull the plug.

1321
01:39:44.198 --> 01:39:45.720
I mean, just stop the AI system.

1322
01:39:46.261 --> 01:39:55.691
And it's not obvious to me and I guess to many of the other leaders that if these systems advance sufficiently far, that they won't be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

1323
01:39:56.072 --> 01:39:58.535
The other thing I would say, and again, this is not original.

1324
01:39:58.615 --> 01:39:59.976
Many people have worried about this.

1325
01:40:00.817 --> 01:40:08.885
You rattled off the names of the leaders of the current companies that are leading the charge in AI.

1326
01:40:09.385 --> 01:40:12.388
There only are a handful of companies and a handful of people.

1327
01:40:12.928 --> 01:40:17.993
Putting that kind of power in such a small number of hands has historically been

1328
01:40:18.233 --> 01:40:24.200
not with AI, but with other power structures, not always turned out well, you know.

1329
01:40:24.701 --> 01:40:33.191
And so, yes, I think there is a chance that there's an instability that the power of these kind of artificial systems may generate.

1330
01:40:34.223 --> 01:40:44.089
So Demis, and I use Demis because Demis is running the biggest AI company, said that since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines.

1331
01:40:44.749 --> 01:40:55.555
If the exponential continues, which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.

1332
01:40:56.035 --> 01:41:00.578
The combination of intelligence, agency, and unpredictability as a recipe for existential danger...

1333
01:41:00.878 --> 01:41:05.022
Not because AI is evil, but because it's complex in ways we don't fully understand yet.

1334
01:41:05.482 --> 01:41:11.148
If a system can improve faster than humans can evaluate those improvements, the normal safety feedback loop breaks down.

1335
01:41:11.548 --> 01:41:13.930
You cannot catch problems before they compound.

1336
01:41:14.251 --> 01:41:15.131
He's absolutely right.

1337
01:41:16.392 --> 01:41:18.454
You know, the problem with exponentials

1338
01:41:19.335 --> 01:41:25.138
is that they grow so quickly that by the time you see them, it's too late to do anything about it.

1339
01:41:25.158 --> 01:41:26.819
I mean, what happens with the pandemic?

1340
01:41:27.340 --> 01:41:29.221
With a pandemic, you know, it starts off slow.

1341
01:41:29.241 --> 01:41:29.901
Nobody cares.

1342
01:41:29.941 --> 01:41:30.742
Nobody's paying attention.

1343
01:41:30.762 --> 01:41:33.023
It's a story in the news, a story in the news.

1344
01:41:33.383 --> 01:41:42.928
By the time it becomes a real story, the pandemic is at the part of the exponential curve that makes it very difficult to address the problem itself.

1345
01:41:43.429 --> 01:41:47.011
And the same thing, you know, could easily happen here.

1346
01:41:47.031 --> 01:41:47.191
Right.

1347
01:41:47.591 --> 01:41:55.953
that the increase in intelligence, and I'm glad Demis phrased that way, it may not be that it's intrinsically evil to have this kind of powerful intelligence.

1348
01:41:56.093 --> 01:42:06.375
It just may act in ways that are so alien to us, so foreign to us, so unexpected to us, that we don't know how to deal with it.

1349
01:42:06.495 --> 01:42:10.056
And moreover, it may not necessarily be beneficial to our existence.

1350
01:42:10.556 --> 01:42:11.416
Now, as I said before,

1351
01:42:12.374 --> 01:42:23.683
I'm perhaps a minority when I say I can imagine that we work with the AI and co-develop into something that we can't even predict today.

1352
01:42:23.843 --> 01:42:26.165
That seems to me a real possibility.

1353
01:42:26.205 --> 01:42:27.346
And that's also the temptation.

1354
01:42:27.366 --> 01:42:27.486
Yeah.

1355
01:42:27.506 --> 01:42:32.210
You know, I have a friend, Michael Douglas, who's a brilliant physicist.

1356
01:42:32.930 --> 01:42:33.611
And he said to me,

1357
01:42:35.922 --> 01:42:47.846
We physicists, we should choose the final problems that we work on because within a few years, we'll be out of business because the AI systems will just be doing it all.

1358
01:42:48.547 --> 01:42:52.108
And that's both exciting and terrifying because as a physicist, you know,

1359
01:42:52.628 --> 01:42:59.091
You know, your lifeblood is looking out at the world and finding puzzles and trying to find the explanations for them.

1360
01:42:59.131 --> 01:43:07.716
And if you can just put it into an AI system and it generates the answer, yeah, there can be a certain existential angst about what your role is at that point.

1361
01:43:07.796 --> 01:43:14.779
But it's also exciting because maybe we will get answers to questions that we thought we would never get in our lifetime.

1362
01:43:15.059 --> 01:43:17.300
Did you say you're friends with Jan Lecun?

1363
01:43:17.320 --> 01:43:17.541
Yeah.

1364
01:43:17.661 --> 01:43:17.901
Yeah.

1365
01:43:18.710 --> 01:43:20.295
And did you say he thinks we should just pull the plug?

1366
01:43:20.697 --> 01:43:23.967
When you confront Jan and say, Dude...

1367
01:43:24.783 --> 01:43:27.385
aren't you worried about what's going to happen with this?

1368
01:43:27.405 --> 01:43:29.246
He's like, ah, don't worry.

1369
01:43:29.586 --> 01:43:31.828
Just pull the plug if there's a problem.

1370
01:43:32.088 --> 01:43:32.208
Oh.

1371
01:43:33.009 --> 01:43:33.349
Yeah.

1372
01:43:33.429 --> 01:43:46.538
His view is the difference between the AI systems that we have today and the AI systems that we need for tomorrow, if you really want this to continue, is they can't just be probabilities and statistics based on words.

1373
01:43:46.998 --> 01:43:52.041
The AI systems need to have some inner model of the world as we do, right?

1374
01:43:52.081 --> 01:43:53.963
I mean, if I take this cup here...

1375
01:43:54.563 --> 01:44:02.390
and I push it, I have an inner model of what it would take to move it without spilling, and I have an inner model of what it would take to spill it.

1376
01:44:02.410 --> 01:44:04.172
I want to actually do it because it would make a mess.

1377
01:44:05.033 --> 01:44:08.136
That's not just statistics and probabilities of words.

1378
01:44:08.676 --> 01:44:08.936
That's

1379
01:44:09.757 --> 01:44:12.818
a model of how reality functions.

1380
01:44:12.858 --> 01:44:15.700
That's what he and many others have been developing.

1381
01:44:16.340 --> 01:44:27.205
A world model, together with the probabilities of large language model or some weird hybrid or something else we haven't thought of, that may be the next phase of artificial intelligence.

1382
01:44:28.045 --> 01:44:29.646
But, of course, Demis and others might say,

1383
01:44:31.043 --> 01:44:36.445
The LLMs, through self-improvement, maybe they would develop that world.

1384
01:44:36.806 --> 01:44:43.168
Maybe they would, on their own, get to the place that you would think that we humans would need to inject something extra.

1385
01:44:43.408 --> 01:44:43.789
Who knows?

1386
01:44:43.809 --> 01:44:51.612
Because if I get this glass here, I say to the AI, what happens to this if I push it in that direction?

1387
01:44:55.006 --> 01:45:02.367
If you push that mug, it'll slide across the table, and depending on how hard you push, it could knock into the plate or slide right off the edge.

1388
01:45:03.292 --> 01:45:07.694
Now, again, it simply is relying upon the fact that it's read everything on the Internet.

1389
01:45:08.215 --> 01:45:09.395
And there are physics textbooks.

1390
01:45:09.615 --> 01:45:11.937
There are conversations about things falling.

1391
01:45:12.557 --> 01:45:17.459
And it bases its response by drawing on those collections of words.

1392
01:45:17.479 --> 01:45:18.460
Isn't that what I'm doing as well?

1393
01:45:18.920 --> 01:45:19.881
I don't know.

1394
01:45:20.041 --> 01:45:22.062
How does human intelligence work?

1395
01:45:22.382 --> 01:45:26.304
Certainly, evolutionist psychologists have asked the following question.

1396
01:45:26.344 --> 01:45:27.505
Are we like a blank slate?

1397
01:45:28.602 --> 01:45:34.203
and we simply learn about the world people tell us we experience and so forth, or is there something more innate?

1398
01:45:35.084 --> 01:45:44.926
And I think there is strong evidence that we have a kind of innate physical intuition about the world that's really been passed down through the generations.

1399
01:45:44.966 --> 01:45:53.928
Not that you can pass down F equals MA or Newton's laws to your children because you learned, of course, that's silly, but there is an evolutionary advantage.

1400
01:45:54.648 --> 01:45:59.770
to being able to quickly assess the world and figure out how to act, right?

1401
01:45:59.830 --> 01:46:06.633
Those of our forebears who could not throw the rock or the spear, they're the ones who didn't get the next meal.

1402
01:46:06.653 --> 01:46:10.835
Those of our forebears that had a slightly better predilection

1403
01:46:11.675 --> 01:46:19.160
for ingesting experience and codifying it in some understanding of how the world actually works, they're the ones that survived.

1404
01:46:19.680 --> 01:46:22.562
And so they can pass down that predilection.

1405
01:46:22.662 --> 01:46:26.084
And I do think that that's part of how we assess the world.

1406
01:46:26.124 --> 01:46:28.826
I don't think we're complete blank slates in that sense.

1407
01:46:29.086 --> 01:46:29.687
It would make sense.

1408
01:46:29.727 --> 01:46:31.568
Babies are born with some kind of intelligence.

1409
01:46:31.588 --> 01:46:32.368
They grip fingers.

1410
01:46:32.408 --> 01:46:36.071
But that is in part because the parent has passed that on.

1411
01:46:36.111 --> 01:46:37.692
And so an AI could pass...

1412
01:46:38.192 --> 01:46:38.853
Yes, that's right.

1413
01:46:38.873 --> 01:46:48.827
When you talk about the AI systems themselves being evolutionary, yeah, they certainly do pass down the achievements of generation N to generation N plus one.

1414
01:46:48.847 --> 01:46:51.832
That is certainly part of this iterative process without a doubt.

1415
01:46:52.433 --> 01:46:53.493
What a weird world we're living in.

1416
01:46:53.573 --> 01:46:53.813
Yeah.

1417
01:46:54.293 --> 01:46:55.234
It's so crazy.

1418
01:46:56.474 --> 01:46:59.874
Sometimes I think, but I imagine through history, everyone's thought like, God, what a time to be alive.

1419
01:46:59.994 --> 01:47:00.194
Yeah.

1420
01:47:00.435 --> 01:47:04.295
We are living through a rapid change that is a little unprecedented.

1421
01:47:04.815 --> 01:47:06.356
How do you think one should contend with all of this?

1422
01:47:06.636 --> 01:47:07.736
Because people are concerned.

1423
01:47:07.836 --> 01:47:10.236
Change is not something that we love at this rate.

1424
01:47:10.696 --> 01:47:14.817
You know, again, I think people will cope in many different ways.

1425
01:47:15.117 --> 01:47:19.058
You know, if you can stay open and excited to the possibilities, you know,

1426
01:47:19.380 --> 01:47:22.302
And have the flexibility of change.

1427
01:47:22.722 --> 01:47:27.384
Oh, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is Elon's out there saying that we're heading to an age of abundance.

1428
01:47:27.585 --> 01:47:30.966
He's kind of shifted his perspective from this doomerism to age of abundance.

1429
01:47:30.986 --> 01:47:33.468
And then part of his narrative there is we won't need money.

1430
01:47:34.008 --> 01:47:41.272
Because when you've got robots and AI and more energy, then we're not going to have to worry about food and these kinds of things or bills, whatever.

1431
01:47:41.632 --> 01:47:43.673
But still, humans pursue scarcity.

1432
01:47:44.654 --> 01:47:45.894
We pursue status.

1433
01:47:45.934 --> 01:47:48.276
We want, you know, humans want the home on...

1434
01:47:49.156 --> 01:47:51.377
the end of Miami Beach with the best plot.

1435
01:47:51.638 --> 01:47:57.841
And there's finite numbers of these things that a lot of humans pursue, even like academic discovery, Nobel Prizes.

1436
01:47:57.901 --> 01:47:59.823
There's a finite number of them, and we pursue them.

1437
01:47:59.843 --> 01:48:04.846
So one would argue that there's still going to be a competition.

1438
01:48:05.366 --> 01:48:07.667
Humans are still going to strive for things, right?

1439
01:48:07.887 --> 01:48:08.768
Why do we do that?

1440
01:48:09.088 --> 01:48:09.288
Yeah.

1441
01:48:09.508 --> 01:48:09.729
Right?

1442
01:48:09.849 --> 01:48:14.872
And part of the reason is if you know that you're going to die...

1443
01:48:15.805 --> 01:48:30.398
If you know that your life is finite, there can be an urge to make your mark, to do something special, to be out of the ordinary so that in some symbolic way you continue to exist even after you are gone.

1444
01:48:30.899 --> 01:48:31.119
Right?

1445
01:48:31.319 --> 01:48:32.260
I mean, you know.

1446
01:48:32.680 --> 01:48:39.062
Elon Musk, yeah, after he's gone, people are going to talk about him for a long, long time, right?

1447
01:48:39.142 --> 01:48:43.483
Because he had a radical impact and who knows where it will go.

1448
01:48:43.523 --> 01:48:46.304
He's got many productive years still left.

1449
01:48:46.944 --> 01:48:56.967
And so, yes, there is this natural tendency to seek something that will allow you to symbolically persist after you are gone.

1450
01:48:57.187 --> 01:48:57.487
Now, yes.

1451
01:48:58.247 --> 01:49:06.293
If we all realize that that is part of human motivation, maybe as a species, we could begin to shift, right?

1452
01:49:06.694 --> 01:49:10.497
It isn't the case that we have to always be the way we have been.

1453
01:49:10.577 --> 01:49:12.538
Historically, that's the way we have been.

1454
01:49:13.079 --> 01:49:15.941
Kings wanna be kings in part because they have the power.

1455
01:49:16.261 --> 01:49:18.523
If they have the power, they have the hegemony.

1456
01:49:18.763 --> 01:49:21.085
They, in a sense, exist even when they are gone.

1457
01:49:21.125 --> 01:49:21.886
They're progeny.

1458
01:49:22.266 --> 01:49:24.388
Why do we have descent of the...

1459
01:49:25.008 --> 01:49:30.014
monarchies because the king continues to exist through the king's progeny.

1460
01:49:30.335 --> 01:49:34.079
And so, yeah, could we perhaps get to a place where we shed...

1461
01:49:35.059 --> 01:49:50.436
That way of being, because we're in a world of abundance where the whole notion of scarcity is artificial and we're only inventing it, we realize, in order that we can feel good and special and maybe we can find other ways to feel good and special.

1462
01:49:50.897 --> 01:49:52.359
I allow for that possibility.

1463
01:49:52.379 --> 01:49:55.162
I'm not particularly optimistic that that's what will happen.

1464
01:49:55.682 --> 01:49:59.764
The flip side, I would say it's easy to say that money won't matter when you have a trillion dollars.

1465
01:49:59.944 --> 01:50:00.085
Right.

1466
01:50:00.205 --> 01:50:00.645
Right.

1467
01:50:00.725 --> 01:50:03.787
I mean, you know, you just have to sort of see this stuff in context.

1468
01:50:04.127 --> 01:50:04.507
But yeah.

1469
01:50:04.887 --> 01:50:07.969
We have one more little souvenir thing there.

1470
01:50:08.369 --> 01:50:10.891
And this is kind of what we're talking about, which is robots.

1471
01:50:10.911 --> 01:50:13.292
Do you think AI can become conscious is the question?

1472
01:50:13.552 --> 01:50:13.912
Yeah.

1473
01:50:14.072 --> 01:50:15.013
High confidence or low confidence?

1474
01:50:15.033 --> 01:50:17.094
Yeah, I'm pretty high confident on that.

1475
01:50:17.818 --> 01:50:22.121
Again, as I'm saying before, I just see consciousness as a physical process.

1476
01:50:22.901 --> 01:50:29.445
And it's a matter of, in one way or another, achieving that physical process in an artificial system.

1477
01:50:29.485 --> 01:50:31.906
And I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that.

1478
01:50:33.387 --> 01:50:40.431
I was thinking about how laws would have to potentially change if we considered robots to be conscious and they lived in our homes.

1479
01:50:40.851 --> 01:50:41.832
Would they then get rights?

1480
01:50:42.652 --> 01:50:45.194
I think that's something we should think about now, actually.

1481
01:50:45.294 --> 01:50:45.654
Really?

1482
01:50:48.078 --> 01:50:49.279
tricky idea.

1483
01:50:49.299 --> 01:50:54.443
I mean, you know, it's one thing, you know, to pull the plug on a light bulb.

1484
01:50:55.064 --> 01:50:58.006
It's another thing to pull the plug on a sentient system.

1485
01:50:59.107 --> 01:51:04.491
And we may well find ourselves in that situation.

1486
01:51:05.152 --> 01:51:07.654
The challenge, the challenge is

1487
01:51:09.158 --> 01:51:12.519
it's virtually impossible to ever prove sentience, right?

1488
01:51:13.200 --> 01:51:19.522
I mean, you know, as we look at each other, we each afford the other consciousness.

1489
01:51:19.842 --> 01:51:22.303
I believe that you are conscious, you believe that I am as well.

1490
01:51:22.383 --> 01:51:22.703
Why?

1491
01:51:23.404 --> 01:51:38.370
You are more or less, you know, we're physically constructed more or less the same way, we're part of the same species, our body language, our speech is so similar in the grand scheme of things that we afford the other what we internally experience.

1492
01:51:39.716 --> 01:51:40.977
But we don't know it, right?

1493
01:51:41.017 --> 01:51:42.198
You don't know that I'm conscious.

1494
01:51:42.658 --> 01:51:43.499
I could be faking it.

1495
01:51:43.819 --> 01:51:49.744
I could be a really good artificial zombie that speaks and talks, but there's nothing going on inside.

1496
01:51:49.764 --> 01:51:51.305
And the same could be true for you.

1497
01:51:51.985 --> 01:51:58.050
And what that means is when we are with these artificial systems that don't have our lineages, they're not part of the same species.

1498
01:51:58.070 --> 01:51:59.691
They don't necessarily look like us.

1499
01:51:59.991 --> 01:52:02.973
They don't have the upbringing that we had and so on and so forth.

1500
01:52:03.634 --> 01:52:08.438
Will we be willing to agree that they're conscious if they tell us that they are?

1501
01:52:09.261 --> 01:52:12.523
I mean, if the artificial system says, I really am.

1502
01:52:13.284 --> 01:52:17.446
I'm feeling exactly the thing that I read about in your internet.

1503
01:52:18.067 --> 01:52:21.449
I'm feeling love or I'm feeling depressed.

1504
01:52:21.749 --> 01:52:23.710
If they say that to us, we say, no, no, no.

1505
01:52:24.171 --> 01:52:28.553
You're just mimicking, you're miming the kinds of things that human beings have said.

1506
01:52:28.594 --> 01:52:30.114
There's nothing going on inside.

1507
01:52:30.435 --> 01:52:32.136
There's nothing, there's no world inside there.

1508
01:52:32.476 --> 01:52:33.637
How do we ever get beyond that?

1509
01:52:34.535 --> 01:52:46.719
And I don't know the answer to that question, even though I strongly believe that there's no logical fundamental barrier that prevents the system from saying that and from telling the truth.

1510
01:52:47.840 --> 01:52:56.323
And electrical circuits within that system causing it to behave in such a way when it's scared, when it's in love, where it cuddles you, because that's what the electrical circuits hold it to do.

1511
01:52:56.723 --> 01:53:02.265
Yes, but is there an inner world associated with that or is it just going through the motions?

1512
01:53:02.885 --> 01:53:05.346
Here's how I think it's gonna likely turn out.

1513
01:53:06.127 --> 01:53:09.249
We'll have these artificial systems, they'll start to say these things.

1514
01:53:09.329 --> 01:53:11.290
At first we'll be like, oh, come on, come on, come on.

1515
01:53:11.850 --> 01:53:12.611
It's not real.

1516
01:53:13.191 --> 01:53:20.455
But we'll start to get used to them behaving just like we, in the sense of having these inner worlds.

1517
01:53:21.336 --> 01:53:28.240
And sooner or later, through a process that's so perhaps slow that we don't even notice it, we will afford them consciousness.

1518
01:53:28.900 --> 01:53:30.722
We will talk to them as if they're conscious.

1519
01:53:31.142 --> 01:53:32.823
We will imagine that they're conscious.

1520
01:53:33.244 --> 01:53:35.826
And ultimately, we will treat them as if they're conscious.

1521
01:53:35.846 --> 01:53:38.889
Now, I hope that we do that in a good way.

1522
01:53:39.429 --> 01:53:46.255
We have a terrible history of treating conscious beings in a respectful way, even in the same species.

1523
01:53:46.435 --> 01:53:46.595
Right?

1524
01:53:46.615 --> 01:53:50.118
We've done terrible things to each other, even though we afford consciousness.

1525
01:53:50.559 --> 01:53:51.860
We do terrible things to animals.

1526
01:53:52.380 --> 01:53:52.700
I'm vegan.

1527
01:53:52.720 --> 01:53:52.921
I'm vegan.

1528
01:53:53.581 --> 01:53:55.302
I don't eat any animal products.

1529
01:53:56.023 --> 01:54:02.007
I think that's not the way to treat a living system that has some level of conscious awareness.

1530
01:54:02.047 --> 01:54:02.888
I do eat plants.

1531
01:54:03.669 --> 01:54:11.775
I don't think plants have a sufficiently high level of consciousness, if at all, that I'm concerned about cutting them and eating them.

1532
01:54:11.935 --> 01:54:12.735
Have you always been vegan?

1533
01:54:12.935 --> 01:54:14.637
I've been vegan since 1993.

1534
01:54:15.097 --> 01:54:16.738
Oh, damn.

1535
01:54:16.918 --> 01:54:19.760
So I've been vegetarian since I was nine years old.

1536
01:54:20.641 --> 01:54:28.584
And so that's how I treat living or conscious beings because I don't think it's right to treat them that way.

1537
01:54:28.664 --> 01:54:29.945
What was the catalyst for that decision?

1538
01:54:30.165 --> 01:54:32.626
Well, when I was nine years old, it was very flat-footed.

1539
01:54:32.786 --> 01:54:34.046
My mother cooked spare ribs.

1540
01:54:34.726 --> 01:54:38.148
And for the very first time, I realized what meat was.

1541
01:54:38.228 --> 01:54:39.088
I'm a city kid.

1542
01:54:39.828 --> 01:54:42.189
I grew up where meat was in cellophane.

1543
01:54:42.209 --> 01:54:44.410
You buy it wrapped at the supermarket.

1544
01:54:44.690 --> 01:54:46.411
But when the meat came on a bone,

1545
01:54:47.579 --> 01:54:48.640
I was like, wait a second.

1546
01:54:49.161 --> 01:54:49.781
What is this?

1547
01:54:49.862 --> 01:54:52.825
I was like, oh, my God, this is like the rib of an animal.

1548
01:54:53.566 --> 01:54:56.989
And I said, I'm never going to eat meat again.

1549
01:54:57.550 --> 01:55:00.233
Later on, I did eat cheese and milk.

1550
01:55:00.253 --> 01:55:01.514
I wasn't vegan at that point.

1551
01:55:02.235 --> 01:55:09.283
But when I was a professor at Cornell in the 1990s, I went to an animal sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York.

1552
01:55:10.181 --> 01:55:19.224
where they showed you what happens to these animals when they are treated like milk factories, what happens to the cows, and it's awful.

1553
01:55:19.644 --> 01:55:23.785
And within 72 hours after visiting that animal sanctuary, I said, I'm done.

1554
01:55:24.486 --> 01:55:26.586
I'm not participating any longer.

1555
01:55:26.606 --> 01:55:33.708
I'm not going to eat or drink or imbibe any living, any substance that came from an animal.

1556
01:55:34.109 --> 01:55:35.169
And so that was the end for me.

1557
01:55:36.810 --> 01:55:40.952
For some people, it might be somewhat surprising to hear that from a physicist.

1558
01:55:42.232 --> 01:55:42.553
I agree.

1559
01:55:42.573 --> 01:55:43.293
It's inconsistent.

1560
01:55:44.173 --> 01:55:54.258
Because if I believe, as I do, that you and I are just a collection of particles in one configuration, and the cow...

1561
01:55:55.072 --> 01:56:03.955
Or the pig is just a collection of particles in a different, what does it matter if you eat particles in one configuration that we call a cow or another configuration that we call a carrot?

1562
01:56:04.215 --> 01:56:17.539
But as a human being, I allow the other parts of me to shine through and I look at that collection of particles that happens to be a cow and I say, it just doesn't feel right to me to eat that collection of particles.

1563
01:56:17.699 --> 01:56:19.340
It just doesn't feel right and I don't want to do it.

1564
01:56:21.660 --> 01:56:23.842
Brian, you've written many fascinating books.

1565
01:56:23.862 --> 01:56:24.783
I've got some of them here.

1566
01:56:24.923 --> 01:56:26.964
I think there's one other that I'm missing, I believe.

1567
01:56:27.265 --> 01:56:29.066
Yeah, there's more of a kid's book, I think.

1568
01:56:29.106 --> 01:56:29.827
That's the kid's book.

1569
01:56:29.847 --> 01:56:30.087
Yeah.

1570
01:56:30.587 --> 01:56:39.015
For my listeners at home, what is the most interesting thing that we haven't talked about, that we should have talked about, that exists within your works that I guess is relevant, either...

1571
01:56:39.990 --> 01:56:43.133
fascinating or somewhat relevant to their everyday life?

1572
01:56:43.373 --> 01:56:46.757
Yeah, well, I'm going to go more on the fascinating than relevant to everyday life.

1573
01:56:46.877 --> 01:56:49.259
As you know, I'm pretty esoteric in these kind of things.

1574
01:56:49.619 --> 01:56:56.986
But in the book, Until the End of Time, I try to give the reader a sense of how we got here,

1575
01:56:57.607 --> 01:57:04.273
But I also then turned to the future and tried to give them a sense of what will be if we go arbitrarily far into the future.

1576
01:57:04.753 --> 01:57:05.393
And yeah, that's it.

1577
01:57:05.434 --> 01:57:20.146
I used a metaphor of the Empire State Building, which I think helps you get a feel for what the universe will be like if you take the current understanding of the laws of physics and extrapolate arbitrarily far into the future.

1578
01:57:20.886 --> 01:57:25.310
And so to try to give people a sense, I asked them to imagine that.

1579
01:57:25.370 --> 01:57:33.992
That every floor of the Empire State Building represents an era of time that's 10 times longer than the floor below.

1580
01:57:34.412 --> 01:57:37.093
So like at the ground floor, that's like one year.

1581
01:57:37.493 --> 01:57:38.753
And then the next floor, 10.

1582
01:57:38.933 --> 01:57:42.534
Next is 100,000, 10,000, 100,000, and so forth.

1583
01:57:43.234 --> 01:57:49.136
Exponentially larger timescales as you walk up the stairs of the Empire State Building.

1584
01:57:49.656 --> 01:57:55.837
Now, in this way of thinking about things, everything from the Big Bang until today takes you to just about here, the 10th floor.

1585
01:57:56.378 --> 01:57:59.998
We were about 10 to the 10 years from the beginning.

1586
01:58:00.619 --> 01:58:12.121
And what I do is I take the audience from that point and I step through the key markers in the far future of the universe to give you a feel for what will happen.

1587
01:58:12.141 --> 01:58:15.462
And I can sort of take you through a couple milestones, right?

1588
01:58:15.862 --> 01:58:17.082
So, again, here we are today.

1589
01:58:17.182 --> 01:58:18.103
Stop when it gets scary.

1590
01:58:18.143 --> 01:58:19.303
Yeah, well, it's scary the whole way.

1591
01:58:21.144 --> 01:58:23.805
So here we are, 10 to the 10 years from the beginning.

1592
01:58:24.205 --> 01:58:30.748
If you just go up to here, 10 to the 11 years, what happens here is the sun will get bigger and bigger.

1593
01:58:30.828 --> 01:58:31.628
It swells.

1594
01:58:31.928 --> 01:58:35.310
It eats up the close planets, Mercury and Venus.

1595
01:58:35.350 --> 01:58:36.830
It may swallow up the Earth, too.

1596
01:58:36.850 --> 01:58:37.751
We're not sure.

1597
01:58:38.131 --> 01:58:44.674
But certainly it will make life on Earth virtually impossible because it will be so hot on this planet.

1598
01:58:45.434 --> 01:59:00.937
If you go up to the next floor above that, 10 to the 12 years from the beginning, what you find here is that the universe is expanding ever more quickly, driving the distant galaxies away faster than the speed of light.

1599
01:59:01.317 --> 01:59:02.398
So we won't see them.

1600
01:59:02.898 --> 01:59:07.199
So a future astronomer here looking out into the deep night sky will see only darkness.

1601
01:59:07.419 --> 01:59:12.560
In the deep, deep night sky, everything will have drifted beyond the cosmic horizon.

1602
01:59:13.407 --> 01:59:15.028
Why will it be going faster than the speed of light?

1603
01:59:15.188 --> 01:59:18.530
Because we have found, surprisingly, that the expansion is speeding up.

1604
01:59:18.850 --> 01:59:19.851
And there's no limit to that.

1605
01:59:20.131 --> 01:59:21.271
There doesn't seem to be a limit.

1606
01:59:21.311 --> 01:59:30.396
Now, again, there's always assumptions in every prognostication, assuming that what we measure and see today will persist.

1607
01:59:31.037 --> 01:59:35.579
It's like what the AI people are assuming, that the growth that they see today will persist.

1608
01:59:35.759 --> 01:59:36.339
Is that true?

1609
01:59:36.419 --> 01:59:37.020
We don't know.

1610
01:59:37.060 --> 01:59:40.302
But it's our best guess from the laws of physics that it will.

1611
01:59:43.103 --> 01:59:46.147
The 20th floor, something interesting happens.

1612
01:59:46.308 --> 01:59:52.336
If the earth is still here, if it wasn't swallowed up on the 11th floor by the swelling sun, the earth is going to spiral.

1613
01:59:53.288 --> 01:59:58.570
into the dead sun because we'll lose energy through gravitational radiation.

1614
01:59:58.750 --> 02:00:02.691
Ripples in the fabric of space will cause the orbit of the Earth to decay.

1615
02:00:02.751 --> 02:00:05.332
We will crash in to the dead sun.

1616
02:00:05.672 --> 02:00:08.934
That will be the end of the Earth by about the 20th floor.

1617
02:00:09.634 --> 02:00:13.215
But the end of life itself took place... Could easily have taken much earlier.

1618
02:00:13.355 --> 02:00:13.975
On the 11th floor.

1619
02:00:13.995 --> 02:00:14.816
On the 11th floor.

1620
02:00:15.376 --> 02:00:21.198
If we go up to about the 30th floor, what will happen here is that the stars...

1621
02:00:22.200 --> 02:00:29.687
themselves will spiral into the black hole at the center of most galaxies.

1622
02:00:30.108 --> 02:00:31.709
So most galaxies have a black hole.

1623
02:00:31.729 --> 02:00:33.991
We have one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

1624
02:00:35.068 --> 02:00:47.738
And the stars themselves, much like the Earth, will spiral into the sun, the stars will spiral into the black hole, which means there'll be only kind of black holes as the remaining macroscopic structure in the universe.

1625
02:00:47.918 --> 02:00:48.859
Has that happened elsewhere?

1626
02:00:49.279 --> 02:00:49.860
Oh, certainly.

1627
02:00:49.920 --> 02:00:53.182
We see things that can spiral into black holes.

1628
02:00:53.643 --> 02:00:58.326
And certainly even in the center of our galaxy, there's evidence that there's activity there.

1629
02:00:58.607 --> 02:01:03.971
And that activity in part is stars being ripped apart as they fall into a black hole.

1630
02:01:04.251 --> 02:01:06.252
So this is pretty clear that this will happen.

1631
02:01:06.512 --> 02:01:09.893
Is this the end of all galaxies as they spiral into the black hole?

1632
02:01:10.013 --> 02:01:10.353
Yeah.

1633
02:01:10.453 --> 02:01:18.876
So after 10 to the 30, 10 to the 35 years, it's hard to imagine that galaxies as we know them will persist.

1634
02:01:18.916 --> 02:01:20.217
The stars will have burned out.

1635
02:01:20.237 --> 02:01:24.158
I could have even mentioned another milestone around the 14th floor.

1636
02:01:25.159 --> 02:01:27.960
Almost all stars will have used up their nuclear fuel.

1637
02:01:28.960 --> 02:01:31.261
All of them... Just about all of them will fade to black.

1638
02:01:31.341 --> 02:01:32.762
All of them in the whole universe.

1639
02:01:33.022 --> 02:01:33.263
Yeah.

1640
02:01:33.283 --> 02:01:34.844
Or at least the observable universe.

1641
02:01:34.904 --> 02:01:37.545
I can only really speak to the part that we have direct access to.

1642
02:01:37.565 --> 02:01:37.845
Yeah.

1643
02:01:38.506 --> 02:01:43.869
And so by the 30th floor, those dark stars will spiral into black holes.

1644
02:01:44.189 --> 02:01:45.650
So there could be no life anywhere.

1645
02:01:45.810 --> 02:01:46.691
It's hard to imagine.

1646
02:01:47.111 --> 02:01:49.953
But let's be optimistic and imagine that somehow...

1647
02:01:50.473 --> 02:01:56.798
There is some life floating in the darkness because I want to get to something interesting on two more milestones.

1648
02:01:56.858 --> 02:02:06.825
By the 38th floor, wherever that is, we believe that protons, which are the heart of matter, will likely themselves disintegrate, fall apart.

1649
02:02:07.756 --> 02:02:18.842
And so if there is any remaining organized matter of the sort that we're familiar with somehow persisting somewhere, it itself will disintegrate by the 38th floor.

1650
02:02:19.002 --> 02:02:22.104
That's our belief based on our laws of physics.

1651
02:02:22.264 --> 02:02:23.344
There'll be no matter anywhere.

1652
02:02:23.684 --> 02:02:30.028
There will be fine particulate constituents because when a proton falls apart, it doesn't disappear.

1653
02:02:30.488 --> 02:02:33.930
It falls apart into other more refined particles.

1654
02:02:34.590 --> 02:02:39.301
And so they will continue to persist, but the aggregate called the proton will not.

1655
02:02:41.092 --> 02:02:45.414
If we keep on going to roughly, say, the 50th floor, this is an interesting point.

1656
02:02:46.254 --> 02:02:53.057
Because imagine that somehow some conscious being still exists in the darkness of space.

1657
02:02:53.157 --> 02:02:53.958
I don't know how it is.

1658
02:02:54.378 --> 02:03:01.321
Dark clouds of particles somehow are having electrical signals, allowing them some kind of conscious self-awareness.

1659
02:03:02.101 --> 02:03:06.683
After the 50th floor, that conscious being will likely think its final thought.

1660
02:03:07.063 --> 02:03:10.425
The reason is when you think it generates heat.

1661
02:03:11.125 --> 02:03:12.786
That heat has to be carried away.

1662
02:03:12.806 --> 02:03:21.290
It's very easy for that heat to leave us in a room like here because there's a lot of room for that so-called heat or entropy to be absorbed.

1663
02:03:21.950 --> 02:03:27.973
By the 50th floor, the universe won't be able to absorb the heat generated by the process of thought itself.

1664
02:03:28.433 --> 02:03:32.415
So any thinking being, when it thinks, one more thought will burn up.

1665
02:03:32.535 --> 02:03:37.097
It'll fry in the entropic waste, the heat generated by thought itself.

1666
02:03:37.717 --> 02:03:43.900
So by the 50th floor, it is hard to imagine any kind of consciousness continuing to exist.

1667
02:03:44.200 --> 02:03:47.922
And that's why I said earlier, when you said, do you think that we'll live forever?

1668
02:03:48.542 --> 02:03:54.425
I'm thinking here and I'm like, well, maybe we'll live to here like 500 years or a thousand years.

1669
02:03:54.745 --> 02:03:55.925
But here, no way.

1670
02:03:56.245 --> 02:03:59.267
It's hard for me to imagine that we will continue to persist.

1671
02:04:00.067 --> 02:04:00.767
By the 68th floor.

1672
02:04:02.228 --> 02:04:05.169
black holes themselves will begin to disintegrate.

1673
02:04:05.909 --> 02:04:09.950
Stephen Hawking showed us that black holes are not fully black.

1674
02:04:10.470 --> 02:04:18.492
When you take quantum physics into account, they can emit particles that will waft outward, causing the black hole to shrink.

1675
02:04:18.952 --> 02:04:22.453
And over time, the black hole itself will disappear.

1676
02:04:23.253 --> 02:04:29.914
A black hole the size of our sun, with the mass of our sun, about 10 to the 68 years for that to happen.

1677
02:04:32.215 --> 02:04:45.490
of the gargantuan sort that we think might exist, billions and billions of times more massive than the sun, it'll take about 10 to the 100 years, very top of the Empire State Building, for that kind of black hole to disintegrate.

1678
02:04:45.931 --> 02:04:51.237
But by the time we get here, 10 to the 100 years into the future, we suspect it will just be...

1679
02:04:52.453 --> 02:04:59.360
detritus of particles wafting through an ever larger, ever colder, ever quiet universe.

1680
02:05:00.181 --> 02:05:03.585
That's the future that we're looking at.

1681
02:05:06.088 --> 02:05:08.049
And then when does the Big Bang kick off and it all start again?

1682
02:05:08.129 --> 02:05:10.150
Well, it's interesting because you're absolutely right.

1683
02:05:10.170 --> 02:05:13.291
You can say, what about beyond the top of the Empire State Building?

1684
02:05:13.311 --> 02:05:15.972
Now things, look, this whole thing is speculative, right?

1685
02:05:16.032 --> 02:05:22.334
We are extrapolating from laws of physics that we've developed on thinking about physics here.

1686
02:05:22.694 --> 02:05:27.936
We're assuming that it applies all the way up into the exponentially far future.

1687
02:05:27.956 --> 02:05:28.396
Is that true?

1688
02:05:28.477 --> 02:05:29.017
I don't know.

1689
02:05:29.037 --> 02:05:29.737
Yeah.

1690
02:05:29.952 --> 02:05:34.235
It's our best guess based on what we know today, but definitely it is an assumption.

1691
02:05:35.035 --> 02:05:38.858
If you extrapolate even further, then yeah, you can imagine that way.

1692
02:05:39.378 --> 02:05:42.800
An exponential of an exponential of years into the future.

1693
02:05:42.920 --> 02:05:53.447
Sure, could particles somehow recoalesce just by chance and build a state of matter that might generate another big bang and it all starts again?

1694
02:05:53.467 --> 02:05:57.189
Yes, definitely within the realm of possibility.

1695
02:05:58.390 --> 02:05:58.550
Hmm.

1696
02:06:00.434 --> 02:06:02.035
It's not the most appealing future.

1697
02:06:02.435 --> 02:06:04.456
Well, I agree.

1698
02:06:04.476 --> 02:06:06.037
But can I tell you my take on it?

1699
02:06:06.117 --> 02:06:06.357
Sure.

1700
02:06:07.178 --> 02:06:14.921
My take on it is when you realize that, you know, the far future is a realm of darkness.

1701
02:06:15.701 --> 02:06:23.205
And when you also realize that until life emerged, say on planet Earth, it was a kind of realm of chaotic moments.

1702
02:06:24.458 --> 02:06:27.060
conglomeration of particles, you know, before.

1703
02:06:27.460 --> 02:06:29.921
So it's as if we're living in a special time.

1704
02:06:30.842 --> 02:06:42.029
We're living at a special region in the cosmological unfolding when living beings like ourselves and consciousness as we experience is compatible with the state of the universe.

1705
02:06:42.950 --> 02:06:49.073
How wondrous, how spectacular that there is this brief window of time.

1706
02:06:49.093 --> 02:06:52.916
I mean, Nabokov had this wonderful saying that we live together.

1707
02:06:54.008 --> 02:06:59.553
A brief crack of light between two eternal stretches of darkness.

1708
02:07:00.534 --> 02:07:03.356
How beautiful to exist in that brief crack of light.

1709
02:07:04.077 --> 02:07:07.420
And that to me is where the gratitude comes from that I was mentioning earlier.

1710
02:07:07.440 --> 02:07:10.303
You said earlier, like what gives your life meaning?

1711
02:07:11.103 --> 02:07:18.210
The fact that we understand that we live in this very special era in cosmological history,

1712
02:07:18.830 --> 02:07:28.512
where for a small period of cosmic time, living beings can stand up, look around, contemplate themselves and the universe, and gain some insight.

1713
02:07:28.833 --> 02:07:29.753
And then it all goes away.

1714
02:07:30.053 --> 02:07:34.494
But how wonderful that there is that brief moment that we are now inhabiting.

1715
02:07:36.795 --> 02:07:38.155
It is wonderful when you say it like that.

1716
02:07:39.900 --> 02:07:43.922
Brian, the thing that I think is most special about you isn't just the extent of your intelligence.

1717
02:07:43.962 --> 02:07:50.305
It's your ability to communicate in such a way that makes the complex both interesting and understandable.

1718
02:07:50.465 --> 02:07:53.307
And that's what I've seen throughout all of your work and all the videos that I told you.

1719
02:07:53.327 --> 02:07:55.368
I was watching your TED Talk with my fiance a couple of weeks ago.

1720
02:07:55.408 --> 02:07:59.890
And it's the closest I've ever come to actually understanding this concept called string theory.

1721
02:07:59.970 --> 02:08:00.310
Oh, great.

1722
02:08:00.331 --> 02:08:01.211
Well, I'm glad to hear it.

1723
02:08:01.231 --> 02:08:02.131
And thank you very much.

1724
02:08:02.191 --> 02:08:03.092
Really appreciate that.

1725
02:08:03.467 --> 02:08:04.548
I have a couple of your books here.

1726
02:08:04.568 --> 02:08:12.757
I think this is the most recent one from 2020 called Until the End of Time, Mind Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe.

1727
02:08:13.377 --> 02:08:20.244
And I think, you know, your work makes us feel so many things, but I think maybe the most important feeling it makes us feel is connected.

1728
02:08:20.665 --> 02:08:20.845
Yeah.

1729
02:08:21.678 --> 02:08:26.503
And I think we're all searching for connection in an increasingly lonely, isolated feeling universe.

1730
02:08:26.784 --> 02:08:28.806
And so that's why I love to have these conversations on the show.

1731
02:08:28.866 --> 02:08:34.231
I sometimes joke to the team that Diary of a CEO, the C in it stands for like, one of our goals is to make people feel more connected in some capacity.

1732
02:08:34.272 --> 02:08:35.913
And you most certainly do that.

1733
02:08:36.694 --> 02:08:38.376
So thank you for having that impact on the world.

1734
02:08:38.496 --> 02:08:41.559
It's a very important, increasingly important impact to be having on the world.

1735
02:08:41.640 --> 02:08:44.603
And it makes us look up, not just down, I guess.

1736
02:08:44.863 --> 02:08:46.505
And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

1737
02:08:46.785 --> 02:08:47.326
Well, thank you.

1738
02:08:47.606 --> 02:08:49.068
I'm going to link all of your books below.

1739
02:08:49.148 --> 02:08:52.992
So if people do want to continue this conversation, they can continue it through all of your books here.

1740
02:08:53.272 --> 02:08:56.636
Is there anywhere else people can go to support your work or learn more about your work?

1741
02:08:56.676 --> 02:08:57.337
Where would you direct them?

1742
02:08:57.337 --> 02:09:01.600
You're sitting at World Science Festival, you know, worldsciencefestival.com.

1743
02:09:01.620 --> 02:09:05.744
You'll find all sorts of conversations of the sort that we're talking about here.

1744
02:09:06.484 --> 02:09:08.626
Also, I'm working on a new AI.

1745
02:09:08.746 --> 02:09:15.612
We're talking a lot about an AI education system where AI will help people understand these ideas better.

1746
02:09:15.632 --> 02:09:18.334
It should launch sort of in the next year or so.

1747
02:09:18.394 --> 02:09:20.816
So keep an eye out for that kind of thing as well.

1748
02:09:21.176 --> 02:09:22.017
Where do people follow you?

1749
02:09:23.358 --> 02:09:32.812
Well, you know, on Twitter or Instagram, we post semi-frequently, but more at our YouTube channel, World Science Festival.

1750
02:09:33.272 --> 02:09:39.160
And in terms of these books that I have in front of me, I have four of them, different groups of people, which one would you direct them to read?

1751
02:09:39.581 --> 02:09:50.284
Well, my favorite, if you sort of frame it in that flat-footed way, is Until the End of Time, because it's the more philosophical and the more the kind of ideas that we spoke about here today.

1752
02:09:50.724 --> 02:09:58.666
But if you want to hear the hardcore of what string theory is or the new insights in space and time, some of the other books are more directed in that way.

1753
02:09:59.128 --> 02:10:00.810
until the end of time.

1754
02:10:01.230 --> 02:10:03.652
Mind, matter, and our search for meaning in an evolving universe.

1755
02:10:04.133 --> 02:10:06.615
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next.

1756
02:10:06.675 --> 02:10:13.361
The question left for you is, what might be worth even more than the thing that matters most to you?

1757
02:10:14.997 --> 02:10:37.884
Oh, well, I would say the thing that matters most to the people I care most about, you know, the things that matter to my wife and my kids feels much more important than the things that matter to me most because I'm so involved in that relationship, you know, so that to me is the thing that trumps all else.

1758
02:10:38.910 --> 02:10:40.132
The things that matter more to them.

1759
02:10:40.252 --> 02:10:40.492
Yeah.

1760
02:10:41.353 --> 02:10:42.174
It's a beautiful answer.

1761
02:10:42.935 --> 02:10:44.557
Wasn't expecting that, but it's very true.

1762
02:10:45.218 --> 02:10:46.620
Brian Green, thank you so much.

1763
02:10:46.660 --> 02:10:47.160
It's been an honor.

1764
02:10:47.421 --> 02:10:47.861
My pleasure.

1765
02:10:47.901 --> 02:10:48.282
Thank you.