Brian Greene - Until The End Of Time: How To See The Beauty Of Science In Everything

Full transcript: Brian Greene on London Real

2:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today. I would have never thought that a physicist would be invited on Conan O’Brien, David Letterman or Stephen Colbert. But that’s exactly what’s happened to Brian Greene. And he’s here to talk to us about all things in the universe, from time to gravity to really how long we’re going to be on this planet.

3:05 And I love sitting down with him and we started off with the Big Bang. How is it possible that everything was created from nothing? He talked about repulsive gravity. We also talked about the fact that there is a distinct chance that there is a parallel universe out there with a version of you and me. That is almost like an opposite of what we are here.

3:26 We talked about artificial intelligence, we talked about the singularity and we also talked about consciousness. Brian had what I believe was a mushroom experience in Amsterdam and he’s convinced that any type of consciousness remains in the brain. There’s no collective consciousness or plane. And it was interesting going deep on him and talking more physics. And what I find really interesting when I sit down with these scientists is they continually come back to really energy.

3:56 They come back to philosophy and really our place in the universe. And I love sitting down with people like this. And I know you’re going to enjoy this incredible episode with Brian Greene. This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

4:08 My guest today is Brian Greene, the American theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist. You regularly appear on television to talk physics with the likes of Conan O’Brien, David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. And your educational series have won Peabody and Emmy Awards with The Washington Post naming you the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today. Your books The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality have collectively spent 65 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.

4:39 Your latest work until the end of time is an exploration of mind, matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. Brian, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. Great to have you here. First of all, what’s it like being in London?

4:53 Like, what does this city mean to you? I know you’ve got a history with this kind. Yeah, absolutely. I did my graduate work at Oxford and we would come down to London on rare occasion when we could pull away from the equations and have a good time. So I feel a definite connection between my upbringing as a physicist and the city.

5:12 OK, gotcha. And the time at Oxford, two years, was it very different than Harvard and different than Columbia? Yeah, it was. It was quite different, especially because when you start at Oxford, even as a graduate student, you’re thrown in right with the first years, the freshmen. So it felt like starting over again after I’d already done that through undergraduate in the United States.

5:31 But in the end, it was a great time, made a lot of great friends, and I learned a lot of physics. Wow, yeah. And it must be a different way they look at physics with all the history there? Why not? That’s an interesting question.

5:43 In the end of the day, most physicists around the world kind of look at physics from 30,000 feet in roughly the same way. But you’re right. You’re in the very place where the subject originated. So there’s a sense of heritage and grandeur that you don’t really get anywhere else. Wow.

6:04 Well, you know, I studied mechanical engineering down the road from where you were at Harvard. And I was joking earlier, if I knew that there would have been all this attention on physics, I would have done that. Do you think there’s students today down at MIT or these other places that are thinking, I’m going to study physics and do what Brian Greene’s doing. I’m famous. Well, because back when I did it, nobody was doing media around physics, really, except for Carl Sagan.

6:27 Well, Carl Sagan was for astronomy and astrophysics. But look, you know, I think, as you well know, these subjects are hard. And the only way you can get through them is if you have a passion for the material. In fact, I tell students when they come to me and they’re struggling between physics and another subject, I often tell them, if you can do another subject, you may want to do that. Because to succeed in physics requires, you know, I was working 14, 15 hours a day when I was a graduate student at Oxford.

6:56 It’s the only way to really make headway and to make a difference. Yeah, it’s really hard. And I was I was having flashbacks to my days at MIT when I chose mechanical engineering. And I lived in a fraternity house with 50 dudes and some chose computer science and double E and some chose civil engineering, some chose mechanical engineering. And I remember they had a few physicists, guys, and they they were so hardcore, man.

7:18 They loved it. They wanted to get in there and with the quarks and the neutrons and mess around. And they went on to get PhDs and work at universities. Whereas for me, I used to work on my car when I was in high school. And for me, I needed I needed to see something move.

7:33 I needed to build something. So I agree. I mean, you really have to love it. Yeah. But it’s funny, though, I was quite different from you growing up.

7:39 I was not the kind of kid who went for the chemistry set or build things. I was totally a math kid. And when I got to college, I did everything that I could to avoid any kind of course we had to touch anything whatsoever. So I somehow wiggled my way through the requirements. I never took a laboratory course.

7:59 And I regret it to this day, because that tangible quality of physics when you’re actually looking at the world with your math, but then touching the world and examining the world, I think that’s a vital part of the education. And I kind of missed out on that. Do you also think, though, that when you’re touching it like that and like smelling it and seeing it, that like, I think you kind of touch on this in this book as well, that it removes you from these bigger principles?

8:24 Like you said, we kind of grew up as cavemen, understanding Newtonian physics, not quantum. It does. But my view is that you need both, you know, you need to look at the world in a variety of different ways, right? So the physicist looks at it in terms of the ingredients and the laws, you know, the chemist puts those together into atoms and molecules and the biologist and cells in life and so on. And the act of engaging with the world through building that car engine or doing the laboratory course is another way of touching and engaging and being part of the reality.

8:58 And I think you need it all. So at times you do need to be pulled away from the big ideas, because ultimately the work is right down here in the gutter, in the dirt. That’s where you make the progress. Right. It’s right in front of you.

9:11 Yeah. Right. Where the matter is and everything. Yeah. So in this book and the discussions that people are having today is how something where I used to think these physicists would be in a lab and like I said, looking at little particles and all that, it seems to almost have come full circle to where you’re talking about how this relates to humanity, consciousness, our purpose, our reason in this world.

9:32 And again, when I knew the guys in physics at MIT, they weren’t talking about that stuff. Well, make no mistake. No doubt there are many of my colleagues who will look at this book and say, what is this guy doing, you know, talking about these kinds of big ideas from the perspective of a physicist? But I have long felt and my research and reading over the last few decades has only confirmed my belief that there is a false sense that physics and science more generally is off there on the side, right?

10:01 It gives us some insights into the world, but we only pay attention if it gives us a new iPhone or new kind of gadget. But the reality is there’s a continuum of these ideas. And our insights into the nature of ingredients, the particles and the laws does illuminate these big questions of meaning, of existence, of consciousness, of freewill. And so I felt that it was appropriate to consider these age old questions, but from the standpoint of someone who looks at the world through the lens of physics.

10:32 Yeah. And I want to get into some of this stuff. Are you surprised that you’re on Stephen Colbert seven times to talk about this stuff? Are you surprised that our auditoriums fill up to listen to what you have to say? I mean, you know, well, yes, I know.

10:46 I mean, obviously it’s gratifying that people come to these events and want to see them. But fundamentally, as kids, we are scientists. We are curious about the world. Why does a kid smash things together, break things apart to figure out what’s inside and how it works? And there’s a drive to really engage and understand things deeply and what happens in the educational system is we kind of stamp out that insight, that curiosity by virtue, I feel, of spending too much time on assessment and testing and quizzes as opposed to the big, wondrous ideas.

11:23 So when an audience member or member of the public has an opportunity to read a book or watch a Stephen Colbert where it’s focused on big ideas, I think it reignites that child like instinct to want to know that is inside of all of us. Yeah. And that’s the thing that new media is showing us, that there’s a massive demand for this. Whereas back in the day, you needed a cable organization to take a chance, like you said, on like a Carl Sagan, and it was kind of a one off and then we didn’t see it much. But when the demand is now kind of the people decide all of a sudden you see, wow, there’s this massive.

11:57 Absolutely. It’s weird because I have some young boys like three and four years old and we’re trying to decide on where one of them is going to go to school. And actually yesterday I was at a school where they’re talking about how they don’t base things on exams. And I’m just trying to rethink my whole education process. You know, I’m trying to go. I’m back and forth, to be honest, Brian.

12:15 I’m like, OK, maybe the exams did make me. I remember studying thermodynamics at MIT. I mean, Jesus Christ, that thing almost killed me. But I learned so much about entropy and all of these things. And so maybe that exam was good.

12:28 But then maybe it wasn’t good when I was a kid. I totally understand because when I first got my first teaching job at Cornell, I was 27, 28 years old and very idealistic. And I told the students, you have an A. You don’t have to do anything to get a better grade. Now come to this class to learn and do the problem sets to learn.

12:50 And they were like, oh, yeah, that’s great. And you know what happened? Because the other faculty didn’t do that in their courses. Mine became the one that was low man on the totem pole. I was the one that they would look at only if they’d done everything else for the other courses where they were being graded.

13:05 So it just didn’t work out. And I had to go back to the traditional approach of grading students, which I don’t like. I don’t enjoy. I want them to come and learn and work hard because of the ideas, not because of fear that they’re not going to get a good grade. But human psychology, as you’re noting, is such that if you are faced with the possibility of not doing well, a bad assessment, it can drive you harder.

13:29 And sometimes that’s the only way that you can achieve what you want to achieve. Yeah, I guess our school system is going to take some time to change. Yeah, I think one day it’s going to be personalized education. It’s going to be personalized medicine. And it’s going to be, I don’t know what it’s going to look like.

13:43 Maybe you sit in front of some AI screen or something that really understands where you’re coming from, knows what you know, and knows the ways in which you can get excited about ideas and sculpts your educational process to meet your own personal demand and personal interest. And I think that will change everything. Some call that YouTube. Well, yes and no. So on YouTube, you have a lot of choice.

14:07 But it doesn’t in any way cater to the precise things that you need to learn, want to learn, and the method by which you do learn. It’s hit or miss. And I think we can radically fine tune that in a way that I think will look back at this era and kind of say, how barbaric the way they taught. They actually put 30 kids in a room and made them all learn the same way, the same material. What were they thinking back then?

14:33 Yeah, and made them memorize it for two weeks and take a test and forget it. And forget it. And not practically apply it in any way. OK, maybe there’s a lab here and a lab there. Yeah, I guess what I was saying with YouTube is that someone’s probably watching us right now on YouTube because they searched something about the Big Bang.

14:51 And then the algorithm learned. They were curious about the stuff. And then it pops in a video that similar people really enjoyed and watched the whole thing of. So maybe it’s the start of something AI. Of course, it probably also serves a bunch of nonsense as well.

15:03 So a lot of nonsense. I don’t know where to start, but part of me thinks we should start at the beginning of time. Also, since this is the country of Stephen Hawking, I still remember his book, A Brief History of Time. I remember I read this back in the day after I graduated MIT. And I remember here was a guy that was supposed to be, probably was, one of the smartest guys in the world.

15:23 Actually, he was just at Westminster Abbey the other day. And I walked over his name. Yeah, right. And yet, here he was explaining something in a real simplistic way about this beginning of time and this Big Bang theory. What do you think about when you think of him, of the original theory?

15:38 And then when people ask you all these questions, like, what happened before that? What happened after that? How do you start on this? Yeah, well, Stephen Hawking was an incredible mind and obviously an incredible situation to be able to go out to the stars, but yet in other ways, being unable to explore the way many of us commonly do. So he’s a great inspiration.

16:01 And his book, I also read it when it came out. I think it was in the late 80s, if I’m remembering correctly. And it was this wonderful exposition in accessible language of ideas that I was working on at the time. So it was sort of great to see this attempt to reach out to the wider world. And I hope that I’m following in some sense in that tradition.

16:23 Because the goal of this book and my other books is to excite people about these ideas and begin to address the kinds of questions that you turn to. I mean, the number of times people say to me, what did happen before the Big Bang? It is the natural question to ask. And one of the answers that I give is inspired by, I believe it was Stephen Hawking who first gave this wonderful little analogy where he said, look, if you are talking about the very beginning of time, and if that is what the Big Bang was, there may not even be a notion of time before.

16:57 And he said, look, imagine you’re walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone, you say, how do I go further north? They point you northward. You continue to walk, you pass by someone else, point me northward, they do. When you get to the North Pole and say to the person there, how do I go further north? They look at you kind of funny and say, you can’t go further north than the North Pole.

17:17 This is where north begins. That analogy may apply to time. You can go back 100 years, a billion years, 10 billion years. But when you get to the Big Bang, maybe you can’t go further back in time. Maybe it makes no sense.

17:30 Maybe it’s just like trying to go further north than the North Pole. I think that’s an analogy with maybe growing up in a world of Newtonian physics and then trying to understand quantum physics or understanding this whole time space continuum where time and space are related. And at first you’re like, oh, how does that work? So I guess we’re thinking of, I got an hour to get home time and you’re talking about the crucial definition of time. There was no time before that, which makes our kind of caveman brain hurt.

17:58 That’s right. And I like to say, look, our brain evolved to survive and it became well-equipped at thinking about the world in terms that aided that survival. But the truth of how the world works and the things that you need to have in your brain in order to survive, that’s two different things. And therefore, what we have in mind in our intuitions may not be aligned with the true nature of the world. And that’s why it takes dedicated study and exploration to break through these intuitions, instilled over 100,000 generations or more and catch a glimpse of the real nature of the world.

18:36 And Einstein, of course, was the genius at this. He would take the things that everybody took for granted and wipe them away, rethink them, resulting in time that elapses at different rates of different relative motion, space and time that can warp and curve and in fact meld into each other, creating what you described, the space-time continuum, showing that there’s a deep connection between these two ideas that at first sight seem different. But because of our size and our upbringings, that’s just a normally foreign thing for us.

19:10 Of course. Look, if we routinely traveled near the speed of light, then you wouldn’t have needed an Einstein. We would understand that time slows because we would experience it all the time. We would understand that space becomes blended into time because that’s what would happen in our experience. If we were born really tiny, like 10 to the minus 10 meters across, you wouldn’t need the quantum mechanics revolution because we would experience quantum mechanics.

19:39 It would be as second nature as Newtonian physics, right? If I take something, I don’t have an object, but if I threw an object at you, I’m quite certain you’d know where to put your hand to catch it. And that would not require you do any Newtonian calculation. Your brain is a Newtonian computer that without any calculation knows the trajectory of objects because that was useful in the ancestral environment. If we were tiny, we would have needed to know the quantum trajectories.

20:07 We don’t know them. So I’d be catching it. You’d be going all over the place. That’s right, two places at once kind of thing. My hands that are in two places at once.

20:14 Okay, that’s an interesting way. So we just grew up knowing this one reality. So we have to study really hard and have a specialist part of our population and a bunch of guys in Switzerland with high speed particles to understand this other thing. And yet that also is a part of our reality, our origins, and somehow maybe our purpose and consciousness. It’s all blended together.

20:36 And my suspicion is that if we get really good at virtual reality or augmented reality, whatever it is, maybe we can from an early age have kids experience the world at high speed or experience the world on very small scales and maybe instill in at least some of these kids that kind of quantum or relativistic intuition from the get-go. And what would those kids as scientists then accomplish if they don’t have to take the leap to understand Einstein and Bohr, rather they feel it the way they feel Isaac Newton and they can then jump off from there. Wow, maybe they’ll go some crazy place that we mirror Newtonian-brained people who have to think hard about quantum mechanics won’t be able to go.

21:22 We kind of see a little version of that today where kids are born knowing what space looks like, knowing all of this information, being able to pull up a video and see people do these things and they start off already up here and then they can go to the next level. Absolutely true. When I teach quantum mechanics to undergraduates, there are these mind-blowing ideas about the world being governed by probabilities and particles that can be in some weird sense in multiple locations.

21:51 And these were the ideas that early scientists in the 20s and 30s racked their brains to absorb the strange nature of the world. But my students, they just take it in. It’s just part and parcel. They’ve heard about these ideas, even if they didn’t study the math since they were quite young. And they just say, okay.

22:12 And I’m like, doesn’t that kind of blow your mind? And yeah, it doesn’t blow that mind as much because it’s already encountered these ideas and absorbed them at some level. Right, kind of how we were with gravity. Whereas a few hundred years earlier, they would have been like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about?

22:27 You mentioned Einstein. What is your take on him? If he wasn’t born that moment, would this stuff still have happened? Was he also a great showman? I know you come from a family of showmen.

22:40 What do you see when you see the Einstein phenomenon? Because you’re deep into it. You see more than I can see. Well, I have a deep affection for Einstein. And look, he was a smart, smart dude, man.

22:53 It’s astounding. When you look at our understanding of the world before him and after him, he changes our understanding of space, time, matter, energy, and gravity, right? That’s a lot of stuff for one person to sort of reach out and reshape and remold. So undeniably the real deal in a massive way. But yeah, he did have also an intuition and understanding of how to work the media.

23:22 And he was able to play up the mad scientist, the wild-eyed genius in a way that really worked. And look, his big discovery, the general theory of relativity, this was just after, it was in the midst of World War I. It was confirmed just after World War I. And the world needed a hero at that point. And I think he knew that the world needed a hero and he was willing to be that hero.

23:51 And he worked with the press and the media in such a way to become that hero. I think that was a kind of wonderful service to provide to humanity. Yeah, he was quite media savvy because he talked about non-scientific things too. At times he did. At least we hear those quotes all the time.

24:07 He may be more famous for some of those. Yeah, be careful about them. Some of them he didn’t quite say, but many he did. And he really had a knack for finding things about the world that people would find deeply interesting, deeply mysterious, even if they didn’t fully understand it. And that was a talent.

24:29 And he had the hair. He did have the hair. And the look. And so he played that role and he needed someone. And it’s nice to have someone that would have something that would unite us as a species, as a planet as well.

24:39 So a perfect time. If he hadn’t been born, what would have happened? Well, it’s hard to say. With the special theory of relativity, his discovery in 1905 of the weirdness of space and time, there were others hot on the trail of that idea. In fact, Lorentz and Poincaré, other great thinkers of the time, wrote down the key equations of relativity before Einstein did.

25:03 They just didn’t understand what the equations were actually telling us about the world. Einstein’s genius was to be able to throw away preconceived notions of space and time, look at the equations fresh, and interpret them in a radically new way. And that’s why he is credited with the special theory of relativity. But I can’t imagine that Lorentz and Poincaré wouldn’t ultimately have gotten to that theory if Einstein had not gotten there first. With the general theory of relativity, it’s less clear.

25:35 Because Einstein was by himself working for 10 long years on a problem that everybody said to him, don’t work on the force of gravity. It’s too hard. In fact, Max Planck, famous physicist, said to Einstein, even if you succeed in understanding gravity, nobody will believe you. It’s just too deep, it’s too hard, and the ideas are too thick for our era to really take them on. And of course, when Einstein heard something like that, he was like, yes, I’m gonna work on gravity.

26:05 He was the ultimate iconic class. So if you told him not to do something, he would do it. Maybe that was Planck’s strategy. I don’t know, I don’t think so. And had he not come up with the general theory of relativity, at some point, would we have?

26:18 I think so, but it could have been 50 years. It could have been 100 years. Some people say, well, there was this mathematician named David Hilbert who actually wrote down the equations of general relativity perhaps before Einstein within a few days. But Einstein went to Hilbert in June of 1915 and told him everything that he’d already figured out. Hilbert went from there between June of 1915 and November to finish the final step, but he wouldn’t have gotten to June of 1915 by himself.

26:51 So again, it really was Einstein all the way on the general theory of relativity. Wow, would we have an atomic bomb in the 40s without Einstein? I think so. So Einstein wrote one of the first two papers on quantum mechanics. In fact, it’s the paper that he won the Nobel Prize for on the so-called photoelectric effect.

27:13 And it’s a brilliant paper, but I am quite certain that others would have come to these ideas. And it was others who developed quantum mechanics from that point forward because Einstein was never a great fan of quantum physics. He didn’t like the probabilistic nature. He didn’t like other more esoteric qualities called entanglement. And therefore he wasn’t the driving force behind quantum physics, even though he was Einstein.

27:42 So people would listen to him. And when he criticized the theory, that would help drive it forward as well, even though he wasn’t the one who was pushing the frontier. So I do think that we would have had quantum physics. So I suspect that we would have had an atomic bomb. In fact, Einstein himself was deeply saddened by the fact that he was sometimes called the father of the atomic bomb.

28:03 He was called that because he wrote the famous letter to Roosevelt about the need to try to build this weapon. And E equals MC squared is an equation that people use to determine atomic yields. But he wasn’t driving the atomic bomb. And to call him the father of the atomic bomb was really incorrect. It’s interesting how, again, we get into ethics and humanity through physics with Oppenheimer, all the work he did on the atomic bomb, and then later how he regretted it and held this big consciousness.

28:35 It’s funny how you guys somehow are at the core of humanity too. Yeah, well look, when you are at the forefront of research and you are grabbing hold of the reins of reality, able to, as Freeman Dyson, who just recently died, described it, lift a million tons of rock into the sky, which is what an atomic bomb can do. It’s intoxicating. And you can easily put aside the ethical ramifications of what you’re working on. But ultimately, as a human being, you come back to it.

29:07 And these individuals, at least a good number of them from the Manhattan Project, did come back to the realization of what their work had wrought on the world. Yeah, it’s heavy stuff. My dad went to Caltech and he learned freshman physics from Richard Feynman, who taught in I think the early 60s. And he was obviously at Los Alamos at a very young age. Would you have loved to be on the Manhattan Project in some way, or not?

29:34 And what do you make of all that? Well, I’ve never been asked that. And what’s my gut reaction? My gut reaction is that if I was there at the time and I had the opportunity to go, I would have gone because it really would have felt being part of a group of individuals seeking to grasp matter and energy at the deepest possible level. I think I would probably have had the naive hope, because that’s how I am, that we would never use this weapon, just the threat of this weapon, or maybe just the demonstration of this weapon would be enough.

30:08 I would have been probably overly optimistic about what we would do with the results of this research. And therefore, I think I would have been part of it. Yeah, no, I know. It was just probably the most exciting place to be at the time, but also we didn’t know what was gonna happen with that. You know, there’s this great movie called The Fog of War with Robert McNamara.

30:27 I’ve not seen it, but I know of it, yeah. The very end, he tells a story where I think he actually went 30 years later and spoke to Castro or someone next to Castro about this Cuban Missile Crisis, which he was a part of. And he said to him, were you gonna go ahead with this, even knowing that millions of people were gonna die? And they said yes. And he said, how could that be?

30:51 So, and he left the movie by saying, this is the most dangerous thing on the planet and no one is paying attention. The fact that rational men, leaders of countries, were ready to kill tens of millions of people over a, I don’t know, whatever, a perceived threat and a situation, an ego, whatever. And I don’t know, I wonder if you ever think of that stuff. Because when I grew up in the 80s, there was this movie, I don’t know if you remember, it was called The Day After.

31:15 It was a television movie about a nuclear bomb. I do remember this, yeah. I used to have bad dreams when I was a kid about that. I was like 10 years old, but we don’t really think about it much these days. Yeah, we are lulled into a sense of safety, even with all this danger around us.

31:31 And we hope that it’s not an unrealistic way of looking at the world. We hope that the mutual assured destruction policy is enough to keep people from pushing the button. But when you have certain leaders in the world, such as those that are prominent in the American system at the moment, you need to question whether that kind of rational thinking would hold sway in a very difficult and perhaps situation that is so tense and needs a split second decision. Would the right decision be made?

32:10 Not obvious to me. Yeah, and that’s where the rubber hits the road with physics, doesn’t it? Yeah. That’s really where, I mean, that’s just the amount of energy and power there. Yeah, on the other hand, if you were to ask me even more generally, should we curtail research in physics for fear of what the research would reveal and then be harnessed in ways that we would be unhappy about?

32:32 I don’t think so. I think you need to push forward with knowledge and research and understanding. And it is incumbent upon the societal structure, civilization more generally, to be responsible with what it is that we discover. But there’s no way to stop research. There’s no way to stop exploration.

32:52 That’s who we are. That’s where we come from. And that’s our life blood. And it’s also the great opportunities that we have for the future. And you can’t not pursue those opportunities for fear of the side effects that could be devastating.

33:07 Yeah, I totally agree. I feel like we didn’t give the Big Bang enough attention. Sorry, yeah. There’s also something you talk about, which, so again, back to the Big Bang, a lot of people say, okay, what happened before? So we kind of address this issue of time as in maybe our understanding of time doesn’t allow us to understand how there couldn’t be time before.

33:22 But there’s something else you talk about which is this concept, I think, of repulsive gravity. Again, I think the other thing people struggle with is how could something start from a pin size or nothing size and then become everything we have? How do you talk to people about that? Well, it is a hard idea to imagine something smaller than an atom in a fraction of a second swelling larger than the observable universe. I mean, that’s such an incredible scale of growth that it’s just unfamiliar in any realm of human experience.

33:55 But when we look at the mathematics, we do find this bizarre sounding idea of anti-gravity, repulsive gravity. You and I are used to attractive gravity. You drop something, it falls toward the earth because the earth and the object attract each other. And we have never experienced any other kind of gravity. But the math of Einstein’s theory shows that in certain exotic situations, gravity can be outward pushing, not inward pulling.

34:21 And the exotic situation is just a region that’s uniformly filled with energy. We’re used to the gravity of a clumpy rock like the earth or a clumpy star like the sun. It’s not uniform. It’s there and then there’s empty space around it. That yields attractive gravity.

34:39 But the math shows if the energy is spread out, there’s an outward gravitational push. And we believe that in the very earliest moments of the universe, a little tiny patch of space was filled with this uniform energy that gave rise to a powerful outward push that drove everything to swell enormously from, as we were saying, a tiny size to bigger than all that we can see. Wow. All right, and then now 13 billion years later, we’re where we’re at today. And where are we?

35:10 If you’re trying to put that in perspective like a normal human, what’s been happening since before that and what’s going to happen? Because you talk about trying to get this whole concept of time. Yeah, to get the whole picture is a hard one and I use an analogy in the book. I make an analogy to the Empire State Building. And I ask the reader to imagine that each floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration of time 10 times that of the previous floor.

35:36 So imagine ground floor one year since the Big Bang, first floor 10 years since the Big Bang, second 100 years and so forth. And so in that way of thinking about things, everything from the Big Bang until today takes us to floor 10 of the Empire State Building. And then I walk the reader from floor 10 exponentially far into the future as we walk up each and every floor of the Empire State Building. And there are key things that happen along the way with the final at the very peak of the Empire State Building.

36:08 The universe is just left with a bath of particles floating through the darkness. All structure has disintegrated. That’s entropy, second law of thermodynamics, everything ultimately falls apart. Entropy finally wins that battle. And there’s nothing but particles and the void in the very far future.

36:26 Now everyone’s getting depressed now to have a drink. This concept of entropy, which is something I first heard about at thermodynamics class, sophomore year, one of the hardest classes, but most rewarding I ever took. But that is this concept that things are constantly decaying or out of, slowly losing order. And over time, that means that everything we know that is in order, that gives us meaning, is going to be destroyed. But you also look at entropy in a different way.

36:54 Well, I look at it that way plus something else. There’s a subtle quality to entropy that we often don’t emphasize when we’re just talking in general terms, and what you’ve described is a perfect description. I would have said something quite similar in describing entropy. But when things disintegrate, when order tends to go to disorder, overall tends to grow in the universe, that does not rule out the possibility that pockets of order can form so long as when they form, they eject enough disorder to their surroundings so that overall, the total disorder goes up even though a certain amount of order forms in the process.

37:34 I like to call this the entropic two-step. It’s kind of a dance. Entropy goes down here so long as it goes up by a compensating amount over here. Down here, up there. And that dance allows for orderly things to happen in the universe.

37:49 That’s why you have stars. It’s why you have planets. Otherwise, if entropy everywhere always went up, those particles that came out of the Big Bang, they just keep on going their merry way and would never clump back together into stars and planets, there would be nothing. Okay, but in the long enough timeline, everything decays. And you said even protons, which just hurts me when you say that.

38:14 Because for some reason, ever since we all, probably you all studied the protons and electrons, they seem like these things that never go away. It’s this, well, with the time thought smallest piece of matter, I guess it’s not true anymore. But it seems like this thing that’s never going anywhere. Yeah, and I think we hanker for that. I think that we humans.

38:30 We love permanence. We love you forever. Yeah, we want things to be chiseled in stone. We want things to last forever. And my belief is that that comes from our singular recognition that we are not permanent as individuals.

38:43 We are mortal. And that recognition that we are all going to die gives us a certain amount of focus on things that will outlast, that will live on forever and for a while. And it could still be, people thought the proton would be a particle that would last forever. But our cutting edge theories, not yet confirmed, and I make this clear in the book, but our cutting edge theories suggest strongly that protons themselves die. They disintegrate into finer constituents.

39:14 And probably, according to our math, that happens, say, roughly around floor 38 of the Empire State Building. So it’s in the far future. We’re at floor 10 now, and it’s exponentially high to go even to floor 38. Every floor, you’re going to factor of 10 longer. But that will happen.

39:31 And on these timescales, complex matter itself will fall apart into finer ingredients. And so everything that we know about will ultimately disintegrate. And then is it over from 38 up, or can I go up to the 100th floor? And will there be another big bang or something else? It could be.

39:48 Well, there are interesting things that happen along the way. For instance, floor 50, something interesting happens, which is, if there are any cogitating beings left in the world, you might say, how could there be any if there’s no protons, right? But I’m being more gentle. I’m going to imagine somehow, maybe a collection of electrons sending signals to each other can somehow have some conscious awareness. Let’s just allow that to be as general as possible.

40:12 You can argue that roughly floor 50 is a time when any such being will think its final thought because thought itself is a physical process that yields entropy, heat. The universe needs to absorb that entropy, but you can argue that the universe will be chock full of entropy by that point. It won’t be able to absorb the heat generated by that thinking being. So one more thought and that thinking being will fry up in the entropic waste produced by its own process of thinking.

40:41 So thought itself has a limited life expectancy in the universe, and from there, black holes are the one remaining thing in the universe. There was a time when we thought they were permanent, but then Stephen Hawking came along and showed us that black holes give off radiations called Hawking radiation. They are not completely black because of that. When you take quantum physics into account and they give off radiation and they get smaller and smaller and ultimately, they are gone into this bath of particles.

41:12 So by the peak of the empire staple, and it’s a good number, roughly 10 to the 100 years into the future, black holes themselves will be gone. And then that’s it? Almost. It’s pretty much, it’s it for any time scale that you could really imagine, but if you’re gonna go wild and toward the end of the book, I allow the mathematics, it’s free reign into the arbitrarily far future. Particles in the void on occasion can just slam into each other and stick together in groups of two and three and so forth.

41:42 And then over a fantastically long time scales can build structures over again. They can recreate protons and recreate atoms. And one of the weirdest things that they can recreate is a human brain. They can come together to create a brain floating in the void. It’s called a Boltzmann brain and that brain floating in the void.

42:02 If its particulate arrangement happened to match mine right now, would think it’s having this conversation, even though it’s floating out there in the darkness of space, has no history, thinks it has a history because memories are just patterns of particles in the brain, but it would just spontaneously appear out of the particles in the void. That’s pretty weird. Okay, so you’re saying that could happen at the very, that could happen at that point. All right, so based on everything you laid out on us, how can we think about that in our lives today?

42:34 And I know you’re a big fan of the book, The Denial of Death. It’s sitting on my nightstand. Really? Yeah, I got it a few years ago because actually Mark Maron was talking about it, who has a podcast in LA. And I know some of the theories behind it of kind of why we worship our heroes, why we build monuments to our fallen soldiers.

42:53 And it’s, from what I understand, and I really like it if you could maybe clarify this for me, it’s a way of us justifying our finite existence and the fact that we die. It’s trying to give meaning to our life by sometimes propping up others because all of this comes back to everybody watching saying, okay, Brian, this is heavy, but what does this mean to me? Yeah, well, I can tell you how I process these ideas. So there was a time when I would think about the far future and it would feel bleak.

43:21 It would give me this hollow sense of dread that was unpleasant and uncomfortable. But as I thought about it more and more, I had a radical turn of perspective, which is the recognition that we are small, we are finite, we do exist on this little window of time on this grand cosmic timeline that we were describing. And that can make you feel insignificant, but at the same time, look at what these collections of particles can do. And look at how unlikely it is that these collections of particles exist.

43:56 You and I are the product of a sequence of quantum events reaching back to the Big Bang, each of which could have turned out differently that way instead of this yielding a world in which we would not be here. So against astounding odds, we are here. And moreover, we are so exquisitely configured that we can think about the past, we can envision the future. Some members of our species can write the Ninth Symphony or create the pyramids or paint the Mona Lisa or figure out quantum mechanics or all of that stuff.

44:28 So that gives me just a sense of deep gratitude that we are here, a gratitude that kind of borders on reverence. And we should all have that sense. Look at how amazing it is that entropy and evolution can combine together to yield these kinds of cogitating structures that only exist on the cosmic timeline for a mere moment. But we are that moment, celebrate that. That to me is a way to not feel that bleakness about where the universe is headed.

44:59 Okay, so this actually can give us a new perspective on things. That’s a different perspective than the denial of death perspective. Yeah, in a sense, yes. In the denial of death, Becker was saying, look, culture in many ways is an antidote against our singular recognition that we are going to die. In fact, he would say, if you encounter someone who says, I’m not afraid of death, that’s culture doing its job.

45:24 Because if you strip away culture- Everything in our culture is to make us feel better about ourselves. In a sense, right? Now you can over blow these ideas and make them sound so universal in scope that it may feel artificial. But many things in our culture, certainly. Superhero movies.

45:40 Yeah, in a sense, right? And that’s not a bad thing either, necessarily. It’s not a bad thing. So to see the hero that who can transcend all manner of danger, we want that and we revere that. And that largely comes from the fact that we are these creatures that can think these grand thoughts, but ultimately we go deep into the ground to rot for eternity, right?

46:01 And that’s what Otto Ronck, a disciple of Freud and Ernest Becker took these ideas further. That’s what they were saying, and it’s absolutely true. So this cosmic perspective, if you will, that I’d like to put forward, you can think of it as another antidote. It’s an antidote that doesn’t just deal with the death of the individual. It’s an antidote that deals with the death of the cosmos.

46:24 And this is this beautiful, probabilistic, very improbable thing that we can be here in these bodies, having these conversations, having these thoughts, creating, manipulating physics in an amazing way. Precisely. And celebrate that, even though it’s not gonna last forever. And that’s okay. That’s right.

46:40 You shift your view from the only thing that’s valuable is that which is permanent to a view which says what’s valuable is the things that are happening right here, right now, for this brief moment. The universe is able to stand up and look at itself in awe, in wonder, and that’s a great thing. So what do you think of these people in Silicon Valley that wanna live forever? Well, I appreciate it. I understand where it’s coming from.

47:05 Okay, right, okay. But look, who knows where science will ultimately take us, but eternity is not in the cards, I don’t think, just based on our understanding of the physical laws, but a very long time, longer than the current human lifespan, quite possibly. But nobody will somehow transcend the finite nature of life. Whether it’s longer than we experience, perhaps, but it will be finite. And look, there have been so many works of fiction that have explored the possibility of immortality.

47:40 The vast majority of them, it does not turn out so well for those individuals in those stories. They’re unhappy, they do that thing. Bored, you know, nothing matters any longer because what does it mean to achieve if you have infinite amount of time? Either you will be unable to get it for infinity and that will be deeply distressing, or you will be able to get it and it doesn’t really feel like you’ve accomplished something because given enough time, you figured you would.

48:07 I mean, there’s all sorts of things that come into play that the traditional ways that we feel important in the world evaporate if we are immortal, right? Obviously, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity of us kind of merging with machines and it’s happening anywhere between 10 and 30 years from what people are saying. And then uploading our consciousness into the cloud. What do you make of all this stuff? Well, it’s exciting to think about and there may be some truth to it.

48:38 Technology has done things today, which if we spoke about them 50 years ago, we’d be like, come on, there’s gonna be a little box that I can talk into and talk to someone on the other side of the world or ask it a question and it will give me the answer. That was like Star Trek silliness, right? And now it’s real. So you never wanna say that won’t happen. It could happen, but the idea of immortality, that’s one that I think strains anything that I understand about how the world works.

49:09 I had two different guests in here. One of them was named Stephen Jenkins, who has been present at the death of about 12,000 people in palliative care. I had another guy named Ben Gertzel, who works on singularity stuff in Hong Kong. And it was fascinating because Ben said, what are you talking about, Brian? I could upload my consciousness and I have a hundred different versions of me and it’s gonna be amazing.

49:29 And I was like, yeah, but you have no body and you have no reference to your mortality. And he’s like, what are you talking about? You’re thinking of it wrong. You’re thinking like a caveman. And then Jenkins is saying, you guys are all crazy.

49:39 Death is something that’s coming that you need to find a way. I was like, oh, you’d have to have a relationship with it. He’s like, no, Brian, you don’t even understand death. And it’s just like death is not only part of the human experience, it is in some ways the human experience. And so, I don’t know, I’ve had- Well, it certainly has been.

49:55 I mean, it absolutely is a vital part of the human experience. Will that change in the future by virtue of these developments? And I definitely have a deep degree of sympathy with the perspective that if we analyze these developments with the mindset that we have developed through the lives that we have led, we may be off base. It may require a radically different mindset to deal with a radical disjuncture in the nature of our experience in the world. If we’re inside some computer, floating around in bits and bytes, that ultimately might be something that we find deeply gratifying and enjoyable, even in the absence of a body, even in the absence of things that we consider vital to our existence.

50:41 I mean, there’s some people who would hear that and say, oh my God, that’s hell. You finally are discussing hell on earth. Being in a video game. Being in a video game, oh my God. I can’t, you know, but that’s from this mindset, the one that has been out in the world that we’re familiar with.

50:58 So you have to be very careful about judging things using the wrong mindset. And if you take that one step further, you get the people that are saying that we might be in a simulation. Yeah, maybe happening right now. Right, how do you feel about that? How do you get your head around that?

51:10 Well, look, there’s a strong, not strong, there’s an interesting argument. It actually comes from Nick Bostrom at Oxford that suggests we’re in a simulation. And it simply goes like this. You know, in the far future, if computers can simulate worlds and have conscious beings within the simulation, then they’re gonna be a lot of people interested to create those simulations. And it might be that everybody has their own supercomputer and they get home at night and they flip it on and they simulate a world.

51:35 So there may be many, many simulated worlds with many, many simulated individuals. Presumably there’s only one real world. So if I ask you, are you in a simulation or are you in the real world? Simply by looking at the probabilities. One real world, gazillion simulated worlds seems more likely that you are right now in a simulated world.

51:58 Now, you know, am I convinced by that argument? I’m not, I get it. It makes it an interesting idea. I find it interesting, frankly, because it gives you a new way of thinking about God. If you are in a simulation, there was, say, a kid in a futuristic garage who started that simulation, maybe observing that simulation.

52:17 That kid is your creator, but it’s not a supernatural creator. It’s a natural creator. That being is in the outer world, governed by physical laws of the outer world. And therefore it’s a kind of existence argument where you can have a creator, but you don’t need to violate the laws of science. Wow, all right, you brought God up.

52:38 So how do you feel about God? And how does religion play into all of this? And you grew up in a religious family, right? Not really. I grew up in a family that was respectful of tradition, Jewish tradition, but we would go to temple for the holidays and we would celebrate the major holidays of the year, but I wouldn’t really say that we were religious.

53:02 And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve even moved further away from participating in many of those traditions. And my view though, overall, is that religion is another one of the human stories that we tell in order to grasp ourselves more fully. And for me, it’s a vital part of who we are. And for many today, it’s still a vital part of how they make sense of the world. I mean, science, fantastic for understanding the external world, right?

53:34 If you wanna figure out things about the Big Bang or the spectral lines of hydrogen, don’t turn to scripture. It’s not gonna be a good way forward, but turn to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, does a great job. But if you’re turning your attention inward, not the objective world, but the subjective world, the things that matter to you and trying to grasp what your awareness is all about and how you fit into some larger story that makes you feel happier or makes you feel part of a tradition that may have gone on for thousands of years, then religious practice is very good for that kind of inner journey.

54:13 And therefore, unlike some of my colleagues who wanna wipe religion off the face of the earth, my view is cherry pick religion. Don’t take it literally, accept those parts that work for you. And if none of it works fantastic, but if some of it works, if some of the tradition and ritual and perspective helps you fully understand your role in reality, fantastic. But not for you. Not for me, because I, well, you know, that’s not even completely true.

54:44 Because as I describe in the book, you know, while I don’t really practice any of the Jewish tradition that I was raised within, when my father died, a minion, you know, a quorum of Jewish men, which is what it needed to be, came to our house to recite the Kaddish prayer. And it was consoling. And I felt part of this lineage going back thousands of years. And it helped me through a very difficult moment. I think that’s a great use of this kind of human invention and not something that I would wanna wipe off the face of the earth.

55:25 Yeah, one of the guests I’ve had on the show is Rupert Sheldrake and he wrote a book called Science and Spiritual Practices. And I mean, I think one of the assertions of the last hundred years, we’ve gotten very scientific and we’ve thrown out religion because it doesn’t hold up to the test of science. But we forgot that religion is actually, I call it technology, for keeping a human society functional. So we’ve thrown out everything that we used to treasure, such as pilgrimages, gathering together, singing together, all of these rituals that give our lives meaning.

55:55 And since it’s part of this religiosity, we’re like, yeah, we don’t play that anymore. But we need it as humans. Like you said, we need the closure at a funeral. So what do we do instead? We go to a football game and we chant.

56:06 And we become part of a tribe. So a lot of what you just said I agree with, but I do need to say that Rupert Sheldrake is somebody who, at least in my interactions with him in the past, struck me as, how would I say, a bit of a nutter. So I’m reluctant to say anything that aligns me with somebody who has described a view of the world that is the antithesis of my view of the world. Yeah, he’s got his morphic resonance and the dog expects you going home and all that stuff.

56:33 So yeah, I hear what you’re saying with that. So totally get what you’re saying with that. And yeah, my science education makes me kind of wonder about some of that stuff too. Although it does also make me question sometimes the religiousness of the scientific community as if it must be this way only. Yeah, but I’ll tell you something.

56:51 I was invited to a gathering of scientists some years ago called Science and the Spiritual Quest. And I had thought, and I was described to him as a closed-door meeting that you couldn’t talk about, but now I think I can’t, I’m not gonna give any names. And it was scientists around the table. It was to talk about views of religion and spirituality. I thought going in that it was gonna be the most boring conversation that everybody would say the same thing that I was saying.

57:13 God might exist, no evidence for it. We allow for the possibility, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. I was the only person that had that perspective at that meeting. There were Nobel laureates at that meeting who were deeply religious. And that was an eye-opener to me because it showed me how close-minded I had been in my view of how people engage with these ideas, with religious ideas, with religious practice.

57:40 And it drove me to read a book that I would recommend to everybody by William James called The Varieties of Religious Experience written back in 1905 based on lectures that he gave in 1902 and 1903 in Scotland. And he was a scientist, a psychologist, a great scientist of his era. And he did a wonderful study of the ways in which people, a variety of backgrounds, engage with religious ideas. And it just shows you how different and how rich and varied the religious experience can be.

58:14 And to me, it has really enriched my understanding with how humankind engages with ideas that may seem foreign from a scientific perspective, but can be deeply valued from a humanistic perspective. So it’s the duality of being a human. You can entertain a religious idea that has no science-based and also scientific phenomenon. And it’s because the yardstick for the religious ideas is not whether they can explain data in the external world. It’s whether they make sense in an internal, singular, subjective way.

58:50 And that’s a different way of judging ideas. Very much so. All right, on that note, consciousness, what is your take on consciousness? I’m for it. Okay, good for it.

59:00 Okay, I mean, consciousness is such a weird word because I didn’t study consciousness at MIT. And, you know, it can’t really be studied or defined. I mean, it can be defined, but it can’t be measured. We kind of all recognize it’s important. Maybe like a spiritual practice is important.

59:16 But like, where does it sit with all these ideas? It’s so hard because we scientists are trained to study the objective things that we can all look at and measure. And we’re not particularly good at turning inward and examining the subjective world. And the weird thing, or the hard thing I should really say about the subjective world is by definition, I only have access to my own. I don’t have access to your subjective conscious awareness.

59:44 So I don’t even know if your conscious awareness is really like mine. I assume that it is we’re made of the same kind of stuff. We have roughly the same kinds of experiences in planet earth. And so I conjecture that you have an inner voice inside your head, sometimes talks to you. I conjecture that you experience love and wonder and thrill and all that stuff.

1:00:07 But that’s just conjecture. I can’t get inside your head. And therefore it’s a different kind of puzzle, understanding conscious awareness because we only have access to our own. Okay. Is it something we’ll ever understand or measure?

1:00:23 Do you believe? I think so. I do think that we will one day understand consciousness as simply the byproduct of information processing in the brain. And I’ve said this for a long time and I need to qualify it by the following notion. Years ago when I would say that it was based on a just a gut feel that there’s nothing more in the world than the ingredients and the laws and therefore this thing is nothing more than those particles acted on by physical law.

1:00:53 And therefore it’s got to be that the inner sensation emerges from the particles moving in the right way. I didn’t fully appreciate the subtlety of the problem when I first started saying things like this say 20 years ago. In the intervening years, I’ve thought much more carefully about the problems of consciousness, much more deeply about other theories that people have put forward. And so I feel like I’ve broadened out my understanding of the difficulty of explaining this inner world emerging from particles that don’t have an inner world.

1:01:28 I mean, that’s like, that’s a real puzzle. But I do feel even after now thinking about it for decades that one day we will resolve this. We have not resolved it yet. And I do not think that we will need to imagine there’s a consciousness feel that we tap into that there’s something else beyond the physical. I really do feel strongly that when all the dust settles, consciousness will be a quality that just emerges when you’ve got particles in the right arrangement moving in the right patterns.

1:01:58 Right, so no collective consciousness, no tapping up to any spirit world. It’s just electrons and different chemicals in your brain that creates your world. You know, one of the ways people have traditionally studied their consciousness is to perturb their consciousness. So a couple of years ago, I went down to Costa Rica and drank some ayahuasca, which is a plant medicine, and you know, it definitely perturbed my consciousness. And you know, people have all these experiences and a lot of people have had these experiences.

1:02:24 Now some people feel like they’re talking to spirits and entities. But I don’t know if it’s because of my scientific training, but when I come back, I’m pretty sure that I was having an experience in my brain. And that’s why a lot of people say, you know, people to be scared of like a psychedelic is like you’re scared of yourself because it is you. Now of course it’s altering your brain chemistry in ways that you wouldn’t normally do, but that’s the way I feel about it.

1:02:47 Other people feel differently about it. What are your thoughts? I agree with you 100. And I know you recently talked to Joe Rogan about some of your own experiences, which probably have millions of views right now, so I’m not outing you. But I mean, that also helped you because you had that experience.

1:02:59 I know Richard Dawkins has traditionally said, I will not smoke the DMT, I will not touch anything, but I’m not going to and it doesn’t work and it doesn’t matter. But you have a little experience. What are your thoughts? Yeah, and I came out of that in exactly the same way that you did. In fact, it confirmed, rather than made me question my previous views because all I did was very modestly change the chemistry for a brief period of time that was going on inside of my brain and that slight change in chemistry yielded a pretty radical change in conscious experience.

1:03:36 If consciousness was out here, you would think that there’d be a consistency to it that would transcend any small perturbation to the particles coursing through your brain. But that’s not what happens. So to me, it just makes it even more obvious, even more intuitive, that all it is is particle motion through this structure and that’s what conscious awareness is. I had a really rough night in Amsterdam about 10, 12 years ago before this show happened, before I knew about plant medicines because I had no experience and I ate a bunch of raw mushrooms by the canal and then barely made it back to the hotel room.

1:04:15 I honestly cannot imagine if I wasn’t in that room in some safety or I would have been, I probably had a very traumatic experience. But over time, I actually realized that taking these things in the right ceremonies, they teach me a lot about myself, some of the conclusions that you came up to this book that it’s special to be here, we should be grateful for this time, cherish this time, make the most of it. Yeah, it’s finite, but that’s actually a good thing.

1:04:39 It’s funny though, my experience in Amsterdam could almost be word for word what you were describing and so I guess maybe it’s quite common. I think as a first time, for someone that uses their brain as much as you did or maybe I did in the past, it’s so foreign because it’s throwing things at you you’ve just never experienced before. I think you said you saw multiple versions of yourself. Yeah, and I just didn’t know what, I don’t know if I was ever gonna come back.

1:05:03 Yeah, and that happens. I’ve had a few of those and I watch where I’m like, I don’t know if I’m gonna make it back. But they say there are no bad trips, you are just learning at a rate you are not accustomed to. No, no, no, no, no, there are bad trips. You think so?

1:05:17 Yeah, oh my God. Well, but I don’t know. I define bad as being so terrified that you don’t know whether you’re gonna pull through and yes, learning, I agree, but I wouldn’t consider that ordinary learning at a different pace. It was a categorically different kind of learning. Do you think you might have taken something away from it?

1:05:37 Oh, I did, I did. I mean, I, you know, well, number one, I don’t wanna ever do that stuff again, you know, but number two, you know, this physicalist view of consciousness is challenged by many people. And look, I don’t mean to say that this is a done deal, right, it could be the case that at some point in the future, there’s a discovery of the consciousness field. We can tap into it, we can measure it and I’d be thrilled if that were the case. So I’m not dogmatic about this, but everything that I’ve seen was confirmed by this one little experience.

1:06:11 So I’m not saying my belief is based on this experience, but it fits in perfectly that all it is is the materialist, physicalist view of stuff organized and moving under quantum mechanical law. You don’t need anything else and when you fiddle with it, it changes the experience. Yeah, and there’s some great studies going on with Imperial College London here. They do a lot of amazing studies with FMRI’s and they’re actually watching to see what happens with the brain with all these chemicals.

1:06:38 And they used to think that it actually would be more active. They’ve actually found that it’s less active and it’s almost the analogy I have is that the conductor of an orchestra is no longer there. So it allows it to kind of play out in different ways where it normally wouldn’t allow itself to play out, which means a lot of times you can confront maybe sometimes repetitive destructive behaviors and look at your alcoholism or depression or anxiety or smoking in a different way.

1:07:00 And they’re finding that it actually has some positive reinforcement on these types of things. That’s interesting. Because it allows you to look at something from a different perspective. So I’m not a proponent. I don’t have any skin in this game but I would just say that even the bad trip, sometimes there’s some type of knowledge there.

1:07:14 Just why a near death experience or a loss of a loved one sometime can allow you to look at life differently. Absolutely, absolutely. But I’m not saying we should go to Amsterdam right now. Talk to me about a few other things. This concept, we talked earlier about the simulation but also this concept that there could be these parallel universes out there.

1:07:33 Because if the universe is infinite, I don’t know if it is infinite, but there could be lots of versions of us out there. Which again, back to Star Trek. I mean, you and I grew up on, in my opinion, the original Star Trek, the only Star Trek. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy. But they were exploring this where there was a parallel universe.

1:07:50 Spock with the beard? With the beard, yeah. I love that episode. And of course, the Star Trek mobile thing. People are rolling their eyes right now.

1:07:57 This old dude talking about the original Star Trek. This is one of the greatest shows ever. Greene Roddenberry, apparently he tried to create these monsters that weren’t scary. But it was an hour-long show back in the day with this late 60s flair and some great uniforms. But they really made you think.

1:08:13 And as a kid growing up in California, it really makes you think about a lot of issues of humanity. Yeah, and this notion of parallel universes is one that comes out of the math and comes out of the real possibility that space could go on infinitely far. In fact, I think if you polled most physicists and say, does space end? Does it come back on itself? Or does it go on forever?

1:08:33 I think many would say that it goes on forever. And if it does, then you’re virtually guaranteed that if you go sufficiently far out into space, there are copies of us. It’s simply that the particles don’t have enough distinct possible arrangements to yield everything distinct from what we have here if you go sufficiently far. It has got to repeat. In fact, if it goes on infinitely far, it repeats infinitely often.

1:08:58 We are out there infinitely many times having this conversation or variations on this conversation of small differences in the environment. But yes, that would be part and parcel of reality if space goes on infinitely far. And how do you process that? Like knowing then that could be a possibility. Does that change the way we think about living?

1:09:18 Well, you know, some of the scientists who first came upon these ideas like a scientist named Alex Velenkin at Tufts, he famously said, it really made him quite depressed when he first encountered this idea to think that he wasn’t the individual, the singular individual that he had always imagined, that there were other versions of him that would have an equal claim on being him because it had the same memories, the same history, the same background, and it sort of took away the specialness of being an individual. That’s one way of looking at it. Will any of these entities come visit us someday?

1:09:57 Well, the distance scales we’re talking about are astounding. So it’s very hard to imagine that there will ever be any sort of cross-communication of that sort. So it’s more of a mindset and also a tool in the physicist’s toolkit because there are certain kinds of questions that are easier to address in a multiverse as this scenario, one of many scenarios is called, they’re very hard to answer if there’s a single universe, easier to answer if there’s a multiverse.

1:10:31 So we leverage these ideas to try to give solutions to real world problems like why the dark energy which suffuses space has its particular values once it’s problem. And so it’s more of a useful device as opposed to something that we imagine ever really encountering in a significant way. But if I go five floors up on the Empire State Building, maybe the humanity here has the technology to space-time travel, maybe not. I don’t think so. So you’re always bound by the speed of light and well then if you take Star Trek, you wonder if you get a warp drive that maybe curves.

1:11:07 So putting away ideas that are hard to square with our understanding, it just seems very difficult to ever imagine encountering your double, for instance. But also maybe we’re the cavemen of this century. It could be. It’s always a possibility. There’s five floors down, none of those people would ever imagine we’re here.

1:11:24 I totally agree. And so I’m sure the reason I’m bringing this up because if we go five floors up, then if there’s all these different universes and people have this new tech, then you could even argue that they must be here surrounding us, watching us now, because there’s so many iterations. That’s right, that’s right. But I guess they’re not. Well that’s taking a leap of technological development and manipulation of the universe on fantastically large scales which feels to me great liberty in order to imagine these things.

1:11:53 But you’re right. I would have probably said in the 1900s, great liberty to imagine the integrated circuit and computers and cell phones. So it is hard to predict where technology will lead. Yeah, you mentioned the integrated circuit. I mean, I think I heard you recently saying that quantum physics, which we think is some esoteric thing, is responsible for like 35% of GDP.

1:12:17 This thing that we didn’t even probably know existed a hundred and some years ago actually governs like our GPS and our transistors. Now the one small footnote I’ll give to that is I then looked up some months ago to find the source of the 35% gross national product. And I just wanted to source it. The source apparently is me, right? So I said this at some point, I gather, and it sort of infiltrated on the internet in some small way.

1:12:43 You know you’re famous when we’re quoting you. So I don’t know. I don’t know if 35% is right, but a lot of our gross national product in the United States and in the world comes from devices that make use of the integrated circuit. And without the integrated circuit, there wouldn’t be cell phones and there wouldn’t be computers and all manner of technology. And you need quantum mechanics to get to the integrated circuit.

1:13:05 So if you would have interviewed the great folks who were developing quantum mechanics, from Bohr to Pauli, to Dirac, to Schrodinger, to Bohr, and said, so guys, what is this all gonna be good for? How’s it gonna change our lives? I think they would have said, probably not. We’re talking about electrons and atoms. But then you fast forward 80 years, and the work that they did has completely transformed our world.

1:13:33 So fundamental research, you don’t know where it’s gonna lead. Five floors up. Five floors up or more. Time-space travel, right? Is that Star Trek stuff?

1:13:42 Is some of it possible? The warp drive is just, people have written articles on the warp drive. I’ve never really looked closely to determine how close it is to say what Star Trek would have said. So some yes, some no. Okay, other takeaways people can expect from this book when they read it.

1:13:58 And can my grandma read this? Your grandma can read it. I think it can be read on a variety of levels. So there is some pretty hardcore science in there, made accessible, like Entropy and the Second Laws. We were talking about before, but it does also move into things that I’ve never written about.

1:14:18 But I think looking at them from a physicist perspective can be quite enlightening. The emergence of language, the emergence of storytelling, myth-making, religious practice, creative expression. These things that define who we are, when seen within the cosmological unfolding, you get a different perspective on them. And I consider it to be a valuable perspective. Tell me about your life and your meaning.

1:14:43 10 years from now, what are you trying to do? I think I’ve heard you say one time that it’s maybe a bit naive to think that you might have an Einstein-type contribution, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t trudge forward. And most physicists know they’re never gonna, because you have to be at the right place at the right time and the right thing to get the Nobel Prize or to get this or that. That’s right. What gives you meaning when it comes to your work?

1:15:05 Well, I think you’re right. Many of us began our work in physics or science more generally, with the image that maybe we would achieve what an Einstein had achieved. And we quickly conclude that those kinds of discoveries are few and far between, and the people that can accomplish them are extraordinarily rare in the species. So you shift your perspective, not to try to set the world on fire, but to contribute to this ongoing journey to gain the deepest understanding of reality.

1:15:39 And for me, just engaging with these ideas and on rare occasion, discovering something that nobody had seen before gives me a sense of connection to a larger reality, a communion, if you will, with the cosmos. And that, to me, gives me meaning. It gives me purpose. It feels valuable. It’s exciting.

1:16:01 It gives me a sense of awe and wonder that helps make life worth living. How important is your personality to changing the way physics is looked at in this world? And is it something you initially embraced or didn’t embrace? And again, I know your dad was in vaudeville. So maybe that was part of the family business.

1:16:21 Was that something you were oppressed at first? But that must be part of who you are because not many physicists can go on late night TV and wow people. Yeah, I’ve always felt that just doing the physics was limited, even though the ideas are big. And I’ve always enjoyed talking to people and getting them excited. And I have to tell you, when I go to schools and talk to a kid that hates science and I start to tell them about black holes and the big bang and their eyes kind of open up and they turn and say, wait, that’s science?

1:16:54 That, to me, is one of the most gratifying moments that I ever have because that kid is used to science just being the stuff on the homework and the exams and so forth. And for that student to recognize this bigger palette of ideas that we physicists are trying to paint, well, that makes it all worthwhile. What is next for you? You’re still teaching regularly at Columbia? More books?

1:17:19 I mean, do you need to open up your media platform to do better work and more work? Because for you, that seems like the best place for you. Well, we have a theater piece that was broadcast in the United States last May on the discovery of the general theory of relativity, the whole stage piece with actors that bring together thick and rich visual explorations of Einstein’s inner world as he was approaching the general theory of relativity. That, to me, was a wonderful experience and we’re doing another one of those stage pieces on the discovery of quantum mechanics.

1:17:51 So why a stage piece? Well, because here’s the thing, stage works, real-time experience of an audience can dig right in to the visceral place in an audience member. Whereas just talking at them with the ideas kind of tickles the brain, and I wanna go beyond tickling the brain. I want the brain and the soul, the heart, to really react to some of the deepest ideas that we have ever come upon. And so this medium is a powerful way of doing that.

1:18:23 Wow, that sounds exciting. Daily practice for you that’s non-negotiable. I know you don’t regularly meditate, that you have in the past. Do you write every day? Do you try to communicate every day?

1:18:33 What’s something that keeps you… Well, if I’m in the midst of a book, then I write every single day. If I’m in the midst of a research project, I work on it every day. I find gaps are not productive for me. Gaps require that I go back to where I was three days earlier.

1:18:51 So it really depends on what the focus is at a given moment. But when I’m working on something, I’m working on it intently, I’m working on it continuously, I’m working on it fully. Okay, and again, 10 years out from now, is it more books? Is it different creative ways to interact with people? Are young people more important?

1:19:09 Tell me. It’s a great question, and I don’t mean this as a waffling answer, but I kind of am happy by the fact that I don’t know how to answer that question. I’m open to wherever it goes. It used to be the case that I would consider that I’ve got to be doing research every single day. And if I’m not doing research, then I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

1:19:30 And I came to a point where I’m now, some days I can do research, and some days I can do other things, and I’m just gonna allow the opportunities in front of me to grab hold of my attention and I’m gonna go wherever it feels most interesting. Okay, you had quite an interesting journey, went to schools in a lot of different places. What was one of your better days in your life, and then one of the harder days? Because I think a lot of people just see an up and up and up journey, but that’s never true.

1:19:55 It must have been hard to do at some point as well. What were some of the tough moments and then some of the ones that you really remember, like, wow, that was special. Yeah, well, you know, some of the tough moments, you know, I think I tend to block them out, which is maybe a defense mechanism, but I can certainly say, generally speaking, that it feels a little bit like a failure, that I cannot get my kids interested in these kind of big ideas. And I understand it.

1:20:22 Since they were quite little, people would come up to them and say, you’re gonna be a mathematician, you’re gonna be a physicist, which kind of just made it like, that’s the last thing that they’ve ever want to do. So I feel like they’re kind of one step removed from things that would get them very excited, and it’s difficult for a parent to penetrate that kind of a barrier. So I kind of weird that there are these kids out in the world that do get real excited when I talk to them about these things, but can’t get it to happen at home.

1:20:51 But in terms of best days, well, they’re obviously the personal ones, birth of kids, marriage, and so on, wedding. But in terms of scientific days, when we discovered that the fabric of space could rip, it was a very intense research project carried out when I was at Cornell with one other individual there and one at Santa Barbara, I guess, at the time. And it was so exciting to look at equations that were telling us that space could do things that Einstein would never have thought possible.

1:21:19 And we were totally nervous that maybe we were making a mistake. We submitted the paper to the online archive where you put new research, and as I was driving away, I suddenly thought, oh my god, I think we made a mistake, and then I had in the car the other way, so we drove back to the department, we tried to retract the paper, we looked at the, it’s fine, it’s all good. It was that level of anxiety, and it was correct, and it was really, for me, one of the gratifying scientific moments to have that kind of a discovery.

1:21:50 That’s big. What scares you? The reason I ask that is because this book puts so much of humanity in perspective, is that what scares you? Well, you know, as an individual, I can’t say that I’m in any way immune to the ultimate terror, the terror of being completely erased by your own demise. So we’ve discussed ways in which we can cope with that, and I’ve described my own mechanism, if you will.

1:22:15 This book, in some sense, is an articulation of it, thinking about the largest possible landscape, how we fit in, and the recognition that this is a very singular moment that deserves us to celebrate it, but I can’t say that that perspective wipes away the fear and the terror that I think is intrinsic to being a human being. We live in this world, we have relationships, we encounter things that we value, and the recognition that it will all be gone is something that we’ve got to deal with, because it’s a fact of how the physical world behaves. Is in this some way your denial of death?

1:22:55 You could say that, you know, but I’d like to think of it as more of a positive spin on that idea, a celebration, if you will, a sense of gratitude as we were discussing, because it’s not really a turn away from the reality of death, but rather it’s an embracing of it, not only at the level of the individual, but on the largest canvas, because the universe itself reflects the same kind of process, birth, maturation, and its own version of death or demise, and it’s recognizing that even within that environment, even within that pattern, we can find a way to have a sense of value, purpose, and meaning. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about like, we’re doing, we’re having this conversation, I think this will be watched a year from now, 10 years from now, 100 years from now, it might be watched 100,000 years from now, and I feel good that this message is out there, but I also wonder, like, it’s also this me just trying to say that I was here, Kilgore was here, you know, the graffiti of me just, you know, there’s something, I had a legacy, or I had this, even though I think it’s not important to me, but maybe it is.

1:24:05 Yes, yes, I believe that that is part of it. But that’s okay, because it can also be super positive and getting people new ideas. Oh, absolutely, one doesn’t take away from the other. Yeah, what keeps you awake at night? Well, I would love to understand the true nature of time.

1:24:21 You know, I’ve been working on space and time, really, since my earliest days as a graduate student, and the weirdness is, it’s hard to really even know what those concepts are at their most fundamental level. We figured out qualities of space and time, weird qualities of space and time, exciting qualities, maybe even extra dimensions, you know, as we were talking about, of space and time and string theory. But I don’t know what they are, space and time. Are they built out of molecules of space and time, atoms of space and time, something else entirely?

1:24:55 And these kinds of issues are the ones that, if we could make headway, at least before, if I could make some headway before my particles disintegrate into the void, I’d be quite thrilled. This is what physicists think about when they can’t sleep at night, right? Okay, it’s good to know. If ever you think you have problems, this is what you guys are thinking about, thank God you are, so. Brian, I was gonna ask a few questions at the end, I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up the phone and ring up 20-year-old Brian Greene, I guess he’s at Cambridge, Massachusetts maybe, at that point, and give him some advice, based on everything you know now, what would you tell that young man?

1:25:29 Well, I would say. The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe, where you get exclusive access and insights from our high-performance guests, on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health, and wellbeing. To join our tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash tribe. Now, let’s continue with the show. I find this really fascinating, and I love this, that you’re writing books that teach us about humanity and teach us about our lives and give us perspective.

1:26:04 I never thought physics would come full circle, although I guess Einstein did a bit of that too, but you know, for me, maybe because of my own background, I always thought those guys just went and worked in labs somewhere, but more and more of this, I’m seeing, that you’re talking about these things, and I can watch the numbers on YouTube, is that people want this information. And I think, Brian, in this age where now, all of the facts are on tap on our phones, now we really want the meaning. And we’re also seeing that people, like we were talking about earlier, they constantly want to learn and be educated in a way that maybe they never were in school, and so now, when people consume on my channel, they’re gonna consume this episode in a big way.

1:26:45 They’re consuming people that give meaning to their lives, because they know the facts, but they’re trying to have someone help them kind of understand that. So this is really important stuff. So thank you for doing this. I know it’s hard work writing books. I heard it’s one of the most loneliest things on the planet.

1:27:00 So appreciate that, and the rest of the books, all the best in the travels, come back and see us, and the next one drops. Until the end of time, grab it, booksellers, Amazon, anywhere, and wishing you all the best. Thank you. Thanks, Brian.