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Aug. 7, 2024 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:45:03
Joe Rogan Experience #2184 - Sara Imari Walker
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joe rogan
01:11:42
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sara imari walker
01:30:50
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jamie vernon
00:06
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unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
joe rogan
So your subject matter is so fascinating to me.
So first, please explain what this idea of assembly theory.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Assembly theory is born out of an interest in solving the origin of life and finding aliens.
So that's sort of the motivation I think is really important to be clear about that to start because it introduces some kind of radical reconceptions of the way we think about fundamental physics, at least I think so.
But the key idea of the theory is that the universe cannot generate complexity outside of living processes.
And so we have a way of formalizing what seems kind of intuitively obvious that the universe doesn't generate complex objects for free.
And we do this with this idea of assembly theory of thinking about the assembly space, which is like the space of all constructible objects.
And you can talk about the complexity in that space as a minimal number of steps for making an object.
And if you see objects that require a lot of steps to make them and they're in high abundance, life is the only thing that can make them.
joe rogan
Wow.
So this includes plant life, this includes...
sara imari walker
Everything.
joe rogan
Everything.
sara imari walker
Everything on your table, you know, requires billions of years of evolution, evolution of intelligence, and technology to generate.
unidentified
So...
joe rogan
When you say life to generate, what about like crystals?
Have you ever seen that enormous cave in Mexico where they have these insane crystal structures?
sara imari walker
Is that the one that's like hot inside?
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
Yes, I have seen that.
It's gorgeous.
I've never been there.
joe rogan
Amazing.
sara imari walker
Yeah, totally.
joe rogan
But it kind of looks like somebody made it, but it's just natural processes.
sara imari walker
Yes.
So I'm actually really interested in understanding to what degree we can consider minerals on our planet alive or artifacts of life.
But we haven't formalized the theory entirely for minerals yet.
So I think that one of the sort of key results we have so far is actually quantifying in molecules a complexity boundary above which if a molecule is so complex that we can say it's definitively of life and we've experimentally verified Measuring this property of assembly of molecules to say these are derived from life.
These are, you know, and that there's a clear boundary.
For minerals, we haven't done that yet because we're still formalizing the theory and the kind of measurements we need to take.
But I expect there to be a boundary that planets can make some kinds of crystal complexity, but not all of it that we see on this planet.
joe rogan
So what's the conventional definition of life?
sara imari walker
Yeah, so there's a lot of debate about what definitions of life should hold, but the one that is usually cited by astrobiologists is life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.
And I've memorized it because I find it so annoying.
So I'm like, I got it down.
I got to know what I'm annoyed with.
joe rogan
What annoys you about it?
sara imari walker
Everything.
It was very funny writing the book because I wanted to get into the new ideas.
And my editor was like, you've got to explain how people think about life now.
And I was like, okay, well, this definition is the most annoying one.
I'll just pick it apart.
And it's actually like all the words in it are annoying in some sense.
So the first one is that life is chemical.
I've never really thought about chemistry being the defining feature of life.
I think you have to Separate out that life emerges, at least as we understand it, from a chemical soup on a planet, right?
So it emerges in chemistry, but it doesn't mean it's a chemical phenomena.
And the sort of analogy from the physicist's conception of nature I could draw there is we don't think that gravity is a phenomena of rocks.
Gravity represents some universal physics in our universe.
And so when we're thinking about, you know, planets and things, we don't think that they obey the laws of gravity because they're made of rocks.
We understand that there's some property called mass that's much more abstract and applies to everything.
I think life's kind of the same.
It emerges in chemistry, but there are some informational properties, these things about how life generates complex structures and how it does that so uniquely.
That is universal physics that happens to emerge in chemistry.
So chemistry has to go out.
It's not just a chemical phenomena.
And I think you need to recognize that if you're going to talk about like technology and artificial intelligence and like are they alive or not?
Because they're very different than, you know, like what's happening inside a cell.
joe rogan
Right.
Non-biological.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
But still seemingly alive.
sara imari walker
Yes.
Maybe.
unidentified
Perhaps.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Open to debate.
sara imari walker
Open to debate.
joe rogan
I've said that about technology, that technology does seem to be a life form that requires us to give birth to it.
unidentified
Yes.
sara imari walker
Didn't Marshall McLuhan- I like that way of thinking about it.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Marshall McLuhan had a great quote, and I believe this was in the 1960s.
He said that we are the sex organs of the machine world.
Isn't that incredible?
sara imari walker
Yeah, I like that a lot, actually.
I don't disagree with that.
joe rogan
Especially if it does become some sort of digital life.
That's essentially what we are.
We're just by proxy moms.
sara imari walker
We are.
So the way that I think about it is to think about life not in terms of individuals but lineages.
So, you know, there's a lineage of how information has been structuring the material world, what we talk about in assembly theory in terms of all of the configurations of objects created on our planet over four billion years.
And that's a process that's continuous with objects making other objects.
And there's no reason that that should stop with biological forms of life and it just moves into technology.
So I like this idea that we're the reproductive organs though.
Because I always think about like societies and like global integrated systems as being living things and we're just like component parts of them.
joe rogan
Well, they certainly look like it.
When you look at traffic from overhead and you compare it to blood moving through arteries, it's really kind of extraordinary.
Because if you see the ebb and flow of the white lights and the red taillights back and forth, and then you see blood cells moving through a person's body, it's Kind of similar.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
In a very weird way.
And if you think that these cars are all carrying people that are assembling this society, both from the inside in terms of like paperwork and research and all the different things that people are doing, then the outside in terms of constructing new buildings and putting glass structures and all these different things.
Like we really are.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
Like some sort of weird, you know, like a form of like the city itself is like a living thing that we're making.
Yes.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
And I think it's really important for us to recognize that.
Actually, it's interesting that you use cars as your analogy because Carl Sagan actually had like the same analogy.
He would have liked that a lot.
You know, thinking about aliens coming to life would have thought cars were the dominant life form.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Which I think is great, right?
Because exactly like you're describing, it looks like the lifeblood of our planet.
And I always think about cities at night as kind of the key signature of life on this planet.
If you look at it remotely, you can see all this structure on the planet.
joe rogan
Right, sure.
sara imari walker
It is hard for us because we're so much wanting to think about ourselves as individuals and like the apex of all of the evolutionary processes, not to think about ourselves as part of systems that are much larger than us.
And I think it's critically important that we kind of change our reference frame on that because we're also seeing right now with like social networks and the influence of like having all these societal level dialogues like brought to every individual and like we don't know how to process that information.
But we are part of these collective systems that are much larger than us and they are constructing a lot of the world around us without individuals having as much agency in that process as we think we do.
Yet that process is also what gives us our agency.
So it's kind of paradoxical.
joe rogan
Right.
Right.
I've often said that if an alien race that was completely outside of our understanding of life and our understanding of biology, if they observed us and they'd say, well, what is this dominant species doing?
Well, it makes better things.
That's all it does.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
We do a lot of things, but ultimately those things, even war, which is essentially about acquiring money and resources, we use those resources and that money to make better things.
And in engaging in war, you're constantly advancing technology to have an advantage over the universe, so you're making better things.
Everything is making better things, which, when you scale it up, ultimately will lead to another life form.
It will lead to some new thing.
sara imari walker
I hope so.
joe rogan
Well, if we don't kill ourselves or if we don't get super volcano, asteroid.
sara imari walker
I'm not a pessimist.
I think we'll be around for a while.
joe rogan
You think so?
sara imari walker
Yeah, but I have a pathology that I'm really optimistic as a person, so I have a hard time.
That's good.
joe rogan
That's not a pathology.
sara imari walker
I think that's a pathology.
I think because I think being overly optimistic can leave blind spots but part of the reason that I imbue so much optimism in my work is like I think we need more optimistic narratives about the future because so many people are really bleak.
joe rogan
I agree.
I don't think that helps anybody and I think ultimately most of the things that you're really terrified about do not come to pass.
sara imari walker
Yes, I think us being terrified of them is like an immune response.
So usually I'm not afraid of the things that people are really scared of and talking about because it means society is dealing with it.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
Which I, you know, maybe that's just sort of a scapegoat.
I don't have to worry about those things because someone else is.
But I think actually there's something rather deep there that like the things that we're trying to work through at this moment in history are being worked through.
joe rogan
My fear about those kind of thoughts is when I worry about things and I say, well, I don't have to worry because society's working through it.
I also say, yeah, but someone's probably not and they're enhancing the actual threat so they could profit off of it.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, that's the military-industrial complex.
That's a lot of different things.
I think that's...
There's a lot of that, unfortunately, that's attached to green energy.
I think the idea of having green energy is wonderful.
Everybody should agree to that.
But the idea that you're going to give massive corporations this completely philanthropic view of the world all of a sudden, that's not.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
unidentified
That's not real.
I know.
They make money.
joe rogan
They're trying to make more money.
unidentified
They're going to lie to you.
sara imari walker
Everyone's trying to make money and get power.
And I think once you realize that, it's a lot easier to see motives.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's freaky.
But that also leads to the acquisition of resources, which leads to making better things.
I mean, I am...
I'm all goo goo.
I was reading articles all day today on the iPhone 16. Why?
Why do I care about the iPhone 16?
My iPhone 15 is perfect.
It works great.
What's wrong with me?
I don't know.
But I think that's also built into materialism.
I think materialism sort of facilitates the creation of newer and better things consistently and constantly.
Because everybody's like, what do you got an iPhone 14?
What are you poor, Sarah?
You know, like people get crazy.
sara imari walker
I'm slumming it.
joe rogan
But you know what I'm saying?
You know how people get weird?
Like, where's your car?
You have a 2018 car?
Don't you want a new one?
Look, they got the new one.
The new one has this and that.
It's a better gas mileage.
Faster zero to 60. And it never ends.
And it never ends until we create sentient life, I think.
sara imari walker
Yeah, so part of your argument is sort of our materialistic culture is about building newer and better things and eventually this is like sort of just more fundamental to the process of life.
joe rogan
I think this pathology of materialism, this thing that has possessed so many people where they live their entire lives to acquire things to impress other people, which is a huge number of people that are involved specifically in finance, like all the amphetamine people, all the people that like to do coke and fucking look at my boat.
That's what they're doing.
They're just constantly getting better and better things.
sara imari walker
It sounds so boring.
joe rogan
It does sound boring to you because you're a brilliant woman, but it's not necessarily more boring than their normal life, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's some sort of reward to showing up with a half a million dollar watch on with diamonds and this.
Some crazy thing where people go, ooh, he's got that thing.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Oh, look at those shoes she's got.
Oh, look at that purse.
Oh, look at this car.
Look at the house they live in.
It's weird.
sara imari walker
It's weird.
Well, I know.
I sympathize.
I am seduced by good fashion aesthetics.
I mean, who isn't?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Well, a lot of men aren't, but a lot of women are.
sara imari walker
I love it.
I think it's great.
unidentified
Yeah, sure.
joe rogan
It's beautiful.
It's an expression of art.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, that's what it is.
sara imari walker
Exactly.
joe rogan
It makes things look cooler.
And, you know, like the way my wife looks at dresses and stuff, it's like she's looking at the way I look at other forms of art, things that I like.
sara imari walker
Yeah, that's right.
joe rogan
You know, it's just a different aesthetic, a different mindset, but it's art.
sara imari walker
Totally.
joe rogan
It is art.
sara imari walker
Yes, it is.
joe rogan
And we are attracted to that, too.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And we're attracted to creation.
I think so.
We love when people make things.
sara imari walker
Yeah, and I think you're right to point that this is like maybe hinting at something deeper.
So, you know, with this assembly theory stuff, my original motivation was really to get at, you know, what fundamentally explains life in the universe.
And, you know, to me, the thing that life does that no other physical system does is creativity.
And Life is a mechanism for the universe generating things it couldn't generate otherwise.
And so one way to think about that is there's this huge possibility space of things that could exist, and there's just not enough resource or time for all of them to exist.
So by a planet constructing things like us over time, it actually sort of maximizes the number of weird things that can be made.
And I really like this.
I like this idea that we're actually really literally the universe's mechanism of expressing creativity and making things possible that would not be possible without things like us.
joe rogan
Do you know who Terrence Howard is, the actor?
sara imari walker
I am familiar with him.
joe rogan
Fascinating person.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
A brilliant guy who has some crazy ideas.
But one of the craziest ideas he has is that whenever a planet gets far enough away from the Sun, it will generate life and then that life will give birth to people.
People will eventually emerge.
And he calls it like peopling.
Like a planet is peopling.
sara imari walker
Interesting.
joe rogan
And that as these civilizations become more advanced, they're going to have to deal with the fact that the planet is further and further away from the sun.
Like over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the climate will change, things will become cooler.
They're going to have to figure out a way to develop some sort of an artificial atmosphere or some way of sustaining.
Along with, of course, biological things that will change with the animal as it adapts.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
I don't really think that humans, like ourselves, as currently constructed, are a universal phenomenon.
I think we're pretty special to this planet, but I think there are certain attributes of humans that Like, you know, the theory of computation and its universality that, like, we invented in the last century that might be universal to any intelligent species that emerges on any planet.
So I think it's really hard to say, like, what here is universal to other places versus, yeah.
joe rogan
It's certainly a big leap, right?
We have no evidence.
There's no evidence of people anywhere else.
Or any other life form.
No real evidence.
There's a lot of shenanigans.
There's a lot of weirdness.
But there's no real evidence.
sara imari walker
Yeah, there's no evidence for life on any other planet.
And the mechanism of how life even got on this planet is not known.
I spent my entire career working on this fucking hard problem.
But I think it's the appropriate descriptor of it.
It's really hard.
So I think it's easy to speculate on what we think life on other worlds will be like.
And we tend to do it from a very anthropocentric lens where we'll say, It will be like us.
And, you know, even professional astrobiologists will do the same kind of thought experiments, and they'll say, oh, well, the geochemistry on a planet should give rise to things like DNA and proteins, and so we should look for those in the universe.
And I think that's really underestimating how large the space of possibilities actually is.
joe rogan
So when you're thinking about the emergence of life, is the only way to do it, I mean it can't be the only way it has to emerge with certain temperatures the way ours has in water.
It seems like there could be a wide variety of possibilities that things could adapt to whatever particularly unique environment that this planet provides.
Given a sustainable temperature and given enough resources that it can survive that we could have...
Like we have jellyfish, right?
sara imari walker
Yes.
We have lots of weird stuff on this planet.
joe rogan
They've been around as long as us, right?
Like octopi.
sara imari walker
Octopi are really weird.
joe rogan
Crazy!
sara imari walker
Crazy.
joe rogan
Crazy.
sara imari walker
Totally batshit crazy.
joe rogan
When my friend Remy Warren, he used to host a show called Apex Predator.
And what essentially the show was about was like examining...
Apex Predators and their particular adaptation they have for their environment and seeing like what a human can imitate like what are these things that they do and he said Octopus by far was the most bizarre thing to dive into.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
He said they're aliens.
sara imari walker
They are.
I mean not literally but like yeah, but yeah, no, no, I totally agree I mean they independently evolved a nervous system so and like and you know like they're crazy and I think they're the most alien thing on this planet from us as far as like trying to look at comparable intelligence and really understanding a different evolutionary trajectory.
joe rogan
Also like how they can take their body and completely morph it to look like coral.
unidentified
Instantaneously.
sara imari walker
Within seconds.
unidentified
I know.
sara imari walker
The color changes are shocking.
joe rogan
Incredible.
And the texture.
It's everything.
How does it even know what it's doing?
How does it know what it looks like on the outside?
It doesn't have a mirror.
How did it adapt to that?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
They're making a lot of progress.
There was like the first cephaloneuro conference this year, which I sent one of my students to.
I didn't go to, but I know, right?
That's a great term.
I know.
The neuroscience of cephalopods.
But yeah, I don't think we know a lot about how they work or how they think.
And their lifespan is incredibly short.
It's only like a year or two.
It's just crazy.
joe rogan
Yeah, I have a friend who is building this office building and I talked him out of putting a jellyfish tank in it.
He's like, because he wanted to have this big cylindrical jellyfish tank in the center.
Like when you walk in, I go, dude, trust me.
That's going to be such a headache.
They die all the time.
They don't live.
unidentified
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Oh, it's like a constant...
unidentified
But they're so beautiful.
joe rogan
Oh, gorgeous.
But there's one of those tanks in the Mandalay Bay shark exhibit.
Have you ever been in that?
sara imari walker
No, I haven't.
joe rogan
Incredible.
Mandalay Bay has this enormous aquarium.
sara imari walker
I've always wanted to go.
I want to take my kids, but yeah, I haven't been yet.
unidentified
It's so cool.
joe rogan
I've been taking my kids since they were really little.
It's one of the dopest places because you go in there and there's sharks swimming around and all these incredible fish and people are diving in there with them and it's enormous.
So we went on a tour of it, and one of the things they showed us was their jellyfish habitat.
That's it right there.
So that thing is a damn nightmare.
And they have all these pipes and filtration systems.
sara imari walker
Do they just fish the dead jellyfish out?
joe rogan
That's a good question.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if they get sucked into the vents.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I wonder.
They have like a thing that they just like filter them every day to make sure there's no dead ones hanging out.
joe rogan
I don't know how they do that.
But the interior of it, look how beautiful.
sara imari walker
Yeah, they're amazing.
joe rogan
God, they're so incredible.
I mean, just imagine if we found that on another planet, how excited we would be.
We'd be trying to talk to it.
We'd be blown away.
sara imari walker
We'd be doing everything, yeah.
joe rogan
We'd be sending it sound and various codes to try to see if we can communicate with it.
We'd try to understand its nervous system.
Where's its brain?
It doesn't have a brain.
Where is it?
Where's the brain?
Where's the blood?
Does it have blood?
What is that?
We would be freaking out.
sara imari walker
We would be.
joe rogan
But it's in the ocean.
We're like, oh, don't get stung.
sara imari walker
Yeah, but I mean, there's a certain level of excitement seeing it here.
I think how diverse life on Earth is is rather shocking.
I guess probably we're decent.
We're like, you know, used to it, as you're saying.
So we don't find it as shocking as we should.
joe rogan
Do you think that...
This is that human life.
I mean, I'm sure you've thought about this.
Do you think that this is a very unusual circumstance that it creates this?
Or do you think there's versions of this is just rare?
sara imari walker
I, you know, I don't know.
Will be my honest, scientific, professional answer.
Sure.
joe rogan
How could you?
sara imari walker
Yeah, no.
Of course, how could you?
But I think it's really important to be, like, honest about the fact that we don't know and just, like, put it out there.
Because it's very tempting to speculate.
But I think, you know, the more I think about how large the universe really is, and I don't even mean physically large, like, you know, like, you can look at the Hubble Deep Field and you can see, you know, 10,000 galaxies at, like, the size of your, like, Pen tip on the night sky and you're like, oh my god, the universe is a huge place.
But if you go into a chemistry lab and you ask a chem informatician how many molecules there are, they can't even estimate how many molecules there are.
Chemical space is so big.
It's really crazy.
There's one molecule, I usually use an example, it's called Taxol, which is an anti-cancer drug.
And if you wanted to make every permutation of that molecular structure and every three-dimensional shape you could with those atoms, It would fill 1.5 universes in volume.
1.5 universes.
One molecular formula.
This is how big chemistry is.
And then if you want to get to technological artifacts or biological forms, like the space that we live in is so exponentially large, it's unimaginable.
And to think that other life out there would traverse the same path I think the universe is far larger in the kind of living things that could exist than we can even imagine.
joe rogan
Wow.
The molecule thing is hard to absorb.
sara imari walker
Yeah, it's totally crazy.
Like, I mean, if you want to think about, like, you know, you've got this, like, crazy stuff on your desk and you took the atoms in those things and you thought about all the ways that you could arrange them, it would fill universes of interesting artifacts.
Right.
Universes.
And, like, why is this one sitting on your desk?
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
Like, why is this the aesthetic humans chose?
I mean, it's kind of cool, but, you know, like, it's crazy to think about how much stuff could exist but doesn't exist because it wasn't selected and evolution didn't build it over time.
joe rogan
Right.
That's such a fascinating way to think about it.
The overwhelming possibilities.
The overwhelming number of different variations.
sara imari walker
Yes.
And so on your question about humans and our specialness, I think what is special about us is we're actually capable of imagining Some of that space and not just imagining it but constructing it with our technology.
That was your point about societies and things.
So there is something special about quote-unquote human level intelligence or whatever is going on in the human brain.
I don't know if it, whatever that thing is, I think is pretty universal and pretty deep about the structure of reality.
I don't know if it would be in something that's like a human on another planet.
But I think our ability to abstract, imagine and create is probably universal.
joe rogan
There's another thing about us that I think is bizarre, and it speaks to this concept.
There's a theory about the creation of human beings, right?
That human beings, the wackiest one of all, is that human beings are the product of accelerated evolution.
Something has manipulated our genome.
Something has manipulated the lower primates.
That's why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years.
And that this thing...
Well, when I think about it, one of the things that intrigues me is I'm a lover of nature and I'm completely fascinated by how animals interact with each other.
I mean, I can watch nature documentaries all day long.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Invasive species are weird, right?
Because when something happens and someone brings a turtle to an island where it doesn't belong or when someone brings a goat to a place that doesn't belong or Australia, which is a fantastic example, there's like so many animals that are non-native invasive species.
These Asiatic buffalos, there's millions of them.
They have to fly overhead and shoot them down with helicopters because there's so many of them.
Humans are kind of like that.
Aren't we kind of like that?
I mean, if there's an animal that doesn't live in sync with its environment in nature and overwhelms the boundaries and seems to exist in some different sort of space than everything else, everything else there's sort of a balance between predator and prey resources and birth rates.
There's all this sort of Symbiotic interaction with nature, with a natural world.
But we're wild.
Like, we're just dumping shit into the ocean and killing all the fish and polluting the sky and driving in our cars and flying in our planes and still talking about climate change and, you know, injecting people with chemicals and trying to make more babies.
sara imari walker
Yeah, we're also doing a lot of good for the planet.
Again, optimists.
joe rogan
Sure, sort of.
But there's so many of us.
We are on every damn rock that you could find that's habitable.
We are essentially like rats.
We go everywhere we can go, which is like an invasive species thing.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think you could talk about it that way.
And I think people do.
I don't really think that's a useful narrative.
joe rogan
I love us.
sara imari walker
Don't get me wrong.
joe rogan
I'm not an anti-person, but I'm just objectively analyzing our behavior and our impact on our environment.
And it's very similar to wild pigs getting introduced into an area where they don't have natural predators.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
I think part of the challenge is actually thinking about the levels of organization that biology has.
So what I mean is like You know, individuals are not actually the problem what you're describing.
It would be like human societies are the problem and humans have because we have societies and, you know, organization that enable us to do these things like we're able to, you know, take over all these environments and things.
But I like the way I think about life is much more at the planetary scale.
So for me, you know, going all the way back to the origin of life.
You know, life doesn't happen just in one environment.
It happens in all environments.
And it's really like a planetary scale transition.
Like something happened on our planet with enough geochemical environments mixing to mediate this global transition.
And when you look at the evolution of life, you get these kind of hierarchies where like cells evolved and then multicellular organisms like cephalopods and plants and fungi and us.
And then we get things that build societies like ant colonies or human societies.
It just seems to me it's like it's a natural progression of the evolutionary process to build more complex systems at larger collective scales that are having more impact on the planet and restructuring more of it.
And, you know, if life wants to get off this planet, it has to go through something like us.
So I don't think, you know, I think we can look at it from the, you know, couple hundred year timescale and say these things are terribly negative and predator, prey, this, that, and the other thing.
But if you look at it over the billions years timescale, there's a really different picture that emerges about what we are and what we're doing.
joe rogan
Isn't it a fascinating thought, though, that you immediately, and we all do, go to if life gets off this planet?
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
So that seems to be something that we have baked into us.
We have this idea of exploring the universe.
So wouldn't something else have that, too?
And if something else had that, and it was a hundred million years more advanced than us, and it found us still throwing shit at each other and beating each other to death with sticks, wouldn't it come in and go...
sara imari walker
Would you?
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
You would?
joe rogan
Yeah.
Would you fuck with it?
sara imari walker
Like, what would you do?
joe rogan
100%.
Yeah, I would do exactly what they did.
I think that's what curious things do.
sara imari walker
Oh, like experiment on them?
joe rogan
Yes, 100%.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
We do it with animals all the time.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
We make different kinds of- That's how you learn.
Yeah.
We also, we don't seem to have a problem with- With sort of manipulating things that we consider lower than us.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
On the evolutionary scale.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
I think that's a problem, but I don't know that that's one that can be solved.
So this issue of, you know, trying to treat every living entity, you know, in sort of a quality, like, I don't actually think it's possible.
joe rogan
Well, you can't because they won't do that to you.
sara imari walker
No, but you can't even, like, you have to eat something, right?
So, like, if you value plants more than animals and you want to eat plants, then you're valuing, you know, like, you're making value statements.
But, like, you know, plants are, you know, like, they're still alive when you eat them.
unidentified
So it's, like, kind of weird.
joe rogan
Not only that, there's evidence that they're sentient.
Plants exchange resources.
They communicate through mycelium.
sara imari walker
There's a lot more to plants.
There's all kinds of very complicated information processing going on in plants, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
We are very sort of egocentric to think that our version of consciousness is the only version of consciousness.
And I always say that when I talk about dolphins and orcas.
To me, it's one of the biggest crimes of modern civilization.
That we keep those things in fish tanks.
sara imari walker
Yes, I totally agree with that.
I totally agree.
joe rogan
I think they're just like us.
I just think they can't manipulate their environment.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
So we essentially have these slave pools where people celebrate with your children to stare at the slaves.
I think they're an insanely intelligent species that just doesn't manipulate its environment.
And we're so egocentric in our concept of like, what does intelligent mean?
Can you control your environment?
Do you have a house?
Did you make a house?
Do you have a car?
Like how do you get around?
Do you communicate with each other through cell phones?
Well, then you must be stupid.
You know, like we have this idea.
sara imari walker
And you have to have the iPhone 16.
It can't be the 14 because then you're really stupid.
joe rogan
Well, if you're going to make things, you've got to make better things all the time.
And you've got to keep up with the Joneses.
But there's this weirdness that we have attached intelligence to ability to manipulate the environment.
And we've ignored language, the fact that they have a cerebral cortex 40% larger than ours.
The fact that they have different dialects that they speak in different areas, different accents, different ways they speak.
We don't even know what they're saying.
We're trying to use AI to recognize the speech patterns.
sara imari walker
I love the stuff about digital bioacustics and decoding languages for animals.
joe rogan
It might be our only way.
sara imari walker
It's an amazing field.
I think it's going to take a while before we really realize the potential of it.
But it's super exciting what people are trying to do.
joe rogan
Well, they've been doing interspecies communication research forever.
They've gotten nowhere.
They've gotten nowhere.
The Leary stuff.
Not Leary.
The guy who made the sensory deprivation tank.
God damn it.
sara imari walker
I don't know who that is.
joe rogan
It's locked in my head.
I always know this guy's name.
What is it?
Oh.
John Lilly.
Thank you.
Whew.
Why does that happen?
Like, that's a problem with the mind.
sara imari walker
Yeah, because you can't remember everything.
You forget things, so you have more information.
joe rogan
I have too much shit in there.
I need a clean house.
sara imari walker
It's hard.
It's really hard.
joe rogan
But Lily, he invented a sensory deprivation tank, and one of the things that he would do with a sensory deprivation tank, he was trying to...
Create an environment where your body, in the physical senses of the body, don't influence the mind at all, so there's more resources for the mind.
And he was setting up these tanks next to dolphin tanks and taking LSD and trying to communicate with dolphins.
sara imari walker
I have heard about these studies, yeah.
joe rogan
He did a lot of really wild things with dolphins, but none of it really...
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think there's a lot of progress in animal communication, but I think we're very far from understanding whether animals are communicating at all like us and in what ways.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
We might be very limited in thinking that this is the only way.
sara imari walker
Well, it's like your point about anthropocentrizing.
We have our bubble, we think about the world this way, and the human way is the only way and the right way, and we put our notions of intelligence on other species, and if they don't match, we think they're not intelligent.
Right.
And that's just not right.
joe rogan
Also, we're thinking about this animal, like an orca or a dolphin, with a 40% larger cerebral cortex.
And why are we discounting the possibility of some sort of telepathic communication?
Like that sounds and frequencies are attached to feelings, and that there's something going on that's not like, I love you, like in words, but some sort of expression that's different than our concept of language.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I would say it's certainly possible that they're communicating things that are emotional or much more intelligent than we give them credit for just like with their patterns of speech because they're pretty complex.
joe rogan
Yeah, yeah.
And then if you think about alien life, you always think about alien life like us.
You think about an alien life that, well, we kind of physically needed to do that in order to conquer the surrounding predators.
Yeah.
If we wanted to evolve and we wanted to stay alive and gather resources, we had to figure out a way to keep the animals from eating us, right?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
And then just survive in our environment, right?
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
Animals are one danger, but there's plenty of other ones.
You don't want to eat the wrong berries.
You want to make sure that you have warm clothes in winter.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
I mean, it's...
Hell out there.
unidentified
Yeah, it's a lot.
sara imari walker
Survival's hard.
joe rogan
Whereas dolphins are in warm water.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Before we came along, there was an abundance of fish.
sara imari walker
Right.
joe rogan
Seems like you don't have to do too much more.
You guys got it nailed.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
They're probably living in paradise until we came along and stuck them in swimming pools.
sara imari walker
Now they live in these noisy oceans or they're in a pool.
Yep.
joe rogan
Yeah, both things, right?
sara imari walker
Yeah, for sure.
I think this is one of the things that really motivated me to really...
I mean, obviously, I love theoretical physics and thinking deeply about the nature of reality, but why pick the problem of life?
And I think life is so complicated.
All the examples you're giving, we don't really understand what it's like to be another species or even to be another human, quite honestly.
And I think if we had a deep understanding of the nature of life, these kind of questions would be much easier.
joe rogan
I mean, when you want to talk about a psychedelic experience, imagine if VR could put you...
I mean, if there was some sort of an integrated VR that gets to, like, a real, like, matrix sort of state where it allows you to have the thought processes of a being for a short amount of time.
Like, if they could record octopus thought process...
sara imari walker
And put it in your brain.
joe rogan
Yes.
And give you the feeling of what it means.
sara imari walker
You want to be human for a little while.
joe rogan
For a little while, yeah.
But imagine the feeling of what it is to be an octopus.
Not just like, wow, I can see the ocean in my language.
But instead, think like an octopus for a brief period of time.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think that would be amazing.
joe rogan
Amazing.
sara imari walker
I've thought about it, like, what must it be like to be a plant?
I mean, like, you know, most places have, like, a plant in every room, and it's like the plant's experiencing the room right now.
Like, what is it doing?
It's, like, just weird if you actually try to think about it.
Like, what does it feel like to be a plant?
joe rogan
And it grows better if you play classical music?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
I mean, their way of expressing their personality, so to speak, or like their morphology is like, you know, like their shape is like their expression of their behavior, right?
Like animals can move around in an environment, but a plant just grows.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
So its shape is its behavior, which is kind of crazy.
joe rogan
It is kind of crazy.
Just the whole interaction that they have with each other, the fact that we've only figured that out over the last few decades.
And have you ever seen time-lapsed photos of plants?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And they interact with each other.
unidentified
I know.
sara imari walker
Yeah, it's been amazing.
joe rogan
Wrap around each other and hug each other.
It's crazy.
sara imari walker
But we have a hard time even with plants not anthropocentrizing with the kind of experiments we want to do to learn how they're intelligent because they're using a lot of animal-based experimental programs to try to test plant intelligence and they probably don't fit plant intelligence because their intelligence is so different.
So it's really hard to say what kinds of properties they actually have.
joe rogan
And so, if we think about the wide potential for variability in terms of planets out there in the known universe, you would imagine that there'd probably be a lot of intelligent animals that would find some sort of Goldilocks thing like dolphins had.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Where they don't really need to manipulate their environment.
They're kind of dominant over sharks.
You know, they're not really worried about getting eaten by other things.
sara imari walker
These are the aliens we'll never meet because they had no reason to go out and explore and conquer.
joe rogan
So like the Na'vi in Avatar.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
They're aliens but they're kind of like...
You know, synced up.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Which is really fascinating, too, because, like, that movie caused people to get depressed that they don't live like the Na'vi.
Do you know that that was like a real, like, diagnosed thing?
sara imari walker
I didn't know that was a real thing.
joe rogan
That's crazy.
Yeah, it's called Avatar Depression.
sara imari walker
Really?
joe rogan
Yeah, and people would go to see that movie, and those people lived in such spiritual harmony with their mother planet.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And they rode around on these flying dragons, and they were honest and noble, and, like, we were like, God, I want to be them!
And so people would, like, go back to their...
You know, apartment people beeping their horns and pollution and garbage on the street and crazy homeless people.
He'd be like, fuck, I want to live in Navi and land.
I want to live in Pandora.
I want to live like them.
So people got depressed.
sara imari walker
Weird.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Avatar depression was like a real thing.
sara imari walker
That's so crazy.
joe rogan
Psychologists were dealing with it.
sara imari walker
They had to sit people on the couch.
But the idea of utopia is like so oversold.
I mean, I think there's something like, like, it's, I don't know, like, I don't think such things exist.
joe rogan
I don't think utopia exists, but I think harmony exists.
sara imari walker
Harmony for sure.
But you have to work hard for it.
And I think that's the thing.
I think there's some conception that there's some easy path to harmony.
And harmony requires work, and it requires constant work.
joe rogan
Constant work.
Yeah, there's no days off.
unidentified
No.
joe rogan
And I also think that we have created a world in which harmony is very difficult to acquire.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because our world and the structure of doing a thing that you probably do not want to do for most of your day, to pay off debt for something that you really didn't need, education that you turned out to don't use, and all this different stuff that keeps...
It's very difficult for people in this environment, especially urban environments that we've...
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
To create harmony.
Whereas people that live in hunter-gatherer tribes and people that live subsistence lifestyles in particular, they report much higher levels of satisfaction and happiness, less depression.
sara imari walker
I think debt's really hard because you're constantly aspiring to things.
And you're right.
It's just totally baked in.
Even I still have student loan debt from...
You know, it's just like, it's like, you want to do, you want to be, yeah, you just, you take on debt, you try to do something, but yeah, it's pretty bad.
joe rogan
There was a Vice series a long time ago, back when Vice, like, was really first starting out, and it was a Vice guide to travel, and they went to visit this guy who lives in the Arctic Circle, and he's been there since, like, the 1970s.
I think he went out there initially as a logger.
He's one of the last few people to have a It's nice for like six hours.
sara imari walker
I can't even imagine.
joe rogan
The point is that this guy does live in harmony, though, and he's very healthy and very happy.
And, you know, the way he talks about, he's a very intelligent person.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, he's not like some weird caveman who's out there in the woods just hunting caribou.
sara imari walker
No, I think mostly people that do, like, it's a choice, right, to actually decide to live that way, so...
joe rogan
Well, for him it certainly is.
But it's also, he has an ability to communicate that's unique for a guy who does that.
Because it's not like he's talking to a lot of intelligent people all the time.
I mean, he's essentially out there by himself.
sara imari walker
Yeah, that's super hard.
Does he read a lot?
joe rogan
I don't know.
It's a good question.
But he seems to have, like, he's synced up with nature.
I mean, he's catching fish and he's hunting animals and that's all he's eating.
He lives off of that.
And this guy wakes up every morning and says, what do I need to do to stay alive another day?
And he just goes out and does that.
Which seems like, for us, we're like, oh my god, that sounds terrible.
But does that really sound more terrible than going to a job at some corporation that doesn't give a shit about you, that will cut you if the stock is down?
And you've dedicated 25 years of your life to this company and all of a sudden you're gone and now you don't know what to do and you're on unemployment.
You're like, what did I do with my life?
I'm 46. What the fuck happened?
That's a lot of people.
Whereas this guy, he knows what he's going to do tomorrow.
He knows what he's going to do the next day.
sara imari walker
And also, he knows his life matters every day, right?
I think this is a thing we forget.
Our life is a choice, and you're fighting for whatever way you want to live your life.
But we're kind of just in the daily grind.
We lose our connection to that existential reality that our lives are finite.
I think it really changes your perception of things when you really think about the fact that you have a finite amount of time.
joe rogan
Yes.
And food's not guaranteed.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
That's another thing.
sara imari walker
Well, survival's not guaranteed, right?
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
So we take for granted survival, and therefore we take for granted that we're alive at all in some sense.
joe rogan
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So when you start studying all these things and thinking about life and thinking about the various possibilities of life, what's the lowest single-celled organism?
How long ago do we think that that emerged?
sara imari walker
I think current estimates are that life, like the oldest fossils that we can identify and like tracing back genomically about 3.8 billion years ago.
joe rogan
So essentially somewhere around a billion or so years that we can find from the time Earth was formed?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
So Earth, we think, formed between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago.
So like 4 billion years ago, we kind of had Earth as we understand it.
Mostly now we don't know if there were oceans, but the moon forming impact had happened.
joe rogan
That's Earth-1 and Earth-2, the impact with some other planet?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Thea, I think it was called.
joe rogan
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Just smacked into Earth and then made our moon.
Must have been really traumatic.
unidentified
Imagine.
sara imari walker
So I think most people think, like, life didn't happen before that, because if it did, it would have been obliterated.
But we really don't know.
So, yeah, current estimates are around, you know, like, 4 to 3.7, 3.8 billion years ago.
joe rogan
So somewhere a billion or less than a billion years later, something emerges.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
And how do we think that happened?
sara imari walker
There is no consensus.
None.
Yeah, I know.
It's not fun.
It's fun.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
sara imari walker
It's totally crazy.
That's why I like this problem because nobody knows what happened.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
So what are the primary theories?
sara imari walker
There's a lot of speculation.
You know, the sort of canonical ones that you'll hear about are usually like the RNA world that life started with an RNA molecule, which like RNA is still in our bodies today.
So like DNA, most people are probably familiar with, gets translated, like transcribed into RNA and then the RNA is what's used to make proteins.
So RNA, you know, kind of does a dual role.
So people think, oh, maybe it happened early on and it was the first life.
And then there's like other hypotheses like hydrothermal vents and, you know, sort of energy first approaches to origins of life that like we had some metabolism that was organizing.
But all of these are really speculative, and I think the issue is that we're trying to take molecules that are in modern living systems and trying to understand how they can emerge in a prebiotic environment on early Earth and not really thinking about how the Earth...
And the geochemistry on the Earth had to evolve into a living system.
So it had, like, selection had to happen, evolution had to happen before life.
And this is sort of the critical gap that we're really missing, is, like, what is that mechanism?
And that's where assembly theory is supposed to be coming in, is trying to give us a mechanism for how chemical systems can evolve before we even have a living cell, for example.
And, like, in trying to iterate what those missing stages are, because we just don't know what they look like right now.
joe rogan
Well, also, like, what would the evolutionary advantage of becoming a cell be?
sara imari walker
I think, well, so that's a great question, but one of the problems with this area is we don't know what questions to ask.
So I actually don't know that that's the right question.
I think when you think about it much more deeply about the physics of life and the way that we've been describing it already, if you think physics, like what life is doing as a mechanism, In the universe is maximizing the amount of stuff that gets to exist, for example.
There's this whole world of complex objects that cannot exist unless there's a living architecture that can select and constrain the space to make something like this instead of the universes of other things those atoms could be arranged in.
So if you think that there's something that deep and that fundamental about the nature of life, the origin of life transition has something to do with the emergence of systems that basically can persist.
They can survive against this sort of random chemical noise, like the chemical soup is just a mess of things being created and destroyed, created and destroyed.
And you get something that basically can reinforce its own existence enough to keep existing and then building more complex stuff.
And that's really the origin life transition is pretty simple to say like that, but trying to build an experiment and understand the sort of chemical architecture that mediates that transition is quite hard and that's where we're at right now.
joe rogan
And so experiments are being done to try?
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
How do they conduct these?
sara imari walker
So that's my collaborator Lee Cronin is a chemist and he's totally brilliant and actually him and I are probably, you know, I don't know, like what we're trying to do is a little bit crazy.
To solve the origin of life.
He's doing the experimental stuff, but the sort of idea we had in mind is like, I'll write a book, try to get the ideas out there, get people excited about thinking about this space, and he'll start a company that will digitize chemistry and try to raise the funds to actually do the experiments.
So he's trying to build the technology and experiments that's built on this platform he has for...
Building robots that basically do the chemistry for you.
And the idea being, if we could build a large enough experiment, we could search that huge space of chemistry, a little bit like a search algorithm for chemistry, and then be able to look in chemical space and try to discover aliens in an original life experiment on Earth.
And so that's what we're trying to do.
I'm really excited.
I hope it happens.
joe rogan
Imagine if you guys, if someone does something like this, maybe it's you, maybe it's someone else, someone does something like this and creates an artificial life form and then starts manipulating that life form and evolving that life form through some extraneous processes.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
So, I mean, there are benefits to that, right?
So Lee's company, Chemify, is a digital chemistry company, and their stated aim is to be able to 3D print any molecule on demand, right?
So this has huge impact for the pharmaceutical industry.
But, like, the real goal is to make an artificial life form in the lab.
But that also has huge impact for humanity because you imagine that...
Now you have the ability to study in this other system all of these other kinds of chemistries, like what can you do for like antibiotic discovery or pharmaceutical drug discovery or even psychedelic drug discovery, people like that.
But, you know, like there's a crazy amount of new technology.
And new insights fundamentally to come out of that.
But I also don't think that we're really going to understand these other kind of technologies that we're building.
Like when we're thinking about artificial intelligence and like, is that alive or not?
Unless we solve this chemical problem of what life is, because I think the chemical problem is much harder, but much more direct as far as like understanding the fundamental nature of life when you solve it in an experimental program.
joe rogan
Biological life.
sara imari walker
Biological life.
Chemical life.
Because it won't be biology as we know it, right?
That's the whole point.
It'll be alien biology that we evolve in the lab.
And I actually think this is how we're going to make first contact with alien life because I think we won't recognize it unless we understand what it is.
joe rogan
Wow.
What ethical concerns would arise when you take a thing, like, let's say, let's advance this whole process a few hundred years from now, and you've created artificial life, you've created this thing that doesn't exist anywhere else, and then instead of it being subject to natural selection as a vehicle for its advancement, instead, we just start fucking with it.
And then it gets to a point where there's an ethical concern, like, hey, this thing's about to get smarter than us.
What do we do?
sara imari walker
I think there's ethical concerns right along the way.
And I don't know that I know immediate answers to those.
So, you know, it's kind of like this is the part where it's a little existentially traumatic to work on these kind of problems.
So I have a friend that's a philosopher, Ben Bratton, and he says the best kind of like ideas are the ones that are like equally like really exciting and horrifying.
And you want to work on those ideas because you don't know what its future is going to be.
And I tend to be on the optimistic side.
I think we need to solve this problem because I think we have this sort of existential crisis in some sense that humanity is facing because we don't understand what we are.
We don't understand what our technologies are doing.
We don't understand what our long-term future holds.
We don't even understand all the life around us on this planet.
So we solve that problem.
I think that the lens through which we will look at the kind of ethical things that you're talking about will be radically different because the knowledge itself will have transformed us.
So I can't even anticipate what those kind of dialogues are going to be like.
Imagine if like instead of just wondering about cephalopods and plants and stuff on this conversation, we actually had a fundamental understanding.
Of what it is to be other life forms and life as a, you know, as part of the fundamental structure of reality and like participatory in actually like what the universe builds.
And you have that kind of understanding.
I think it radically changes the way that we conceptualize who we are and what we're doing.
And I don't, you know, I don't know what that looks like.
joe rogan
And we would assume that if we continue, especially down the path of AI and quantum computing, they are probably going to solve a lot of these problems.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think we're flying blind in those areas, though, really, especially AI. I mean, I think that that's pretty obvious that, you know, there's a huge amount of debate about the nature of intelligence in these artificial algorithms.
I certainly think that they're life, but I think they're life in the sense that the lineage of information necessary to train a large language model, for example, you know, requires a planet to evolve something like us and evolve language and then enough data about that language to train the model.
So it's a direct descendant, like you were saying, like, you know, or technologies or babies.
So there's that part of it.
But I think...
I don't know.
I totally lost my train of thought.
This is very funny.
It went two ways and I don't know which way I want to go.
That's very funny.
Yeah.
What was your question again?
I'm so sorry.
joe rogan
That's a good question.
I don't remember what my question was, so we're both in the same boat.
The idea was that artificial intelligence would enhance our understanding of what it means to be biological life.
unidentified
Oh, I see.
sara imari walker
Yeah, and you were asking about quantum information.
joe rogan
Yes, and that when computing power is massively increased and you have a sentient artificial intelligence that essentially has all the information that we have of Every human being, every database, everything all over the world, but yet far more capable of processing this and advancing these things that maybe it'll have a more complex understanding of what life is.
sara imari walker
Yeah, so I think there's a sort of subtlety here when you're talking about artificial intelligence and whether it could compete with natural intelligence.
So this is sort of the canonical debate about the nature of artificial intelligence.
But I think we really underestimate what chemistry can do.
And I think some of the most powerful computers on this planet are still chemical.
And if we actually understand chemistry better, you know, with these kind of new digital chemistry technologies, the kind of compute we can get out of chemistry might actually out-compete silicon in the long run.
joe rogan
Hmm.
Well, then there's also the concept of hybrids, right?
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
When it becomes hybrids.
sara imari walker
I like that concept.
But this gets into the blurry area of like, are you human anymore?
Like, if you have a chip in your brain and you're like being a cephalopod and then you morph into like, you know, being, you know, on your own desktop, like, are you still human?
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Well, that's what I always say about if you go back to Australopithecus and explain to him airplanes and cell phones, but you can't be Australopithecus anymore.
I'd be like, whoa, I don't want to stop being me.
Wouldn't that be the same reaction that they have?
sara imari walker
I think, yeah.
unidentified
Probably.
joe rogan
Probably terrified.
I don't want to become a person.
I don't want to become an alien.
I don't want to be some gray dude with a giant head and big black eyes, but maybe that's what we become.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think also intergenerationally we're already doing that.
So like the sort of, you know, people will always talk about how kids are more comfortable with technology than their parents or grandparents were.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
sara imari walker
And why are they more comfortable?
Because they grew up in a totally different environment.
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
Like the world has literally changed in the last few decades.
So like the world that kids are growing up today is not the world that it was when kids are growing up like 50 years ago.
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
And so they are quote unquote alien, not really alien, but like they're really fundamentally different in a lot of ways.
And I think it's okay to recognize that.
Like that's, you know, part of the progression of understanding and the fact that the world is changing.
joe rogan
And if we're looking at it from generation to generation, let's scale that up a thousand years or a hundred thousand years or a million years.
sara imari walker
Those are fun thought experiments.
joe rogan
Yeah, it really is.
Because the amount of change that's happened in terms of technology and our ability to access it over the past hundred years is enormous.
But yet we're still the same biological creature.
How long does that stay?
When do we start integrating?
Even if we didn't integrate, how much of it would change us?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
I mean, I think we're already seeing signs of that, right?
Like, people's, like, fear of leaving their cell phone behind.
You know, it's like an extensible brain.
So, like, we're all pretty much attached to our cell phone already.
So, when you just, you know, you can imagine in a generation or two, it's more comfortable just to have that inside your body so then you don't lose it.
joe rogan
Yes.
Some people are choosing to have it on their wrist now.
sara imari walker
Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan
It seems like we're in the very bizarre doorway period where we're about to go through this doorway of transhumanism.
Like the phone thing.
We don't want to let it go.
The car.
I don't know how to get anywhere without my navigation system.
You know, all that stuff.
We're completely connected in some new strange way that we've just sort of accepted as normal now.
And accepted, I mean, for you and I, it's over the course of our lifetime.
I mean, when I was a child, there was no internet.
I remember very distinctly when it emerged.
I was like 27 years old was the first time I got a computer and I got online.
I'm like, this is crazy!
And that was the you've got mail days.
sara imari walker
Yeah, AOL was like mind-blowing to me.
joe rogan
Mind-blowing.
sara imari walker
I know, instant messaging.
joe rogan
Mind-blowing.
You could chat with people back and forth with a computer.
This was crazy.
sara imari walker
Totally mind-blowing.
joe rogan
And then you could research things and find out things.
And then when bandwidth started increasing and then you started to be able to watch videos and YouTube comes along.
There's obviously a lot of nonsense on things like YouTube, but how many people have become educated on so many different things because of YouTube?
sara imari walker
It's incredible!
joe rogan
There's so much to know on any subject.
Quantum physics, on carpentry, whatever it is, there's millions of videos.
And all of a sudden you're instantaneously watching some professor discuss what it means to be alive.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's crazy.
sara imari walker
I love the time we're living in.
I think a lot of people want to complain about it, but I think it's fabulous.
joe rogan
It's the best.
You wouldn't want to live in the 80s.
unidentified
No.
joe rogan
All the music sucked.
People were on coke.
sara imari walker
The hair was great.
joe rogan
The hair was interesting.
But it was like, that was a dumb time.
This is a better time.
sara imari walker
It's a better time to go live.
No, I think now is perfect.
joe rogan
For us.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
The people in the future are going to be like, imagine living in 2024. I know.
sara imari walker
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Imagine that presidential election they had to go through.
Imagine this and that and Israel and Gaza and whoa, whoa, whoa.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, they're going to look back at us like, how did we do it the way we look back at cave people?
sara imari walker
Right.
But I think the things that they're going to ask about are not the things that we think that they're going to ask about.
joe rogan
What do you think they're going to ask about?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
I set myself up for that.
Now I don't have an easy answer.
That's so bad.
I totally did that.
Well, I think...
I don't know.
You don't know what the historical moments are right now.
We cite things that we think are historical, and I don't think that they are.
Sometimes it's really interesting because people imagine the future, you know, being radically different than the present.
But Ken Liu is a science fiction author.
He's got this great take that like, if you want to actually predict the future, look at the things that haven't changed in centuries or haven't changed in decades.
And those things are likely still to persist and be the same.
And so like, like when he was talking about this, he had a picture of like, you know, some futuristic thing from like the 1930s.
And there was like a maid in like the black outfit with the white thing.
And they're like, Which of these things is still around?
Like, she's vacuuming.
And it's, like, just, you know, on the side of the photo.
And there's all these, like, robots and things, you know, like, outside.
And, like, nothing looks the same except for, like, we still have the same maid outfits and vacuums.
And we recognize those.
joe rogan
Interesting.
sara imari walker
And that was, like, predicted 100 years ago, right?
So it's, like, it's weird, our conception of things and, like, how much change there is.
And, of course, we, you know, we're, our brains are tuned to look out for the things that are dangerous and changing in our environment.
And so we're always hypersensitive to the things that are not changing, right?
Are changing without recognizing how much is still the same.
joe rogan
Interesting.
And I also think we're aware of how much of an impact technology, in particular, the internet has had on us, but probably not as much as someone who's studying history will be aware of it.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
To them, it'll almost be like a bomb went off.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Yeah, and I love talking with historians, especially about the ideas I work on, right?
So one of the sort of fundamental ideas in assembly theory, which is really radical in some sense from a perspective of physics, but just generally, is that history is actually embedded in objects.
So I actually think any evolved structure has a physical size.
It might be sitting on the desk, but it also has a size in time.
And this is actually like a fundamental feature of the physics of life that living objects, the things that life creates, are large in time.
And this kind of idea has been sitting around humanity for millennia that like, Contingency history might still be alive in the present, but we don't really think about that in a fundamental way.
So, you know, like I was talking with Thomas Moynihan, who's a historian, was just saying that there's so many threads through history that kind of point to this idea being like, you know, super interesting and very relevant.
And so when you think about like the future history, are they going to be like, oh, they finally realized these kind of things were true?
And I think about this with the history of physics.
It's kind of crazy at what generation we started realizing certain things.
Like, when did humanity first start abstracting and building mathematics?
Or when did we build mechanical clocks and start recognizing that we could track things at the level of seconds?
Like, we had to invent seconds.
And now we take them for granted.
joe rogan
Right.
When did China invent the mechanical clock?
What year was that?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
joe rogan
Let's see if Jamie can find that out.
That's a fascinating thought, right?
sara imari walker
I know.
joe rogan
Because before that, they required sundials.
sara imari walker
Right.
joe rogan
You know, and I don't know how much of an effect.
How much of an effect is, like, the sun position?
sara imari walker
Well, all our clocks before that were based on sun.
725 A.D. I mean, that's just incredible.
joe rogan
Look at that.
The world's first mechanical clock, water-driven spherical birds, was invented by Yijing, a Buddhist monk, and 725 AD. Is there a photo of what that looks like?
That's a good question.
unidentified
Does that what it looks like?
Whoa.
joe rogan
Let's see what it looks like.
Whoa.
sara imari walker
I want to see, like, a real one.
joe rogan
Imagine you would go visit that thing.
unidentified
I know.
joe rogan
Like, I need to find out what time it is.
sara imari walker
Well, imagine, but I mean, this is a good thought experiment, right?
Like, imagine being one of the first people to see a mechanical clock.
joe rogan
How big was the first mechanical clock?
unidentified
It doesn't look small.
joe rogan
It looks fucking huge.
sara imari walker
Is that the first one?
joe rogan
Just imagine the calculations involved in figuring out how to make all these gears sort of click, click, click and sync.
sara imari walker
Or even having a concept that you could keep time with that kind of regularity.
Because like you're saying, our clocks before were based on like sand or shadows or water.
Like they were very elemental, right?
And they were not incredibly precise.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
And then the sort of subsequent human knowledge that comes out of timekeeping precision is things like the laws of gravitation, which we wouldn't understand.
Newton and Galileo couldn't have done what they did in their generation unless mechanical clocks existed before they did.
joe rogan
Right.
And the tolerances are so tight that they've created things like tourbillon movements so that they're not affected by gravity.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like these constant force gears.
Have you ever seen tourbillon watches?
sara imari walker
No.
I feel like I should build a watch now.
This is kind of like, I'm going to get like this weird hobby where I'm going to become like a watchmaker or something.
joe rogan
Oh, watches are amazing.
sara imari walker
I know, they're cool.
joe rogan
Mechanical watches are so damn cool.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
They're so fascinating.
There's a company called Grand Seiko, and Grand Seiko is like the advanced version of Seiko.
Seiko makes like a bunch of different kinds of levels of watches in terms of price points, but then Grand Seiko is their luxury line.
And Grand Seiko has created watches that are mechanical, but also have quartz involved in the movement.
So their accuracy is insane to within a half a second a day.
And it's all just these gears spinning around in springs.
sara imari walker
Amazing.
joe rogan
And half a second a day.
And they have a 72-hour power reserve.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
Some of them even more than that.
It's bananas.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I know it is.
joe rogan
It really is bananas that they've figured out a way to do this with these tiny...
And this is one right here.
So look how thin it is.
sara imari walker
It's awesome.
joe rogan
It just sits right there.
sara imari walker
Is it heavy?
joe rogan
No, not that heavy.
But I have some of them.
That's a Grand Seiko right there.
It's called the Spring Drive.
It's not that heavy.
But that's all.
That is also a Grand Seiko.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
But there's mechanical gears and stuff inside of them.
sara imari walker
So much cooler knowing what's going on inside.
joe rogan
This one is different, too, because this one actually has a battery as well.
And so this one is super-duper accurate.
unidentified
Oh, very cool.
joe rogan
They just tried to figure out a way to make these things work.
Over time, more and more accurate, more and more precise, and what they've gotten it down to now is extraordinary.
But show it the tourbillon movement, because it's bananas.
When you see what those look like in some of these tourbillon watches, they go for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a watch.
Just because of the complexity of the gears, and then they also have clear windows over the movement so you can stare at it while it's doing its thing.
This is a tourbillon watch.
unidentified
Look at all that jazz.
sara imari walker
That's amazing.
joe rogan
Bananas!
Look at all these gears!
sara imari walker
I know!
I'm trying to figure out how many gears are actually in it, but it's pretty insane.
joe rogan
These sync up.
I mean, I don't know what the accuracy of...
This is another Grand Seiko.
This is their constant force tourbillon movement.
That watch is several hundred thousand dollars.
sara imari walker
Wow.
joe rogan
Because it was just so insanely complex.
sara imari walker
It's gorgeous.
joe rogan
To create.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I love the see-through that you can actually see.
joe rogan
See, find out how accurate that thing is today.
Because the dive watch or the spring drive is accurate within a half a second a day.
So how accurate is that damn thing?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Nutty.
sara imari walker
You could do physics with it.
joe rogan
So the fact that you're doing this with seconds, I mean, the precision involved in making sure that every gear and every spring represents a second so perfectly with no deviation that it's a half a second over 24 hours.
That's bananas.
Okay.
Plus or minus 12 seconds a day.
Is that a different tourbillon?
That's a different tourbillon.
That's a seagull tourbillon.
jamie vernon
I was trying to find an answer for one of them.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's a different one.
jamie vernon
This was saying a tourbillon doesn't...
joe rogan
It doesn't improve accuracy.
Okay.
So the idea is that it's not affected by gravity, but it doesn't improve accuracy.
The same gravity-fighting effect as tourbillon mechanism in fact has been proven that tourbillons offer no more accuracy than a traditional escapement on a wristwatch.
In some cases, even less.
But it's kind of a nerd thing.
sara imari walker
Yeah, no, I can see that.
joe rogan
People love the tourbillon movements.
sara imari walker
That's good.
joe rogan
It's so...
sara imari walker
I could nerd out on those.
They're amazing.
joe rogan
Oh, for sure.
And you can go deep and deep and deep.
And they're also, some of them are like wafer thin, wafer thin, and they have this automatic movement inside of them.
So the movement of your hand, like every time you move your arm, it's winding the watch.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
So as you move around.
unidentified
Oh, really?
joe rogan
Yes.
Yes.
Like a Rolex.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
Yes.
If you have like an automatic watch, like a Rolex Submariner, you don't wind it.
You move it around.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And as you move it around, that's what causes it to have the power to keep going.
So as you're wearing it throughout the day, and then there's some that you do wind.
sara imari walker
I just had a morbid thought that you could tell how long someone was dead for by like how many seconds off that watch is because it wasn't wound up anymore.
joe rogan
Sort of, but you'd only tell within, you know, 12 hours.
sara imari walker
Yeah, yeah, I know.
unidentified
That's funny though.
joe rogan
It is funny.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Well, you'd have to find out what kind of a movement it is.
Is this a 48-hour movement or a 72-hour movement?
How long does it last for?
Yeah.
sara imari walker
That's incredible technology.
joe rogan
Was the watch broken already?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Time Rolex watch helped solve a murder mystery.
unidentified
Whoa!
sara imari walker
Okay, there you go.
See, I wasn't totally off.
joe rogan
Look at that.
sara imari walker
Wow.
joe rogan
Is that how it solved it?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
I just made that up, but cool.
joe rogan
Interesting.
Well, it makes sense.
So that's the Oyster Perpetual, right?
That's one of those watches that also has an automatic movement.
sara imari walker
I just love the idea of recovering information and figuring out puzzles.
joe rogan
All right.
The Rolex is known to be 48 hours, the power reserve.
Police were able to determine the date of death within a reasonable margin of error by subtracting the watch's power reserve from the date that was displayed on the watch when it was found.
sara imari walker
Yep.
joe rogan
According to his Rolex watch, Ronald Platt was murdered on July 20th, 1996. The problem with that is a lot of people don't set their date correctly, so that wouldn't hold up in court.
It seems like, how do you know the guy was accurate with his date?
Oh, sorry.
How do you know if he had shitty vision?
Like, you can't even see.
I can't read that.
Unless I have good lighting.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I can't read that.
Is yours set to the right date or no?
Mine probably isn't.
Hold on a second.
Let me tell you right now.
sara imari walker
It'd be funny if it's not.
joe rogan
Oh, this one doesn't even have a date.
sara imari walker
Oh, there you go.
That's not going to hold up in court.
joe rogan
This one doesn't have a date.
You're safe.
Why did I think it does?
That's funny.
But some of them do.
And that's a different – there's like a different mechanism inside of there.
They call them complications.
But these different ones, like they'll have one – I have one that I gave to Lex.
That's an Omega, and it has a moon on it.
And so it has a moon-faced thing where there's a high-resolution photograph of the moon, and as the moon rises and moves through the sky, it becomes a full moon, and a half moon, a quarter moon, it shows it on the watch.
And so it's accurate.
So you have to go to a website, you find out what the moon phase is, you set the moon phase for where the watch is, and then you set the time and the date on the watch, and then it stays in sync.
sara imari walker
Love it.
joe rogan
It's crazy.
sara imari walker
That's so amazing.
joe rogan
The Omega's really cool because it's a little image, but it's a high-resolution image of the moon.
Can you see if you can find one of those?
It's an Omega Speedmaster moon watch.
And so this little moon sort of moves through this little night sky window in the bottom of the watch.
sara imari walker
I love the phases of the moon.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's not it.
Find the one with the moon on it, Jamie.
Say...
No, no, that's the...
No, no, no.
Moon watch is the watch they wore during the moon landings.
Moon phase is what you're looking for.
Yeah.
So that one's different.
That's it right there.
Click on the one where you just had your cursor.
So that, see the image of the moon at the bottom?
sara imari walker
Got it.
joe rogan
Isn't that dope?
So it even has like a bunch of little stars back there.
sara imari walker
And that's all run by Gears too.
unidentified
Yes.
sara imari walker
So cool.
joe rogan
It's so cool.
And then the one above it, that's the calendar.
The window to the upper left of it, that's its calendar.
sara imari walker
It's amazing that they can sync all those different sort of scales of time within one device with just a bunch of Gears.
joe rogan
And incredibly accurate too.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Amazing.
joe rogan
That's my favorite watch.
unidentified
I love that thing.
I love it.
sara imari walker
That's great.
joe rogan
So cool.
sara imari walker
It's a great gift.
joe rogan
Yeah, but it's just an amazing piece of human ingenuity.
Someone's figured out how to do that.
And again, that's fully mechanical.
That's just you move your hand around and it does all the winding.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it keeps it accurate.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's nuts.
sara imari walker
It is nuts.
joe rogan
That's our simple little simian brains.
unidentified
Human brains.
sara imari walker
I know.
It's amazing.
joe rogan
And when you think about what could possibly become of advanced life if we could exist in, you know, just stay alive and advance another million years, which doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.
sara imari walker
I think it'll happen.
joe rogan
You think so?
sara imari walker
I think so.
unidentified
What do you think we look like in the future?
sara imari walker
I mean, I think, as we've been talking about, it's some kind of hybrid existence.
I think we are becoming more integrated with our technology.
I don't feel existentially traumatized by that.
And I also don't think...
There's all these tropes about machines completely replacing biological life, and I just don't think that's a realistic possibility either.
And again, it goes back to looking at the history of life on Earth.
There's no technology that life invented That was completely replaced if subsequent architecture was built on it.
So I always think about the ribosome, which mediates the translation in a cell, as one of the most important and oldest technologies on our planet.
We don't think about molecules as technologies, but life had to invent that thing, and it's still here.
And there's billions of ribosomes on this planet, and they're kind of the engines of existence in some sense because cells require them to function.
And so I think a lot of the stuff that we're building now, like it's an interesting question what's going to be around billions of years from now.
I don't think that we as humans have invented any technology that will last that long.
But I do think the idea that we're not going to be replaced because we are like sort of a key part of the infrastructure of what comes next is compelling to me based on looking at the history of life on Earth.
joe rogan
Yeah, we may not be replaced, but we probably won't remain the same.
sara imari walker
No, we won't.
Yeah.
joe rogan
When we do integrate, if we do have some sort of a technological cyborg existence, what does that look like?
sara imari walker
Well, the question of, like, what does it mean to integrate, though?
So, like, already in this discussion, we've been talking about, like, being in a society or not in a society.
And the lifestyle of a human and what a human is is fundamentally different if you're an individual living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on your own versus if you're living in a modern society and you have all this technological aid and this, like, social constraints imposed on you that you have to hold a nine-to-five job and you have to have an income and all these other things, like...
You're a fundamentally different kind of entity than you would be as someone living in the wild on their own.
And so we're already part of a technological infrastructure.
We just don't really recognize societies as that.
But it's being built more and more into us that we're kind of stuck in that.
Most of us couldn't survive on our own.
And then we're going to become more integrated with that system.
So I think of analogies with other kinds of life.
You know, molecules inside a cell can't exist on their own either, but they're alive as part of a cell.
Or, you know, ants in a society can't exist on their own.
Like, they need to be in the colony.
And I think humans are already the same.
joe rogan
I think so, too.
And I think the way we make distinctions with animals, like feral pigs versus domesticated pigs and things along those lines, we think of them as different things.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
I think they are different.
sara imari walker
And you could say there's superficial physical resemblances, but I think those are kind of superficial.
I think it's fundamentally different to be a wild species versus a domesticated one, or a wild human, so to speak, versus a domesticated human.
joe rogan
Right, right.
And I think when you look at that guy who lives in Antarctica, or in the Arctic Circle rather, and you compare him to like the saddest overweight gamer who's drinking Mountain Dew all day.
sara imari walker
Oh Mountain Dew, that sounds painful.
joe rogan
What if someone's just pale, no sunlight at all, just eating garbage and playing Call of Duty all day long?
They're completely different animals.
sara imari walker
They are.
joe rogan
One of them is walking through the mountains with a rifle looking for caribou, and the other one is just calling Uber Eats.
sara imari walker
And I suspect that, like, even the way they feel about the world is totally different, right?
So it's not just, like, obviously the physiological differences manifest in, like, mental differences about, like, the acuity of their mental architecture, how they feel about their environment and, like, what's happening to them.
It's just totally different.
joe rogan
How much, if any, do you pay attention to the UFO, UAP world?
sara imari walker
I don't pay too much attention to it, to be quite honest.
I think, for me, it's not very exciting, to be honest.
I'm much more interested in understanding fundamentally what life is and I think the UFO discussion really hasn't afforded me a deeper understanding of the problems I'm interested in solving.
So I don't pay too much attention to it.
I think it's much more interesting as a cultural discussion and like some of these things that we've also been talking about, like augmented humans and all these other things, it's like there's a lot of discussions happening Culturally that I think are preparing us for the next phase.
And so I kind of see the UFO discussion as being one like, you know, we culturally need to understand how we want to think about alien life, what it is, how we intersect with it.
And so there needs to be a lot of discussions about the nature of that problem and people interested in believing in that problem.
But I don't really see a lot intellectually for me personally coming out of that discussion.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's no meat.
sara imari walker
No.
joe rogan
It's just a lot of talk and a lot of stories that some of them from very respected people that I believe them.
And their encounters are fascinating.
But you could waste your whole life thinking about what that means and what's true.
There's not enough data.
There's very, very, very little data.
unidentified
Yeah, that's the problem.
sara imari walker
So I find it interesting.
It's certainly intriguing to think about the possibilities.
But it's sort of like mythology versus...
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
And like individual knowledge versus shared knowledge.
And I think what science, like, you know, you can question the sort of academic establishment and the way that we do science and it's very dogmatic and all those things.
And I can agree with a lot of those criticisms.
But science fundamentally is about shared knowledge and the ability to like, Have a joint conversation about something we both understand and to be able to use that to do things like, you know, the laws of gravitation are things that we can easily state and we can build satellites and new technologies out of that knowledge.
And I think, you know, the discussion on alien life is fundamentally about new knowledge that we need to have about how the universe works.
And that's going to come from a lot of different places.
But for me, I don't see the UFO discussion fundamentally advancing.
That question.
It's just raising some of the mystery about, you know, certain experiences people have had, but not in a way that allows us to really answer the question of what is an alien.
joe rogan
There's also a fundamental problem of accuracy of information and how much of this whistleblower stuff is nonsense.
How much of it is true?
When you're relying on person A to discuss classified documents.
sara imari walker
There's a lot of control of narratives.
Which I don't like.
So I don't like people telling people how to think.
And I think what I see in the UFO discussion a lot that actually makes me stay out of that community is a lot of people that claim authority on knowledge and then they claim they can't share the knowledge.
And I don't like that.
I think if you have knowledge, you should share it.
You should discuss it.
You should try to figure out what it means for everybody and you should not protect it.
joe rogan
That's why you're a scientist.
unidentified
Yes.
Yeah, that's what people should be doing.
sara imari walker
I don't trust people when they claim to have absolute knowledge they can't share with people.
joe rogan
The only thing that gives me pause is the possibility that they're dealing with top secret programs that could get them in great trouble and would limit their access to this technology.
That gives me pause.
And it's the only thing that gives me pause.
sara imari walker
But it's such a good story though, right?
joe rogan
It's the best story.
sara imari walker
I know, right?
joe rogan
That's the problem is I'm a sucker.
I'm a giant sucker for that kind of story.
I love those stories.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think we all do.
joe rogan
I hear about those stories and I'm like, oh my god.
I love it.
I want to hear all of them.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Yeah, but I think that's like a sort of also standard play that like, you know, if the government needs to keep knowledge a secret, suddenly it becomes more valuable, right?
joe rogan
I don't even necessarily think it's the government as much as I think it's the government and military contractors.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
So if you have some sort of technology that is literally out of this world and you're trying to figure out how it works, it's within your best interest to keep that as secret as possible.
Yeah, right.
sara imari walker
Well, we see the cases of that in Arizona.
It's like, you know, like they're testing, you know, whatever new technology for fighter jets or whatever.
And it's like a million UFO sightings.
And then it's like released later that it was, you know, the military.
joe rogan
Have you ever seen a military jet, like a stealth bomber?
No.
When we were filming Fear Factor way back in the day, we were...
Out near Edwards Air Force Base.
And one of those stealth bombers flew overhead.
And if I didn't know what it was, I would swear that was from another planet.
It looks so cool.
It looks so cool.
And it does not look like anything else you've ever seen flying in the sky.
Yeah.
This is post 9-11, 2001. Right.
So this is the very beginning of Fear Factor and right after 9-11 and we were out there in the desert and you see this thing, it's near Palmdale, and you see this thing fly overhead and it's like, it looks like something Batman owns.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
See if you can find one of those.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
See if you can find like a video of a stealth bomber flying overhead.
It flew right past us.
I was like, whoa.
sara imari walker
I would love to see that.
joe rogan
Part of it was terrifying, because like, oh my god, are we going to war?
Like, why am I seeing these alien warships?
sara imari walker
Yeah, I always feel like that when I see military stuff.
It's equal parts amazing and profound, and then totally existentially traumatizing.
joe rogan
Yes, exactly.
unidentified
It's cool, but it's designed to kill people really quick.
joe rogan
It's designed to sneak in and mess people up and then get out of there without anybody knowing you're there.
That's literally what it is, a stealth bomber.
sara imari walker
Yeah, but I do find it exciting that so many people want to talk about UFOs and are, like, really excited about the possibilities for aliens.
joe rogan
The thing is, like, my point is, I mean, was that Einstein's quote?
Sufficient technology is indistinguishable from magic.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Was it Asimov maybe?
joe rogan
Might have been Asimov.
Yeah.
So here's one flying overhead.
Look at this.
Come on.
Like if you saw this, you'd be like, oh my God, they're here.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like if you saw that fly overhead, you'd go, oh my God, aliens are real.
unidentified
Right?
joe rogan
That's how I felt.
sara imari walker
It's kind of epic that the most alien thing on the planet is the human mind and like what it can create.
joe rogan
Oh my God.
The most epic.
We're responsible for every single thing.
Every single thing that's an object that didn't grow, we made it.
Nuts.
sara imari walker
Blows my mind.
joe rogan
Blows my mind.
And if I think about the possibility of something even more advanced than us coming here and manipulating us, the same way we're willing to take a chance in creating artificial life in a laboratory, if we're willing to do that, if they're so much more advanced than us that they think we're just these silly territorial apes...
sara imari walker
So why is it always a narrative that they're so much more advanced?
Like, where does this come from?
joe rogan
Because they got here.
We can't get there.
sara imari walker
I see.
But I don't think that technological progress is linear.
So they might have the technology to come and visit us, say, but not have other kinds of technology that we've advanced.
joe rogan
Perhaps.
But the idea that they have...
They've gone so far in one area that is so perplexing, which is deep space travel and vast distances of space and time, and that they've conquered that.
So the closest planets that we think we have Goldilocks zones are how far away?
How many light years away?
sara imari walker
I mean, the closest planetary system is probably, you know, about four light years away.
joe rogan
With a recognized Goldilocks zone?
sara imari walker
There's planets there.
It's very debatable about, like, whether it's a Trappist system, like, whether those planets are actually habitable or not.
Because we don't know if they have atmospheres and there's all kinds of debate in the community.
But, like, potentially, yeah.
joe rogan
So let's take the closest planetary system.
So four light years?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Okay.
Is that?
Yeah.
So imagine something coming here every four years because it takes that long.
sara imari walker
Well, that's assuming they can travel at light speed, which is a big if.
joe rogan
Or assuming they can do something.
Well, we're also assuming that speed is you're taking an object and you're moving that object through some method of propulsion to a new place.
Instead of moving the space around it...
Folding that and having it instantaneously travel from one point to point, which is the way the real super eggheads describe the potential future, like long distance space travel.
sara imari walker
Based on sort of extensions of current theories of gravity, but yeah.
joe rogan
And, you know, obviously extrapolating greatly our ability to generate power, right?
But if they did figure out a way to get here, they would probably be so unimpressed with us, especially if they caught us a few hundred years ago, you know, and we're basically like making stupid houses and burning coal and riding horses.
sara imari walker
And making mechanical clocks.
joe rogan
That's true.
Right.
That was quite a while ago.
Yeah, that's true.
Was that AD or 725 AD? Is that what it was?
Yeah.
I mean, just the idea that we have come so far in such a short period of time, you would just imagine that if that keeps going, it's going to get to the point where everything expands exponentially and the ability to travel through space will be on the list.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
And then you're going to go, okay, what are they doing?
Oh, they only have rocks.
They only have sticks and rocks.
They haven't figured out metallurgy yet.
They haven't figured out Right.
sara imari walker
But the challenge with these kind of like thought experiments is we're always applying today's standard and understanding to long term futures.
And if you imagine that we go through this process of, you know, creating the kind of technologies that you're describing, we will be so fundamentally different in the process, we'll be having a different discussion.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
And we won't be able to reason about what that looks like based on the way that we think about things now.
So I think this kind of, you know, I've never really been a fan of like these sort of, you know, survival of the fittest, predator, prey, like the aliens are just going to be so much more advanced than us and come and take over everything kind of narratives because it just doesn't seem to be, first off, it's not consistent with what we actually observe because we don't observe aliens yet.
And second off, it doesn't seem consistent with the trajectory of what we're doing overall, especially if you think about us not individually but like much more as just like a biosphere evolving into a technologic, like a technosphere.
joe rogan
Yeah.
I agree with you there.
I think this predator-prey thing sort of got sidelined the moment we created agriculture in cities.
That kind of stopped, and then it became a new thing.
And as we advance technologically, it becomes another new thing.
My thought is...
There's going to be a moment in time.
The way we've integrated with each other digitally through cell phones and through social media and interaction online, there will be another level of that that is exponentially more bizarre.
It's probably going to take place with Neuralink and similar type technologies that we're going to integrate with each other and communicate telepathically and communicate with large groups of people telepathically.
sara imari walker
And I think Isn't it amazing that things that were once myths become fact through technology?
I think this is just absolutely amazing like how much our ancestors thought about these things that they called magic and like we're making you know like actual physical reality through technology.
joe rogan
We had the gentleman who received the first Neuralink implant here.
We talked to him about what it's like.
I look at him like, this is, you're the future.
We're probably all going to have something similar to that in our bodies.
And then eventually we're going to go, why do we have these fragile feet when you can have these immense deluxe carbon fiber feet that allow you to run over hot coals and not feel a thing?
Wouldn't you rather have those?
They're better.
You can control them better.
sara imari walker
It depends on what you want to do.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
It depends on what you do.
But we're very connected to our biological existence.
But my thought is that our biological existence comes with all the baggage of all the human reward systems that have been put in place in order to ensure our survival.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
And this is what's led us to war.
This is what's led us to violence.
This is what's led us to all the terrible things.
Yes.
sara imari walker
We have a lot of baggage.
joe rogan
Yes.
And that baggage, I think, is a byproduct of survival of the fittest mentality that came out of our biological life.
As we integrate digitally, I think that might be one of the primary benefits, is that we realize, oh, we can't kill each other.
We're all one.
We really are all one and we really are all connected.
And instead of doing that, why don't we figure out a way to solve all this and work together?
And if we are all one of the same mindset, this whole idea of stealing resources and covert operations, that's all going to go away.
It just makes sense that that would be one of the things that would happen.
We would stop doing all the dumb things that we do.
And then as we joined together, we would say, well, we need to come up with solutions for our environmental issues.
We need to come up with solutions for long-term strategies for dealing with all these different problems that we've created.
And then we could do it together.
Yeah.
And instead of like having this whole concept of territorial lines in the sand where you're not allowed to cross unless you have a passport or you have to paperwork.
Some sort of an integration with all human beings.
The way we have with cell phones, but way more sophisticated.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
I mean, something I find really shocking is how difficult it is for humans to think of other humans as human.
Right.
Like, so we have like our severe friends or like people that we find socially acceptable.
And then like, pretty much anybody outside of that space is like beyond our cognitive horizon.
And we just can't treat them as people anymore.
And I find this very perplexing and, you know, about a bit of an issue in making the kind of transition that you're talking about that we just like can't even see each other as humans.
joe rogan
Sure.
I mean, that's the whole concept of the other, right?
They're different than us.
They're different.
We're allowed to do this because they're those people.
sara imari walker
Exactly.
And that permeates so much of modern society right now.
It's hard to look at anybody and see them as a person.
joe rogan
And I think that's baked into us, first of all, because we all evolved in tribal groups of very small numbers of people, which is where Dunbar's number comes from, right?
We only have a certain amount of people that we can keep intimately connected to in our minds.
sara imari walker
Yeah, and our social networks are much larger than that now, so most of the people in our network we can't actually humanize.
joe rogan
Well, it's even worse if you're famous because you don't remember anybody's name.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because I meet so many people.
sara imari walker
And then you have all kinds of people that have a parasocial relationship with you and, like, they think they know you and they don't know you.
joe rogan
Especially me because I do this, right?
unidentified
So I'm talking all the time.
joe rogan
It's like, I talk to you every day.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
It must be very weird.
joe rogan
Fucking strange.
But it's also I feel like that sort of connection with people.
This is what I'm what anybody who's doing any sort of a podcast or something like that is kind of doing is like a one way version of what I think is going to exist universally on the planet.
sara imari walker
Yes.
I agree with that.
I think actually the thing that I find really interesting about the podcasting space is this kind of like very intimate conversation, but it's technologically mediated and shared, right?
And I think that's exactly what you're talking about.
And so like this transition phase and like why are podcasting becoming so popular, I think is because it's part of this kind of transition that we're all undergoing.
joe rogan
There's also an unusual authenticity in having access to individual minds without influence of producers and directors and a bunch of different people.
So like this conversation in particular, I had zero conversations with any person before I got you on.
I had a text message that I sent to my friend who's the booking guy.
I said, hey, reach out to her.
This sounds cool.
See if she can do this date.
And that's it.
And then it goes on my phone and that's it.
And then so I start watching some of the conversations you had.
I watched your thing on Lex.
I start looking into these concepts and assembly theory and all these different things.
And so all it is is something I'm interested in.
There's no other reason to have this conversation other than I'm interested in it.
sara imari walker
Yep.
joe rogan
And so that, I think, resonates with other people because I love when someone's interested in something.
If they're interested in making baseballs by hand or whatever it is.
sara imari walker
I think we should all be more excited about things.
Things are exciting, especially creative spaces and new ideas and people that are thinking about Like, changing things.
joe rogan
But for me, it's someone who's passionate about something.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
For sure.
sara imari walker
I totally get what you mean about the baseballs.
It's infectious.
unidentified
Anything.
sara imari walker
I mean, this is why I like the watch discussion.
unidentified
Yes.
sara imari walker
Because it's very clearly, like, drawn from enthusiasm.
And somebody, like, designed that thing.
joe rogan
That's crazy.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan
And I am, by the way, I am a Luddite when it comes to watches.
There are watch nerds.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like serious watch nerds that can tell you like all the models and what this movement has on that movement in it.
They know all the pieces.
Some of them take them apart and put them back together again on their own.
They got these giant goggles and little tweezers and shit.
It's crazy.
I mean, but I love when people are really excited about things.
Whether it's about playing the guitar or making a painting.
Like something about that to me is infectious.
And it makes me excited about other things.
If I see someone who's really excited about making furniture, I start getting excited about what I do.
It's like there's something about that energy.
sara imari walker
Passion is infectious.
And I think enabling people to find their own passion is really important.
joe rogan
Very much so.
And when you do what we're doing on this podcast and have conversations about things that are just interesting.
That's all it is.
It's just interesting.
sara imari walker
Interesting is good.
It's far better than the opposite.
joe rogan
Yes, it's just fascinating.
And so that stimulates minds.
It stimulates people.
There's people at home that are listening like, I have a question.
How did this happen?
How did that happen?
What would have happened if it was a little bit colder?
What would have happened if it was a little bit warmer?
What would have happened if there was no this or no that?
Imagine a world where no one figures out the wheel.
sara imari walker
I think about alternate histories all the time.
joe rogan
Well, the bizarre thing is they do not think the Egyptians had the wheel.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like, what are you talking about?
How is that even possible?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And so no theory there.
That's like the massive mystery of human civilization itself, just in the structures that were left behind with no explanation.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
That alone makes us go, well, we have this bizarre idea in our head of how things progress based on our current understanding of the world we live in right now.
But that has no bearing on Egypt.
Like, what did they do?
How'd they do that?
We don't know.
sara imari walker
I know.
History is a predictive science, which is like a weird thing, but like people don't like think about this, but like, you know, you have to have theories of the past and then test it against the record, right?
So it's not really any different than any other domain of knowledge where we're trying to make predictions and test them against current data.
It's just like history, for some reason, we think it actually happened.
Therefore, like there's one narrative, but it's usually constructed based on what we know and we're learning all the time.
joe rogan
Well, also the problem in- And we forget all the time.
The collapse of that civilization, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, all the records lost.
So they probably had written down how they did everything.
And some assholes came along and burnt everything.
And now we're like, what did you do?
sara imari walker
They were definitely assholes.
That was such an amazing list.
Assholes.
When I first heard about the Library of Alexandria, I was like, that was heartbroken.
I was like, can you even imagine what was lost?
joe rogan
If we knew what they knew, the amount of advancement...
Just Egypt, just that one part of Africa where they figured out how to do some things that to this day, 4,500 plus years later, we are perplexed.
unidentified
Yeah.
Perplexed.
joe rogan
There's shitty theories.
They all suck.
Every theory sucks.
They've just recently discovered some sort of hydraulic technology that was in one of the pyramids.
sara imari walker
Oh, really?
joe rogan
Yeah, see if you can find that.
That's crazy.
There's some recent research that was published where it wasn't the Khufu pyramid.
It was another pyramid.
And in one of these other pyramids, they believe they have evidence of some sort of hydraulic technology that was used.
sara imari walker
Oh, that's so cool.
joe rogan
A study published Monday in a journal PLOS. One researcher proposed that ancient people may have relied on water to build the step pyramid.
The suspect hydraulic system may have helped lift stones from the center of the pyramid.
Wow.
So, like, we're still trying to figure out what they did.
sara imari walker
So, long before I got into science, like, one of the first places I actually encountered in astronomy was, like, reading about the Orion mystery when I was, like, in fifth grade.
And I, like, I was, like, got obsessed with it for a little while about, like, whether the chambers and the pyramids were actually aligned with the stars and stuff.
And, like...
How did they possibly do that?
It was kind of crazy.
joe rogan
There's a guy named Christopher Dunn, who's an engineer, and he has the wildest theory.
He thinks that the construction of the pyramid, and this is, by the way, both maligned by some archaeologists, completely dismissed, but also embraced by younger archaeologists.
sara imari walker
Oh, interesting.
joe rogan
So this theory is that the way the Great Pyramid was set up was not set up as a tomb, but was set up as some sort of a way to generate electricity.
And that there was a chamber, a subterranean chamber, and that this chamber had something in it that was like pounding on the stone and creating a certain vibration.
And then they had this...
These shafts that they had access to that had – they know these shafts existed and they know the structure of these shafts and these shafts that existed in the marble or whatever the stone, granite rather, and they would fill these shafts up with some sort of chemicals.
And then at the end of the shaft was limestone, and so the limestone is porous, and the limestone allows the gases to escape from all these chemicals and contain itself inside this chamber.
This chamber is constantly being vibrated, and then there are these pathways that lead up to what they're calling the King's Chamber, which is this insane structure.
It's one of the most perplexing things about the pyramid, because these are immense stones that are positioned— I mean, they're just a phenomenal piece of architecture.
And then in those, they have shafts that go straight out into space that he thinks is gathering gamma rays.
And so the gamma rays are interacting with this hydrogen that's being created by these chemicals and the vibrations and that all these things are used to generate electricity.
And this is why there's a gold capstone on the top of the period and smooth limestone on the outside.
It's a nutty theory, but this guy's a brilliant man.
sara imari walker
No, I mean, it's incredibly creative.
And if it's testable and, like, there's ways to validate that that could work, that would be...
joe rogan
Well, the problem is you'd have to do it at scale.
sara imari walker
Well, you could look for traces of, like, whatever chemistry is talking about on the pyramid walls.
And, like, it would be possible to experimentally verify whether gamma rays could do that.
I don't suspect that they could, but...
But, like, there's pieces of it.
Like, this is how science works.
You have, like, a story of a set of hypotheses and you can test individual parts of it and then try to validate it.
So it'd be kind of cool if, you know, like, he wanted to try to do that.
joe rogan
Right.
And so then the question is...
How'd they figure that out?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
joe rogan
Imagine if it turns out to be correct and this was some sort of a way of generating power from the earth and space itself.
How'd you figure that out?
sara imari walker
But also why?
Because where would they put the power?
They didn't have any electric grids or anywhere to put it.
joe rogan
Not that we know of, right?
The problem is...
It all gets to this weirdness of how much evidence would be left from 10,000 years ago?
How much evidence would be left from 20,000 years ago?
How long did it take people to figure that out?
Was it 2,000 or 3,000 years?
How much tinkering?
sara imari walker
Yeah, and yeah.
I mean, there's all kinds of interesting questions you can ask about that kind of stuff, even in like deep time.
So, you know, one of my colleagues, Adam Frank, had this paper on like the Silurian hypothesis, which is like the idea that there was like intelligent beings around the time of dinosaurs, like a dinosaur race, and like how would you actually look in the geological record for it?
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
And so, like, people can work out the mathematics of, like, you know, what would be the traces of these, you know, like, if the Egyptians had this capability or if, you know, there were intelligent species that emerged on the planet long before humans and had enough technology, say, to, like, have radioactive waste or anything.
Like, you can actually, like, bound, you know, like, what would we actually see in the record.
So it is possible still to constrain this stuff.
Even the most radical hypotheses.
So I've been raised in a tradition scientifically of entertaining any idea as long as it's something that we can actually test and measure.
And so I guess for me, I think some of the most creative ideas in science are things that people completely didn't expect.
Like what?
Well, I mean, I think Einstein's a great example.
You know, like, he was one of the few people that took seriously that the speed of light, you know, is constant.
Like, we take that for granted now, but everybody thought that was kind of ridiculous and the experiments must be wrong because there's no way that the speed of light could be constant.
And he was like, no, the laws of nature are invariant.
And this invariance also implies that the speed of light could be invariant because it's a law of nature.
And then he was able to derive relativity from that and that has all kinds of, you know, radical consequences about the way that we think about space and time and, you know, the fact that time is, you know, like, it's actually a relative concept.
At least simultaneity is a relative concept.
I think there's many concepts of time in physics.
But yeah, so I think that's one.
But like quantum mechanics is another.
Like if you actually look at the observational evidence and you try to build a theory from the observational evidence, you get to like really interesting spaces that are completely different than what you thought.
And so it's easy to have theories and creative ideas.
It's actually harder to go from the observational constraints and work into a theory that's consistent with all of those.
And that's actually where most of our more radical conceptions and foundational shifts come from.
And so that's why I'm actually particularly excited about what we're doing with assembly theory as an example, because what we're trying to do there is say, if life is actually a real property of the physical world, like whatever we call life, it'll have to be redefined, then we should be able to have a measurable consequence.
And the way we talk about that is actually to measure this complexity of molecules, assembly of molecules, Which you can go in the lab and measure with standard instrumentation like a mass spec and an NMR and infrared.
Like you can measure this property of a molecule.
It's a real physical feature.
And then you can derive all kinds of weird shit from that.
And I think this has been the tradition of physics in general, but science also more broadly, that, you know, the reason that we get so convinced about things and they work is because we're working backward from what we observe and measure.
And then we test it against what we can observe and measure.
And the things that happen with reality are far stranger than the things that we could dream up, which is why I love it.
It's just crazy, like, the kind of ideas you get out of that process.
joe rogan
Well, it's just the process that allows you and I to be staring at each other.
First of all, the fact that we can see each other is crazy.
sara imari walker
Evolution of eyes is amazing.
joe rogan
Nuts.
sara imari walker
Nuts.
Totally nuts.
joe rogan
And then also, octopi have them too.
They just evolved on a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree.
sara imari walker
Totally crazy.
joe rogan
But they all evolved eyes.
It seems like a property that almost every animal has.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Seeing is pretty deep.
I mean, I think, I don't know when the first photon receptors evolved in cells, but, you know, even cells have light sensing capabilities.
So, I mean, that's how photosynthesis evolved also.
But, yeah, but it's crazy.
So, like, the idea of, you know, like, when life first emerged on the planet, nothing could see, but it evolved later.
And it is something that is fairly consistent.
And even if you think about our technology, so I always think about the progression of biology into technology.
It is fascinating also that a lot of our technologies that allow us to understand the world are technologies of sight, like telescopes and microscopes.
And, you know, like we think we knew life on this planet and then we invented the microscope.
And it's like, you know, just you don't need that much more resolution.
And you can suddenly see that this table is completely covered in cells, for example, that we didn't know were there.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
Which is just mind-blowing.
joe rogan
Mind-blowing.
sara imari walker
Mind-blowing.
It's like we evolved from cells billions of years ago.
It took us billions of years to evolve into an intelligence that could build a technology and then look and be like, oh, biology's made out of cells.
joe rogan
And then if you think you understand any of it, the people that understand subatomic particles are like, hold my beer.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because this whole thing's empty space.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it's all operating in some bizarre quantum state where it's like both still and moving at the same time.
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Those wave functions, yeah.
unidentified
What?
sara imari walker
I know.
joe rogan
Like, what is everything?
Everything's weird.
Every single thing.
sara imari walker
This is what got me into it, though.
Like, that feeling is just like, I love that feeling.
I love not understanding and thinking, like, we live in a really trippy reality.
And the fact that our minds are capable of understanding any of it, to me, is pretty profound.
unidentified
Absolutely.
joe rogan
I feel like we're just emerging from it the same way the ability to see things was this emerging technology, this emerging ability that probably changed everything, right?
The ability to actually recognize distances and to see objects and recognize them.
That is this emergent phenomenon that we sort of take for granted because we have But there could be other things like that that have not emerged yet.
sara imari walker
Yes.
So much.
joe rogan
Psychic phenomenon is one of the things that I connect with that.
I don't believe in psychics, like a person could read tarot cards.
But I do think there's some weirdness involved in human beings that you can't put on a scale.
sara imari walker
I think some people are really good at reading patterns in their environment.
joe rogan
I think there's that too.
But there's also like phone rings and it was a person you were talking about that you haven't talked to in forever, and all of a sudden they feel you and they call you.
There's something trippy to that, that maybe not every time, not maybe repeatable, but occasionally you catch it.
Occasionally there's this connection that seems to emerge.
And I always wonder if that's an emergent form of a new ability that human beings will eventually possess.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I have lots of thoughts.
But I think the first one is, I think we forget often that we are all connected by a common history.
And so a lot of the features about like, why is it that we can be sitting here having this conversation?
You know, obviously, we both have to speak the same language, but we also have to emerge from the same evolutionary architecture, have the same kinds of sensory apparatus to like to be able to communicate with each other.
Implies shared history.
And so, you know, I think about life as these kind of, you know, like these structures that are emerging over time and generating novel, you know, things.
But like the whole temporal relation, this idea of like objects being in time means that they're connected through time.
So, you know, like if you assume a living object actually has a time and size, it means that like every living object in this planet is not really a distinct object.
They're all part of that same structure and time.
And I think this is really necessary for interpreting some of the things that you're talking about because there is so much in our environment that is a part of that shared history that we're picking up on all the time that we don't even recognize.
That is like cues for us to really – and we miss it because we don't even recognize the history in our environment.
And so we think things are just happening spontaneously and there's some magic behind it.
where really all it is is contingency and causation.
But I think the other thing that is interesting about what you're saying, which we already touched on a little bit, is these kind of stories that there's ancient myths.
I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan and thinking about the history of mythology.
But we've had these myths for most of human history, and there's been a lot of recurring motifs in them about telepathy, psychics, miracles.
You know, all of these stories.
And it's super interesting to see how some of them are becoming, you know, like embodied through our technology, like, like the things that we imagine, like, are we're making real.
And that's the part that's interesting to me.
And that's much more physical.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
The things we're imagining we're making real.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
So it's not impossible that people that are psychic at quote-unquote could exist.
But I think what will happen is the stories that we're telling become embodied in the observations that we're making and the things that we're actually implementing in the world.
But I don't know that historically I would say...
I don't believe in magic.
I think magic is...
I do believe in mystery.
When I say I don't believe in magic, it's not that I don't believe that people have personal knowledge or things, but I think what's more important is when those things become shareable, they actually become things that we can use collectively, and I'm much more interested in that kind of knowledge.
So it's not that I don't value mysticism or the kind of personal narratives that people have about experiences.
I think those are incredibly valuable and I think that we need those stories in our culture.
It's just for me, I'm much more interested in when do we make those kinds of things regularized in the way that we understand them as really fundamental properties and we can use them and we can share that information.
That's what I like about science because it's like, it's like shareable deep thoughts that are universally usable.
joe rogan
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Universally usable is a great way to put it.
I've often entertained the idea of, you know, I'm sure you're aware of the concept of the muse, right?
sara imari walker
Maybe, but I'll probably explain it anyway just because it's hopeful.
joe rogan
One of the best representations of this is a gentleman named Steven Pressfield.
He's a great author.
He wrote Legend of Bagger Vance and a bunch of other great movies.
He wrote this book called The War of Art.
The book is essentially like a guidebook for creative types to avoid procrastination resistance and to develop a structure that allows you to sit down in your desk at a very specific time every day and summon the muse.
And this idea has persisted throughout time.
I'm sure you've had ideas that have come to you like, where does that even come from?
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
What is that?
sara imari walker
I think everyone has.
I love creativity for that reason because it's so mysterious even to the person having the creative act.
joe rogan
Yes, yes.
sara imari walker
Which is just crazy.
joe rogan
Yeah, I almost always think of my best ideas as not even really mine but like a gift.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
I do too.
This is the concept of the muse.
You summon the muse.
You treat the muse with respect.
You literally communicate with the muse.
You put this intention out there.
And if you do this every day, she will reward you.
And she will consistently bring you ideas.
And if you are a person who can develop that kind of discipline to sit there and do that, you'll become productive through the muse.
sara imari walker
Is the Muse like a placeholder for your unconscious brain?
Could be.
joe rogan
Yeah, certainly.
But if you treat it like it's a real thing, it behaves like a real thing.
unidentified
No, no, no.
sara imari walker
I mean, I think the unconscious is a real thing.
The reason I'm bringing it up is like so many people are really interested in consciousness and then, you know, like really focused on that.
But part of the reason that, you know, like where creativity comes from and like part of this idea of using intuition to guide how you think about the world I think is like there's so much happening in your brain that you're just not even consciously aware of.
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
And I think a lot of the information processing architecture and like where like I've kind of resigned myself to like almost all of my thinking is my unconscious brain and I should just like leave it there.
And if I get an idea emerging out of it, it seems like it came from nowhere.
But it's just it's I'm just not consciously aware of all the processing in my brain.
joe rogan
I also wonder if the term consciousness is connected far too much to language.
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
Because, right, we think of things that we can describe with language and processes that we examine with language, words that we attribute to specific objects and specific tasks and things that we do.
And then there's this other thing that's going on.
Maybe you feel bad that day.
Maybe you feel lonely.
Maybe you feel this.
These sort of subconscious things are very conscious.
They're conscious, but they're not attached to language.
And so when we're interacting with people on a conscious level, we're communicating constantly through words.
So we have sounds that we make, and these represent things, and we all understand them, and so we use this as a way to express this thing that's going on with this thought process, the consciousness.
We're attaching it to language.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
No, I think most of us do because I think a lot of us, you know, construct words or visuals in our brains.
But it's super interesting when you have people that don't do that.
Like Lee Cronin that I work with a lot and, you know, he's the person I originally did at Assembly Theory as chemist.
Like he doesn't have any visuals in his brain or like language in his brain.
And it's super interesting talking to him because he's like completely and utterly brilliant.
But I think like his mental architecture is really different.
Yeah.
And I love working on deep foundational questions because I think when you talk about these deep ideas and you talk, and maybe this is also why people like psychedelics, because if you're not trained at the sort of frontier of intellectual debate, where do you have these kind of experiences?
But the kind I'm talking about is you have really thought about how reality works and you have an architecture in your mind about what you think is.
Is fundamental about the nature of reality because you're asking this particular scientific question.
And I think some of my best discussions with some of my colleagues have been, you know, those kind of discussions and you really realize how people's brains are so different.
joe rogan
Very, very different.
sara imari walker
So different.
joe rogan
What is the estimation?
There's some percentage of us that do not have an inner voice.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I think it's like 4%, but I don't know.
joe rogan
I think it's higher than that.
unidentified
Is it?
joe rogan
I think it's quite a bit higher.
sara imari walker
I thought it was like...
joe rogan
I think it's in the 20s.
sara imari walker
Oh.
joe rogan
What's that?
unidentified
It's higher than that.
sara imari walker
I just made up a number.
jamie vernon
It's up to 60%, but I've tried to look into this many times.
unidentified
I don't understand anything.
sara imari walker
Well, I think it's hard to report, though, because people don't even know they don't have an inner voice, or people don't know they do have an inner voice, because you don't know what it's like to be in someone else's mind, so everybody just thinks their mind is normal.
joe rogan
Right, right.
So if you talk to a schizophrenic, you're like, what?
What's going on in there?
What is that?
What's that misfiring?
sara imari walker
Well, this is one of the things I'm really excited about, these neural enhancement technologies, because I think we really underestimate the diversity of human minds.
It might be the most diverse things on this planet are actually just what's going on in our heads.
joe rogan
Most certainly.
I mean, I know so many different unique people.
I'm so lucky that I've met so many unique people from talking on this podcast.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And then just through walks of life.
I know so many people who think so differently.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And I know great athletes and great scientists and great comedians and great musicians and they're all different.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
They think different.
They just have a different way.
Like some people will look at a problem and go...
Why is that?
What about this thing?
And I'm like, how the fuck did you even see that?
Why did you look at it that way?
Everyone has...
I mean, it's based on your life experiences, your genetics, but there's also...
I think everyone's interface is different.
I don't know even what you see.
I assume that it looks...
sara imari walker
I know!
This blows my mind.
I think about this all the time.
I'm like, I have no idea what it looks like to anybody else when we look out in the world.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Well, it makes sense to me that it has to be different.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because if it wasn't different, why would you like things I don't like?
Everybody would like the same thing.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like the way that things look.
unidentified
That's true.
joe rogan
Or food tastes.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like I have two children that have totally different ability to absorb hot, spicy food.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
sara imari walker
My kids are like that, too.
joe rogan
So my youngest is like me.
My youngest...
I mean, she might have a better version of it than me.
Like, that kid can eat anything.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Ghost peppers.
Like, she likes it hot.
unidentified
Oh, my God.
joe rogan
And she loves, like, really...
unidentified
Those are really hot.
joe rogan
From times when she was a little kid, like, reapers.
Like, I get this hot sauce called Senor Lechuga.
It's really good stuff.
It's...
Organic and really strong.
If you like it, really spicy.
And I told her, I'm like, this is pretty spicy.
Kid dips her finger in it.
Sucks on it.
She's like, it's not that spicy.
I'm like, it's pretty damn spicy.
You freak.
What the hell's wrong with you?
unidentified
Wow.
Wow.
joe rogan
It's kind of incredible.
And then the other one, like a little bit of a jalapeno and she's hiccuping and coughing.
Like she can't take it at all.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's bizarre.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because they both came from the same parents.
Right.
So obviously things taste different to them.
sara imari walker
Yeah, totally different.
joe rogan
So whatever that is, where some people love the taste of hot dogs, some people think they're disgusting, and they like, whatever, broccoli.
Whatever it is.
Why?
What is it?
What are you experiencing when you're eating this?
I don't know.
What are you experiencing when you're seeing it?
I'm just guessing that you're seeing what I see.
It's a total guess.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
And it's probably a bad guess, as you're pointing out, right?
joe rogan
Probably.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, it has to have some...
There has to be a bunch of other factors that we're not taking into consideration that are going on internally.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
They're allowing this person to process this in a pleasing or an unpleasing manner.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like, what is going...
And then the actual structure of the eye, right?
We know some people's eyes aren't that good.
Like, why is that?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like, what's going on in there?
Like, it stops working so good, and so you see things blurry, and like, Or colorblind is also interesting.
Crazy.
sara imari walker
Yeah, totally crazy.
joe rogan
The world could all be colorblind.
We'd be lost.
The idea that we're in this spectrum of how light interacts with objects and this incredible variety of different shades of things.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
And like people that have a major shift in that, like I read this Oliver Sacks story once about this person got hit in the head and then they could only see the world in black and white.
And how existential that experience was transitioning.
That's really depressing.
You see a world of color, then everything's black and white.
It's like you're living in a movie or something.
But the story was about how they were an artist and they came to understand the world quite differently.
And you can see a lot more shadow and light.
You start paying attention to different detail.
But it's just mind-blowing that that can happen.
It's like the same brain.
joe rogan
Yeah, same brain.
sara imari walker
And then you have to completely readjust your experience to reality because now you see the world differently.
joe rogan
I have a friend who got a concussion and he lost his sense of smell.
sara imari walker
Oh, really?
joe rogan
Yeah, for years.
sara imari walker
That's probably pretty traumatic.
joe rogan
Well, a lot of people got it during COVID as well, right?
sara imari walker
Yeah, that's right.
joe rogan
But he got it through a concussion way back, at least 15 years ago, and lost his sense of smell.
sara imari walker
Yeah, that's crazy.
Yeah, I like to, you know, when I started thinking about how people think differently, I was like, I think I was listening to a podcast running one day, and it's like, you know, like, imagine an apple and now taste the apple.
And I was like, I can imagine an apple, I can see an apple in my brain, and I can bite in the apple, but I cannot taste it.
I cannot imagine tasting food.
And this was really perplexing to me, because like, I never thought about the fact that like, inside my head, I don't have taste.
I only have taste when I'm eating food.
I can definitely taste things.
But it's a weird thing about my brain, but I don't know how common that is.
But I think everybody has things like that.
And if we just do experiments with our own minds, it's kind of interesting to probe the boundary of things you take for granted that you think you can do or you can visualize and you just can't.
It's just not in your head.
joe rogan
Well, the sense of smell we take for granted because everybody has it.
And obviously there's an evolutionary advantage in terms of food being rotten and there's a bunch of different factors, gases that are poisonous.
But it's invisible.
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Do you know if your friend could still imagine smell or did they lose the ability to even recall what smells like?
joe rogan
I haven't talked to him in years.
I'd have to reach out.
I don't even know if he got his smell back.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
He's a guy who used to fight in the UFC. Oh, I see.
And he got...
Knocked out once and lost his sense of smell.
sara imari walker
Wow.
Crazy.
joe rogan
Crazy.
Not good.
But the idea is that sense of smell, we all just take for granted.
We have it.
Oh my god, you smell that apple pie.
unidentified
Oh, it's coming.
It's coming.
joe rogan
Oh, this is so exciting.
You know, you smell it.
You walk in the house.
Someone's cooking bacon.
We take that for granted.
But that is an invisible thing.
And who knows how many other things there are like that that we don't have.
We don't have the ability to detect neutrinos.
Imagine if we could feel all the neutrinos passing through us at any given moment.
sara imari walker
I'm trying to visualize it as you're saying that.
unidentified
I'm like, there's just a thousand I mean, they're literally going through the entire earth.
joe rogan
They're flying through the earth right now.
But we don't have the ability to detect that.
But why not?
Right?
I mean, that's a thing that's real that we don't have the tools for.
But we do have the tools for smells.
So we have the tools to detect gases, but we don't have the tools to detect other things that we know are real.
sara imari walker
Right.
Well, our sensory perception that evolved biologically only took us so far.
But obviously we're sitting here talking about neutrinos because we have built technologies that can detect their existence and validate that they're there.
And then we have theories that would be consistent with what you're just saying.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
So the ways that we see the world, I guess my point is, are not just the biological ones, but they're becoming enhanced by technology in all sorts of ways.
And theories and explanations are part of that technological infrastructure, which is why we can talk about that.
Our gravitational waves, for example, is another one.
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
Going through us right now, too.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
We can't detect them.
We can feel the effects of gravity itself.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
But we also know that that's entirely based on mass, right?
So we also know that gravity, the more weight you have on you, the harder it is for you to get around because you're being pulled, which is bizarre.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And you can use that to your advantage by rucking.
You can get in better shape by putting a heavy backpack on and going up a hill.
It's bizarre.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
So you change your physical structure by adding weight.
That's what weightlifting is too, right?
You're changing your physical structure and your ability to move through space and time by resisting constantly.
So developing these biological tools to get past gravity.
sara imari walker
Well, I think it's amazing how much of the physical world you can get a sense of by simple things like that.
We really do live in a physical reality.
I know some people want to think we live in a simulation, but there's a real physical world.
And I think we only kind of misconceive of it as a simulation because so much of our environment now is architected by human minds that it seems not real, but it is real.
joe rogan
So you don't subscribe to the possibility of simulation theater?
sara imari walker
No, I find it inadequate.
It doesn't seem like it's a better explanation than any other current explanation for how the universe works.
So, you know, I put the simulation, argument, intelligent design, and even sort of the current laws of physics on kind of equal footing as far as their ability to explain why the universe exists the way it does.
Because what all three theories do is they basically push explanation to the boundary and And in physics, we do that by saying there was an initial state of the universe that was low entropy, and the laws of physics have described what it's done ever since, but you can't explain where the universe came from.
And in intelligent design, it's like the universe is designed by some being, but where did that thing come from?
And in the simulation argument, it's just the great programmer in the sky made us.
And I think, you know, the nuance there is, like, if any entities like us could evolve that could build simulations, then it's far more likely that we live in a simulation.
But I think you still have to assume a physical reality that evolves the capability of building simulations.
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
So it seems all very circular to me.
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I completely agree.
joe rogan
Yeah, I just, I don't understand why people are so confident in stating that, like Elon said, the chances of it not being a simulation are in the billions.
It's like one in billions that we are not in a simulation.
But he's also crazy.
sara imari walker
Well, I think it's easy to throw numbers out there, though, and not have them be founded in anything.
joe rogan
There has to have been a thing before the simulation existed in order for that thing to create the simulation, for the simulation to emerge.
sara imari walker
It's super interesting also to me that a lot of the people that are proponents of the simulation argument tend to be in the tech world.
And so I think it's in their favor to think that it's great to think that...
Computers are like gods and to build this kind of mysticism around these technologies.
But if you really want an explanation for what simulations are, there has to be a continuity between the physical world and the simulation.
You have to be able to explain how it is that computation emerged on a planet and simulations became possible on our planet.
They emerged out of something.
So I think I'm much more interested in like what is the unification of the virtual and the physical and like how can you think about them as similar kinds of systems than to just say the universe is a simulation therefore I'll tell why the universe exists.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
It doesn't get you anywhere.
joe rogan
It doesn't.
Well I always think about the universe itself.
We always want to look at a birth of a universe and the end of the universe.
And I always say I wonder if we do that because of our own biological limitations.
If we Think that a thing had to emerge because we emerged.
But why does it have to have emerged if it exists?
Why didn't it always exist?
But then that's a huge problem.
sara imari walker
You can't have everything exist forever is part of the problem.
joe rogan
But what could possibly exist to make everything exist?
Which is the other one.
sara imari walker
Yeah, the prime mover.
joe rogan
Well, not only that, but the craziest theory of all is the primary theory of the creation of the universe itself, which is the Big Bang Theory, which is the absolute nuttiest theory that's ever existed.
Everything that exists came out of something so small, was smaller than the head of a pin, and then in one massive moment, it creates the universe itself.
And that's one that universally is agreed upon.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I know.
unidentified
I agree.
joe rogan
And there seems to be a signature of it.
So you can study it.
sara imari walker
Yeah, there's no problem with crazy ideas, by the way.
I love crazy ideas.
joe rogan
They're the craziest.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
But that's the craziest, right?
sara imari walker
Yeah, yeah.
But even going back to the simulation, I'd like...
But yeah, the Big Bang is...
I mean, but I think, you know, when you're trying to understand how reality works, it should surprise you.
And it should have counterintuitive properties.
I mean, I think that's how we really know we're learning things.
And I'm also of the perspective that I think any theory can be replaced by a better one.
Any explanation is not an ultimate explanation.
So we're constantly learning more and we're constantly refining our ideas.
joe rogan
Is that a problem in science in that when people have espoused a very particular idea of how the world works, they have a hard time backing off of that?
sara imari walker
Collectively, yes.
I think scientists have a hard time doing that.
And so I confront this a lot in my work because the kind of ideas we're proposing are new and They say very different things than sort of the standard canon would say.
We're seeing structure that isn't part of the way that people talk scientifically about the nature of life or its fundamental properties.
And what I see is a lot of resistance to new ideas because people think things are already explained.
And so this is really funny for me.
The original life, it's like, It's like, we already have an evolutionary theory.
The original life is solved.
And it's like, have you been to a meeting on the original life?
It's like, that problem is not solved.
I'm sorry.
But so many people think it is.
They just think it's easy.
It's been done.
You'll get really prominent physicists, too, being like, oh, you get the first replicator on the planet, and then you get life.
And the real hard problems are like...
You know, the long-term future of the universe and things.
And I think we're just reasoning based on assuming absolute knowledge sometimes when we don't have absolute knowledge.
joe rogan
Do you think that some of that Well, some of that sort of trying to define things in a definite way that we do know it, we understand it, is in response to some religious ideas about the creation of life and that they propose that these scientific riddles have been solved because if you leave them open, that kind of opens the door to the possibility of a creator or of intelligent design and they want to kind of rush to say, no, we figured it out.
sara imari walker
That's what I've been told.
There have been a lot of reactions to the work that we've been doing, both positive and interacting with people's dogmas in certain ways, so they're very reactionary, and then some people that are much more thoughtful and critical, and then some people that are very not thoughtful but very critical.
And so you get the whole spectrum.
And I guess if you do any kind of high-profile science, you're going to get everything thrown at you.
And part of the reason that I want the ideas out there is because I want that critical feedback.
So that's fine.
If it's intelligent feedback, that's amazing.
But I think the thing that I've noticed is...
Is that the way that different communities interact with the ideas are totally different.
So it's like, you know, the evolutionary biologists, you know, where some of them, not all of them, you can't make blatant statements about any group, you know, really don't understand what we're trying to do.
And then but the creationists don't either.
And they don't want it either.
So it's like you're in this weird space and they're dueling with each other because they think they have totally different ideas.
I have been told that that field is particularly protective of its ideas because it's had to battle with intelligent design for so many decades and really stand its ground.
And original life is like a really separate community from biology writ large.
I was even told early in my career When I was a postdoc by a very prominent biologist that I shouldn't work on origins of life.
I want to understand what life is.
I should just pick a standard biology problem.
And I thought to myself, like, the one problem you want to pick is the one everyone can't answer because that's where you have the most progress.
So it's just very funny to me that it's often it's swept under the rug as solved or too hard to solve, both simultaneously at the same time.
joe rogan
It sounds insane to me that someone would tell you not to look into the origin of life.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because the idea that we have figured everything out about...
Even if we understand the processes involved, right?
How often does this take place in the universe?
What is this?
Are there other ways to do it?
It's fascinating.
sara imari walker
I mean, we don't have an idea what an alien is, right?
I mean, just that should slap you in the face.
The multitude of ways we talk about alien, we don't know what we mean when we say that.
joe rogan
It brings me back to this concept of the muse.
So my thought, I had this bizarre thought once that ideas are life forms.
sara imari walker
Oh, sure.
I totally agree with that.
joe rogan
Really?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
So my thought is every physical object that human beings have ever created came out of an idea.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
So idea gets into primate brain.
Primate brain goes, oh, I think I can make a canoe.
And then primate brain figures out a way to hollow out a tree and turn it into a canoe.
And then primate brain says, you know what?
When I let go of this stick, if I pull it back, it goes forward, right?
If I let go of it and it springs, what if I could tie a string?
And what if I could pull it further?
And what if I get a stick?
I think I can get that stick to fly and then it becomes a bow and arrow.
And so the human mind interacts with these ideas.
The ideas manifest themselves in physical objects.
And every physical object, including airplanes, spaceships, space stations, satellites, all of them come from ideas.
And then these ideas, much like human beings, interact with other human beings.
These ideas interact with other ideas and they create more and more complex versions.
Then you get quantum computing.
It's not like one person's idea.
sara imari walker
No, these are things that happen over centuries.
No, I totally agree with this.
I actually make similar arguments in my book about rockets as a good example of this.
They were imagined long before they became actual physical objects.
joe rogan
Another Chinese invention, by the way.
sara imari walker
Yeah, the Chinese were onto lots of stuff.
joe rogan
Everything.
Paper, alcohol, everything.
Mechanical clock, everything.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think, yeah, I think this gets to the idea of like living objects being deep in time because you like and this and I also think a lot about the nature of like abstract things versus physical things.
So I think everything is physical.
And when we think of ideas as being abstract, it's just because, you know, like they're not physical objects yet in the same way that we see these kind of physical objects.
joe rogan
But they come to our mind in some weird way that doesn't seem like you...
Look, if I dig a hole, I know I dug that hole.
I know I stuck that shovel, I exerted effort, I put force, I lifted the dirt out, I made the hole.
So if someone says, where'd that hole come from?
I go, oh, I dug the hole.
Simple.
But if someone says, where'd you get the idea for a joke?
I'll go, oh, I don't know.
It came to me one day.
I was just laughing with my friends and a thought popped in.
It wasn't a calculated thing where I worked on it forever and ever.
It's just it got entered into my mind out of nowhere and then it came out my mouth and everybody laughed and I'm not sure where it came from.
unidentified
That's weird.
sara imari walker
It is totally weird.
joe rogan
It's weird.
Now imagine that, someone figuring out an airplane.
Like some Wilbur and Orville writer.
sara imari walker
Well, people did.
unidentified
But you're right.
sara imari walker
It's also distributed over many human minds.
So it's not like a single mind architecture.
It's like the interaction of many minds and the physical world that generates these things.
But I think...
Yeah.
I think it's time.
It's time.
joe rogan
Time.
sara imari walker
Literally.
Yeah.
So in assembly theory, we think time is fundamental, but you might think of doubt time as in terms of causation.
And things like you that take billions of years for the universe to generate have a lot of time embedded in you.
And time is actually the creative mechanism that's expanding the space of possibilities and maybe the universe itself.
But that's how I think about it.
So you actually have an incredible amount of time in a small volume of space.
That's what you are as an evolved object.
At least that's sort of my current thinking with this theory that we're developing and how we're trying to test the transition to life.
And so where are those things coming from?
They're coming from the fact that you are an architecture that's deep in time and you have all of this internal space in you.
joe rogan
That's And if you are reading people's work and interacting with people's research and you're learning things that people have discovered, you're essentially interacting with their time.
sara imari walker
Yes.
You're looking at all their traces of time and you're doing it over time and that's becoming part of your architecture in time and all of that structure is still in you.
joe rogan
And the more time you spend on it, the more you'll absorb that.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
You'll absorb more and more and more of it.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And the more people's thoughts and more people's work you take in, you're taking all of their time.
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
And you're putting it all into your head.
sara imari walker
We're just like bundles.
You know, I think about time and information kind of being the same thing, but we're just all of that causation bundled up in like these small...
small, but we're not small.
Yeah.
So sometimes I have this visualization of Earth as like the largest thing in the universe that we know of, which is in terms of possibility space or how much time is embedded in the current structure of the Earth.
So if you could do a zoom out of the entire universe and you could look at space, assuming there's no aliens out there, you look at Earth.
Earth is giant as far as the amount of stuff that can be made here and how much history is embodied in every object.
It's just this huge causal structure.
And I think we're representations of that physics.
And that's one of the reasons that we have this kind of perplexing feature of...
These things seem abstract.
Well, they're not abstract.
They don't look like they're in physical space, like knock on wood on the table, but the table is like an object that has like 4 billion years of history in it.
So it's like the physicality of the table is mostly in time, not space.
And that's true, I think, for us as living things.
joe rogan
It makes sense.
And it also, if you could go to the original collision of Earth-1, when Earth-1 creates the moon, and just imagine being able to...
sara imari walker
It's so fabulous we have a giant moon.
joe rogan
So crazy.
sara imari walker
Like, so crazy.
joe rogan
It's the only thing that keeps our atmosphere stable.
That's the only reason why we're here.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
In this form.
unidentified
Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan
With the stable temperatures.
sara imari walker
Such a chance event.
joe rogan
And it's so big.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's one quarter the size of us.
sara imari walker
I know.
And it looks nice on watches.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's beautiful.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it's floating in the sky and it makes a summer night look incredible.
Look at the moon!
sara imari walker
I know.
And we get eclipses.
joe rogan
Yeah.
sara imari walker
So much of human history is dictated by the moon.
It's amazing.
Anyway, sorry.
joe rogan
It is.
No, it's incredible.
But this whole thing, if you could watch it take place, I wonder if...
I've often thought, like, there's so many mysteries of history, but I've almost wondered that if...
If calculations get to a point, if computers get to a point where they could examine all of the objects in all the places that they are currently in the world and all the force that would cause them to exist and all the history that caused them to exist, you could accurately go back and see exactly what happened every step of the way.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
I think it might be possible.
It's an interesting kind of thought experiment about like whether the universe is deterministic and fully predictable.
And I think in the past, like one of the reasons that we think the laws of physics are deterministic is because in the past you can determine things, but I think the future is undetermined until it happens.
joe rogan
Probably.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
So it might be possible, but I don't know how much you can reconstruct because things die out, like extinction of entire lines of life or like things disappear, like they don't exist anymore.
And so I think that you can reconstruct the past, but I don't believe personally in an exact history for the universe.
joe rogan
Well, if we can reconstruct the past based on our current understanding, which is fairly limited and much greater than it used to be three or four hundred years ago, if we could expand that knowledge for the next thousand, five hundred thousand years ago, whatever it is from now into the future,
to develop some sort of a computation system, some sort of an ability to have an accurate assessment of everything that took place, And then be able to lay it out how it took place because of all the objects and all the places and all the species that died off and all the records when they do core samples and they understand the iridium content, which meant asteroids impacted here and carbon, which is some sort of a fire here.
And just calculate it out where you can get some accurate...
sara imari walker
Like in principle, it makes sense.
But I think in practice, I'm not even sure that's physically possible because as you're like trying to compute everything that the universe has done, you also have to like make sure that that physical thing actually can calculate itself and continue to exist in the future.
So if you're like there, it's not it's it's it's.
It's an interesting thought experiment about how much of the universe can be computed.
But you have to deal with resource bounds.
And so you have to deal with an actual physical implementation of that computer, and that computer has to be able to persist long enough to do the calculations and have enough energy to do it, which means there has to be things external to the computer.
So you can't use all the resources available just for the computer, like the compute.
You actually have to keep the whole thing running.
So I don't think that you actually can know the past with exact – I was going to say infinite resolution, but I don't believe in infinities anyway.
But like really precise resolution that you could reconstruct everything that has happened in the history of the universe.
I think our universe forgets things, and I think it does so on purpose because that's part of the, not purpose, but like not in an anthropocentric way.
But it does so because the act of forgetting things is actually in part how the universe generates novelty.
If it remembered everything in the past and only those things persisted, like we live in an incredibly boring universe.
We live in a universe that's constantly creating things and sometimes it, you know, like some of those things can't be generated anymore but it makes more space for other things to be created.
joe rogan
You don't believe in infinity?
sara imari walker
I don't.
joe rogan
Interesting.
sara imari walker
I mean, as a mathematical construct, sure.
But as a real physical thing, no.
But I have a really different view of mathematics than most people.
Like, I think mathematics is a physical system that exists on our planet.
And I don't believe in, like, a Euclidean world that's, like, a perfect mathematical form.
I think they're a thing that our biosphere has invented.
And one of the reasons that we think mathematics is universal...
It's because it's a language that we understand that actually is information that's embedded in pretty much every object in our environment.
But it doesn't mean that it has universal reach.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's some problems with mathematics too, right?
Eric Weinstein, who's a mathematician, is kind of explaining the number two.
There's a bunch of different things that are bizarre with math.
So it almost hints to an incomplete understanding of mathematics, even as we currently know it.
sara imari walker
Right.
Well, there's always that.
I mean, you know, it always perplexes me that, you know, people accepted Euclidean geometry as the only form of geometry for, like, 2,000 years.
I mean, it's, like, literally, like, that was it.
And then we were like, oh, well, there could be non-Euclidean geometries, and we just never imagined them because, like, they don't reflect our physical environment.
I mean, that's crazy.
So that's, like, that's saying that there's mathematics we don't understand.
But then there's a question about whether there's a That math might be derived from.
Like, is there a language deeper than math?
joe rogan
What could that be?
sara imari walker
Don't know.
Have you thought about it?
I have.
I think about it a lot.
What are the theories?
joe rogan
I'm sure you do.
sara imari walker
Kind of a rhetorical question.
Yeah, no, it's okay.
Well, I worry about this a lot with the nature of the relationship between the theory of computation and assembly theory, for example.
So, computation is a way that we kind of understand the formalization of mathematical things that we actually can You know, algorithmically do, right?
So anything that you can calculate, you can compute.
And so there are obviously, like, uncomputable numbers and things like that, but they live in some abstract, you know, like...
But anyway, so assembly theory has some features that look like theories of complexity and computation in that, you know, like people talk about a minimal complexity for a computer program as being the way that you talk about complexity, and we talk about a minimal causal history to construct an object...
But I think what assembly theory is that is a bit different and super interesting is it's NP, like, it's actually hard to compute the assembly index.
It's harder than classes of computational algorithms that are kind of similar to it.
But the universe generates these molecules that are computationally incredibly complex, but causally the universe can generate them.
And so you couldn't compute necessarily on a supercomputer the complexity of a cell.
Like you're saying, could I reconstruct the whole history?
Yet the universe can generate that structure.
So it suggests to me that there's something else going on and the space is actually a lot larger than what you can computationally compress.
joe rogan
So what else could be going on?
sara imari walker
I think that the best language I have for it right now, and I really don't know, like I'm really struggling with this in my work right now, and Lee and I are going back and forth about these things all the time, but is causation.
And also that the other part about like why the universe is maybe not computable is Is this mechanism of novelty generation?
If the universe genuinely creates novelty that can't be predicted on prior history, and the future really is not determined, that's just suggesting something fundamentally different than the way that we understand the way the world works right now.
And I don't know what it is, but I think it has to do with something with causation and something about the physicality of objects.
Like objects really do exist.
They really do encode their histories.
And those histories are interacting all the time, which is making everything much more complicated.
Like that idea of these time threads interacting that you were talking about.
joe rogan
And then there's the fundamental question of why.
sara imari walker
Yes.
I think, I mean, when I think about, like, what life is, like, why does life exist, I think the universe is trying to maximize the number of things that exist.
Because if you think, like, things exist or they don't, and, you know, like, the universe is the constructor for things to get to exist, like, it's building, all of existence is, you know, like, what physically exists in our universe.
You know, wouldn't it be great if, like, there was a principle of nature where it's just trying to pack as much existence in as possible?
joe rogan
Well, it makes sense also if physical things these human beings create and life creates physical things, that that would be the best way to maximize it.
sara imari walker
Yes, which is also why I think we have free will.
Because if we act independently, we're actually more creative than if we didn't.
joe rogan
Do you ever butt heads with determinism people?
sara imari walker
I buy heads with everyone.
Nothing wrong with that.
joe rogan
No.
That's what it's all about, right?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
No, I fundamentally love disagreeing with smart people.
And so I think...
And I try to surround myself with colleagues that share that mentality.
So I think...
Yeah, and I think being around people that challenge you is so critical.
And you disagree with them on fundamental things.
That's okay.
Some of my closest friends boil my blood on some things, but you have to respect that they're thinking smart people.
joe rogan
I always put myself in their head.
I think we have a huge problem as human beings.
We attach ideas to ourself and so we defend these ideas as if we're defending our very existence.
sara imari walker
Yes, I know.
I think we do have a tendency to do that.
joe rogan
I've developed that through having so many conversations with people that I don't see eye to eye with on the podcast of instead of arguing with them, I try to ask them how they think, why they think, the way they think, what is it, challenge a little bit just to try to get a response out of them and try to figure out what is your process and why is it so different than mine.
sara imari walker
Well, that's good for you too because you grow more and you understand more by doing that.
joe rogan
Doing this thing over the last 15 years has been like the most radical, unexpected education that I could have ever had.
sara imari walker
That's amazing.
joe rogan
I'm a different human.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like completely different human than I was 15 years ago.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that is something that's really hard is like if you close yourself to ideas that you don't agree with, you're closing off like yourself to potential to grow.
joe rogan
Yes.
sara imari walker
And understand the world better.
And I think Unquestionably.
joe rogan
Unquestionably.
And these ideas, the problem when we start defending them is like, then we stop looking at them.
We put them as like a protected thing that we're trying to argue against and we're trying to, instead of invite criticism and some sort of an analysis of our thought process, we're trying to defend it.
sara imari walker
No, so I'm happy professionally also to change my mind all the time.
So I was a determinist.
I'm not a determinist anymore.
Right now I'm a presentist.
joe rogan
When did that change?
sara imari walker
I think that probably changed in the last few years.
And it's mostly because of the structure of what I understand of what we're doing with assembly theory.
So assembly theory is still very much in development and we're still really trying to work on the ideas.
But I always had these ideas about the origin of life having something to do with information playing a causal role in the structure of reality.
And information is like an abstract thing.
Like how can you think mathematical structures can influence physical world?
But like you just gave great examples of things that were once ideas that became physical.
And I think about like Newton's law of gravitation is a law of nature.
It describes something about the objective world.
But the law itself is also an object that exists in our biosphere that's generating structure like allowing us to launch satellites into space that wouldn't be possible without that mathematical form existing on our planet as a description of reality.
So that's an object.
And so these kind of things were always really perplexing to me.
And so, you know, I started working with Lee on assembly theory and like Lee's very radical and very thought-provoking and always pushing.
And, you know, he was really on this idea of the universe not being deterministic and getting larger in time.
And like part of that was not like it was...
He's like, I'm a chemist.
I burn shit.
I see this in the lab.
The second law is not the right description of what's going on here.
But there is some underlying undeterminism and novelty mechanism in chemistry that life seems to be really manifesting.
joe rogan
So what is free will then?
sara imari walker
For me, so what happened was when I started reading assembly theory, I started to see that there was a really different structure, especially associated with the way information gets embodied in physical objects and the history being physical in the objects.
And free will becomes...
This idea that like, you know, you can't, you actually can't, you know, in standard physics, you would say like an emergent thing like us can be reduced to our atoms and all of the fundamental description is down there.
But what you've done is stripped that physical system of all the time inside of it, right?
So elementary particles, they don't require memory for the universe to generate them.
They just, they're spontaneous.
The universe has them for free.
But things like us require memory and And things that know how to build things like us in order for us to exist.
And then once we exist, we're encoding all of that history and information in us as objects.
All of that causation is in us, which means that all of the selection over all the histories to generate us is still part of us and allows us to actually work in this combinatorial space that we can actually generate new structures.
And that is actually, like, where free will comes from.
It's basically if you assume you can't reduce things to elementary particles all the time and you actually have time in objects, things become causal agents, actually have some navigability over the combinatorial space of the possibilities they live in that they have some control over.
That's what I think free will is.
You don't have control over everything.
So it's not like free will is not all free or all determinism.
And I think Dan Dennett was really brilliant on this point.
He talked about free will inflation, which I thought was a hysterical concept.
It's really funny.
But it's like either people think the universe is random and you absolutely have free will and control over everything.
I think it's fully deterministic and you have no freedom.
But actually what it is is determinism is built over lineages because things get selected to exist and they become part of the regular structure of our universe.
So determinism itself is an emergent property and things that are very deterministic like us actually have more causal control over the kind of things that can happen to them but they can't control everything.
So we have limited free will.
Like I couldn't be home in Arizona this exact second but I can be there later today because I planned ahead for it.
Like that's where your free will executes over time.
joe rogan
So this concept of determinism is just too simplistic.
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
I mean to think that the universe is all like one human concept anyway is too simplistic.
It's like it's deterministic or it's not deterministic.
Actually, there are cases where you can model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the past and there are places you cannot model it as being deterministic because you're looking at the future.
unidentified
Right, right.
sara imari walker
And I think that's a pretty simple concept and very evident when you're looking at living things.
Like, no one can predict the future technologies, like, or the future of the biosphere.
joe rogan
Right.
sara imari walker
Some of the information's there, like we were talking about before, like, maids will probably still be present 50 years from now, so, like, I might be able to predict some things about the future, but the novelty's really hard.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
The problem I've always had with determinism is that people seem too sure of it.
Yes.
And the people that espouse it, they seem very sure of it.
And I think, how can you be sure when you know for a fact, in your own mind, you make decisions?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
And you think that these decisions are made entirely based on your life experiences, your education, your biology, yada yada yada.
But maybe not.
Maybe not.
Because there's things going on that are weird.
There's moments.
There's inspiration.
There's a lot of stuff happening.
sara imari walker
Intuition is a big one for me.
I always find that very mysterious.
joe rogan
I live my whole life on instincts.
I do things that a lot of people go, why are you doing that?
I feel like that's what I should do.
I feel like that's what I should do.
It feels like a thing to do.
And that seems to be, for lack of a better term, free will.
You know, discipline itself, for lack of a better term, is free will.
What is it about the idea of being rewarded by doing something difficult that you don't want to do, but you force yourself to do it?
If that is not free will, what is?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
It seems like nothing can make you get up and go for a run if you don't want to go for a run.
But you decide to do it, which is the embodiment of free will.
sara imari walker
Right.
joe rogan
That is free will manifested in a physical action.
sara imari walker
I 100% agree.
I think the issue about why people really want to say free will doesn't exist is because it's not compatible with standard theories in physics.
And therefore...
We know how our universe works.
You can't have free will.
But our standard theories in physics can't explain life.
They can't explain mind.
And free will lives in the space of whatever physics describes life and mind.
It doesn't live in the physics of gravitation or the physics of quantum particles.
Those are totally different areas of physical reality that have nothing to do with you as an evolved structure over 4 billion years that now has agency in the universe.
You're a different component of physical reality than those theories are describing.
And I think, you know, we have a tendency to think physics is complete.
We have done this throughout, like, the history of physics.
It's like every century, they think the last century did it.
Like, we understand reality now.
It's like every century has a new description.
I will never forget, like, bouncing between my classes as an undergrad physics student.
And how many times I was told, like, you know, it's like, it's really comical at the end of the 1800s, they thought physics was complete.
And like, then there was general relativity and quantum mechanics.
This is so funny.
But it's like, I go in a physics department, and I'm like talking about this.
And I'm like, we don't need new physics for life.
Like, physics is already done.
Like, we have the standard model.
And I'm just like, are you not like understanding the dichotomy here between what we teach like students and like how we talk about where we are now in history?
It's like crazy.
Yeah, totally crazy.
joe rogan
It is crazy that we repeat these problems, repeat these issues over and over and over again.
And we go, oh, back then they were stupid.
Don't you think in the future, if you could just look at the history of human beings and what they believed, and don't you think there's got to be some stuff like that right now?
It has to be.
sara imari walker
There has to be.
joe rogan
There's no way we figured it out.
sara imari walker
No.
No, I definitely think fundamental physics has a very bright future of having some really fundamentally earth-shattering...
Like, ways of thinking about things that I don't even think, like, our current theories are, like, that, like, they're going to be replaced by things even more awesome.
And I'm really excited about that.
I mean, that's, like, why you want to do, like, physics, right?
Like, you don't want to work on the theories of, like, you know, the guys that were around 100 years ago.
Like, why don't you work on the new ideas that describe the reality as, like, you're coming to understand it now in history.
unidentified
Right.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
So it's funny that people want to just accept what previous generations taught them as, like, absolute fact.
And then not be confronted with the changing times, the changing understanding of the world around us, the changing sets of observations.
Because I can imagine many thousands of years ago when humans were still being hunter-gatherers, not really thinking we have a lot of causal agency in the world.
You see the seasons, you have no control over them.
Obviously, we're born out of this idea that the universe is objective and existing outside of us because of a deep history of not having control.
But now, in a modern technological society, we see how much of reality we've shaped and changed.
I don't know how you could hold that view anymore.
It's very deep in our history that we think these things, but the evidence around us right now is completely to the contrary.
joe rogan
And this also seems like an emergent property of human beings.
sara imari walker
Yes, humans in particular.
I think animals do it to an extent.
But I think our ability to abstract and our ability to build technologies based on our abstractions and like what we're doing now is fundamentally different than anything that our biosphere has done over the last four billion years.
I think we're pretty special.
And I have no problem saying that.
Like, I think we're the most interesting thing in the universe.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think so.
Well, the known universe.
sara imari walker
Known universe, yeah.
joe rogan
I think it's quite possible there's something else out there that's a little bit more interesting than us.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I'm sure there is, but I don't think that we're ever going to recognize what that thing is until we actually really appreciate what we are.
joe rogan
Interesting.
You glossed over this, but I want to get back to it.
unidentified
Sure.
joe rogan
Why don't you believe in infinity?
sara imari walker
Oh, so I just, I think it's not possible for, like, I guess people want to say the universe is infinite in size, and I don't know what that means.
I think it just is a placeholder of, like, we don't understand.
So infinity helps in, like, certain theories of physics, like, to actually make your mathematics tractable.
But to say it's actually, like, a physical thing, to me, is...
It doesn't make any sense.
And it doesn't make any sense because I think if you assume, you know, like there's an infinity of things that could exist and that infinity of things exists somewhere, right?
Like so you have like, you know, Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, all mathematical objects exist somewhere and obviously there's like an infinite number of them.
It doesn't actually explain anything about here.
Or like, why do we have the things that we have in this universe?
And I think what infinity is, is it's a feature of humans' imagination to define the space of what's possible.
And it physically exists as the boundary of that space.
But it doesn't physically exist out there as a real physical thing.
There is no infinite space.
There is no infinite possibilities of a multiverse.
Those are abstractions that exist in human minds that allow us to think about how the world works and reason in what we can actually construct here as far as theories we understand or things we can build.
joe rogan
But the concept of infinity, if the universe is not infinite, then the universe has a defined boundary.
So what's beyond that boundary?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
joe rogan
That's weird, right?
sara imari walker
Yes.
joe rogan
It seems like maybe that's what infinity is.
sara imari walker
Yeah, so I think we could be saying the same.
I think about it sort of like there's a boundary that is like the physical size of the universe and the physical stuff in the universe.
And then there's another boundary which is part of that physical boundary.
But it's like the things that we can imagine.
And the things we can imagine at least can possibly be physically real.
And then there's another boundary we can't even imagine.
I don't even know if there's stuff out there that's like beyond that.
And like you can't even talk about it because you can't even imagine what it is.
joe rogan
Right.
One of the most perplexing theories that I've ever heard was the concept of in the center of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole and that going through that supermassive black hole you will go into another universe.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Yeah, these are kind of interesting and fun.
unidentified
Fun?
sara imari walker
Yeah.
joe rogan
But like, what are you saying?
sara imari walker
Yeah, no, I mean, well, there's a lot of theories about like the multiverse, and I think they're intellectually interesting.
And they bring interesting philosophy into physics, but I don't know that I can assign physical realism to To anything that we can't observe directly.
And I would rather take the mathematics and the theories of physics themselves.
I do these thought experiments about the theoretical physics of theoretical physicists.
It's like if I were outside of myself and I was watching what I was as a theoretical physicist writing down equations and trying to describe the world, what would those mathematical objects look like as physical things?
And so this to me is the perspective that I find much more productive because I don't think people have looked at that Through that lens at what mathematics is.
We tend to take the Euclidean and Plato's cave type paradigm from the ancient Greeks that there's a perfect world of forms and we're just seeing the shadows of this perfect reality.
And I think the universe is constructing itself and mathematics is a particular thing our universe has constructed that enables things to be possible that wouldn't be possible without mathematics existing.
joe rogan
The people that are proponents of this concept of infinity and that do believe in it, when you steel man that, what's the best argument for it?
sara imari walker
Well, I think the idea, it's kind of like what you're saying.
If you take the limit, it actually is consistent with our equations to assume that the universe could be infinite or the time in the future could be infinite.
And to them, I think it seems like it has some physicality to it.
But it always seems to me to be a placeholder of the boundary.
But also it depends on what you think is satisfactory.
So if you want to believe a multiverse hypothesis and there's sort of an infinite number of realities because you find that more explanatory to assume that everything exists and therefore we're just one thing in that space, some people find that satisfactory.
I don't find that satisfactory because it doesn't explain why we exist.
And I want to explain to us.
I want to know what we are.
Yeah, but it's a hard set of questions around infinity and mathematics just generally.
And I find it really fun to think about.
joe rogan
The multiverse to me is the most bizarre mind experiment because there's no evidence that it exists, but it's a concept that's universally shared a lot and it's debated a lot.
Some people, they'll pontificate on it, but you might be thinking about nonsense.
sara imari walker
Right.
So I think, you know, another reason I don't really think infinity is like a real construct is I really am a big fan of Nick Jissen.
He's a physicist that's kind of arguing that real numbers aren't real.
And what he means by that is like if you want to compute a real number and like, you know, we use real numbers like, you know, like they require infinite precision to compute all the digits.
And, you know, you're assuming a lot of resource for a universe built on real numbers because basically it means anything that you look at, you can look at with infinite resolution.
And it's probably the case, especially if you think the universe is constructed or even if you believe in a simulation argument, that there has to be a granularity there because the universe has to do these things in finite time with finite resource.
There isn't evidence that there's infinite time or infinite resource in our universe.
And therefore, if you want something to actually be physically real, the universe has to be able to implement it.
The universe cannot implement infinity in finite time.
It just can't do it!
joe rogan
Right.
Finite time.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
And I think time is finite.
I think time is a resource.
And I think time is part of the mechanism that the universe is actually constructing itself.
The universe is constructing itself from moment to moment.
And we persist over a certain set of moments.
But yeah, this is why I said I'm a presentist.
And I don't even know if I agree with myself on this.
I disagree with myself on a lot of things.
And I might change my mind tomorrow.
But it's like the idea only the present exists.
So the past is rolled up in the present.
I think that the past structure exists in the present and the present is now constructing the next moment, right?
But the space, like the future is expanding.
It's getting larger and larger and larger because there's so much combinatorial structure, like all these past histories now entwined in the modern structure, that they can now intertwine to make the future bigger and bigger.
joe rogan
And this is from our current observable position.
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
And then you go...
sara imari walker
Which is the only one we can talk about.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
And then you expand down to the whole universe and it's like, what is going on out there?
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
So it's interesting you say that because, you know, most theories of physics are actually constructed with the observer living outside the universe, right?
So like Newton had this conception of, you know, like you could take a God's eye view, literal God's eye view of the universe and describe it objectively from the outside.
And all of our theories of physics have this problem.
This is why quantum mechanics is so existentially hard, because it confronts us with the fact that if you have a physics where the observer is not part of the physics, it leads to really big problems with how we structure theories of physics.
And this is why there's no one quantum theory.
There's a whole bunch of interpretations of quantum experiments, and people call those different theories of quantum mechanics.
But there's no accepted standard interpretation that people would point to and say, This is the theory of quantum mechanics.
There's interpretations.
And I think that's...
They're great.
You know, there's great theories.
It's great, like, amazing, insightful stuff.
But it's not quite on the same footing as, like, general relativity, which is like a widely accepted theory that describes a set of observations.
But it's because quantum mechanics has observers and people don't know how to interpret the observer.
And we don't have a physics that was built from starting from observers like us, things like us that are constructing theories of physics.
How do we think about the world and put us inside the world?
And I think a theory of life has to have that property.
It has to account for the fact that we live inside the universe.
We cannot escape the universe.
We're always going to be physically stuck here.
unidentified
This is it.
sara imari walker
This is all we got.
And describe what is the observational horizon we interact with and how did we get structured out of that space?
Why do we exist the way we do within that space?
joe rogan
Why do we?
sara imari walker
I don't know.
But, I mean, I like the why questions.
I was also told by a really prominent senior physicist not to ask why.
And I was like, why should we not ask why?
Like, you should ask the why questions.
They're good questions.
joe rogan
Isn't it interesting that some people that are at the top of their field still have these bizarre ideas that you just completely disagree with?
unidentified
Yeah.
sara imari walker
Do I find that bizarre?
unidentified
No.
sara imari walker
I've had that since, you know, it's very funny because I think sometimes people are like, oh, Sarah, you're really successful in your career.
Now you can say these things.
And I'm like, I think I've been saying these things since I was like, I don't know, forever.
Like I haven't changed.
My personality hasn't changed.
I just like I'm deeply curious and I want to understand things.
And I think, you know, you have to be able to follow what you rationally think and what the evidence is telling you and the questions you think are interesting to answer.
And I think the thing that I guess I've done is like the questions I want to answer are not ones that people have really taken as seriously as I've taken them because of the reasons that they think they're not answerable or they're already answered.
And I just see this gaping hole in our understanding of reality that needs to be filled.
joe rogan
Well, listen, Sarah, I'm glad you're out there.
I really am.
This is a really fun conversation.
I really appreciate it.
Tell everybody how they can see some of your work or read about it.
sara imari walker
Yeah, I have a book out.
It actually is out today called Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence, where I talk about assembly theory and, you know, like what's needed to solve the physics of life.
And also really trying to motivate this experimental program that Lee is spearheading because I am such a fan of it to try to find aliens in the lab.
So basically, like the idea here is we just want to get people excited about these problems and thinking about them more deeply.
Agreeing or better yet, like having lots of debate and discussion about like the nature of life and how we think about it and whether we can start an experimental program to really validate the idea.
So that's that.
And I narrated the audio book.
joe rogan
Fantastic.
That makes me happy.
sara imari walker
Yeah, it was kind of funny.
I was really shy about doing it because some people criticize my voice on all the YouTube channels and stuff.
And I was like, you know what?
I'm going to do it.
joe rogan
Listen, stop reading the comments.
unidentified
I know.
You should never read the comments.
joe rogan
You got a great voice.
sara imari walker
Thank you.
But anyway, it was really fun.
And it was deeply personal, so that was cool.
And I'm on Twitter X thing and Instagram.
joe rogan
Who are you on?
How does someone find you on Twitter?
sara imari walker
Sarah Amari.
There, you can find me that way.
joe rogan
Instagram as well?
sara imari walker
Alien Matter.
joe rogan
Alien Matter.
Okay.
sara imari walker
I don't use that one as much, but it's fun.
joe rogan
Okay.
sara imari walker
Yeah.
Anyway.
joe rogan
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
It was a lot of fun.
sara imari walker
It was fun.
unidentified
Thank you.
Thank you.
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