Sean Carroll

00:00oh wait it would go live boom and with like mr. Carroll how are you sir very good feedback very good to have you back so uh you have a podcast now I do I've joined the ranks you inspired me well you it's important we need people like you out there you are you have like what seven episode so far seven episodes up a few more in the can I'm gonna try to dribble mail once a week for the first six months or so see how it goes are you enjoying the process I am mindscape by the way is the name for those out there in podcast line yeah I'm loving it you know the the real the thing that tilted me over toward doing it cuz like look it's I have a day job right I can't spend too much time doing this stuff but what I realized it was an excuse a license to talk to people who are not just physicists right cuz like I have intellectual interests that go way beyond just what I do for a living and

00:55in academia you're not allowed to take seriously anything other than your discipline your job right I'm allowed to be talking about physics but nothing else but so now I can talk to historians and economists and philosophers and psychologists and it's great well you could have just gone to Evergreen State and then you could talk about anything teaching a professor you could just if you're a professor you could teach them dance we have to break out of the system yeah man gotta break out that system so your podcast you decided that this would be a great venue for you to just to expand on subjects and just get into anything that you'd like well you know I I have opinions about things and I've never been one who said you shouldn't talk about things unless you're a PhD credentialed expert right I think everyone should be talking about everything but you should know what your

01:44level of expertise is so you're not an expert you should listen to people and you should then make your own decisions but you should first gather the information and so I don't feel quite like I can go I have a blog write whatever I want on my blog but I can't really expand on my theories of economics cuz what do I know about bernama can call up a very expert economist and chat with them on the podcast and both I will learn something and hopefully the listeners will so you're gonna just basically talk about anything the stick is we sort of try to pick an idea right so for the hour or whatever it is I don't have your statement I can't do the two 1/2 hours I know anymore need more nitrous caffeine in me but yeah for an hour hour and a half I'll get someone who's an expert and will dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on you know in in sort of

02:34everyday people's language and how it fits into the bigger picture and things like that and trying to mix up you know good old professors which are my peer group to sort of I got some people coming out of left field I had a professional poker player I have a movie director coming up a chef and things like that so but basically yeah whatever I want to talk about that's awesome so is this for your own edification or are you just using it as just a platform like what yeah I think that my like philosophically I treat it like it's for me right like I'm not gonna do guests or topics or not do topics because the people say so right right there's plenty people out there who don't want me to talk about anything other than physics okay or at least nothing that involves politics or religion stay in your lane bro very much right I love talking about politics and religion so guess what I'm

03:26going to talk about those things and so and then hopefully it finds an audience right and so I'm willing to listen to suggestions but mostly I have to treat it like it's for me well I think it's absurd to ask someone to not talk about things if there's things people love doing it right like I especially love you know the commenters saying oh you know of course he's a scientist so he knows nothing about politics I'm like you're an anonymous YouTube commenters like well I should I listen to your opinions about politics you definitely can't listen to the opinions of anybody that's willing to take the time to comment on YouTube what that's a problem a whole bit about it because I was like what kind of a person does that like who listens to a video and goes wall it's about time that I put in my input takes a very rare breed unless they have like a real specific expertise

04:20in what's being discussed like maybe it's about auto repair and like that it's not how you replace a transmission here's why or if you just ask him question like I thought my condors like mostly the comments even on my youtube like so I send the video I don't do video right I'm just doing audio podcasts but you can put them on YouTube with the static image and right for some reason people like that people listen to podcasts on YouTube right a lot of them yeah and the comments have actually overall been surprisingly good because YouTube is one of the worst right and overall but you know people say like oh I didn't know that or tell me more about this or this was interesting that's great like by all means do it but if you're like don't talk about that I want to hear about this then you know block go away it only takes a tiny drop of LSD to pollute a whole bucket of water and that's really

05:09what the deal is with YouTube comments it's just the the sheer number of people there the problem as the YouTube has a dedicated group of and trolls for whatever reason I don't know why with that platform seems to attract some of the worst and people that comment and I'm you know I cannot claim that I'm immune to reading it and getting annoyed I'm like I know I should just say forget it yes move all of my life well it's it's interesting in a lot of ways I mean there's there's there's something fascinating about this new form of communication where someone can send this very the just flat text you don't know anything about the background the person is sending it and there's a style of doing that that's designed to kind of mess with your head just like and look let's let me just you know just to redress the balance here it's great that we have these new ways of talking to

06:15each other right and part of you know I glancingly mentioned the fact that academia wants you to stay in your lane very very much and I think that's a shame and so I think that part of the many hidden purposes of my podcast one of them is to dissolve the boundary between science and the rest of our intellectual life right like I'm not sometimes I'll be talking about science sometimes I won't like we tend to silo off science as a thing and then like a kind of economics in history in political science is another thing that is out there and relevant to the world and science is something that is sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of people and I want to mix it all up I want like the different people talking to each other and so overall by all means comment on the YouTube videos and you know keep that conversation going that's good of you that says that's a very healthy

07:00attitude and that's kind of that attitude that you have to have if you're putting everything out there yeah and and just one more irony is like I'm not uh I don't seek conflict I'm a conflict averse person like I just want I don't want to argue with people right but I do want to say things that are true and not everyone agrees about what is true so there's gonna be arguments so I put up with that but I'm not seeking it out so I would like this you know utopia of rational discourse where everyone is talking about ideas in a dispassionate way and in good faith looking toward moving toward the truth it would be nice if we had like a system like almost like a rating system of for humans like a Yelp for commentators that people are trying that it's not a bad idea it really isn't in terms of like like people review your comments on things and enough people decide like like this

07:52is just unnecessary help for expertise or for commentary and gently well all the above yeah I mean I think that's probably going to move to some sort of a system like that in fact some people are actually advocating that in for society to have some sort of or like a rating system for people and almost a new kind of currency like a social currency they're doing in China right yes yes yes it's scary for people though because it's China and you know and China is it's a trippy place and it's very trippy in terms of it's sort of got capitalism going but it's also a communist dictatorship and government and the all the companies are also in you know the thing with Huawei am I saying it right people getting mad at me about Huawei I think it's Huawei it's the now the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world and they're forbidden to work with US carriers right the the

08:54United States government does not trust this company so they've said you know this company has apparently done some shading things according to them not according to certain tech people say it's nonsense but they're so that another keeping them from selling their cell phones with AT&T and t-mobile whatever but they're the number two manufacturer in the world now they just surpassed Apple because Chinese just yeah yeah China's a trip yeah well it's it's they know very well is it's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful because there are you know people who don't like it there are people who rebel against the system but even so the government's been so enormous ly successful controlling information yeah only what you learn like you can't Google Tiananmen Square if you're there right yeah you can't get those images or anything like that and

09:42companies want to do business there so they'll go along with it and I'm not sure if it's stable building and you know I talked about this my last podcast with Joshua monk I'm not sure that democracy is stable either so um when when the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly huge abuses and huge changes are on the horizon even we don't know what they're gonna be I mean that's that's my worry about the social credit system right like it's so obviously abusable yes I make the wrong people have bad credit make the people you like have I mean if this is run by the government you're gonna trust them to do it fairly I you know I'm a little skeptical about well I think this last election and the subsequent analysis of the manipulation of the election has been very eye-opening to people and the the Russian troll farms have you been paying attention yeah that's tough yeah

10:37that is that is a stunning revelation that there's 24/7 businesses where people are set up where they're hired to just tweet and post things and comment on things and they're all working in some way to try to manipulate wait the way people look at the news yeah and the most interesting thing to me I thought like if they were clever they will do this and they do it it's not just that they have a policy that they want to push right or a candidate they want to push they want to foment disagreement yes we'll take the most radical views on either side and pump them up just so Americans are tearing at each other's throats yeah and yeah that kind of works right that's that's pretty successful so far there was a radio lab podcast where these people that were Trump supporters detailed being contacted by these Russian troll farms where they organized these rallies and

11:34they organized these these protests and they even hired a fake Hillary they thought they hired a fake Trump and they're gonna have the Hillary in a cage and they wanted everybody to yell out lock her up and this these Russians coordinated this whole thing right and then once it starts you know it organically takes over right right you you probably saw just the other day this Trump rally where the CNN reporter was trying to do to Moscow yeah trying to do a camera spot and he just like got drowned out by people shouting at him and you know shouting obscenities and yeah I I don't know what that that's bad right okay I mean it's bad that the media I wouldn't want that to happen to Fox News I wouldn't want that to happen to people I disagree with right you gotta let the people in the media be the media they're not the enemy of the people well what he's done is very

12:23dangerous you know it's it's very it's very sneaky and very dangerous and it's very manipulative and he's essentially he's in survival mode and when people are in survival mode they he's not thinking at all about the importance of the press he's thinking about his his situation his stance his position in life preserve that yeah and what's the best way to preserve that well someone's attack you me attack the people who are attacking me any yeah you you build yourself up by creating an enemy that everyone can agree on one of the chilling things that Yasha pointed out there's really despite the rhetoric there's never been a successful truly multi-ethnic democracy in the history of the world like democracies that have worked have worked because one group is the boss right you know they they give rights to the rest of the people and so forth and try to be fair to some extent but that's

13:16changing like as the demographics of the world are changing we're you know we're becoming more of the patchwork that we claimed to be years ago and people aren't quite happy with that they're not comfortable with it and this is something that can be used to gin up emotional reactions yeah there's people are terrified of change - this always is nostalgia for the for the past yeah and you know a past that is not necessarily accurate right it has that they you know that they that they envision and and it's and I'm sympathetic you know with the real problems right there are real problems with inequality and with healthcare and with jobs and you know not just the number of jobs but the jobs are changing not everyone is really tooled up to be a high tech office worker and run day and age and so I take those concerns really really seriously but those concerns being channeled in

14:06very unproductive ways to scapegoat people who don't deserve it one of the things it's fascinating to me that seems to be boiling under the surface is the possibility that we might need some sort of universal basic income to deal with what's happening with AI and automate automate ation like auto automation of cars automation of normal jobs that peoole food preparation and things that people have come to just take for granted that a human is going to be doing that it's entirely possible that millions and millions and millions of people are going to be out of work within a very short period of time and it seems to me it's just it's one of those little sneaky things it might just catch us before we're ready for it yeah I think that if you you know extrapolate very far ahead into the future and imagine what utopia is supposed to look like or you know the far technologically

14:56advanced civilization why wouldn't we imagine that work is done by robots and machines and human beings are free to be creative or artistic or athletic or just sit on their butts if that's what they want to do if you believe that that's a possible future then the way to get there is to as robots and machines do more and more make it more and more possible for people to live without working I think that's at least I have no idea whether works in practice I'm not an economist I haven't studied it but I think it should be taken seriously as an idea if you looked at it as a pessimist if you looked at it with a cynical perspective you'd say uh well people just what they don't have motivation then they behave like rich kids or entitled people or people who won the lottery they blow all the money they don't take it seriously because they didn't earn it it goes against human

15:43nature yep I get that and maybe it does let them do it Who am I to tell people that they need to be virtuous by earning a living and some you know Jabba they may or may not be able to keep for very long people who say that usually haven't gotten fired from me right right yeah and I always feel like the people that are actually ambitious but the real problem I think would be growing up with that I think if you you got it as an adult you'd probably recognize it as a safety net that it is but as it was during your developmental process you might rely on it as a constant yeah and so that might be a problem in terms of motivation I think so and I think that uh and you see it right I mean I have friends at various levels of income and class that they grew up in and you can always tell people who grew up in very comfortable environments because they don't have

16:34jobs they have projects done a project because they're not really worried about the project failing you know like the if you grew up without that safety net you're more cautious yeah like you have to have a fail-safe you have to have a back-up plan and but what if everyone had that back-up plan what if we could all do projects instead of work is that really a worse world you know any trust fund people oh yeah yeah the ones that I know all blow their money actually I know some I know some very wealthy people who raise their kids really well and you guys trust fund people oh yeah as people who like never need to work a day in their lives and they all work really hard that's so weird yeah it's possible find those people and clone them yeah find out what made them pick what was there so they found a passion they found something that they're actually that

17:21seems to be a giant issue that's right and your parents need to you know sort of encourage that you know you parents matter when it comes to like if you're if you are very wealthy do you feel like you deserve it or do you feel like I should you know give something back because I'm really really right well there's cockamamie ideas that come from people that haven't earned their money - like one guy came to me with this crazy idea for this project he's doing and wanted me to get involved in it and I was I was going over the details of it I was like I don't think this is gonna work like why why is this guy so enthusiastic about it and then the more I dug into him like oh he got all this money from his dad like oh well there you go this guy's just he just he's got pipe dreams yeah I mean I guess I feel just to be honest about it like I'm very lucky not because I grew up

18:08wealthy because I didn't but because I now have a job that represents what I want to do like what I would do with my life if I were independently wealthy isn't that different from what I'm doing right now right that's yes exactly but therefore I kind of think that I would like a world where everyone can do that if that's what they wanted that would be amazing yeah the real question is does everybody have an actual interest and if they don't is it nurture or nature and if they don't do we force them to is that a thing I you know I'd actually I'd never tell people like follow your passion or fine what do you love because look there's a lot of people who need to earn a living right a lot of people who just need to do work because they need to pay the bills that's fine that should be respected that in the work and what we have right now that's an honorable thing

19:01to do and not everyone gets to just do what they love that's true there are some things though that you can do for a living that you'll actually enjoy like you need to make a living but because of your temperament because your interests you can find a thing whether it's carpentry or you know whatever it is that you find to be fascinating and fulfilling when you're actually doing you're making a living but you're also doing something like man I this is very satisfying maybe maybe that's true I mean it's certainly true it can be done can it be done for everyone in the world I don't know that's a good question I don't know yeah well there's so many styles of living - you know when you're talking about China I was in China recently I was we spent some time in Thailand and we flew through China and one of the things he realized about China is they just say there's a

19:47different totally different way of move like people just walk right through people yeah I mean they their lines if there's a space and a line that like peanut they don't respect that space they go right into that space right in front of you like oh there's a space there yeah they didn't even think of it as rude it's not the style right yeah yeah it's just no no no we went through Southeast Asia for a few weeks and you know visited Vietnam and Thailand and they're right next to each other but just the behavior in the cities utterly different like just walking down the street it's just a different culture I haven't been to Vietnam what was I'll be none was my favorite it was realized yeah everybody says that it's great I mean I don't know I was there for a few days right I'm sure that there's depths to the country that I didn't perceive but you know I was

20:29coming to life literally the week we were there was the first McDonald's was opening in Vietnam so which is not good but at least it meant it was we were there in a pre McDonald's Society right and though it was physically very beautiful the food was amazing it was all scatter shot like that you know people just go crazy on the streets in any direction they want and it was not organized or anything like that but it was very genuine you know it was people were trying you know to be nice people it seemed to be very friendly like that we didn't speak any of the language or anything like that and it was just a wonderful experience overall yeah that's awesome yeah it's Asia's trip it's a really different part of the world China is yeah I've been to China too and it's it's a that's a trip for a different reason right and you know I I'm scared by China in the sense that I I'm worried

21:17that they will succeed while still being repressive dictatorship right like I remember reading you know this these memoirs from Bertrand Russell when he visited China and he was rhapsodizing about this is an amazing culture amazing people this is great and I'm like does he not know it's a communist dictatorship and then my brain kicked in I'm like oh no is 1912 it was not a communist dictatorship at the time in the there's a great tragedy in the way that China has been sort of repressed for so long I think there's immense potential and promise there but it's also the possibility that they just remain and this autocracy forever and some people's lives improve and a lot of people is just drudgery for billions of people yeah it's totally possible it's it's fascinating that they become this combination of things combination of both capitalism and communism yeah well I think that's it

22:06they found a release valve like he couldn't you couldn't be the Soviet Union was gonna collapse because it was it's a terrible system right then economically politically whatever and China found this little bit of balance where they still have the repressive dictatorship but they give enough freedom for people to you know be ambitious and try to get ahead and and that improves the economy and they make some terrible mistakes right there are these huge cities that are built no one lives there right these spooky pictures right you've seen the recreations of other large cities like Paris I've seen that and sometimes like cities like Shenzhen like right next to Hong Kong there's the city five million people the thirty years ago was fifty thousand people right like it just they built it yeah in a couple years and in other places like oh well build a shopping mall here where there's

22:52and it's just instantly it looks like Detroit the next day there's no one there and you know no one makes no one builds anything no one does anything with it because it's it's not really capitalism it's still a planned economy and there's pluses a minus or that no doubt one of the big fears about China is their experimentation with genetics is that they're willing to do things ethically that scientists in America and a lot of parts of the Western world are not willing to engage in yet yeah including the use of CRISPR on human embryos yep and I think so I have mixed feelings about that I think it's gonna happen in all cultures I think we're gonna do it right I actually had sorry I haven't released that podcast yet but stay tuned I have an excellent podcast coming with Carl Zimmer who is a science writer just wrote a long book about heredity in genetics and yeah so what

23:43they're going to be doing with the designer babies it's not science fiction as far as I can tell it's gonna happen and but it's very unclear what it will mean because we're not any good right now at figuring out how genetics turns it how your DNA turns into a person right yeah it might be like you know that we find something other if you increase if you change this particular gene sure you can live twice as long but also you'll have Parkinson's disease when you're four right like we don't know what the interdependencies are and stuff like that so but but it's coming like I think that the idea that we will be choosing embryos to come to term and be people on the basis of their genes before they're you know implanted in a uterus is a hundred percent that's gonna happen and the chance that we're gonna be editing them is 99.99% chance and you're right China is way more willing to do that and

24:39again I'm not really sure that's good or bad you know I think it's gonna come here what I'm more worried about is that you know people figure out a system that will make you can have a baby who's guaranteed to be you know tall and beautiful and smart and live for a hundred fifty years and it'll cost you a million dollars then that'll be a little bit unfair right that will be an issue that will come up yeah but then isn't it unfair that the rock is the rock how did he get to be the rock it is but I think just psychologically it's I think he worked hard he started in the right place you know the story of Yao Ming right no because so yelling the basketball player right I know he was basically the result of a breeding program really like they encouraged his parents who were both really tall basketball players to have a baby and you know it worked for him it doesn't

25:32always work as it's a crapshoot but yeah it can work yeah and so but that's normal breeding that's like a dog and my dog is a good-looking dog of the same breed let's put them together that's right with human beings but yes otherwise normal yes and it it I think it's different it's different psychologically because we think it's different winning the lottery than already being rich and therefore being able to afford something that changes who you are right right I think that I don't know maybe I'm wrong maybe people will think that that's awesome and will these people all be you know celebrities and we'll follow them on Instagram but I suspect people be rubbed the wrong way at that kind of access to something that most people can't afford it most certainly will they most certainly well but I think if you look at it objectively if you look at the interactions of the species as

26:25you know a completely outside observer you would say not only is it's inevitable but this is going to lead to some really spectacular changes in what a human being is like think about a big part of what we're concerned with constantly on a daily basis is healthcare right people are very concerned with people that have to deal with debilitating diseases and if we could just eliminate all those yeah why wouldn't you want that yeah I think you know and think you probably will be able to and it will probably happen that I think is yeah but then so ever almost everyone agrees with that like that's not the controversial part right like yeah if we can eliminate and apparently some diseases we already know like right there in your DNA you're gonna get Huntington's when you're 40 years old right yes and so those are easy to eliminate peanut allergies or something

27:10like that other diseases are harder we don't know what causes them so it'll take time but I think that that would be unconscious tree move diseases from people ahead of time it's a little bit different if you're choosing their hair color and skin color and shape of their nose and feet and whatever mm-hmm that gets it does get squirrely but it's also you know when the idea of it being a cost prohibitive issue well isn't that the case with almost all technology as it emerges it's very experimental and plasma TVs were like $20,000 for a small television I remember I saw them it was only like a 30-inch television or something that was a exorbitant I was like this is incredible it's flat but you know everybody has them yeah and they're cheap you can get one for a few hundred bucks and it's way bigger and way better than what it was back then yeah and I think that actually that's

28:03very realistic that maybe will be million dollars but then 10 years later will be hundred thousand passes to sort of be a million dollars first right it kind of just like cell phones like everything else it has to be a really expensive thing and then eventually it trickles down like cell phones and becomes available everywhere to everybody like if you look at the average person's cell phone if you buy a cheap cell phone for like 300 bucks it is way better than an iPhone from 10 years ago yeah you know it's just it's just in every way ya know I think that's probably right and I think that it's one of the things that's happening like we're still the beginning of technology right like we're technology's not that advanced compared to where it's gonna be you know I have another podcast guest coming up who is an expert on aging and how we can fix that by messing with genes a little bit was

28:50it Aubrey de Grey no no this was a real scientist at Princeton you know someone who's just doing a real scientist uh well he's I don't know him that well so I shouldn't say but I think it was an advocate for anti aging yeah which is good which is cool but the but my guest Kelly Murphy's just like a biologist who was working on things and discovered something right she's not trying that hard right you knock out a certain gene in the certain worm and it lives twice as long and without any decay right like it doesn't get old because it's it's fascinating like why do we die why do we grow old it's not necessary like you could design an organism that doesn't get older it would die from random bad things you get hit on the head with a brick but you don't need to die the reality is that evolution programmed aging and death into us because once we have kids or once we've outlived our

29:44reproductive lifespan we're not useful anymore so biology is wants us to die and so that that in other words it's potentially fixable you know it might not be easy might be not happen 200 years from now but it could so I think that you know aging genetic engineering brain computer interfaces you know all that stuff is going to within the next hundred years totally change what it means to be a human being and we're totally not ready for it and so I was saying this to Carl he Carl's like not that Carl Zimmer was is more or less sanguine about it's like don't worry just you know we'll put regulations on it'll be fine and my attitude was no actually we should think of the absolute craziest science fiction scenarios because I want to be prepared right yeah it doesn't come to pass I want to worry about the least probable things because it might spark something

30:31that actually helps us down the road yeah there was a recent discovery they've figured out a way to shut off whatever it is that causes wrinkles and reverse the process so whatever is causing your skin to get wrinkly and sag yeah they're reversing that process we might be members of the last generation to die whoa or of old age we won't be immortal well then if you thought you were immortal if you thought let's say you thought that your average lifespan was a million years would you suddenly become way more cautious I'd start jumping off buildings and do like I have a friend of mine who does that a flying squirrel suit stuff he holds the world you don't become invulnerable you just don't he yes exactly flying school stuff is truly dangerous oh it's super dangerous yeah thanks jump what if they could just fix you if you like even but that's a separate thing yes that's possible right

31:22like maybe they get back to your goo back you up then you just dive when they build your clone put you back together like all these crazy science fiction's here I don't think that that's I think that backing up is way harder than people think and I think that stopping aging is way easier than people think but we'll see I agree with you I went to the 2045 I think they're calling it a conference in New York City a few years back ago it's all the Ray Kurzweil advocates that think you're going to download brains into computers and stuff flowingly not that compelling yeah that that stuff was like what are you gonna do what's good what's gonna happen it seems like everybody had this idea of one day we'll be able to do this and we'll be able to take consciousness and I'm like yeah hmm I mean maybe doesn't violate the laws of physics but it's hopelessly impractical compared to

32:10anything we can do right now like the human brain it's just not something you can read out my question and this was was something really concerned me was what's to keep someone from making hundreds of thousands of versions of themselves like what it's what to take someone from some you know really rich billionaire character that can afford to do this and say I'm gonna do this many many times then I'm gonna have my clones make clones of clones and I'm gonna fill up a whole island with me why would you do that though cuz you're a crazy person okay I mean crazy people are lovely crazy things right letting you imagine if you had a hundred Sean Carroll's into your house working on things but it but they're not the same person but if you found out the thirty the Sean Carroll or smoking crack have you realized that like after a while there is a randomness yeah sure yes evo-devo right yeah you

33:07grow up in matters that would be really fascinating if that would be an excellent episode of black mirror yeah where someone cloned themselves and found out that a certain percentage of their clones were just crazy or they were the crazy one right like all the clones were very different than them and they were all it seemed to each other yeah or maybe having all those clones somehow another set something off and them that made them crazy because they were in competition with all these other people that were exactly like them this is golden yeah we should edit this out of the podcast so we can write up this episode there's a real concern with messing with biology in a way that's never been done before exactly I think that the extent to which it's coming is something we haven't quite faced up to right and it's really coming it's coming fast and profoundly we're not ready yeah

33:54and the possibility of just creating a world that we're not prepared for and we're not prepared for the consequences of yeah exactly so that's why I'm all in favor of thinking crazy right like just wondering what it would be like even if the answer is no that'll never happen at least you know be prepared a little bit you know think of all the alarmist crazy scenarios yeah have you really gotten into CRISPR have you really looked into that stuff at all not that much you know it's all too applied to real-world for my taste but for people don't know what we're talking about we're talking it's a new technique for editing jeans that was discovered accidentally while examining the effects of the story is amazing I mean they're these bacteria you know so we here's a thing we think of DNA as where our genetic information is stored right like you have a little code a little list of

34:48symbols a CGT and they're in a row and that's it is handed down from parents to children but the reality is way more complicated than that because different parts of the DNA do things and different ones don't some of them get turned on turned off we have mitochondrial DNA which are not our DNA we have these little sub cells within us that get carried along for the ride and have their own DNA and so crisper is this thing that was invented by nature right not by human beings these bacteria who were trying to resist viruses right so the viruses would come in and attack them and basically the D the bacteria learned a way to steal part of the DNA of the virus and keep it as like a facial recognition software thing it's like a template like oh this DNA thing is approaching me that's a virus and I should attack it right like this is something that I learned how to fight

35:44off and so to do that I need to be able to snip out a little piece of DNA and so scientists biologists learned that they could train this is a little bit fanciful way putting it metaphorical but they could train the bacteria to go in there snip out pieces of DNA and you can do that for any DNA you want so--but and you can replace it with something else it's not really very high precision right now but that's coming and so in principle this is you know a little way to change a genetic code and then they figured out some other way that ordinarily right if you have two parents and you have like you know brown eyes versus blue eyes and blue eyes are recessive so they both need to have the blue-eyed gene to give you if you want to have blue eyes but they figured out a way that you can change the DNA and it automatically with 100% accuracy gets sent to all of your offspring right it's

36:38not you know 50-50 chance or whatever so then you can just propagate a change in the genetic code throughout the species pretty darn quickly I know human beings take a long time to breed but animals and plants it's a whole nother world right you can design those very very rapidly and there's already been at least one revision of the process right I think so but yeah I think I just told you everything I think they're they're continuing to improve on the process and it's really it's really going to be very interesting to see where that goes as that advances yeah I think this was a concern with P places like China right they're already doing this they're already manipulating genetics and trying to create super people and I think the chances that gives them a great basketball team or greater than the chances that you have a bunch of brilliant PhD scientists well

37:25that's where that starts right in it starts in competitive athletics have you paid attention did you watch the documentary Icarus no I did not yeah fascinating documentary that's on Netflix right now about its it really is a kind of a crazy set of circumstances there's a guy named Brian Fogle he's the director of in the producer of the movie and he was competitive bike racer and he decided to document what he wanted to do was compete in a race a bike race a hundred percent clean and then get a Russian scientist to juice him up so in the process of getting this Russian scientist to juice him up he stumbled upon a scandal and in the middle of him making shocked yeah but I mean in a crazy way because his Russian guy is the head of the anti-doping agency in Russia and he was just sort of informing him how you would do this so he teaches him and forms him how you can do this while

38:19this is all going on it turns out that the Russians had completely cheated their way through the Sochi Olympics now and it was all documented and so they were getting busted as this is all going on and he films this Russian guy was the head of it escaping Russia barely coming to the United States and being chased and testifying all the different strategies that the Russians used in order to completely cheat on like at least one entire Olympic team like every single athlete was on drugs yeah and they had a record number of gold medals and so then he starts detailing the process and how they did it in these forensic tests examined them with urine bottles and showed that they've been open even though they were supposedly not open a bowl and really really interesting stuff but that national pride the thing about national pride and you know the ability to win a bunch of gold

39:18medals and athletic dominance is so important for the morale of these countries that want to establish the periodic right yeah and there are some people who say well let's just go for it let's just have the old dope Olympics right like let people enhance themselves as much as they possibly can and there's an ongoing you know debate about what about people who use aesthetics right is that fair if you lost a leg and you have a prosthetic leg is could that potentially give you an advantage in a running event or something like that if there is efficiently good prosthetic eye I don't know the answer any of these questions I think it's a little bit weird because we set up these arbitrary categories for what is it a sporting event we invented them right they're not out there in the world and now we're we're faced with wholly different circumstances to what

40:05to do about it but yeah I think that you know there's there's the question what we should do which is hard there's the question of what's gonna happen which is it's all gonna happen you know all of these things are gonna happen I was talking to a guy this past weekend who's a Navy SEAL and his friend lost his hand and they gave him a new hand and they're working on this new hand now that's gonna allow him to play piano so it's a completely artificial carbon-fiber hand with all these different things that attach directly to your nerves and somehow or another he can control it with his arm it's gonna allow him to play piano and you're gonna tell me he could never play the piano before its program it's in that it's in the thing it's yeah well this is what I was saying about the brain computer interfaces I think that's the the real that's even bigger frontier than synthetic biology

40:55or genetic engineering because computers are really useful for things robots are very useful for things yeah human beings are just gonna sort of blend in it's not like we're in AI and super healthy humans it's we're gonna just have everywhere on that spectrum yeah that's what I'm thinking as well there's gonna be some sort of a symbiotic thing like a chip or you know they tried it with the Google glasses to try to get people to wear that but they were goofy I put them on they felt to science fictiony just like the first portable phones were these giant things that doesn't that's not a long term for classification tool yeah lots of lots of people are working on it Elon Musk has a little company that no one knows about that what they do now yeah well people know about if they care but it's not like one of his famous ones right right to implant neural lace write something in your body

41:44that reads your brain neuro lace I don't like the way that sounds where's it go you win a more macho I wanted the back of your head too I was thinking of it as like a mesh yeah yeah that's what that's it just seems creepy that it's gonna latch on your nerves yeah and improve you yeah neuro ladies won't need your phone anymore Wow and where's you went to the back your head everyone goes to the back of their head well my name is useful I mean like the matrix everybody goes to the back of the head yeah I mean they're right now companies that want to make money in the short term are building these non-surgical non-invasive things we like wear something on the front of your head or a cap or something like that which can detect frequencies of vibrations in your brain and you can it's very primitive but you can move things around you can control drones right with your brain without touching

42:40anything but yeah the if it ever becomes practical which is very far from certain but the thing to imagine in the far out science fiction scenario is cracking open your skull and searching some electrodes in there closing it back up and now you were part of the super internet without doing anything more than closing your eyes yeah and there's also the possibility of enhancing various thought processes to with transdermal stimulation like if they could figure out you know they're doing that now they're they've performed a series of tests where they have people do like certain tasks and then they put electrodes into certain areas of the brain and put an electric charge and that electric charge stimulates various aspects of the brain and it allows them to complete certain tasks quicker and more efficiently you know I think and this is just kind of uninformed belief

43:33but I suspect that the human brain is pretty optimized for what it tries to do I think that rather than improving the brain are stimulating it the way forward is to augment it like hook it up to calculators and Internet and whatever you know one thing that I don't see talked about very much but I think will be a real game-changer you know we we talk about phones as if we're carrying around phones but we don't mostly use our phones to talk to people on the phone right we check the email check the internet and we take pictures once you really have and again it might not be possible but if you really had a direct connection between your brain and the internet your eyeballs are a video camera everything you see you can record and and store somewhere right so and you can lend them to other people or people can subpoena them or whatever like there's literally no place in the

44:25world that human eyeballs are looking at that would not be subject to later inspection and that it's weird and scary and bad right it is where he's carrying bad and what if someone comes up with a better eyeball oh yeah they let you scoop out your old dull eyes and put in some new awesome ones you can record with yeah absolutely yeah I don't think that Nessa I absolutely agree that enhancing it with electronics is probably the way to go and that having some sort of some sort of symbiotic relationship with electronics but I also think that this transdermal stimulation can enhance that process on top of it I think there's gonna be a bunch of different things going on at once you think about CRISPR being something where someone eventually figures out a way to design various aspects of the human brain that are more open to interface with technology changing various receptors make them

45:20more efficient for data to go straight to the dome yeah and I think that there is a short-term versus long-term question here right like even if what I said is a long-term truth on the short-term improving our thinking skills in direct ways with stimulation or whatever sounds you know pretty good but maybe you can just do that through beta blockers or some drugs or something like like I think that that's another thing very plausible that we'll have safe super efficient drugs someone can take in over the next six hours their their way clearer thinkers than they were before yeah is there any concern with what's the endgame like with this yeah I hope so I mean if you're super far advanced the endgame is you realize that life is not that interesting yeah you're like well why am I here what am i doing with all this yeah a little challenge is helpful actually well in particular if

46:09you develop immortality yeah if there's no concern about getting injured or killed yeah I think that people who invision super far ahead science fiction scenarios and especially people who envision uploading brains and consciousness underestimate the importance of our bodies to who we are as human beings right not just that we're in a body but like hunger thirst exhaustion me horny like these are motivating factors that really affect who we are and what we say and what we do and if you remove all that if you're just a thinking processor in a computer what's your motivation why are you going on write like why are you doing anything at all like I don't think it'll be I don't think it'll be anything like the personality the person who you are if your body is taken away that's the big question about artificial life right or artificial intelligence rather like what

47:07what we have very specific needs that are addressed by our ambitions right biological needs the idea of you know transferring your genes keeping your your bloodline going all that stuff yeah there's all these survival instincts that we have that you'd necessarily wouldn't necessarily have if you were an artificial life-form like why would you care if someone pulled the plug on you why would you try to survive what do you what's your purpose here right exact seems sort of futile if you're there's a lot of talk in AI existential risk community like worrying about artificial intelligence about value alignment like making sure that the AIS value the same things that we do like our existence for example yeah and but I think a little bit at least what I hear and I'm not an expert but right here it seems a little bit off the mark because they're talking about what to program into the AI but if

47:59it's in any sense really an AI it can reprogram itself right like you can change your mind as they can be you can change your values you can change your motivations artificial intelligences should be able to do the same thing and in fact they better be able to do that if they're going to be truly intelligent if they're if we're gonna mimic what a human being can do it can't be something where we program them to just do a task because that's not intelligent right so if that happens there then you know who knows what they're gonna eventually be motivated to do if anything like you said like what is their motivation even to do anything at all even to exist well isn't one of the big concerns is that in releasing artificial technology and giving it autonomy that we're gonna do is like start a process that's some sort of a perpetual exponential domino effect of technology

48:51where this new artificial life is going to create better artificial life which creates better artificial life which expands to godlike powers within a very short period of time and decides where he's stupid and useless and it just eliminates us and then it gets bored and shuts itself off yeah it goes what are we doing here Suns gonna burn out these are hard things to even extrapolate because they're so far beyond our experience but I do think that we're opening up doors that we never had before right between between genetic modifications of human beings artificial intelligence brain computer interfaces we don't have the the experience or the capacity to really even ask the right questions about these things right we're sort of rudimentary we're rudimentary idea of the ideas that we have of like what is necessary a really based on our own biological needs yes if we have

49:48family we want to keep everybody healthy we enjoy our community we want to keep it safe we enjoy our Earth who want to keep it clean we want to we want to save things for the future generations and all these concerns that we have that are very biological yeah they just won't exist for artificial life I think that's exactly right and I think that what we're really good at or what we're better at in terms of imagining the future is taking what already exists and just expanding it right yeah like so when people I think we talked about this in the last podcast but when people first started imagining mechanical devices to carry you around mechanical transportation in the late 1800s they imagined a mechanical horse yes they knew the horses existed right and the car was a totally different thing and people hadn't thought of that originally and then when people did think of cars

50:38they thought of flying cars because they saw they were flying animals right and the flying cars haven't appeared because we we didn't what they should have been thinking about is how would our car is going to change our cities and our commutes and how we live right when people invented the internet that what they weren't sure what they were gonna do with it and I think that the same thing is true and when if we can imagine blending the barrier between our biological existence and some virtual existence wouldn't even know what questions to ask about that yeah and I think we are getting close to those other things you mentioned though Boston Dynamics is getting really close to artificial dogs and artificial horses yeah I mean they have things you can't kick you kick them and they don't get knocked over indoors yes they can jump like incredible distances like

51:25incredible Heights there's there's some amazing ones that do acrobatics now have you seen that when you're gonna replace stuntmen in movies that could potentially get harmed with these robots that can do crazy backflips and jump off buildings and the next big war is going to look very very different than very weird right yeah that's hopefully it won't happen but if it does yeah it's gonna there's a big emphasis on automated things not just drones but physical things that are running around on the ground can make decisions right give it a little bit of AI and then do you watch Dark Mirror I haven't seen any other than make in my queue there's an insane episode on do you remember the name of it the one with linear black beard I say dark man yeah Blackbeard's insane episode on these little robots that are chasing metal face metal head something like that yeah

52:21it's about robots chasing after this lady and it's it literally is these little tiny boss and dynamic robots but they can kill you yeah and they're there on a mission and this is not outside the realm of possibility at all nope it really isn't and like I said it's we don't even know it's easy to extrapolate right ahead to sort of the senses there it is oh yeah that's from the episode it's a fantastic episode too there's so many good episodes of that show black mirror is just amazing yeah I guess they're watching it but dad that's a concern I mean there's there's a real concern I mean we're doing it right now with you know if you talk to people that are really that paid attention studied drone warfare and how incredibly inhumane it is and how different it is from any other type of warfare in terms of its like the ability to rationalize targets when you're not there yeah and you're

53:21you have you're nowhere near and you're just pressing buttons and you decide like well there's a very good possibility this person's in here it nuke the building yeah and we're doing that yes it's absolutely happening but on the other hand the drones are also delivering pizzas are they though these kind of pizza with a drone think so if you looked at the amount of people that have delivered pizzas with drones versus the amount of people that have been killed by drones skilling is bigger well the innocents are the scariest drones are really good at killing innocent people yeah not so good at killing the people that are specific target targets but I think my point is just that there are gonna be pluses in - yes right so I think that it's gonna change like if we if we combine this idea of you know interfacing with computers with this idea of drones doing some drudgery work with this idea of

54:09giving people a basic income everyone is just gonna sit in their rooms and right on their tumblers all day that's gonna be the future I don't think they're gonna be writing any more I think this there's a real possibility that we're gonna create virtual reality that's indistinguishable from regular reality and people are gonna live in there like ready player one well it'll be better that kind of thing I think the the big flaw to me and things like Tron or ready player one is that they make a virtual reality look too much like the real reality there's no reason why virtual reality has to have gravity right there's no reason why it has to be three-dimensional there's no reason why you know any limit on how strong you are or how fast you are any yeah like there's no reason why you have to have only one body I mean there's a million different ways in which it could

54:51be very very well it also could be implemented with something like the tank the float tank that we were talking about earlier I mean you could climb into that float tank with some sort of apparatus hook these gloves on put this helmet over and literally not be subject to the whims of gravity can't even feel it the effects of gravity will be inconsequential because you will feel like you're floating and then from there you'll be able to fly around and do all sorts of yeah I think like this weird period between you know the year 1900 and 2000 or 2100 or whatever it's gonna be it'll be a weird transitional period in human history where we invented technology and not really put it to work yet and there might be some equilibrium that we reach in 100 or 200 years where the whole mode of life is utterly different than what it is now if you could put priorities in terms of like

55:42what you think people should concentrate on first with in regards to this kind of stuff what do you think those would be like if someone said Sean you're a super smart dude let's let's get on the ball here figure out what what direction should we take this in I mean what I do for a living is more like foundational what are the laws of physics kind of things right so I'm not the person to speculate on this well I think this is why I said earlier like a thing we should be talking to each other because nobody is no one person is right like that's why we need to have people from different areas of expertise talk about each other's areas if only then to be corrected right but you know to be open to that dialogue so I think that for example an enormous amount of effort has been put into nanotechnology building tiny little machines I suspect that mostly the real advances

56:33they're not going to be nanotechnology but in synthetic biology where you take bacteria or multicellular organisms that already exists and adapt them for your purposes make them do whatever you want because biology has already solved a lot of the problems that technology is still struggling to figure out so the concept of nanotechnology is you're going to take like almost like a cell sized machine right and many of them gonna go into your body and find areas that are damaged or whatever yeah there's a woman a professor at Caltech who gave a talk a few months ago about he builds robots out of DNA hmm so these little DNA robots can go in and right now they're at the level what they can do is sort things so like if they have molecule one and molecule two scattered across some surface this little DNA robot will go in and move all molecule one to the left

57:21all of molecule due to the right and so she says that's the beginning like in the future you'll have your DNA box and you'll say you know I'm allergic to Tomatoes and then it will invent a little machine that will run through your body and fix your allergy to Tomatoes right you don't need that anymore with a machine with a DNA robot so it's little so why DNA because you think of DNA is carrying the genetic code but DNA is a wonderful molecule because it is relatively stable but it's not just a crystal right it's not just doing the same thing over and over again so it contains information and it can adapt it can it can you know hold on and grab on to certain things and let go and and do things so DNA is a wonderful testing ground for building little really really tiny things in your body that will change who you are well here's a question that's not totally related

58:13but you might be a good person for this what is quantum computing now I keep hearing about this that's one of the big breakthroughs in computers is going to be quantum computing right I'm almost the right guy I'm not completely the regular I actually did teach a course at Cal Tech that involve quantum computing so I'm above average so so quantum mechanics this is the book that I'm writing right now that's gonna be out a year from now called something deeply hidden it'll be about quantum mechanics and the goal of the book will be to make quantum mechanics understandable to everybody and convince them that quantum mechanics really does imply the existence of multiple worlds where things look very much the same except for tiny differences and one way to think about what quantum mechanics says is in classical mechanics which is what came before quantum mechanics let's

59:05imagine you have a bit right that is something is either zero or one right one piece of information in quantum mechanics you have a quantum bit a qubit as they call it very clever so the difference is that instead of it being a zero or a one like it would be classically quantum mechanically it is in some superposition of 0 and 1 and some combination of a little bit zero a little bit one and it's not that you don't know which one it is it's that it really is both it might be 90% 0 and 10% 1 or something like that so take that fact number one okay fact number two is that quantum mechanics says the thing called entanglement which means that if you have two bits classically so you have 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 right 4 different possibilities so quantum mechanics says it's not that this one bit is in a combination of 0 and 1 and this other bit is also in a combination of 0 and 1 it's that the 2

60:01bit system is in a combination of 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 right so it might be that it's 50% 0 0 and 50% 1 1 so you don't know what either bit is but you know they're the same right so that's entanglement so you take these two ideas that you have a combination of zeros and ones rather than just one or the other and the different bits can be entangled with each other and then you just say well what is a computer computer something he takes bits in does manipulations and spits out the answer right you solve problems you that's what's literally going on in your computer is a bunch of zeros and ones being pushed around so a quantum computer is pushing around a bunch of qubits right bunch of spinning particles or something like that the spin of a particle that can either be spinning clockwise or counter clockwise is a qubit and so these particles can interact with each other they can become

60:51entangled and you invent a quantum algorithm right like there's algorithms for you know finding the area of a surface or something like that factoring large numbers you know solving the shortest distance between two different points you can do this using the rules of quantum mechanics instead of the rules of classical mechanics and the belief which is not yet 100% established but we think is true is that there are some problems that are really really hard to solve for a classical computer which means that you can easily make the problem long enough that it would take the lifetime of the universe to solve it on a classical computer which quantum computers can solve quite quickly and efficiently and so it's we're not we haven't proven that it's not mathematically why is this why would they think that quantum computers would be able to solve it quicker

61:38there's more information in the quantum computer like if you have two bits 0 0 0 1 etc there's only four things it can be right if you have a quantum computers an infinite number of things it can be because it's any combination of those four things right ten present this 20% that so there's like a continuum of possibilities it's it's analog rather than digital in some sense and so what you what you can do you know the quantum computer can just sort of take advantage of that extra power to look I mean because of this entanglement what this is this is I'm gonna get in trouble with my quantum computing friends cuz not quite fair but roughly speaking rather than manipulating bit by bit because of the entanglement between the bits the quantum computer can move all the bits a little bit at once so let's say that you're you're searching for something in a list right a very elementary computer

62:31science program is I'm giving you a list find an element that is equal to a certain number right right it sounds easy but if that list is 10 trillion things long that's hard right so what the quantum computer can do is say take every element in the list nudge it a little bit towards zero if it's the wrong answer in towards one if it's the right answer and you don't know where it is in the list but you can do that nudging over and over again at the end of the day look for where's the one it's very easy to find so you can get the answer much quicker it is believed and so things like cryptography privacy right are dramatically changed by this because if one of the things that we think quantum computers should be able to do faster is factor large numbers which is the the the the difficulty in factoring large numbers is the basis for much modern cryptography but also

63:20simulating systems that were just too difficult to simulate you know just just it took too much computer power to do it now maybe we can do it because nature is truly quantum mechanical at the core it turns out to be very hard because the problem is you have all these bits if you touch one of them if the outside world bumps into one of them right like a cosmic ray or atom hits it and the whole entanglement is ruined between everything so it's very very delicate and that's what the you know right now they're they're working on systems of let's say dozens of qubits entangled at once you would you would like it to be way more than that because you can store an enormous amount of information in these things and if it works is I think it'll be way better at computing if it works I'm not at all sure that quantum computers will be efficient or cost-effective or

64:10anything like that in the near term but you know doing computations faster is something a lot of people want to be able to do so right now they're working with dozens of qubits and what's preventing them from expanding that or they doing it slowly sort of make sure that it all works correctly and get a accurate model yeah so the problem is if you had a qubit it can be in a combination of 0 or 1 right any combination whatsoever but as soon as you look at it you never see the combination you see zero or you see 1 that's it and you've ruined you've erased this pre-existing combination right if you see zero now it's in the state 0 Brian C 1 it's in the state 1 so if you have a group of many many qubits what I mean by look at is literally anything else in the world bumping into it so like if like I said if photons hit it if particles you know if molecules of air and oxygen

65:02or nitrogen bump into the qubit that'll count as an observation and it will collapse as we say it collapses the wavefunction and all of your quantum information is ruined so you have to make the most sort of very cold very isolated very shielded from external influences and the more qubits you add the heart of that is to do now is there a proof of concept this yep they have working quantum computers I forget there was a joke Scott Aaronson who's a friend of mine is a genius theoretical computer scientist used to joke that the quantum computers are able to say that the number 15 is equal to 5 times 3 with very high probability that was the state of the art I think they're able to say the 21 equals 3 times 7 with very high probability now but what you would like to say is you know some hundred digit number is the product of two other numbers not able to do that right now

65:53now what are they looking at with this when they're looking in terms of the future this stuff what are the how do they want to implement this lots of different ways actually like you know the actual physical technology that they're using some people are using atoms some people are using sort of features of condensed matter systems like two dimensional systems where like drones are moving slowly and can wind around each other and things like that this is way beyond what I actually know about but also you know this sort of side light of this is that this in existence of entanglement is kind of a shared information between two different things in a way that classical physics just would not allow and that's interesting and exciting because it opens up ways for you know for sharing information that other people can't get to because you have some information

66:44your friend has some information but it's it you need both pieces of it to get to it right Seth Lloyd who's another friend of mine an MIT professor said that he was he tells a story where he was in a hot tub with the Google guys right with Sergey and Larry and you know the heads of Google the founders and he said I came up with this brilliant new idea where we can use quantum mechanics build a quantum computer so that a person who does a search a Google search using this quantum computer they can do a search and they can get their answer but is literally impossible for anyone else to ever know what they searched for and the Google guys were like very excited and they went away the next day they came back and said oh we realized this is the opposite of our business model it's really important to us that we know what is hurt so that's the whole thing with them Google Ads

67:36do Google Adsense and you go to another website it shows you all Shawn's been looking at you know lenovo laptops they follow you around and all your other devices right your cookies creepy but yeah so in quantum in quantum computing is there's quantum money there's quantum cryptography there's quantum eavesdropping things like that so it's just it's it's easy to speculate about I would not say the actual technology is very far advanced right now but I can't tell you how quickly why wouldn't someone like Google just have to adjust because prior to these Google Ads you'd never really knew what someone was interested in unless they took surveys or unless they had purchasing history or there had to be some way that you could now they're just detecting off of searches and that's what their business model isn't mean they can't come up with a better new business model

68:29they'll have to adapt but they are not in the business of making that happen no seriously now it's so effective if they were really smart they would have given sat the hundred thousand dollars and say tell no one about this ever again is that enough yeah we found out with the stormy Daniels case that right hundred thousand dollars doesn't buy a lot of two-thirds of a stormy Daniel night what do you think they'll like what would be the first way they try to use something like this they try to use quantum computing I don't know I think that you know the people who are really interested in now are the NSA and the DoD right national security easy the department defense because secret messages are the right most obvious thing cracking codes and things like that that's like the killer app that we know about right now physicists of course won't use it to simulate quantum mechanical systems to

69:21learn about the behavior of materials like maybe you'll build a better superconductor or something like that right away maybe you'll do better designing of your genetically engineered DNA on the quantum computer right like there's sort of the generic thought that you'll be able to do computations faster that's interesting then there's more specific things like if the system you're trying to simulate is itself quantum mechanical then simulating it on a quantum computer might be the way to go hmm yeah to most people that just we're whoo right over the head what is what are these guys taught this quantum is so weird like one of the things you said earlier you were when you were talking about quantum you were talking about worlds that are very similar but with very small differences right yes so yeah I forget whether we talked about this last time but you know there so

70:08there's this whole version of quantum mechanics we obtain right sure quantum mechanics is weird because among other things it is by far the most successful theory of physics ever invented we've tested it to enormous precision right there's zero evidence the quantum mechanics is in any way not right but we don't understand it we don't we like not just people on the street like professional physicists don't know exactly what quantum mechanics says so how do you practice it well we have a recipe we have a black box right the way that I put it in the book is imagine you have a website you could go to and you would say you know if I threw a ball with certain velocity in a certain direction how far would it go and it would give you the answer right away depending upon is that fair yeah do you put uppal details in it gives you the answer does that count as you knowing

70:53the laws of physics you know no does you have a black box right right well that's what quantum mechanics is right now if we set up an experiment we can say what the probability of every answer is gonna be every outcome but if you say well why what happened we don't know or we don't agree like different people disagree with each other and so this version of quantum there's different versions that try to answer this question what's really going on beneath the surface right what's what's the deep down story of the world and one of these stories is the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and it was invented by a graduate student Hugh Everett in the 1950s who was instantly kicked out of physics yeah oh yeah if there's a long one glorious history of people trying to think deeply about quantum mechanics and being shunned in the community for doing

71:39so because we've set up this weird thing where I mean there's literally a memo that went around the major physics journal the United States said we will not even look at papers to try to think about the foundations of quantum mechanics it's embarrassing it's terrible it's like we need to do like real work like shut up and calculate you know we need to build bombs and things not think about the nature of reality which i think is very much antithetical to what physicists should be doing but anyway so what many world says is well so what we when we do talk about quantum mechanics but let's say we have a qubit we have a spinning particle right we have this combination of spinning clockwise and counter clockwise and so we call that the wave function the wave function is just it's 10% clockwise 20 you know 90% counter clockwise or whatever so to every possible

72:24measurement outcome you give me a number and that number is basically how I figure out the probability of that measurement outcome coming true and that's the wave function so there for a long time people thought well this is just a trick this is just like some it characterizes our inability to be precise right we have a probability of this a probability of that but some day they hoped Einstein for example had this hope that we'll have a better theory and we'll know exactly how to predict everything with perfect precision so whatever it's says no notes the other way around this wavefunction is reality that's the whole world right that's what reality is it is a superposition the combination of all the different possible outcomes it's not any one outcome there's no such thing as where the electron is it's all spread out and the problem with that is that

73:14when you look at the electron spinning you never see it as a combination of spinning clockwise and counter clockwise you always see one or the other and everett says that's because you have a wavefunction you live as a superposition of different possibilities and when you look at the electron what happens is before there was you and there's an electron and a combination of counterclockwise and clockwise afterward there is the electron was spinning clockwise and you saw it spinning clockwise plus that's ten percent then ninety percent the electron was spinning counterclockwise and you saw it spinning counterclockwise and both possibilities are real but they're separate they branched off from each other they've gone their own ways they're separate versions of the world separate copies of reality that's why it's called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum

74:02mechanics possibilities is always a big feature that's the thing that people are constantly discussing right yeah what are the possibilities predicting the possibilities and when it comes to human beings this is also randomly discussed because we we we talk about determinism versus freewill mm-hmm we talk about what are the what what's created what are the possibilities that is created as Sean Carroll and why why do you think the way you think and why are you gonna say the next thing you're gonna say and is it how much of it is biological how much of it is your life experience how much of it is information that's dancing in your head how much of is you interacting with me the last thing that I've said to you yeah so I had I was on the same Harris's podcast be a long conversation about this because he is very anti freewill and I think that it's I disagree with him but I don't care I

74:52think I think to be honest is easy it's boring really I think it's boring because here's why I think it's boring because there's two questions one question is how does the world work and the other question is what words should be attached to how the world works and the first one is interesting the second one is kind of boring I said then when I agree on how the world works right but I am what philosophers call a compatibilist when it comes to free will which which is I don't think that I have some ways of thinking my way into overcoming the laws of physics right like I'm made of atoms made of particles that obey the laws of physics if I talk about myself as a large collection of atoms and particles obeying the laws of physics then clearly there's no free will there's just the solution to the equations and sometimes the wavefunction branches and there's now two of me but

75:41that's whatever it is there's no spark of consciousness that lets me overcome what the equation says gonna happen but guess what that's not a fruitful way to go through your life in terms from talking about human beings when you meet somebody for the first time and you say like you know what do you do who are you they don't give you a list of their atoms and say what every atom is doing and say let you let go ahead and solve furniture's equation to figure out what's gonna happen next right you tell a story you say like you're a person you know you grew up in a certain place you have a certain job stuff like that you dramatically condense the information about who you are into a few salient points and among those salient points are I am a person who thinks and makes decisions every person in the world no matter how anti freewill they are talks about people as if they make decisions

76:28and the reason they do is because that's how people are that's the best way to talk about people it's not like just a compromise like if if you don't know the atoms and molecules in somebody's body and you're not infinitely computationally powerful so you can predict the future then it's correct to talk about people as agents who make decisions we call that free will I call that free will most philosophers call it free will if you don't want to call it free will be my guest I don't really know it doesn't really matter I agree with what you're saying I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that really simplifies a very complex issue i when I looked at it and I have had this conversation with Sam as well I totally see his point and I think he makes a hundred percent sense it says there's no arguing with it I really think it's it's very rash and all that approach but I also think that

77:16it's very much like what we're talking about earlier that it's not necessarily just a one or a zero that it's a combination of these things free will there has to mechanism that chooses to do one thing versus another there is some computation there's calculation there's debate there's discussion there's a thing inside of you whatever it is whatever that process is that's causing you to I mean how many times if people stayed up all night going over and over and over a certain idea trying to find a rational conclusion oh yeah all the time what is that right what is that is that this will is that is yeah this is where the it actually becomes interesting to talk about the vocabulary we use right yes because it becomes very very hard to know where to attach the word I or you when you're talking about this like you you tend to say I made a decision okay that's fine right I decided to have this

78:14can of pure caffeine that you put in front of me and drink it I could have decided otherwise so that that's the question like does it make sense to say I could have decided otherwise and if you define yourself as the following list of atoms and particles in a certain configuration then no then the laws of physics said that that was gonna happen but I don't know what all that is that's not a useful way of talking so there's a whole nother way of talking that says I'm a person and I kind of like coffee but I already had a cup this morning and no there's a chance there's a probability like you say that I would drink this and a probability that I would not and those are completely compatible you know they're different the only way you get into trouble is if you mix up those two different ways of talking if you say like I chose to have the coffee because my atoms were in a

79:02following configuration or something like that right that's like talking about us as humans and then switching vocabularies talking about us as atoms and that's where you get in trouble yeah it's a weird reductionist take on what it means to be a person that thinks yeah yeah I think you know if if you say like there's no free will in your atoms then I'm with you I'm on board but no one in the world goes through life that way right for good reason and they never will it's not gonna happen yeah well he and you could break that all the way down to creativity right like what when someone sits down right something like where's all that coming from yes I think again there's room as well there is an interesting question about you know how much we will ultimately be able to unpack and understand about that right right now the brain is kind of just a mystery box

79:46to us and there's so much we don't know about what how people make decisions how they remember things how they come up with new ideas so so where it matters is how we treat people right like the obvious case is responsibility blame like if if you think that a person makes choices then you can assign responsibility to them for making the choices they made yes that's what we do in the world if someone chooses to rob a bank we choose to put them in jail right yes and someone someone could come along and say no one ever does this but someone could come along and say well they're just a bunch of Adams baying laws of physics how can you blame them right that would be dopey that doesn't make any sense right but what if you were Minority Report right what if you could like put someone in an MRI in a brain scanner and say yeah you know what tomorrow they're gonna rob a bank do you

80:38arrest them is that is that enough right the fact that their brain was hooked up to to violate the law in the future is that enough to assign personal responsibility to them for that or do you or do you do the opposite and say well it's gonna happen no matter what we can't really blame them well and also if you do catch this thought process is before the actual action takes place isn't it possible to correct that thought process with education or some sort of awareness training or something where you could shift the consciousness and abruptly sort of disassemble determinism at its most problematic point yeah so there's there's a whole kind of interesting set of ideas that are very popular among philosophers right now which is the question of moral luck ooh so if you're driving down the street and you're buzzed you're drunk right maybe you get home fine maybe someone jumps in

81:37front of your car and you run them over because you don't have the agility or the reflexes because you're drunk right so you're the same person you went home you're drunk and you're driving home right but depending on the outside world you ran someone over and killed them where you didn't but in the world we blame the person who ran somebody over we punished them much more severely than the person who got home safely right that's not their responsibility they sort of got unlucky there in the world so should we blame people who you know have the chance of doing it no one knows the answer to these questions either these are tricky things like we're not very good with human beings at the thinking about these probabilistic counterfactual questions yeah that's a good one that is yeah mm-hmm yeah what who are you then yeah are you lucky oh yeah right I mean so

82:27much of what happens to us in life we don't get responsibility for sure I mean we're interfacing with randomness every time we step out the door that's right but can you treat people that way consistently it's hard it's tricky I'm not giving the answer because I don't know I'm right yeah this is this is tricky stuff we're certainly not like if you lived in a world where you thought that what happened in the world was preordained that there was all the great playing out as a master plan or at the very least that there was some sort of karmic influence that made good things happen to good people bad things happen to bad people then the world makes more sense right yeah I don't believe any of that stuff but at least then the world seems if if there's something random you can attach a reason why it happens there seems to be something to karma in that when you do good things you make people

83:18feel better they feel about you better and then they interface with you in a more positive way and that sort of like has this outgoing effect that's not karma that's just a smart thing to do yeah I think no I think that you're right that we and maybe this is just sort of a Western post-enlightenment way of thinking we tend to sort of think about immediate consequences for our actions for better for worse and in the real world sort of generally trying to be good can often payback in good ways as but the calm the woowoo thing is that we're putting out this good energy and the good energy is coming back to us and it's a fun way to look at things yeah although there's no evidence it points to it yeah exactly like if I'm in a yoga class and my yoga instructor is talking about different energy flowing through different chakras or whatever I don't care like as long as it makes me you

84:10know do that I'm not gonna speak up let's put it that way stop this class I would rather have that then you know you know if people want to come up with excuse to be a good person that's okay it's funny that yoga class is always the base it's always where people go to talk about like where woo comes from yeah yeah it's it's there because I've had you know you I mean if you've done yoga you know like there's a whole spectrum right like there's teachers who are basically just physical therapists and there are people who are complete crazy hippies oh yeah you know you have to think the right thoughts you know yeah it's but people are always searching for some understanding of really complex issues and behavior it's a very complex issue sure behavior and how you feel like like whether you feel good please whether you feel spiritually enriched whether you feel positive about

85:09humanity so all these things are like which was trying to manipulate these states whether it's through meditation mindfulness training trying to figure out a way to positively on your face you know it's true and it goes back to where we started talking about YouTube comments because like I said I do react badly to bed to stupid YouTube well you're a human being I'm well I'm a human being but I think and I think that the Internet does magnify some of our bad tendencies right and I think that you know among these and so I I totally include myself as a bad actor here in the sense that it's just so easy to be sarcastic and put people down and yes you know disagree in sort of dismissive ways and I don't think that's good I would like to live in a world where people including myself even when we disagree with people even when we disagree with people who are stupid and

86:02we're not trying to engage them or improve their lives just you know get on with our own lives rather than trying to have a snarky comeback like I get that there's a purpose to snore sarcasm and whatever but it weighs you down rightly this is why people complain about Twitter and social media like it's so much like psychic energy just gets zapped by reading all these complaints on either side there's no political bias right like whatever your feelings are someone else is making you feel down on the internet somewhere and it does weigh on you there's also this weird impulse that people have with whether it's social like whether it's Twitter or YouTube comments this is reductionist take on things to reduce a person down to maybe one statement or misinterpretation of one position and then have that person be dismissed yeah and I think contain II ously yeah

86:57and it's tough play I have her thinking about a little bit I think that it was a bad decision that James Gunn got fired for example I know if you follow that yes well those were really bad tweets oh yeah they just weren't funny and he wrote a bunch of them and there were a lot a lot of it a lot of it about pedophilia so I totally get it I'm not shocked but he got in trouble that way but I also think that his response was immediate and correct and grown-up he said he didn't say like oh I was young it was a different time he said like oh yeah I did that it was shitty and it was wrong and I take responsibility and I do think we gotta let people grow right like that's what most people in this sort of post me to era have not done when they've been accused of these things they haven't taken responsibility they've made excuses and I think that on Twitter especially you know I love Twitter I

87:49think it's my favorite social medium but it is too easy to be reductive it's too easy to be simplistic and and to respond and you know wonder one of the things that annoys me the most about Twitter is when someone tries to be good and then 20 other people say well you're not being good and precisely the right way I even though I failed live up to it myself I'm trying to be better I want to be charitable when I deal with other people I I got in trouble on Twitter the other day for defending Kellyanne Conway a little bit what did she do well years ago she did the arts alternative facts thing remember when she said when they talk about the inauguration right crowd and people point out like no that's just factually incorrect and she says well there are alternative facts so like I don't want to defend Kellyanne Conway I'm not a defender of her in general but I think that she just

88:39misspoke that one time I think that what she was trying to say was there are additional facts that we could also look at right and of course is in a bigger context where she lies all the time and she you know lets other people she is an apologist for other Liars but I you know I think that the idea that the these people who I disagree with politically are so divorced from reality that they think they can just make up their own reality no one actually thinks that way like the people who you know the people who disagree with me about politics or religion or whatever it's comforting for me to think that they are you know just cheerfully making up facts and reality by themselves they don't think of themselves that way they think that they're being truthful they think they're being rational and correct and so I should at least grant them that that's what they think in their own

89:30right well I'm gonna disagree with you okay on that because I don't think that first of all I don't think that she's granted any sort of autonomous decision-making capabilities and I thought this is probably something that was sat down that they sat down with a team of experts or you know air-quote experts team of people that were in that you know that you know room whether it's press people or spin doctors where they're trying to figure out a best way to get out of this and one of the best ways was this concept of alternative facts very similar to the one of the ways where Trump was in that meeting with Putin at very famous awful meeting that happened recently where he said I don't see any reason why it would be Russia that's interfering and then he said afterwards obviously I misspoke I thought it was clear what I meant to say I didn't see any reason why it wouldn't

90:27be right shouldn't say but it's clear if you watch him say it yeah that's what it's not what he sounds entirely entirely dangerous but I think scary in my opinion yeah said it's such a lie right and such a way in in context the ways expressing himself it's clearly he's dismissing it like why would it be why would it be Russia he's not saying why wouldn't it be Russia because he's standing right next to Putin and he would be saying that in a much more measured and he would be it would be accusing yeah that was clearly a case where he did something really bad and he came home and all of his advisors said like no we have to fix this look right they came up with a really clumsy you know incredibly that's all they had that's all they had right because I'm so blatant right alternative facts is also all they don't I don't well I you might be right actually you know what I didn't

91:23really study it very carefully I think that it was just a spontaneous blurting out hmm he might be right too because here's why I think that that's probably right because I don't think I was trying to say before I don't think that's their self conception like people often think that the people who they disagree with think false things that's very natural but they also also like uncharitably say they know they're thinking false things and they're you know they're they're happily making up their own version of reality and I think that's very rare I think that happens like if it you're just a conman or whatever but I think that more often than we want to admit people are sincere in their very false beliefs right so I so I just find it implausible that I mean Kellyanne come again lies all the time that that is not my defensive hurt my defense of her is it was just that she would not go out

92:15there and say oh yes but we're making up new facts that's just not the kind of thing samoans but she didn't say it that way she said there are alternate art there are alternative facts now you got to think that he's playing to the dumbest people in the room all the time and fortunately for him that's a big number yeah and there's a recent thing where he was defending his behavior saying that anyone can act presidential and he stood on stage and he did this sort of like robotic boring walk back and forth and then started talking in a boring way and mocking it and what's interesting about the video is not just him doing this which is very silly game but it's also the people behind him thinking it's hilarious these these did not see this yeah see if we could find it there's a video of him saying that he anyone can act presidential this is very very recently and a lot of people were

93:17watching this going what but he also thinks you need ID to buy groceries yeah there's a lot of that there's well he also thinks that stealth bombers are invisible yeah you're right behind it you can look at it you follow a Kellyanne Conway's husband on Twitter no no he is George Conway he's a lawyer and he's like like very vocally anti-trump it's hilarious he's constantly subtweeting and like you know funny from yeah oh that's interesting but what's this is what gets me go fullscreen in this go you can't what's interesting is these dummies behind him yeah like while this is happening one of the interesting things about this to me is that his back is to all these people which is very odd right so they're all behind him instead of having a static backdrop you're getting to part of the thing is the other people it's not just him it's their reactions yeah it's it's a sense

94:27of belonging to a weird group yeah and everyone has that like leftists and rightists and whatever all have this weird belonging but when it's again it goes back to the China thing right well we have FoxNews we have a way of giving people information that if you fall I follow Fox News on Twitter because I want to see what they're telling people Yeah right it's it's a weird thing cause it's not like it's all lies right there's there's often lies they're there but it's like a very different mixture of things than you would get from the rest of the media and a lot of it is it's very clear if you if you follow fox news like they're they're targeting an older white rural suburban audience right so there's a lot of like weird human interest stories about an alligator popping out of the sewer and things like that like things that are not there's no political agenda but

95:16they're just trying to get those old white people to pay attention yeah well they're sending a message that the world is kind of scary and weird and you know we need to protect ourselves there's an alligator on the golf course it really yeah like they love those stories right the alligator the golf course is my favorite it's just local news yeah it's the ten o'clock local news but you know nationwide and edit in there with some cheerleading for this bizarrely dysfunctional administration well isn't Sean Hannity now the number one watch cable news program it's something like that yeah I don't know that I think it's number one and it's awful they just they just there was just a poll this goes back to the you know social credit thing they did a poll what is the most trusted news source and Fox News came in number two what's number one BBC that makes sense well CNN has just taken a giant hit

96:09because his constant constant berating of them and then you see Jim Acosta you know the whole these all these pro wrestling fans like giving them the finger and screaming at them and yeah and it's why I I do worry that this is a hard thing to come back from because you know once you you know like one another thing that Trump said was that you know don't believe anything you're told right unless you hear it from me and he says the same thing no I was sorry Tucker Carlson said the same thing right did he say that to Tucker Carlson said like yeah any other show than this one don't believe it yeah look at this the media he has on women for Trump yeah it's just wow and then after listening to this radio lab podcast about these Russian troll farms and about how they implement these things you got to think is all of this organic as how many of how much of this is

97:04orchestrated how much of this attacking CNN is orchestrated it's part of it is part of it is it's just it builds on itself why you need is just a little bit of a push talking to someone who is who is you know boasting about how hard Donald Trump works that like compared to previous presidents he's really just putting in the hours oh you could think of it he wakes up late he watches TV every day he's like spends all the time at its own resorts like of all the fantasies you could invent that's a very weird one well people just love to find narratives that fit what what would be you know acceptable for their opinions so this decide that they've taken exactly right yeah and so he's you know he give him credit he gives people a narrative that works for them well CNN does it too cuz CNN they spent so little time going over Donna Brazil's book about how the DNC had been corrupted and

98:02about how they had rigged the primaries for Hillary and really screwed Bernie Sanders over this was not a narrative that they dwelled on they didn't dwell on the fact that she illegally deleted thirty plus thousand emails and said they're about yoga classes yeah just as preposterous it's just as it's just as damning against CNN as some of the nonsense that Fox News does there's no one pure organization of news that's wholly object it's not just as damning I would I think that Fox News is special especially damning I think it's Fox I mean Fox News was founded by a guy who was a political operative for the Republican Party right like there might like individual reporters for most news organizations tend to be liberal but they also sometimes tend to overcorrect for that like to try to bend over backwards to be fair like way more Republicans or quoted in new york times

98:54and democrats ever are and i think that there are certainly biases and certainly misrepresentations of reality from all these different outlets but I think Fox News is special among the major ones I would concede that and but I also think that one example like the New York Times is different because the New York Times I feel like because of the fact that it's actually writers and it's in text you're you're not dealing with people that have to be comfortable performing in front of a camera which eliminates a large swath of intellectuals right it's a very different medium it's definitely they fact jack and it's carnival corrections yeah in a way that the TV does not yeah it's theater it's a different thing and people like Sean Hannity that if you read his written word I don't think he would stand out no and I and again I like I was before it I worry about what

99:49happens next cuz I don't think the Trump will win again I think you will all right I I don't thinks entirely possible he'll win again yeah I would be but again I didn't think he was gonna win the first no I did not so she's gonna say don't listen to me like before Donald Trump I was really good at predicting who's gonna win elections and I have no ability once he's in the in the game so but I worry that the people who sort of are on his side are gonna feel even more disenfranchised and disenchanted and angry after he loses again than they do now and that's that's gonna be a problem I think that's a real fear and I think that the one of the reasons why I said it's entirely possible and I don't know if he will win again but I don't even know if I believe he'll win again but I think it's a possibility and I think that one of the reasons why I think that is I don't see

100:33what who's the the big candidate on the other side that's opposing him that stands out right now yeah that's a problem I think there's a real issue with people not wanting the job it's a really scary job you know I mean it it sucks you drive like a vampire that's hooked up to the back your neck it's just so even with him with his unique ability to sociopathically sort of navigate the waters of accusations and guilt he still looks beaten down by this job yeah but people want it maybe not the people we want to want it right who wants it on the Democrat side who wants it on the Left that stands out I mean I think I'm not excited by any of the people right now but no one is I said there's gonna be ten people running at least I mean I think the Biden is at least 50% chance to run Elizabeth Warren's definitely gonna run do you think reasonable warned though she's got

101:29that real problem with the whole Pocahontas thing well that whole Indian thing gonna run that nari gonna win right but that that is a giant problem the thing that she may have faked whether or not she has Native American heritage and she's not one take a DNA test and that's this Native American heritage she claimed is how she got into Harvard and she she used that in order to get special status and that's a problem you know whether or not you should forgive someone for something they did a long long time ago which I think you probably should so the problem is it's sort of in some ways negates a lot of the good work and things that she said because people say I can't trust her she lied about her actual ethnicity yeah it's but what is hard for me to do is to predict how much it will matter right like in 2008 we had a race between Vietnam war hero and a black guy whose

102:25middle name was Hussein who told me that a few years earlier who's gonna win we also had Sarah Palin exactly this is what we don't know had taken a better running mate it's entirely possible McCain would have been president I think that people were really tired of George w and I think that McCain was not a good candidate I think he's gonna lose no matter well I think also Obama was so charismatic and so uniquely intelligent and smooth and relaxed and statesman like I think he fit the bill I remember worried about like he went to Jeremiah Wright's church and things like that Wright didn't like at the time it was a big deal and you know who cares eight years later so I don't know about the Pocahontas stuff that's now that's a big one though the Pocahontas stuff is a big one because it's a personal lie I don't know but again I mean I think Cory Booker's gonna run Camelot Harris might run

103:20who knows there's a bunch of people I would not be at all surprised that Joe Biden didn't run and I kind of don't think that he should but he's getting up there and he's a Washington insider which is not really what the country wants right in 1988 in Boston we used to have Joe Biden night at the comedy clubs and Joe Biden night was a night where we would do other people's material because this is when Joe Biden I got busted yeah with Kennedy speeches yeah well an Neil Kinnock the British politician yeah and this was when he was running for president in 88 right and so we've never done very well running for president like he's won several time it's so I'm I think that he was a good vice-president and people like him for that and they might not want him to do more than fine sir president is a great job she want no one to pay attention to you yeah exactly it's like being the the

104:10you know the the co-star and a buddy cop movie with a huge super responsibilities go to some funerals yeah yeah right easy yeah unless you're my fence where you're trying to you know make it The Handmaid's Tale behind the scenes he seems like he's kind of laying back though like it's especially over the last few months like that Trump is so insane that you see very little Mike I don't think you see very little of him but I think that he's trying his best to put in policies behind the scenes well what is this new thing that Jeff Sessions is trying to push religious freedom yes which means you have to obey whatever the fundamentalist Christians want to do yeah well this is what you know Michael Mouse was tweeting about this the other day when he tweeted this he said when I said that a version of Sharia law could very well be coming out of this administration this is what I'm talking

105:01about yeah yeah it's a it's a weird backward thing where you define religious freedom to be let fundamentalist Christians do whatever they want right yeah and do it by law yeah yeah I mean it's it's tricky because yeah I don't know I mean if someone once part of me is a little bit libertarian know when it comes to personal action like if someone doesn't want to deal with you that's their right but when whole groups are being subject systematically to discrimination like gays are then the government steps in to protect them a little bit and I think that's okay and a lot of this is you know doctors don't want to do abortions or you know health care providers or insurance providers don't want to pay for things because of their religious beliefs or Catholic universities don't want to do certain things and I think that these are legitimate questions we're not really having a grown up

105:53intellectual conversation about them we're just throwing feces at each other you know in this particular arena well it's also strange when someone comes up with some sort of a new idea like that that goes against the separation of church and state and it's being promoted by a guy who's openly religious and says about a bunch of really preposterous things and you know generally someone who's not a very trustworthy source of well electoral discourse that's right and there's this there's this fascinating question about why white def angelical czar Trump's biggest support group right yeah like huge fact despite the fact that he is not religious himself that he's the biggest sinner ever to be in the Oval Office but they love him and yeah it's a weird thing and I think a lot of it comes well so there's there's sort of the strategic questions a lot of it comes down to abortion right they want

106:49Supreme Court justices will overturn roe v-- wade and whoever however they're gonna get that is good for them but then there's a whole much more elaborate apologetics about how God is using Donald Trump as his instrument to you know make the country better even if he himself is a flawed vessel sometimes God works through flawed vessels well if you position yourself as an ally even if you have previously sinned the beautiful thing about Christianity is all you have to do is say that's not me anymore I found Jesus and I saw a pastor on television going on about that and about you when you're talking about Trump you're talking about the Trump before he found Jesus and he's like I don't have a past and he was like I am born again I do not have a pass do you and he was going on about this whole thing about this concept of Trump is now an agent of God but I don't necessarily

107:45even think it's Christianity I think that religion can be infinitely malleable to the purposes of the moment right he wouldn't have said that about Obama or whoever right you know you pick and choose when you apply your criteria like I I did this once as an exercise for myself there's certain phrases in the Bible or certain passages in the Bible which are sort of unapologetically left-wing and socialist right just like there are others that are unapologetically right-wing and authoritarian it's a big book full of different things right so I wondered like how what do they tell themselves you know what are the people who don't follow on that side of the spectrum tell themselves about these passages in the Bible so there's one faint very famous passage about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the

108:32kingdom of heaven right right clearly I think that anyone who reads this says this is an anti rich person statement beside like you can google it like so what do people say about this so my favorite explanation was that sure it's impossible for camels to pass through the eyes of a needle except if Jesus helps them or if you grind the camel down they interpret this jesus said that only through Jesus do we get into heaven that's really the only lesson they get okay so that's all you have to do is find Jesus and if you're rich you're good well this is why your own you're this is why I can't even though I'm an atheist I'm I'm very happy to explain why I don't think that God exists but I don't blame religion most of the time for people's bad actions because I think that religion is just sort of a catalyst it lets people find excuses for their bad actions but it's

109:28usually the bad actions the desire to do bad actions that comes first most of the time do you ever look at religion as a potential almost evolutionary software program that's allowed people to sort of adopt morality and impose certain standards of behavior that are conducive to civilization so people talk about that and again I'm not an expert there I little skeptical because it sounds like too much of a patent story to tell after the fact right I think that we are a little bit quick to attribute ideas and cultural concepts to evolution but certainly you know religion was not like just science done badly back in the day right like what religion was was something much more expansive entered to enter leafed with your life overall so it was not just how the world was created and and whether God exists it was how to be a good person how to live in your community things like that and

110:26you know disentangling these things is one of the reasons why religion is still hanging around right like even after the kind of underpinnings of the religion in terms of understanding how the world works have removed by science the other functions are still there and I I'm a big you know critic of my fellow natural ists who have not put enough effort into replacing the other functions of religion now that the claims about the world are no longer viable mmm that's great way to present it yeah and it's it's really a problem when there's so many versions yeah so I mean one of the many many reasons why I think that it's not really credible to be religious intellectually is because if in the classic traditional Western religious sense where there's a God and he cares about us right so there's all sorts of questions about where we define the boundary of religion

111:23whether Buddhism is a religion or something like that but in the usual sense that we read that we grew up with in this country surely if that were true God would have done a much better job of explaining himself to us right look why would God give us his message through a bunch of people in a tiny country who didn't write you know like the New Testament wasn't written down until decades after the event none of the people who wrote it down we're eyewitnesses why is it only shared there I mean God it's God is God right like he could easily shut up everybody in the world talk to them explain how things were going and let them make their own choices yeah that would have been a much more efficient way of getting the message out and so it's just not really sensible to think that so if God didn't exist then what you would imagine is that in different countries in different parts

112:11of the world and different periods in history people would tell their own stories and they'd all be a little bit different maybe adapt to their local circumstances and they'd be utterly incompatible with each other and that's exactly what do you find do you speculate as to what the origins of the concept of God are since so many different groups of people all over the world have a very similar idea at least that there's some omnipotent super power that's controlling the destiny of everything yeah so number one I think that the idea of omnipotence was actually somewhat late coming onto the scene right like if you dig into what was happening before 2,000 years ago you know the Hebrew God it was not omnipotent at the beginning right I mean the Hebrews came out of a polytheistic society where there were lots of different gods around and you can trace how their God evolved over

113:03time and first you know became their God right like this was one god that the Hebrews were you know worshipping and the Egyptians and the Babylonians worship other gods then they started saying well our God is better than all the other ones and then they started saying well the other ones don't even exist right it was an evolution over time and omnipotence came late like you would talk about the gods quarreling if you were a polytheistic a pagan culture it actually makes more like a lot of the world makes more sense if you believe there's a whole bunch of gods out there who disagree with each other right suddenly lots of aspects of realities you know come into focus but the idea there's supernatural very powerful influences in the world I mean that's just an obvious idea I think like we're human beings we tend to as our first guess in understanding the world

113:51treat the world is you know humanists like we're we're we're anthropomorphic like if something exists it must been designed there must be a reason there must be a purpose things work in a certain way cuz someone made them that way and that we don't see that person hanging around so it must be you know up there in the sky or something like I don't think it's that hard to imagine that all sorts of different cultures would evolve do you think it's also a function of us growing up with mentors and father figures and leaders and chieftains and there's always someone who is the big the Big Kahuna so this is the sky daddy yeah sky daddy overlooks the big picture I think there's that and also the idea of your ancestors and ancestor worship or veneration right which is also very almost universal you know in in primitive cultures like you don't wanna admit you died right that's that's a sad

114:43thing to sit through so I don't know I'm sure there are real experts who know a lot about the actual origins of these things but it but my point is just that I don't take the commonalities between different sets of religious beliefs as evidence for anything other than there's a very human thing to invent people search for meaning and they take meaning from the what are whatever religion or ideology that they subscribe to and they use it as sort of a reason why they're living it gives them hope it gives them gives them something yeah it's a very common theme among religious thinkers that if it weren't for the existence of God or whatever there'd be no reason to live there be no reason to be a good person and so forth and you know I think it's it goes back to the motivation we have as having bodies versus being in a computer like there's plenty of reasons

115:39to do different things like in the big picture in my last book I talked a lot about you know we it's okay to admit that we as human beings have desires there are things we care about that we want to be true and you can talk about why that's true from evolution from biology or whatever but it doesn't matter why in some sense we have goals we're not completely aimless like we want to survive we want to flourish we want to be friends with people we want to have families whatever it is we want to do all that we put together in terms of morality and ethics and meaning and purpose comes out of thinking hard and carefully hopefully about how to systematize and grow those existing desires that we have into a way of living in the world we don't need anything external to make that happen we just need to sort of think about where we are already and try to make it better

116:32but you as an intelligent person who is also an atheist who thinks very deeply about things what do you cling to as a purpose for life do you have one do you have like when you sit and think like what's the point of all this do you do you I don't have a single one I don't have a monolithic purpose I have plenty of intermediate-sized purposes right otherwise you know why continue living I think that there's plenty of things I want to do to achieve to experience to share to give to the world right that's a big feature right they give to the world that you are your inner the way you interact with other human beings and your effect on other human beings gives you gives you purpose yeah and even if I think that when I die I will no longer exist and my feelings won't matter I have feelings right now about what the world would be like even after I'm not here anymore right so I can

117:29still be motivated to make the world a better place in ways that will outlive me even if I think that when I die it's really the end for me hmm and do you get down sometimes do you ever do you get like these periods of like you like what is the purpose of all this especially if you see some ridiculous thing in the news or some horrific tragedy and I'm pretty I mean so for horrific tragedies no you know I'm just you know fortunate enough to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to that stuff I don't have I don't struggle with depression or despair or existential anxiety or anything like that when I was a kid when I was you know first starting to think about the universe and and science and things like that I would start wondering about well what if the universe hadn't existed at all what if I weren't wasn't here then that maybe lose sleep that night and I

118:26think like many people there was a very definite moment when I realized that I and everyone I knew would die right and that so I woke up crying and my mom had to you know comfort me because like I was like you know grandma was gonna die and you're gonna die I'm gonna die and you know yeah but you know as it grown up no I think that uh you know I'm more or less so one again one of the future podcast guests that I'll be next week's podcast will be by a woman who's part of the death positive movement have you heard about this yeah this is real stuff so don't distinguish don't don't confuse it there is a whole movement like an anti needleless move or something like that forget what they call themselves but it's a whole movement that once human beings not to exist that's crazy yeah but there are people who like that the death positive movement is the following like we're gonna die we should

119:20face up to it we should accept it and we should deal with it in a personally and culturally positive way so for example right now especially in the United States even compared to Europe or other countries we're terrible at dealing with death we put people in hospitals we take them away from their families away from their homes we refuse to admit that they're gonna die so we treat it as if the whole purpose of the game is to squeeze out as many more hours of life as possible no matter what the quality of that life is and all that it's just rubbish and we should be much more grown-up about it we should plan ahead you know when Obama suggested that in the health care system there should be you know some planning for what happens when you die Sarah Palin came along with death panels that was a very effective rhetorical strategy we don't want to think about the fact that we're

120:14gonna die we don't want to plan for it if we did plan for it it could be better we could die at home we could die with less pain we might not live as long so we don't like do every single medical intervention possible just to squeeze out a few more breaths but it could be a much more life-affirming experience to die because the people around us who are there come across with an acceptance of what's going on rather than the feeling that we should just do everything we can to prevent it I had a similar situation happen recently with a dog of mine who's a mastiff reached 13 years old and from Mastiffs that's very old and we had to put him down because he couldn't walk anymore and he was it was brutally painful to watch him try to get up and I fall down and you know but one of the things I was thinking was that if this is my grandfather and not my dog I would

121:14have to watch him suffer until the bitter end yeah I knew this dog wasn't going to go backwards in time and become a puppy again right and knew his days were numbered he couldn't do anything most days he just slept all day until it was time to eat but it was getting to the point where I had to carry him to his food yeah and I knew that it was there's no quality of life right no quality of life in some sense is even harder with the dog because you can't talk to them right you can't explain to them what's going on they can't explain to you what their wishes so you have to be the responsible one but yeah so everything legally and culturally in the United States is we're not allowed to relieve that pain or that that despair that you have in the end of your life some states including California are passing Death with Dignity laws where basically it's what

122:01used to be called assisted suicide but we don't call it that anymore you a doctor is allowed to give you the means to end your own life when you're when you're near you have to be near a point of no return but still clearly thinking enough to be able to make that decision for yourself and there's also an issue with our real concern is their fear and their this this experience being this terrifying sort of step into the great beyond and there's a tool to mitigate that and the tool that has been shown to mitigate that as psychedelics one of the big ones being psilocybin psilocybin has a remarkable effect on people that are going through stage four cancer and Johns Hopkins has studied it there's there's there's quite a few studies that have shown that people when you give them psilocybin they they're much more relaxed and much more comfortable with this idea of ending this life of this

123:06life you know it's gone through its course and yet it's it's an inevitable thing and it's really our biological limitations that are terrified and and and it's sparking up all these intense primal fears of the end yeah I'm actually 100% in agreement there my wife Jennifer will let - as a science writer wrote a book called me myself and why searching for the science of self and one of our friends said oh if you're gonna write a book about the self you gotta do LSD and so we did and she researched it and it's a fascinating history right and Aldous Huxley I don't know if you know this story and he took LSD to do exactly this he had throat cancer and it completely helped yeah it's never fun to die right but it absolutely helped ease that journey in a very simple way but just as we are a sort of immature society that doesn't want to face up to the reality of our eventual deaths we're

124:05also very culturally conservative and squeamish about drugs right and so we don't even let people do research on some of these drugs and so I think that yeah we have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to not just living a good life but also having a good death and also paying attention to actual scientists who study these compounds and really understand what the effects of them are and and have researched them deeply and have personal experiences with them and they're saying well these these things have been demonized yeah and there are tools that we can use to sort of mitigate a lot of the real issues that we have whether it's culturally or personally with these transitionary times like death is inevitable so now that we know it's inevitable you tell me what the main problem would be with someone taking psilocybin before they die and letting them ease their way through this but you

124:57know it's the same reaction that doesn't want people to have a basic income right there is a sort of moral feeling that you're weak you don't struggle against death everything and it's silly right yeah very very common yeah it's so weird that that that the the universal basic income topic is one of those knee-jerk reaction or topics that I myself my friend Eddie Wong introduced it to me for the first time and I my initial knee-jerk reaction was ah you can't do that to people human nature people are gonna get lazy yeah and then the more I thought about it I was like well if you just cover their food and their round house are they really gonna get is it really gonna kill their ambition like why would that kill it is our own amp is our ambition uniquely tied to just survival that doesn't make any sense well and it's a weird it's the same weird thing that people use against you

125:52know having a progressive tax system like if we have if we tax people's money they won't want to work anymore right but you know if you know you still want more money like we don't some so much that you have less money the hard work that's not how it works and I think like what so but but also for the for the universal basic income stuff I think people have to reconcile selves so what if someone wants to just sit around and play video games all day Brian is that the worst thing in the world like I mean I think for that there will be people like that there will still be other people who want to write poetry and build sailboats and you know build spacecraft etc or build artificial intelligence and you wouldn't what if everyone you know could do whatever they want when they were kids when they're 10 years old they were alert they were taught a good programming language and

126:35could you know make up whatever apps and programs they wanted like that would be a whole different world than what we live in right now and it might be very exciting well creatively it could possibly expand a lot of people's potentials right where they no longer have to have a job so they could do whatever this one thing is that they were thinking about doing write a book screenplay develop something and and and in the short term I don't know if a basic income works sort of economically but I think that if we believe that there's more and more stuff that can be done by computers or by robots or whatever automation then it's absolutely something that should be taken seriously yeah so I think that this is the whole thing this is great because we've been talking in a lot of different angles about the fact that the shape of the world is changing in a way that makes what it means to be human

127:23changing yeah and facing up to what those changes are the fact that we die the fact that we make up purpose and meaning for ourselves and our lives and the fact that what we are physically in terms of bodies and and machines and so forth is also changing so and there's you know part of the theme of my podcast I hope is that to think through some of these issues to sort of I don't know the answers but when I ask the questions about you know who we are what we're living what should we should be doing about it because God's not gonna give us the answer well I think podcasts like yours and it mean any podcast where people are really carefully considering issues the I think what's important about them that really didn't exist before is that someone can sort of digest these very complex subjects through two people having a conversation about it that perhaps are more informed and

128:20more data and have more experiment have more thought about these particular issues so what you can do and what Sam Harris can do and a lot of people can do that are creating these podcasts about these really complex issues is you start that conversation and this seed gets planted into someone's head and maybe they carry with them at work they carry with them carry with them when they're on the subway or during the commute home and then they become a part of the broader conversation that we have as a culture exactly yeah and that's why I sort of want to not draw a distinction between science and other ways of thinking deeply about the world because I want people to you know I've often said this as a joke I want to live in a world where people work hard in the factory and they go out for a drink afterward and talk about their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics

129:07right the kind of thing people they're bullshitting about you know over beers that view I want to live is that possum mechanics conversation in a bar there are far too many people who think they understand something about quantum mechanics and are gonna explain it to me so I'm what the existing conversations to be a little bit more informaiton formed yeah well it's there's a few people online that someone is try to get this guy on and then I've listened to them talk I'm like I'm pretty sure that that guy's full of yeah but I can't really point out how I know that a lot of crack but feel free to email me I will help you out if yeah well I don't want to bring this one guy up on but I'll talk to you about I got there yeah there's a lot of wooooh out there but also it's quantum mechanics a lot of very respectable people who sound crazy if you don't know too deeply what

129:56they're what they're saying so well that is the Fineman quote right if you think you know quantum mechanics you definitely don't know quantum mechanics exactly which is the whole point of my book is to overcome that feeling because I think what happened is you know it's true that we don't agree we physicists don't agree on what quantum mechanics says but we now Feder sighs the fact that we don't understand it like it's good that we don't understand it like if you try to understand it too hard you're wasting your time like yeah I so disagree with that point of view so I think the quantum mechanics is and should be understandable by everybody what a squirrely concept it's it's yeah yeah it's it's weird and that's why a lot of people there's a lot of people who I know who friends of mine who are professors in philosophy departments because they got a PhD in physics and

130:44they realize what they really wanted to do was to think about quantum mechanics at a deep way and they would never get a job in the physics department doing that to put philosophy would let them do it oh wow yeah interesting what they're really doing is physics but they're doing it in a way that philosophers are happy with and physicists aren't what year did the concept of quantum mechanics become inverted invented in started it started in 1900 exactly but they sort of perfected the modern version around 1927 well what was the original thought process do you know yeah it's uh it was it's the the history is amazing and messy because they didn't have so much weirdness going on it was max plunk write of plunk radiation have you ever heard of that no German physicist so black body radiation something glows when you heat it up right so basically what happens when you heat something up

131:39is all the atoms and molecules start vibrating there's a lot of charged particles a charged particle has an electric field around it and if you vibrate it the electric field starts vibrating we call that light or radiation right gravity electromagnetic waves are being emitted so you could in the year 1900 you could sit down and do a calculation what should that look like you know if you heat everything up how much radiation should it give off and there the problem was it should give off an infant amount of radiation at very long wavelengths which is obviously false right is obviously not how things really work so there was this blatant disagreement between everything we thought we knew because in the in the 19th century in the 1800s people really thought in physics that they were close to the answer right they had a picture where there were particles like

132:29electrons and protons and then there were fields like the electromagnetic field in the gravitational field and the particles were matter and the fields pushed them together they interacted they you know they were the forces right and this picture was so good and so compelling that people were basically like we're almost done physics right we always have it all figured out and then but there were a couple of little things like the blackbody radiation that you made a prediction it was wildly off and so they're like well what's going to happen so plunk says well maybe when this electromagnetic radiation is emitted it's not just a continual stream of radiation maybe it's like individual little packets of energy he had no reason to say that like it's just out of the blue let's just pulled out of his butt right so he was just sitting there with a pad yes--it's contemplating and

133:15hey something what if and he goes what if he gets exactly the right answer it's the data right he said there it is and he's like he published and he himself like wasn't sure what to make of this he's like I got this idea it gives the right answer who knows that is crazy and it was five years later young man named Albert Einstein said well I know what's going on those little packets of energy are themselves particles that light is not a wave there's particles that are being given off photons would they were later called right and that's what he won the Nobel Prize for Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for relativity he won the Nobel Prize for inventing photons basically Wow and then so there was that so that was there were two tracks going on what remember I just said in the nineteenth century it was the world's made of particles and fields so the first thing

134:03that happened is people started thinking about these fields the electromagnetic field and Einstein says well there's something a little bit particle like about it right there's it's not a hard and firm distinction then separately they looked at atoms right so you have an electron orbiting an atom orbiting the nucleus of an atom you have this picture that everyone has seen of a cartoon of an atom right with the electron orbiting around again you can make a prediction that that electron moving around the the nucleus of an atom should be giving off light it's a moving electron when you when you accelerate an electron it gives off light so it should lose energy and spiral into the middle it should not just stay in the same orbit it should be losing energy by radiating at an energy away you can you can calculate for a typical atom how long should it take before the atom

134:48shrinks to zero size and the answer is like a hundred billions of a second so all the atoms that you and I are made of should just go right away fat brain yeah evaporate give off light and and when crunch down to zero size that's a problem right that's that's not compatible with the data so niels bohr in 1913 ish comes along and says I have an idea what if the electrons don't do that because they can't what if there's certain orbits that they're allowed to have and they're not allowed to have any other ones again just pulled out of nowhere like for no good reason but he says if that's true I predict the following you know spectrum of radiation from hydrogen you know look it up it's exactly right fits the data perfect Jesus and people like what the hell's going on and then it was so that took it like another 10 15 years before people like Heisenberg and Schrodinger

135:38built that up into saying it's not just that waves of light have a certain particle miss it's also that particles like electrons have a certain waviness and there's a wavefunction and they're inventing quantum mechanics and we're still arguing about it to this day well it's such a difficult concept to wrap your head around that it's been distorted right it's especially absolutely whoo merchants I have a fun part of my book I list like 20 titles that came up in Amazon when you type the word quantum in so there's like quantum love quantum power quantum yoga quantum healing quantum Politics quantum theology you know it's like used for every crazy bit of nonsense that you've ever heard of how do you mitigate that right more books have more podcast keep talking right like you know you'll never get rid of it entirely there you know as you may have heard there are people who

136:30still believe the earth is flat oh so you're never gonna completely get rid of the wrong ideas but you can get the right ideas out there more effectively yeah do you think that it's possible that I mean this concept was created and invented somewhere around the 1900s is it possible that another theory that's just as revolutionary is is being developed right now and through things like the Large Hadron Collider and its search for understanding the elementary particles of the universe is it possible that we could develop a new theory and are there any that are being contemplated right now so it's absolutely possible that's what Einstein and tried his best to do right he thought that he could do better than quantum mechanics and he did not succeed the big difference is that when real quantum mechanics was developed between 1990 27 at every step it was because there was some dramatic

137:30disagreement between the theory and the data and right now our theories are good enough that they fit the data really really well so we're trying to make problem high and others are proposing new ideas to try to understand you know how space-time emerges in quantum mechanics and things like that and you can try to do better than quantum mechanics but it's all just on pure principle right on pure like coherence and beauty and elegance because we have a theory fits the data fine and it's so much harder to make progress when you're just trying to do it in your brain rather than doing it by data hmm so as for right now there's nothing else being contemplated that's pretty it is being contemplated nothing promising nothing nothing emerges like there are people who think they can do better there is no-one who agrees that someone else is doing better right now are there any

138:21standout theories that people have sort of I think replacing quantum mechanics or even improving quantum mechanics is because there's no guidance whatsoever from experiments there's not even a sort of leading thing in fact I don't think it's the right way to go I think that given right now given the fact that we have quantum mechanics and yet don't quite understand it our job should be to understand what we got mmm what what are the what has come out of the Large Hadron Collider I know that they there was some discussion as to whether or not they found the Higgs is it bosun or Bossin I say boson but boson was all with a Z it's pronounced with zebra spelled it hence boso n oh it is pronounced because I only read it I never physicists a boson boson yeah okay so the Higgs boson there there was some discussion that they had absolutely proven its existence but then there was

139:22also some debate about that so it's actually a very bittersweet story large hadron collider no well yeah life doesn't promise you a rose garden we found the Higgs boson fairly quickly after getting the Large Hadron Collider up to speed we found it in 2012 read that in my other book the particle came to the universe but we didn't find anything else so did we find the Higgs boson yes it is crystal clear that we found a particle and that particle is exactly what we predicted 40 years before that the Higgs boson would look like it it talks to the other particles in the same way it has the right mass it has the same lifetime and all those things but there is a puzzle so this is what we have we don't have blatant disagreement between theory and experiment well we have our puzzles right what we have are mismatches between our informal expectation and what reality is doing so in one way so

140:18there's a number which is the mass of the Higgs boson we measured it okay 130 some times the mass of a proton but there's a guess as to what the mass should have been if nature were natural nature is natural but if our notion of nature worked out the way it was what should the mass of the Higgs boson be and it's literally a quadrillion times bigger than what it actually does what's a quadrillion 10 to the 15 okay I'm not making this up the masses bosons should be enormous Lee Baker by sort of what our intuitive feelings about quantum mechanics in quantum field theory saying so there's a known problem it's been known for a long time called the hierarchy problem and so even before we discovered the Higgs we knew it wasn't that happy we knew is much much lighter than what it should be so the hierarchy problem was a known thing and people said how could it be true well you have

141:11to change the theory a little bit yet like add some new particles or predict some new features of physics going on and many many people myself included were very optimistic that the Large Hadron Collider would find evidence for what was going on would find more particles than just the Higgs boson it's found nothing else maybe would find supersymmetry or extra dimensions or strings or you know some new kind of combinations of old particles it's found nothing else so now we have a puzzle and no answers right and then that's the most frustrating thing because there I mean people don't want to say this out loud but here we go since no one's listening this right the last time particle physicists were surprised by an experimental result from a particle accelerator was in the 1970s since then we found new particles but they were already predicted and expected to be

142:04there we've never found a particle since the 70s that no one had anticipated finding long before well just the idea of a particle collider as a layperson as a person just looking on the outside like you got to create crashes yeah yeah yeah what's going on with the the the basic building blocks of the universe you have to nourish things into each other I know yeah well so the secret to that is that really the world is not made of particles it's really made of fields right that's wantem field theory is the label given to this so for the electromagnetic field for the light coming out of the light bulbs that make sense we figured out the fields first and only found the particles later but it's also true as we were just talking about for the particles like electrons protons quarks neutrinos these are all vibrations and fields so what you should think about when you think of colliding

142:54particles it's not little pea shaped things that are bumping into each other and smashing right it's really like a little vibration in two fields that are coming in to the same place and overlapping and all the particles that could potentially exist are fields that are out there in the world and usually they're just quietly sitting there not doing anything but when these particles that you've made in the Large Hadron Collider hit each other that sets up vibrations in every field in the universe like very faint little jiggles up and down and then you look and you see in quantum mechanics says there's a probability we'll look one way versus another so the way you make it how in the world do you make a Higgs boson by colliding protons even though the Higgs boson is over a hundred times heavier than a proton right the answer is really you're setting up vibrations

143:40in the Higgs field which was always there all along and then you very quickly actually you can't the Higgs the Higgs boson disappears so quickly you'll never see it you see what it decays into you see what it converts into the vibrations in the Higgs field get transferred to vibration other things and that's what we observe in our detector so if you if you were able to do this sort of conceptual switch from particles to fields then the reason why we need an accelerator and a Collider to make new particles begins to make a bit more sense whew doesn't it don't ya oh I get it now there was something that I had read I'm translating one more thing like if you're in a room with two pianos and you play one piano the other piano will start vibrating along with it a little bit ah that's an interesting way to look at that's the one field the book the quarks and the gluons and the protons

144:29start the Higgs field vibrating a little bit we eventually see I'm glad you mentioned gluons that's one of the things that I had read about that they did they had either discovered or were able to observe with the Large Hadron Collider was a believe it's called quark gluon plasma right you got it right thank ya which is an immensely dense thing that the the the the way they described it was something like something that was a fraction the size of a sugar cube would weigh as much as the earth itself yeah that's right so usually what you try to do with particle accelerators is discovered new particles right so to do that why haven't you discovered them already usually it's because they're too heavy it takes a lot of energy to make them equals mc-squared if their mass is big you need a lot of energy in a smallest possible region that's how you make new particles so to do that you

145:23take some particles that are pretty small like protons and you smash them together and that's how we discover the Higgs and we're looking for other things but maybe your goal in life is not to discover new particles but to understand the particles that we already know about right in that case maybe you want to see what happens when you get like you say a huge number of particles together in the same place with a lot of energy and see how they interact with each other and make a plasma like a plasma is like what's at the center of the Sun right but instead of electrons and photons we're gonna make it a quarks and gluons so instead of smashing together protons a proton has three quarks each right we smash together the nucleus of a heavy atom like an iron or lead atom right which as you know dozens of protons and neutrons in it so we get as many particles as we can

146:12squeeze together in the same place so the energy is a bit more diffuse but we get to study how they interact with each other because that's what conditions were like near the Big Bang lots of particles going on it wasn't just two particles smacking into each other so we're learning a lot about what conditions were like in the very very early universe what is the mass of this stuff this quark gluon plasma like there's there's some insane number that I remember reading yes but my neural implant is failing me I do not remember the number right now but we could google it yeah it's very dense gigantic you know it's a bit of a cheat right like you know so I always I get laughs when I give talks on the Higgs boson because I mentioned that they hate the lifetime of the Higgs boson I already said it disappears very quickly right so I say it's one zero second which is true

147:02that's and just like you know you when I said quadrillion like what is that number and I said ten and fifteen but who cares right the point is the depth Oh seconds really short so I say the Zepto second which is a really short period of time and everyone laughs it's ten to the minus twenty-one seconds but who cares like if I had said ten to the minus twenty-eight would that have changed your opinion of the Higgs boson in any way like it's a really short period of time right like five could really is that more than four trillion doesn't really affect your life in any meaningful way what is going on right now with with science that is particularly compelling to you other than things we've already discussed you know I'm very interested in entropy and complexity complex systems there's a wonderful place in New Mexico and Santa Fe just called the Santa Fe Institute

147:49which is devoted to the study of complex systems physicists are really really good at studying simple systems couple particles at a time right and there's certain techniques they have that's this is why we have theories that explain all the data because we're asking questions about the simplest possible things that we can once you have a bacterium or an elephant or an economic system or an Internet these are very very complex systems with many moving parts that interact with each other in complicate and so you can start asking yourself questions about are there laws that govern the behavior of these complex systems that we wouldn't have noticed if we just studied them piece by piece and the answer is a little bit yes I hate to keep advertising my podcast but we had Jeffery West on the podcast who is why do you hate it yeah I shouldn't hate it and that's the

148:42whole reason of my lying I'm not actually telling the truth you saw through me there I love advertising my podcast I had Jeffery west who's a brilliant physicist who actually started as a particle physicist and then when we were gonna have you remember we were gonna build the superconducting supercollider in the United States this is gonna be our version of the LHC the Large Hadron Collider but the SSC would have been both sooner and better we've been higher energy I was during the Clinton administration correct that's right and well it started during the Reagan administration and then Clinton let it be killed by Congress so Geoffrey West who's a particle phase at the time said like that's my life's work like I was hoping for this to come online I'm not gonna see what what else can I do and he found that in biology there are what is known as scaling laws so if you

149:31look at different organisms like mammals or whatever right you can plot different quantities like their mass and their metabolism or their lifespan things like that and it turns out that they are related to each other it's not you know if you know how heavy a mammal is you know how long it's gonna live you can figure that out and in fact it's really the metabolism also so there's a wonderful so basically the bigger you are the longer you live also the bigger you are the slower your heart beats and they exactly cancel out so that every mammal lives for about one and a half billion heartbeats on average I've read that and I relate that to my friends that are runners and I was like you got to think of your an ultra marathon runner like my friend Cameron Haines he runs he's 240 mile runs was he just did that in Death Valley and dad what I keep making badass but it's like the bad water

150:27yeah 335 miles these races are crazy you gotta think the exertion over long periods you tell you're juicing up your battery you don't get a finite number a fixed number of heartbeats to begin with but you know what they do do though it lowers their resting heart rate yes so all this extreme exercises are you're wasting heartbeats but also your heartbeat is probably like 78 whereas theirs is 34 yeah now they're winning overall yeah it totally compensates weird right it's a weird sort of intuitive thing it's the hundred the billion and a half is just an average but the point is so Geoffrey west and his collaborators said why why is it that you know you can't make an animal that's twice as big and lives the same law like yeah what's that what's going on so they actually came up with a theory based on the fact that our bodies are networks right our circulatory

151:21system or a respiratory system or a nervous system and they all have the same structure like trees right like fractals and and they are able to show that if our if the resources that our biology uses travel through these fractal networks in a three-dimensional space right we're three dimensional beings then you get these scaling laws you get the this universal behavior and it fits the data and now you know you can extend it to the behavior of things like cities and corporations and stuff like that so when you get people in a city they walk faster right like people in little small towns mosey down the street and everyone in the big city walks faster and why is that like what's going on and there's you would not be surprised to learn that there are more patents that are generated in a big city than this small town but there are even more patents per person in a big city

152:17like living in that dense environment changes the rate of innovation and things like that so they're studying how we can try to extract these not quite as precise as particle physics but still very general robust relationships between these large systems and learn from that how to make things more sustainable more creative more innovative more livable and things like that so I think all the stuff is very fascinating they've actually done studies where they've put cameras up on streets and they watch people walk by and the amount of footsteps they take per minute they can accurately depict or they can accurately predict how many people live in that city I believe that that's Ain yeah just based on half and also how fast you talk yep how fast you talk how fast the line moves in the DMV in the host office in I think it's Dublin I'm not exactly sure but but Geoffrey West

153:17has this picture of Dublin there's this tourist area and so it's both a big city where a lot of people live but it's also a famous tourist destination where foreigners come in and wander around right and the locals who live in a big city and want to get where they want to go became so frustrated with all these moseying tourists they literally made walking lanes for the locals where you have to walk fast right you're not allowed to meander oh wow that is interesting that's interesting listen thank you very much for doing this thank you for being you thank you for this podcast you're putting out the books you're right it's so important for people like me to have someone like you that can sort of illuminate a lot of these things and I really really appreciate your time my pleasure thanks for being a role model help inspiring me here my pleasure and mindscape podcast that's right it's

154:04available now everywhere probably heard hopefully yeah tried beautiful thank you Sean Carroll ladies and gentlemen