Sean Carroll’s Mindscape bridges physics and broader intellectual debates, from quantum computing—where qubits in superposition could theoretically crack modern cryptography—to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, critiquing "shut up and calculate" dismissals of free will. He argues morality stems from natural desires, not divine influence, and advocates for a "death positive" culture, contrasting U.S. resistance with California’s death with dignity laws and psychedelics’ proven anxiety reduction in terminal patients. Discussing the Large Hadron Collider’s 2012 Higgs boson discovery and unresolved physics gaps like supersymmetry, Carroll highlights how scaling laws—from heartbeats to city foot traffic—reveal hidden patterns in life and technology. Their conversation underscores the need for interdisciplinary dialogue to prepare society for AI, genetic engineering, and UBI’s transformative potential within a century. [Automatically generated summary]
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 level of expertise is.
So if 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, I can write whatever I want on my blog, but I can't really expound on my theories of economics because what do I know about economics?
But I 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.
I know I need more, I need more nitrous caffeine in me.
But yeah, for an hour, hour and a half, I'll get someone who's an expert and we'll dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on, you know, in sort of everyday 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.
But basically, yeah, whatever I want to talk about.
Yeah, I think that my, like philosophically, I treat it like it's for me, right?
Like I'm not going to do guests or topics or not do topics because the people say so, right?
Like there's plenty of people out there who don't want me to talk about anything other than physics, or at least nothing that involves politics or religion.
And look, let me just, you know, just to redress the balance here.
It's great that we have these new ways of talking to each 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 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 economics and history and 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 the different people talking to each other.
And so overall, by all means, comment on the YouTube videos and keep that conversation going.
And just one more irony is like, I'm not, I don't seek conflict.
I'm a conflict-averse person.
Like, I just want, I don't want to argue with people, but I do want to say things that are true, and not everyone agrees about what is true.
So there's going to be arguments.
So I put up with that, but I'm not seeking it out.
So I would like this utopia of rational discourse where everyone is talking about ideas in a dispassionate way and in good faith looking toward moving toward the truth.
I mean, I think that's we're probably going to move to some sort of a system like that.
In fact, some people are actually advocating that for society to have some sort of a rating system for people and almost a new kind of currency, like a social currency.
And it's scary for people, though, because it's China.
And, you know, China is a trippy place.
And it's very trippy in terms of its sort of gut capitalism going, but it's also a communist dictatorship.
And control by the government.
And all the companies are also in.
You know the thing with Huawei?
Am I saying it right?
People are getting mad at me about that.
Huawei.
I think it's Huawei.
It's now the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world.
And they're forbidden to work with U.S. carriers.
The United 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 who say it's nonsense.
But now they're keeping them from selling their cell phones with ATT and T-Mobile and whatever.
But they're the number two manufacturer in the world now.
It's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful because there are people who don't like it.
There are people who rebel against the system.
But they've been so, the government's been so enormously successful at controlling information, controlling what you learn.
Like you can't Google Tiananmen Square if you're there in China.
You can't get those images or anything like that.
And companies want to do business there, so they'll go along with it.
And I'm not sure if it's stable.
But I talked about this on my last podcast with Yasha Munk.
I'm not sure that democracy is stable either.
So When the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly, huge abuses and huge changes are on the horizon, even though we don't know what they're going to be.
I mean, that's my worry about the social credit system, right?
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 Russian troll farms, have you been paying attention to any of that stuff?
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 the way people look at the news.
There was a Radio Lab podcast where these people that were Trump supporters detailed being contacted by these Russian troll farms where they organize these rallies and they organize these protests.
And they even hired a fake Hillary.
They hired a fake Trump and they were going to have the Hillary in a cage and they wanted everybody to yell out, lock her up.
And yeah, you build yourself up by creating an enemy that everyone can agree on, right?
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.
And they give rights to the rest of the people and so forth and try to be fair to some extent.
But that's changing.
Like as the demographics of the world are changing, 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.
One of the things that'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 automatic.
Like automation of cars, automation of normal jobs that people, like food preparation and things that people have come to just take for granted that a human's 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 that it's one of those really sneaky things that might just catch us before we're ready for it.
Yeah, I think that if you extrapolate very far ahead into the future and imagine what utopia is supposed to look like or the far technologically advanced 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 it 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, well, people just, 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.
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 of your interests, you can find a thing, whether it's carpentry or 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, this is very satisfying.
I'm sure that there's depths to the country that I didn't perceive.
But it was coming to life.
Literally, the week we were there was the first McDonald's was opening in Vietnam, which is not good, but at least it meant we were there in a pre-McDonald's society, right?
And it was physically very beautiful.
The food was amazing.
It was all scattered out like the, 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, people were trying, you know, to be nice.
People seemed to be very friendly.
We didn't speak any of the language or anything like that.
China is, yeah, I've been to China too, and that's a trip for a different reason, right?
And, you know, I'm scared by China in the sense that I'm worried that they will succeed while still being a repressive dictatorship, right?
Like, I remember reading 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 and I'm like, oh no, it was 1912.
It was not a communist dictatorship at the time.
And 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 this autocracy forever.
And some people's lives improve and a lot of people is just drudgery for billions of people.
You couldn't be, the Soviet Union was going to collapse because it's a terrible system, right?
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 be ambitious and try to get ahead.
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, including use of CRISPR on human embryos.
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 who just wrote a long book about heredity and genetics.
And yeah, so what they're going to be doing with the designer babies, it's not science fiction as far as I can tell.
It's going to happen.
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?
It might be that we find something that 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 14, right?
Like we don't know what the interdependencies are and stuff like that.
But it's coming.
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 implanted in a uterus is 100%.
That's going to happen.
And the chance that we're going to be editing them is 99.99% chance.
And you're right, China is way more willing to do that.
And again, I'm not really sure that's good or bad.
It's going to 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 tall and beautiful and smart and live for 150 years and it'll cost you a million dollars.
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.
But I think if you look at it objectively, if you look at the interactions of the species as a completely outside observer, you would say not only is this 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.
If we could just eliminate all those, why wouldn't you want that?
Yeah, I think you probably will be able to, and it will probably happen.
That I think is but then so 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 going to get Huntington's when you're 40 years old, right?
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 remember when 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.
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.
Well, he's, I don't know him that well, so I shouldn't say, but I think of him as an advocate for anti-aging.
Yeah.
Which is good, which is cool.
But my guest, Colleen Murphy, is just like a biologist who's working on things and discovered something, right?
Like that was, 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 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 reproductive lifespan, we're not useful anymore.
So biology wants us to die.
And so in other words, it's potentially fixable.
It might not be easy, might not happen 100 years from now, but it could.
So I think that aging, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, all that stuff is going to, within the next 100 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.
Carl is like not that Carl Zimmer is more or less sanguine about it.
He's like, don't worry, just we'll put regulations on it.
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?
Even if it doesn't come to pass, I want to worry about the least probable things because it might spark something that actually helps us down the road.
Well, then if you thought you were immortal, if you thought, well, let's say you thought that your average lifespan was a million years, would you suddenly become way more cautious?
Well, my question, and this is something that really concerned me, was what's to keep someone from making hundreds of thousands of versions of themselves?
Like, what's it take someone from some really rich billionaire character that can afford to do this and say, I'm going to do this many, many times.
Then I'm going to have my clones make clones of clones and I'm going to fill up a whole island with me.
That would be an excellent episode of Black Mirror where someone cloned themselves and found out that a certain percentage of their clones were just fucking crazy.
Or maybe having all those clones somehow or another set something off in them that made them crazy because they were in competition with all these other people that were exactly like them.
We think of DNA as where our genetic information is stored, right?
Like you have a little code, it's a little list of symbols, A, C, G, T, and they're in a row, and that's it.
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 CRISPR 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 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 learn how to fight off.
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 of 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.
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 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 eye 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 not 50-50 chance or whatever.
So then you can just propagate a change in the genetic code throughout the species pretty darn quickly.
And human beings take a long time to breed, but animals and plants, it's a whole nother world, right?
And I think that the chances that gives them a great basketball team are greater than the chances that it gives them a bunch of brilliant PhD scientists.
Yeah, fascinating documentary that's on Netflix right now about it's it really is a kind of a crazy set of circumstances there's a guy named Brian Fogel he's the director of and the producer of the the movie and he was a competitive bike racer and he decided to document what he wanted to do was compete in a race a bike race 100% 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 this sucked yeah but I mean in a crazy way because this 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 informs him how you can do this while this is all going on it turns out that the Russians had completely cheated their way through the The Sochi Olympics.
And it was all documented.
And so they were getting busted as this is all going on.
And he films this Russian guy who's 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 at least one entire Olympic team.
Like every single athlete was on drugs.
And they had a record number of gold medals.
And so then he starts detailing the process and how they did it.
And they use forensic tests to examine the urine bottles and show that they've been opened, even though they were supposedly not openable and really, really interesting stuff.
But that national pride, the thing about national pride and the ability to win a bunch of gold medals and athletic dominance is so important for the morale of these countries that want to establish superiority.
And there are some people who say, well, let's just go for it.
Let's just have the all-dope Olympics, right?
Like let people enhance themselves as much as they possibly can.
And there's an ongoing debate about what about people who use prosthetics, right?
Is that fair?
If you lost a leg and you have a prosthetic leg, could that potentially give you an advantage in a running event or something like that, if it were a sufficiently good prosthetic?
I don't know the answer to 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 and we invented them, right?
They're not out there in the world.
And now we're faced with wholly different circumstances to what to do about it.
But yeah, I think that there's the question of what we should do, which is hard.
There's the question of what's going to happen, which is it's all going to 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 going to 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.
There's going to 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 it, but they were goofy.
I mean, right now, companies that want to make money in the short term are building these non-surgical, non-invasive things where you like wear something on the front of your head, right?
Or a cap or something like that, which can detect frequencies of vibrations in your brain.
And it's very primitive, but you can move things around.
You can control drones with your brain without touching anything.
But yeah, 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, inserting some electrodes in there, closing it back up, and now you're 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, too, with transdermal stimulation.
Like if they could figure out, you know, they're doing that now.
They've performed a series of tests where they have people do 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 a kind of uninformed belief, but I suspect that the human brain is pretty optimized for what it tries to do.
I think that rather than improving the brain or 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 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 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 world that human eyeballs aren't looking at that would not be subject to later inspection.
I don't think that necessarily, I think 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 going to be a bunch of different things going on at once.
I mean, if 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 more 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 pretty good.
But maybe you can just do that through beta blockers or some drugs or something like that.
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.
They're way clearer thinkers than they were before.
I think that people who envision 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, being horny.
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, right?
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 were, if your body is taken away.
It seems sort of futile if you're – There's a lot of talk in the 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, right?
But I think a little bit, at least what I hear, and I'm not an expert, but what I hear, it seems a little bit off the mark because they're talking about what to program into the AI.
But if it's in any sense really an AI, it can reprogram itself, right?
Like you can change your mind as a human being.
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 we're going to 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, yeah, then who knows what they're going to eventually be motivated to do, if anything.
Like you said, like what is their motivation even to do anything at all or even to exist?
Well, isn't one of the big concerns is that in releasing artificial technology and giving it autonomy, that what we're going to do is like start a process that's some sort of a perpetual exponential domino effect of technology where 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 we're stupid and useless and just eliminates us.
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 have before between genetic modifications of human beings, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces.
We don't have the experience or the capacity to really even ask the right questions about these things.
We're sort of rudimentary, we're rudimentary idea.
The ideas that we have of like what is necessary are really based on our own biological needs.
We have family, we want to keep everybody healthy, we enjoy our community, we want to keep it safe, we enjoy our earth, we want to keep it clean, we want to save things for the future generations.
And all these concerns that we have that are very biological, they just won't exist for artificial life.
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 maybe we talked about this on 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 because they knew that 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, they thought of flying cars because they saw they were flying animals, right?
And the flying cars haven't appeared because we didn't, what they should have been thinking about is how are cars going to change our cities and our commutes and how we live, right?
When people invented the internet, they weren't sure what they were going to do with it.
And I think that the same thing is true if we can imagine blending the barrier between our biological existence and some virtual existence.
We don't even know what questions to ask about that.
They can jump incredible distances, incredible heights.
There's some amazing ones that do acrobatics now.
Have you seen that?
Where they're going to replace stuntmen in movies that could potentially get harmed with these robots that can do crazy backflips and jump off buildings.
But if it does, yeah, it's going to, there's a big emphasis on automated things, not just drones, but physical things that are running around on the ground.
You know, if you talk to people that are really that have paid attention and studied drone warfare and how incredibly inhumane it is and how different it is from any other type of warfare in terms of like the ability to rationalize targets when you're not there and you're you 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 fuck it nuke the building yeah
Like if we combine this idea of interfacing with computers, with this idea of drones doing some drudgery work, with this idea of giving people a basic income, everyone is just going to sit in their rooms and write on their tumblers all day.
I don't think they're going to be writing anymore.
I think there's a real possibility that we're going to create virtual reality that's indistinguishable from regular reality and people are going to live in there like Ready Player One.
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.
Yeah, I think like this weird period between the year 1900 and 2000 or 2100 or whatever it's going to be, it will 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 what you think people should concentrate on first 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 get on the ball here and figure out 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 stuff.
But who is?
Well, I think this is why I said earlier, like I think 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 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 there are not going to be in nanotechnology but in synthetic biology where you take bacteria or multicellular organisms that already exist 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.
There's a woman, a professor at Caltech who gave a talk a few months ago about she builds robots out of DNA.
So these little DNA robots can go in, and right now they're at the level where 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, all of molecule two to the right.
And so she says that's the beginning.
Like in the future, you'll have your little 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?
Because you think of DNA as 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 hold on and grab on to certain things and let go 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.
So quantum mechanics, this is the book that I'm writing right now that's going to 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 of thinking about what quantum mechanics says is in classical mechanics, which is what came before quantum mechanics, let's imagine you have a bit, right?
That is something that's 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 zero and one.
It's 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% zero and 10% one or something like that.
So take that fact, number one, okay?
Fact number two is that quantum mechanics has a thing called entanglement, which means that if you have two bits, classically, so you have zero, zero, zero, one, one, zero, one, one, right?
Four different possibilities.
So quantum mechanics says it's not that this one bit is in a combination of zero and one, and this other bit is also in a combination of zero and one.
It's that the two-bit system is in a combination of zero, zero, zero, one, one, zero, one, one, 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 that the different bits can be entangled with each other.
And then you just say, well, what is a computer?
A computer is something that takes bits in, does manipulations, and spits out the answer, right?
You solve problems.
That's what's literally going on in your computer.
There's a bunch of zeros and ones being pushed around.
So a quantum computer is pushing around a bunch of qubits, right?
A bunch of spinning particles or something like that.
The spin of a particle that can either be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise is a qubit.
And so these particles can interact with each other, they can become entangled, and you invent a quantum algorithm, right?
Like there's algorithms for finding the area of a surface or something like that.
Factoring large numbers, 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.
Like if you have two bits, 0, 0, 0, 1, et cetera, there's only four things it can be, right?
If you have a quantum computer, there's an infinite number of things it can be, because it's any combination of those four things, right?
10% this, 20% that.
So there's like a continuum of possibilities.
It's analog rather than digital in some sense.
And so what you can do, the quantum computer can just sort of take advantage of that extra power to look.
I mean, because of this entanglement, I'm going to get in trouble with my quantum computing friends because it's 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 searching for something in a list, right?
A very elementary computer science program is I'm giving you a list, find an element that is equal to a certain number, 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, and 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, you look for where is 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 one of the things that we think quantum computers should be able to do faster is factor large numbers, which is the difficulty in factoring large numbers is the basis for much modern cryptography.
But also simulating systems that were just too difficult to simulate.
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 an atom hits it, the whole entanglement is ruined between everything.
So it's very, very delicate.
And that's what the, you know, right now they're working on systems of, let's say, dozens of qubits entangled at once.
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, 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 anything like that in the near term.
But doing computations faster is something that a lot of people want to be able to do.
Yeah, so the problem is if you have a qubit, it can be in a combination of zero or one, right?
Any combination whatsoever.
But as soon as you look at it, you never see the combination.
You see zero or you see one.
That's it.
And you've ruined, you've erased this pre-existing combination.
If you see zero, now it's in the state zero.
If you see one, it's in the state one.
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 or nitrogen bump into the qubit, that'll count as an observation and it will collapse, as we say.
It collapses the wave function.
And then all of your quantum information is ruined.
So you have to make them sort of very cold, very isolated, very shielded from external influences.
And the more qubits you add, the harder that is to do.
I forget, there was a joke, Scott Aronson, who's a friend of mine who's 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 that 21 equals 3 times 7 with very high probability now.
But what you would like to say is some 100-digit number is the product of two other numbers.
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 electrons are moving slowly and can wind around each other and things like that.
This is way beyond what I actually know about.
But also, the sort of sidelight of this is that this 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 sharing information that other people can't get to because you have some information, your friend has some information, but 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 this story where he was in a hot tub with the Google guys, right?
With Sergei and Larry and the heads of Google, the founders.
And he said, oh, 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 it is literally impossible for anyone else to ever know what they searched for.
And the Google guys were very excited and they went away and the next day they came back and said, oh, we realize this is the opposite of our business model.
It's really important to us that we know what you search for.
Well, wouldn't someone like Google just have to adjust?
Because prior to these Google ads, you 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 is.
But that doesn't mean they can't come up with a better new business model.
I think that the people who are really interested in it now are the NSA and the DOD, right?
National Security Agency and the Department of Defense, because secret messages are the most obvious thing, cracking codes and things like that.
That's like the killer app that we know about right now.
Physicists, of course, want to use it to simulate quantum mechanical systems, to learn 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 a 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.
Like one of the things that you said earlier, when you were talking about quantum, you were talking about worlds that are very similar but with very small differences.
The way that I put it in the book is, imagine you had a website you could go to and you would say, you know, if I threw a ball with a certain velocity in a certain direction, how far would it go?
There's a long, unglorious history of people trying to think deeply about quantum mechanics and being shunned in the community for doing so.
Because we've set up this weird thing where, I mean, there was literally a memo that went around, the major physics journal in the United States said, we will not even look at papers that try to think about the foundations of quantum mechanics.
It's embarrassing.
It's terrible.
It's like, we need to do real work, like shut up and calculate.
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 worlds says is, well, so when we do talk about quantum mechanics, let's say we have a qubit, we have a spinning particle, right?
We have this combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.
And so we call that the wave function.
The wave function is just it's 10% clockwise, you know, 90% counterclockwise or whatever.
So to every possible measurement 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 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 someday, 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 what Everett says is, no, no, no, it's the other way around.
This wave function is reality.
That's the whole world, right?
That's what reality is.
It is a superposition, a 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 when you look at the electron spinning, you never see it as a combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.
You always see one or the other.
And Everett says that's because you have a wave function.
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 in a combination of counterclockwise and clockwise.
Afterward, there is the electron was spinning clockwise and you saw it spinning clockwise.
Plus, that's 10%.
Then 90%, the electron was spinning counterclockwise and you saw it spinning counterclockwise.
And both possibilities are real, but they're separate.
They've 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 mechanics.
And Sam and I agree on how the world works, right?
But I am what philosophers call a compatibilist when it comes to free will, 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 wave function branches, and there's now two of me, but that's whatever it is.
There's no spark of consciousness that lets me overcome what the equations say is going to happen.
But guess what?
That's not a fruitful way to go through your life in terms of 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, go ahead and solve Schrodinger's equation to figure out what's going to 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-free will they are, talks about people as if they make decisions.
And 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 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 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 100% sense.
There's no arguing with it.
I really think it's very rational, that approach.
But I also think that it's very much like what we were 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 is some 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 have people stayed up all night going over and over and over a certain idea trying to find a rational conclusion?
Because it becomes very, very hard to know where to attach the word I or you when you're talking about this.
Like, we tend to say, I made a decision, okay, that's fine, right?
I decided to have this can of pure caffeine that you put in front of me and drink it.
I could have decided otherwise.
So 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 going to 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, you know, 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, although 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 following configuration or something like that, right?
That's like talking about us as humans and then switching vocabularies to talking about us as atoms.
And 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 atoms obeying the laws of physics.
How can you blame them?
That would be dopey.
That doesn't make any sense.
But what if you were a minority report, right?
What if you could put someone in an MRI in a brain scanner and say, yeah, you know what, tomorrow they're going to rob a bank?
Do you arrest them?
Is that enough, right?
The fact that their brain was hooked up to violate the law in the future, is that enough to assign personal responsibility to them for that?
Or do you do the opposite and say, well, it's going to happen no matter what.
Well, and also, if you do catch this thought process 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?
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?
I don't believe any of that stuff, but at least then the world seems, if there's something random, you can attach a reason why it happened.
There seems to be something to karma in that when you do good things, you make people feel 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.
Yeah, 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 or for worse.
And in the real world, sort of generally trying to be good can often pay back in good ways.
Yeah, yeah, it's there because I've had, you know, 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 then there are people who are complete crazy hippies who think you have to think the right thoughts, you know.
Like whether you feel good, whether you feel spiritually enriched, whether you feel positive about humanity.
All these things are like, we're always trying to manipulate these states, whether it's through meditation, mindfulness training, trying to figure out a way to positively in their 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 bad, to stupid YouTube comments.
Well, you're a human being.
Well, I'm a human being, but I think that the internet does magnify some of our bad tendencies, right?
And I think that, you know, among these, and so 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, 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 we're not trying to engage them or improve their lives, just get on with our own lives rather than trying to have a snarky comeback.
Like, I get that there's a purpose to snark and sarcasm and whatever, but it weighs you down, right?
Like, this is why people complain about Twitter and social media.
Like, it's so much psychic energy just gets sapped by reading all of 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.
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've got to let people grow.
Right?
Like, that's what most people in the sort of post-MeToo 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 think it's my favorite social medium.
But it is too easy to be reductive.
It's too easy to be simplistic and to respond.
And 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 in precisely the right way.
Even though I fail to live up to it myself, I'm trying to be better.
I want to be charitable when I deal with other people.
I got in trouble on Twitter the other day for defending Kelly Ann Conway a little bit.
Well, years ago, she did the alternative facts thing.
Remember when she said when they were talking about the inauguration and they said, and people pointed 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 misspoke 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, as 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 think that the idea that 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 in reality by themselves.
They don't think of themselves that way.
They think that they're being truthful.
They think that they're being rational and correct.
And so I should at least grant them that that's what they think in their own right.
Well, I'm going to disagree with you 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 think 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 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 one of the ways where Trump was in that meeting with Putin, that 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.
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 a little bit.
And they came up with a really clumsy, you know, incredibly.
I do worry that this is a hard thing to come back from because, you know, once you know, like another thing that Trump said was that, you know, don't believe anything you're told, right?
Unless you hear it from me.
And Sean Hannity says the same thing.
No, I was, sorry, Tucker Carlson said the same thing, right?
And then after listening to this Radio Lab podcast about these Russian troll farms and about how they implement these things, you've got to think, is all of this organic?
Well, CNN does it too, because CNN, they spent so little time going over Donna Brazil's book about how the DNC had been corrupted and about 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 30 plus thousand emails and said they were about yoga classes.
That shit is just as preposterous.
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 objective.
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 from 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 are quoted in the New York Times than 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.
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 not dealing with people that have to be comfortable performing in front of a camera, which eliminates a large swath of intellectuals.
Before Donald Trump, I was really good at predicting who's going to win elections.
And I have no ability once he's in the game.
But I worry that the people who sort of are on his side are going to feel even more disenfranchised and disenchanted and angry after he loses again than they do now.
And I think that 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 who's the big candidate on the other side that's opposing him that stands out right now.
I think there's a real issue with people not wanting the job.
It's a really scary job.
I mean, it sucks you dry like a vampire that's hooked up to the back of 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.
He seems like he's kind of laying back, though, like, especially over the last few months, like that Trump is so insane that you see very little Mike Pennsylvania.
I mean, and it's tricky because, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, if someone wants to, part of me is a little bit libertarian 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, you know, 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 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 intellectual conversation about them.
We're just throwing feces at each other in this particular arena.
And there's this fascinating question about why white evangelicals are Trump's biggest support group, right?
Like huge frack, 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.
Yeah, why?
And it's a weird thing.
And I think a lot of it comes – well, so there's sort of the strategic questions.
A lot of it comes down to abortion, right?
They want Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v.
Wade.
And however they're going to 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 make the country better, even if he himself is a flawed vessel.
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 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 past.
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 even 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 pick and choose when you apply your criteria.
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.
So I wondered, like, what do they tell themselves?
You know, what do the people who don't fall on that side of the spectrum tell themselves about these passages in the Bible?
So there's one 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 kingdom of heaven, right?
Clearly, I think that anyone who reads this says this is an anti-rich person statement.
So you can Google it.
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.
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?
I'm a little skeptical because it sounds like too much of a pat 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, inter-leafed with your life overall.
So it was not just how the world was created and whether God exists.
It was how to be a good person, how to live in your community, things like that.
And 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 been removed by science, the other functions are still there.
And I'm a big critic of my fellow naturalists who have not put enough effort into replacing the other functions of religion now that the claims about the world are no longer viable.
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, whether Buddhism is a religion or something like that.
But in the usual sense 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?
Like why would God give us his message through a bunch of people in a tiny country who didn't write?
Like the New Testament wasn't written down until decades after the event.
None of the people who wrote it down were eyewitnesses.
Why is it only shared there?
I mean, God is God, right?
Like he could easily have showed up to everybody in the world, talked to them, explained how things were going, and let them make their own choices.
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 of the world, in different periods in history, people would tell their own stories and they'd all be a little bit different and they'd be adapted to their local circumstances and they'd be utterly incompatible with each other.
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 superpower 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 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 time and first, you know, became their God, right?
Like this was one God that the Hebrews were worshiping and the Egyptians and the Babylonians would 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?
And it was an evolution over time.
And omnipotence came late.
Like you would talk about 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 reality 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, treat the world as humanist.
Like, we're anthropomorphic, right?
Like, if something exists, it must have been designed.
There must be a reason.
There must be a purpose.
Things work in a certain way because someone made them that way.
And we don't see that person hanging around, so it must be up there in the sky or something.
I don't think it's that hard to imagine that all sorts of different cultures would evolve.
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 primitive cultures.
Like, you don't want to admit that you died, right?
That's a sad thing 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 my point is just that I don't take the commonalities between different sets of religious beliefs as evidence for anything other than this a very human thing to invent.
People search for meaning and they take meaning from whatever religion or ideology that they subscribe to and they use it as sort of a reason why they're living.
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'd be no reason to be a good person and so forth.
And, you know, I think it goes back to the motivation we have as having bodies versus being in a computer.
Like, there's plenty of reasons to do different things.
Like in the big picture, in my last book, I talk a lot about, you know, it's okay to admit that we as human beings have desires, that 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, and 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.
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 will be like even after I'm not here anymore, right?
So I can still 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.
I'm pretty, I mean, so for horrific tragedies, no.
I'm just fortunate enough to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to that stuff.
I don't struggle with depression or despair or existential anxiety or anything like that.
When I was a kid, when I was first starting to think about the universe and science and things like that, I would start wondering about, well, what if the universe hadn't existed at all?
What if I wasn't here?
And that made me lose sleep that night.
And I think like many people, there was a very definite moment when I realized that I and everyone I knew would die.
So I woke up crying and my mom had to comfort me because I was like, grandmom's going to die and you're going to die and I'm going to die.
But as a grown-up, no, I think that I'm more or less.
So 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.
We should accept it and we should deal with it in a personally and culturally positive way.
So for example, like 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 going to 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 is just rubbish.
And we should be much more grown up about it.
We should plan ahead.
You know, when Obama suggested that in the healthcare 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 going to 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.
We don't 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.
And in some sense, it's even harder with the dog because you can't talk to them.
You can't explain to them what's going on.
They can't explain to you what their wishes are.
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 despair that you have near the end of your life.
Some states, including California, are passing death with dignity laws where basically it's what used to be called assisted suicide, but we don't call it that anymore.
A doctor is allowed to give you the means to end your own life when you're near the, 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 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 is 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 quite a few studies that have shown that people, when you give them psilocybin, they're much more relaxed and much more comfortable with this idea of ending this life, of this life.
It's gone through its course and it's an inevitable thing.
And it's really our biological limitations that are terrified and sparking up all these intense primal fears of the end.
My wife, Jennifer Willette, who is 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 going to write a book about the self, you've got to do LSD.
And so we did, and she researched it.
And it's a fascinating history, right?
And Eldis Huxley, I don't know if you know about Elders Huxley's story.
And he took LSD to do exactly this.
He had throat cancer, and it completely helped.
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 also 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 have studied these compounds and really understand what the effects of them are and have researched them deeply and have personal experiences with them and are saying, like, well, these things have been demonized.
And they're 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.
Yeah, it's so weird that the universal basic income topic is one of those knee-jerk reactionary topics that I myself, my friend Eddie Wong introduced it to me for the first time.
And my initial knee-jerk reaction was, oh, you can't do that to people.
Human nature.
People are going to get lazy.
And then the more I thought about it, I was like, well, if you just cover their food and their rent, are they really going to get, is it really going to kill their ambition?
Like, why would that kill it?
Is our own ambition uniquely tied to just survival?
Like, I mean, I think 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, et cetera, or build artificial intelligence.
I mean, it wouldn't, what if everyone, you know, could do whatever they want when they were kids, when they were 10 years old, they were taught a good programming language and could 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 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 the whole theme, 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 changing.
And facing up to what those changes are, the fact that we die, the fact that we make up purpose and meaning for ourselves in our lives, and the fact that what we are physically in terms of bodies and machines and so forth is also changing.
So, and 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 I want to ask the questions about who we are, what we're living, what we should be doing about it, because God's not going to give us the answer.
Well, I think podcasts like yours and any podcast where people are really carefully considering issues, 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 have more data and have more experience and
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 it with them when they're on the subway or during their commute home.
And then they become a part of the broader conversation that we have as a culture.
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.
Right?
I want that to be the kind of thing people are bullshitting about, you know, over beers.
And that's why a lot of people, there's a lot of people who I know who are friends of mine who are professors in philosophy departments because they got a PhD in physics and they realized what they really wanted to do was to think about quantum mechanics in a deep way and they would never get a job in a physics department doing that.
Yeah, it was, the history is amazing and messy because they didn't, there was so much weirdness going on.
It was Max Planck, right, of Planck radiation, if you ever heard of that.
No.
German physicist.
So blackbody radiation, something glows when you heat it up, right?
So basically what happens when you heat something up is 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?
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?
If you heat everything up, how much radiation should it give off?
And the problem was it should give off an infinite amount of radiation at very long wavelengths, which is obviously false, right?
This is obviously not how things really work.
So there was this blatant disagreement between everything we thought we knew.
Because 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 electrons and protons, and then there were fields, like the electromagnetic field and the gravitational field.
And the particles were matter, and the fields pushed them together.
They interacted.
They were the forces, right?
And this picture was so good and so compelling that people were basically like, we're almost done with physics, right?
We almost have it all figured out.
And then 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 Planck 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.
And it was five years later, a 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, what 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 there were two tracks going on.
Remember, I just said in the 19th century it was the world is made of particles and fields.
So the first thing that 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?
It's not a hard and firm distinction.
Then separately, they looked at atoms, right?
So you have the 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 nucleus of an atom should be giving off light.
It's a moving electron.
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 energy away.
You can calculate for a typical atom, how long should it take before the atom shrinks to zero size?
And the answer is like 100 billionth of a second.
So all the atoms that you and I are made of should just go right away.
And then it was, so that took like another 10, 15 years before people like Heisenberg and Schrodinger built that up into saying it's not just that waves of light have a certain particleness.
It's also that particles like electrons have a certain waviness and there's a wave function and they're inventing quantum mechanics.
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 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?
That was what Einstein 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 1900 and 1927, at every step, it was because there was some dramatic disagreement 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 pro.
I and others are proposing new ideas to try to understand 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 coherence and beauty and elegance, because we have a theory that 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.
It is being contemplated, nothing promising, nothing.
Nothing emergent.
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 standout 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.
We found the Higgs boson fairly quickly after getting the Large Hadron Collider up to speed.
We found it in 2012.
You can read that in my other book, The Particle at the End of 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 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.
What we have are puzzles, right?
What we have are mismatches between our informal expectation and what reality is doing.
So in one way, so there'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 will have 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 is.
The mass of the Higgs boson should be enormously bigger by sort of what our intuitive feelings about quantum mechanics and quantum field theory say.
So there's a known problem.
This has been known for a long time called the hierarchy problem.
And so even before we discovered the Higgs, we knew it wasn't that heavy.
We knew it was 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 to change the theory a little bit.
You have to 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.
And it's found nothing else.
Maybe it would find supersymmetry or extra dimensions or strings or some new kind of combinations of old particles.
It's found nothing else.
So now we have a puzzle and no answers, right?
And that's the most frustrating thing because people don't want to say this out loud, but here we go, since no one's listening to 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 there.
We've never found a particle since the 70s that no one had anticipated finding long before.
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 quantum field theory is the label given to this.
So for the electromagnetic field, for the light coming out of the light bulbs, that makes 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 in fields.
So what you should think about when you think of colliding particles, it's not little P-shaped things that are bumping into each other and smushing, right?
It's really like a little vibration in two fields that are coming into 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 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, and quantum mechanics says there's a probability will 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 100 times heavier than a proton, right?
The answer is really you're setting up vibrations in the Higgs field, which was always there all along.
And then you very quickly, actually, you can't.
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 vibrations and other things, and that's what we observe in our detector.
So if you're 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.
Which is an immensely dense thing that 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.
So usually what you try to do with particle accelerators is discover 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.
E equals mc squared.
If their mass is big, you need a lot of energy in as small as possible region.
That's how you make new particles.
So to do that, you take some particles that are pretty small, like protons, and you smash them together.
And that's how we discovered 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 going to make it out of 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 a lead atom, right?
Which has, you know, dozens of protons and neutrons in it.
So we get as many particles as we can squeezed 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.
So I always get laughs when I give talks on the Higgs boson because I mentioned that the lifetime of the Higgs boson, I already said it disappears very quickly, right?
So I say it's one zeptosecond, which is true.
And just like you, when I said quadrillion, you're like, what is that number?
And I said 10 and 15, but who cares?
The point of a zeptosecond is really short.
So I say it's a zeptosecond, which is a really short period of time.
And everyone laughs.
It's 10 to the minus 21 seconds, but who cares?
Like, if I had said 10 to the minus 28, would that have changed your opinion of the Higgs boson in any way?
You know, I'm very interested in entropy and complexity, complex systems.
There's a wonderful place in New Mexico in Santa Fe, just called the Santa Fe Institute, which is devoted to the study of complex systems.
Physicists are really, really good at studying simple systems, a couple particles at a time, right?
And there's certain techniques they have.
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 complicated ways.
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 Jeffrey West on the podcast who is.
So they actually came up with a theory based on the fact that our bodies are networks, right?
Our circulatory system or our respiratory system or our nervous system.
They all have the same structure like trees, right?
Like fractals.
And they are able to show that 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 this universal behavior.
And it fits the data.
And now 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?
You would not be surprised to learn that there are more patents that are generated in a big city than a small town.
But there are even more patents per person in a big city.
Like 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.