Lawrence Krauss - A Godless Universe

Full transcript: Lawrence Krauss on London Real

7:50 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Lawrence Krauss, who is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, science and public policy advocate, best-selling author and actor. You’ve written over 300 scientific publications and nine books, including the best-sellers The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. Your notebook is the greatest story ever told so far.

8:23 When you’re not a scientist, you’re in showbiz. Your executive produced The Unbelievers, a documentary film that discusses science and reason. You’ve appeared with the Cleveland Symphony, been nominated for a Grammy, and most recently acted in a film by Werner Herzog. Your fans include Johnny Depp, Miley Cyrus, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence. Welcome to London Real.

8:41 Lawrence Krauss: Gee, I sound so good. Right? I might actually just start doing that as a living.

8:47 Brian Rose: Yeah. I was wondering if you could tell me how a guy gets from Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT, 1982, graduates with a Ph.D.

8:55 To now being, you know, going to a theater later tonight, sold out crowd, you’re basically like me. You’re now in the media business, you know? And I was there 11 years after you graduated mechanical engineering in 93.

9:09 Lawrence Krauss: That makes me feel old.

9:10 Brian Rose: It does, right?

9:11 And it’s funny, my dad graduated Caltech in 65. He actually took a class from Feynman when he was there. And he said, Brian, when I go to my class reunions, nobody’s doing the same thing they studied.

9:21 Lawrence Krauss: Well, I think that’s really important. I think most people, what I tell students, even the ones who go on in a career in science, in the same trajectory they started, that most of what you learn, you learn even after a Ph.D.

9:33 As a physicist, most of the things I know I learned after my Ph.D. And that’s the point if education is good, is to make you a lifelong learner. And if life is interesting, you shouldn’t be doing the same things. Even if it’s the same field, you should be trying to find new things to do. I didn’t have a trajectory that I planned.

9:55 Well, actually, the trajectory I planned I learned how to juggle because I thought I wouldn’t get a job when I got my Ph.D. from MIT in physics. There were no jobs. So I thought I knew how to drive. I figured I could either drive taxi or juggle.

10:08 And those were the backup plans. And the rest wasn’t planned. I’m not very strategic, or at least I’ve never been strategic. Up to now I’m trying to be a little more because life has a lot of demands on me right now. But I really took opportunities as they arose and planted a lot of seeds.

10:29 So it was just following my own interests because what I also tell people, scientists aren’t trying to save the world. In general, they’re just doing what they enjoy. And so I’ve always been doing what I enjoy, but I like to try and tailor it to something that I think is also useful. And I didn’t plan for any of this actually. I think I always had interest in communicating to the public.

10:57 I was always gregarious and outgoing and I worked at a science museum when I was a kid and things like that. But I don’t think I necessarily planned that. But part of it is that I got interested in science because of people like Feynman and other people who’d written about science and who’d performed it one way or another. And I think to some extent it was returning the favor when I started to do that. I also think it’s probably just laziness that if I didn’t do a lot of different things I wouldn’t do anything.

11:29 Brian Rose: What are your memories of MIT?

11:31 Lawrence Krauss: Well, you know, you black out a lot of the bad ones. The thing I liked about MIT, and I really noticed it when I moved to Harvard after MIT, was the unity. There’s that big main hallway in the building. And I would know almost everything that was going on campus from the time I walked in the door at Mass Ave to all the way to my office.

11:53 So I’d know everything that was going on campus where I went to Harvard. I really didn’t know what was going on except what was going on in physics. So I liked that unity. And I liked the no-nonsense atmosphere. Day or night the building was open and that.

12:08 But graduate school wasn’t fun in any way that I could describe.

12:12 Brian Rose: Boston’s a great place to be a student, as you know.

12:16 Lawrence Krauss: Not a student at MIT. Well, no, in fact, interestingly, I taught some undergrads when I was a graduate student because I liked to teach and they had me teach. But I remember teaching a junior, a third-year student, who was so proud of the fact that he and his friend had never been off the MIT campus in the three years that they’d been at Boston.

12:38 It’s an incredible city and he was so proud that he’d never left campus. So that’s MIT.

12:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, that is MIT. When people ask me what Boston’s like, I’m like, I didn’t know. Because they worked us pretty hard.

12:48 And so I remember 24-hour libraries. I remember when you walk in, it’s called Lobby 7, the big lobby on Massachusetts Avenue. And I remember looking up at the ceiling and it’s this beautiful lobby. And I just remember every time it kind of caught my heart.

13:01 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, me too.

13:02 Every time I walked in. I remember the first time I walked in the building when I got accepted to graduate school and I came from Canada and I drove there and it was something. It was really unbelievable. And then, yeah, every time I walked in, it was very special. I love that aspect of the building.

13:17 But Boston’s a great town. And I was fortunate. I mean, graduate school is a little less intense than undergraduate. But nevertheless, I think if it hadn’t been for the blizzard of 78, which was a huge blizzard, I think I might not have got my degree because they have PhD written exams, many of them. And I didn’t take any courses.

13:43 One of the nice things about MIT and the graduate program in physics anyway is that you don’t actually have to take any courses. You just have to pass these qualifying exams and then go on to do research. And I opted to, for some reason or other, not take them and try and teach myself. But the blizzard happened and there was absolutely nothing to do. The whole state was closed for nine days.

14:06 I remember cross-country skiing across the Charles River into downtown Boston. And I remember going to the undergraduate dormitories to try and find food. But as much as I would try and find something to distract me from studying, there was nothing. And so I think that’s the only reason I passed. Those are great tales.

14:23 And I remember I have selective memory too, so I’m sure I blocked out all the bad stuff. But it’s an interesting school and it’s intense. And it’s a great city. There are 62, I think 62 colleges and universities in Boston with half a million students. So I came from a, in Canada, a place where there were only two people that graduated in physics and math when I was there.

14:46 So it was quite a change. It was quite a wake-up call. And it was hard to leave Boston. I don’t know if you found it this way. As an academic anyway, and then I moved to Harvard, it was very difficult to leave.

14:58 I felt like it was the center of the universe. And when I moved down the road to Yale to teach there, I still kept a position one day a week because I had to cut the umbilical cord slowly because Boston seemed like the center of everything.

15:10 Brian Rose: Right. I guess it is the center of knowledge in that way.

15:13 Lawrence Krauss: Well, it certainly seems like it, yeah.

15:15 You realize you can do things other places, but it draws you in. And yeah, for American cities, Boston is still one of my favorites. In spite of the fact that the driving there, as you know, is miserable. It ruined me for the rest of my life. I’m an awful driver, and I claim that it’s because of Boston.

15:34 Brian Rose: Because of Boston. Yeah, no, I treasure the days I was there. I felt like I was really around a real elite group of people in a place with so much history. In America, there’s not many buildings or universities that are that old. And you go there, and I was, yeah.

15:47 Lawrence Krauss: Well, you know, that hits a point that’s interesting because I remember when I first went there, I got involved, I’ve always been political, but I got involved in the Graduate Student Council for some reason that I can, I have no idea why I did. But early on, the first day when you were graduating, there was some orientation, and then the president of the Graduate Student Council came and spoke and said something really interesting. Because he said, so you all felt like hot shit before you, and I can use that word, I hope, on your program.

16:16 But when you, because there were all these kids who were the best in their classes or whatever and come to graduate school, and then they suddenly feel worthless. They said, you’re going to feel worthless and incompetent for the next four years, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel after you graduate, it’ll be okay again. And that was really the experience of coming in and feeling good about yourself and then beginning to feel bad about yourself for four or five years until you got out.

16:41 Brian Rose: And so it’s a hard time. One of my buddies, who actually lives in Portland now, and he teaches cooking, was an aero-astro engineer there. And I saw him a few years ago, and he said, Brian, he said, what I realized about MIT is it’s a game. And he was like, you knew how to play the game, and that means you just have to be methodical, you have to put the work in, you have to balance your social life, because you put all the great minds there and then all their egos get crushed those first few months.

17:04 And they’re like, wait, I’m not the smartest guy in the classroom. And then you have to just deal with it, put a process in. Because it’s very challenging. So many things to talk to you about, but we were talking earlier how you’re going to wear these beautiful shoes when you’re going to be interviewing Johnny Depp soon.

17:19 Lawrence Krauss: Dialogue.

17:19 Brian Rose: Dialogue with Johnny Depp. Because there’s so many things I could ask you about that. Why are you two talking, and why are thousands and thousands of people going to show up to watch you talk?

17:28 Lawrence Krauss: Well, they’re going to show up because Johnny’s there probably. But as I was telling you earlier, I’m very happy that we built this program, My Origins Project, which looks at everything from the origins of the universe to the origins of consciousness.

17:39 And we run high-level scientific meetings with the best people in the world on different forefront topics that are interdisciplinary. But we always have a public component where we have panels or discussions. And because we built up a brand, we get 3,000 people regularly coming to pay to come to our programs. And I’m just very proud of that, as proud of that as anything I’ve done at Arizona. But science and culture are intertwined.

18:06 And one of the new brands we’ve created beyond these panels is things called Dialogues. And just like we’re having now, people I think are interested in conversations between people that for one reason or another they think are interesting. And so we started last year, my first one was with Alan Alda, an actor, who’s also interested in science. And we call it, I think, science and culture, long-lost lovers. And we did it a beautiful location, actually in that case downtown in Phoenix.

18:34 And then Noam Chomsky. And Johnny is going to surprise people. We’re actually having a workshop, again, the National Institutes of Health asked me to organize it on pattern processing in the brain and computers exploring creativity and madness. And it’s a fascinating topic, and it ought to be a fascinating meeting. And I thought, well, how could we complement that with a public event?

19:00 And Johnny and I were talking, and I thought if anyone could talk about creativity and madness both from his work and the people he knows, he’ll be Johnny. And he had trusted me. He hasn’t done anything like this before. But people will be surprised because he’s a very thoughtful, literate man. And I think people will be surprised.

19:22 Some people say, why do you have Johnny Depp on? It’s just a pretty face, and they sell him short. But for me, it’s this fact that you can’t separate science and culture, that science is part of our culture. And it does what art, music, and literature do. It causes us to reassess our place in the cosmos.

19:39 And Johnny, I met because Johnny was a fan of mine, which rather surprised me at the time. And my stepdaughter, when I told her, who was a big fan of Johnny, by the way, and when I told her what he’d said, some rather nice thing, she said, she found it funny that someone she found amusing but annoying was idolized by someone that she idolized. But Johnny was interested in the things I’d done, which surprised me, but now I’m not because I know him. So I think it’ll be fascinating to just have a dialogue to explore lots of ideas as well as things about Johnny and then have the public ask questions.

20:20 But we’ll explore not just the movies, but aspects of the relationship between creativity and madness. He’s had great relations with people like Hunter Thompson and then portrayed him on the screen. So I’m not 100% certain where we’re going to go yet. It’s a week and a half from now, and I’ve got a lot of things between now and then, but we’re exploring a bunch of possibilities, and we’ll see where it goes.

20:43 Brian Rose: Very excited to see that.

20:44 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, it’ll be fun.

20:45 Brian Rose: Do you think science has suffered a PR problem in the last 30 years, and do you think that’s kind of like, it seems like that’s reversing a lot lately?

20:54 Lawrence Krauss: It’s reversing. I think it’s been the opposite. I think science had a PR problem 30 years ago.

20:59 I remember when I actually first became chairman of a physics department, it was right after this thing called the super glutton supercollider was being built in Texas, the largest accelerator in the world, and it was canceled by the U.S., which was an act of stupidity. Congress then seemed stupid, but boy, by comparison to now, they seem brilliant. But I think part of the problem was the scientists had not sold why they wanted to do this. And now I think people are appreciating more than the need and the usefulness of scientists who talk to the public.

21:32 I mean, Carl Sagan had been earlier in some sense, and so I think there’s an appreciation for that aspect of what I do. That’s not why I do it, but there certainly is a great public interest in science. It’s just most members of the public don’t realize there’s science that they’re interested in. That’s why when I wrote my book, the Physics of Star Trek, it was one of the reasons I wrote it, because you go to a party and tell people you’re a physicist and they go, how about those Yankees or whatever, change the subject.

22:02 But you talk about time travel or warp drive, and people are fascinated, and that fear goes away, and you can begin to explore things that everyone’s fascinated by. And so the Star Trek book did what I really think all teaching is about, is really seduction. It’s really not just for teaching, but for radio and for TV or car salesmen. Really, if you want to talk to people, I often tell teachers that the biggest mistake they make is assuming their students are interested in what they have to say, because you’ve lost them then.

22:34 You have to explain to them why they should be interested. You have to go to where they are. And Star Trek was that way. People were fascinated by Star Trek, but they didn’t know they were fascinated by science. But I think more and more people, the fact that I can get 3,000 people to these events and the fact that lots of people are willing to watch science on TV, in spite of the fact that the media people don’t think that.

22:54 And part of the biggest problem of getting science in the media is that the producers, or not the producers, but the executives somehow don’t think it’s interesting. But the public eats it up. And they should, because it’s fascinating. It’s the most interesting stuff that’s happening in humanity, so it should be fascinating, and it is.

23:12 Brian Rose: You made the movie The Unbelievers with Richard Dawkins and Werner Herzog a couple of years ago now, and I was just wondering if, in retrospect, now that you look back on that movie, is there things that you learned in that process that surprised you?

23:25 And did you ever get an answer to that question where you said, you know, you asked him a question in the movie, it was like, would you rather explain science or destroy religion? Did you get anywhere on that topic?

23:37 Lawrence Krauss: Well, look, Richard and I have spent a lot of time together. One of the reasons the movie… The movie originally happened because, in fact, the two young gentlemen who were director and cinematographer were originally fans, had come to lectures of mine and Richard, and had seen that for them it looked like rock concerts, and they were former musicians and also filmmakers, and they wanted to make a rock and roll tour film about science because they’d seen huge crowds and they wanted to show what it was like behind the scenes.

24:05 And so we filmed for a long time, and I got to know them because they asked me to do a cameo in a movie they were making, and I was very impressed with the quality of their work, so I actually had them begin to film our origins events and they continued to do that. And then they told me what they wanted to do, and I knew Richard and I were having an upcoming tour in Australia, and I said, well, let’s consider that, and in a week I managed to somehow raise that money for it. But that question is one that Richard and I had started talking about ten years earlier because we had very different views about how to both interest people in science and attack myth and superstition, and we came at it from different directions.

24:48 We’ve come a lot closer over the years, but it’s an ongoing dialogue. I don’t think there’s any real answer because in some sense, inevitably, exciting people about science does, by and large, help destroy religious myth. They’re a religious scientist, so there’s not a statement that you can’t be religious and be a scientist, but you can be a scientist and somehow be a republican, too, so there’s no accounting for taste. There’s no theology department at MIT.

25:23 As well, and I don’t think there should be a theology. I’ve often said I taught at Yale, which I had at Vindhi School, but I think theology is the antithesis of scholarship. I’ve challenged theologians, and I’ve never gotten an answer. Give me one example in which theology has contributed to knowledge in the last 500 years. The answer they usually give me is, what do you mean by knowledge, which means they don’t have an answer.

25:51 Brian Rose: What do they say? The printing press?

25:53 Lawrence Krauss: What do they say? You could ask us any other real field of scholarship, you could find something that’s contributed, but theology has just been circles within circles going around and around, and it’s almost obscene, the fact that we treat it with any respect whatsoever. I mean, there’s aspects of theology that are useful, but there are aspects of other fields, like the history of religion is fascinating, but that could be done in a history department, and certain philosophical aspects of theology or archeology.

26:24 But as a unique discipline, the notion of trying to understand and give meaning to the Scriptures, as if they have any significance beyond historical documents from the Iron Age or before, is ludicrous.

26:39 Brian Rose: Was there any religious argument or figure that you met during the making of that movie or since that made you at least double-take something you had already thought about and said maybe, or was it all pretty much black and white for you?

26:57 Lawrence Krauss: No, it’s not black and white, but generally, I’ve been enlightened by being on the stage with theologians, serious theologians, when I realized how difficult it is for intelligent people, and they are intelligent, to try and make sense of something that doesn’t make sense.

27:17 It’s amazing, the convoluted paths of logic and inference that they can take to go in these circles. I find that very enlightening to see how adept people can be at fooling themselves and others if they’re intelligent. They’re honest ones, they’re really trying to. The problem is that they assume the answer before they ask the question, and that’s the antithesis of science, because they say, okay, these Scriptures are divine, now let me understand how they can do what they do and how they can make sense.

27:51 That assumption, of course, is an assumption that needs to be tested, and all tests would tell you that they’re not, and so the problem they have is assuming a ludicrous conclusion and trying to find a rational route to that ludicrous conclusion.

28:06 Brian Rose: It could be good for your conversation with Johnny as far as the science of madness.

28:12 Lawrence Krauss: Maybe, maybe, but there’s science, you see. That’s the point, and the great thing about science is we can be wrong. That’s what really differentiates science from religion is being wrong is what progress is all about.

28:25 I often say, and you may have heard me say, I’m not sure, but as a theoretical physicist, the two states that are best to be in are wrong and confused, and I’m both a lot of the time.

28:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, and you have a great quote where you talk about, you said, lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights. I guess you see that probably personally, and sometimes you see maybe even society.

28:48 Lawrence Krauss: Well, I think we all should be, yeah, if we’re in our comfort zone our whole lives, then it’s not much of a life, it seems to me.

28:55 I mean, that’s a different way of saying an unexamined life is not worth living, but when I’ve said the purpose of science is to make us uncomfortable, I don’t mean it’s a bad thing. It means it’s pushing us out of our myopia, and science does it well, but so does all scholarships, so does all learning. It should take us out of the realm of what we thought was common sense and teach us that what we thought was sensible is not always the way the world is, and science forces us to be that way because it’s driven by experiment.

29:29 If it was just driven by theorists, then we’d always sort of come back to things we like, but the universe tells us that it doesn’t give a damn about what we like. It is the way it is, and we’re driven to that because science is based on empirical evidence. That’s what differentiates it from many other areas of human intellectual endeavor, and that’s what makes it so successful because we’re driven, we’re kept honest by experiment.

29:55 Brian Rose: Right, and with cosmology and physics lately, experiments we never thought could ever be performed 30 years ago, now they’re happening.

30:03 Lawrence Krauss: Things that I never would have thought we would measure when I was a graduate student are happening. I’m honestly amazed at what’s happened over the last 40 years and the recent discovery of gravitational waves is one example. I mean, the daunting nature of what was required to do those experiments are one reason why I’m not an experimentalist.

30:22 Brian Rose: Because of the precision required.

30:24 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, the precision.

30:25 The technology couldn’t have been done 30 years ago. The theoretical predictions couldn’t have been on 30 years ago because computers weren’t there. This was about as early as we could have detected gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein first proposed their existence, and it’s just amazing. It’s a testament to the perseverance and ingenuity of humans who really work hard.

30:47 Brian Rose: When I heard about that lab in Louisiana, I was wondering how it didn’t skip for funding like the Texas Super Collider did, because I was thinking people must have thought this was a big waste of time for 20 years or a waste of money, and then all of a sudden…

31:02 Lawrence Krauss: A lot of people did, and I was skeptical about spending $100 million, which is the amount of money that was still two orders of magnitude smaller than the Large Hadamard Collider or the Superconducting Super Collider, which was $6 to $10 billion. So maybe it snuck under the radar, $100 million as that famous senator, I forget who it was, who said, you know, it’s almost real money, but it’s still a lot less than an aircraft carrier. But it was questionable, and it was interesting that it was the large…

31:30 They went to the National Science Foundation, which, in spite of the fact that what many people in the United States think of the National Science Foundation as the major funder of science, it isn’t. The major funder of fundamental research has been the Department of Energy, and their budget’s much bigger. This was the largest single investment the National Science Foundation had made in any project, and I don’t know what politics led to it. I think it was a unique confluence of things.

31:53 I know the people who were involved. They were fortunate to get that earmarked one way or another. In this case, it was an earmark that was a good thing, but it was not at all clear that it would work. It pushed the limits of the envelope and still is pushing limits of the envelope, but that’s what makes it so great. So is the Large Hadron Collider.

32:12 These things, the daunting nature of what’s required, are such that most people would just give up. And it means that no single individual can do it, in spite of the fact that we honor individuals with prizes. I mean, there are a thousand scientists on the LIGO collaboration. There’s one in Louisiana and one in Washington. It’s important there be two, because each single one would just get noise.

32:36 When a truck hits a pothole 30 miles away, it creates a bigger signal than the signal they’re looking for. There’s a thousand there. There’s probably 10,000 people working at the Large Hadron Collider. Big science is necessary, for better or worse, because it’s just too complicated and too difficult for any one group or one individual to do. And just the way it is.

32:57 If we could do it with smaller amounts of money and smaller groups of people, we would. Because no one likes the fact that they have to take projects that take 40 years to do. Everyone would like to be able to do something in their basement, but it’s just not the way it works anymore.

33:12 Brian Rose: Can we talk physics very quickly?

33:14 Lawrence Krauss: Sure.

33:14 Brian Rose: What does this discovery of gravitational waves like, what does it really mean to us if you have to break it down?

33:21 Lawrence Krauss: Well, it means that it gives us a new window on the universe. Because we can now use these, the weakest, gravity is the weakest force in nature. It may not seem that way when you wake up in the morning without your coffee, but try and get out of bed. But it is the weakest force, and so to measure anything aspect of gravity is daunting itself.

33:40 But to use these waves, which are ripples in space, not only just test their existence, but using the probe, the most exotic objects in the universe, black holes that are colliding, will give us a new window on processes that ultimately are related to the formation of our galaxy, and maybe even to the nature of the beginning of space and time themselves. So, again, they won’t address what you might call practical questions, but if we’re interested in our own origins, they’ll reveal things that will lead us to be able to understand the origin of the Big Bang itself. We don’t know what new discoveries are going to come out of it, but every time we open a new window on the universe, we’re surprised.

34:23 And this is a brand new window. It’s the astronomy of the 21st century. It’s only the first baby step in what will be much more ambitious detectors that will not be four miles across, but four million miles across in space. It will be a long road, but it will be a road worth taking, I think.

34:42 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about the beginning of the universe and how something can start from nothing.

34:48 I know it’s a topic that you addressed before. You wrote a book about it. You wrote a book about it. How can something start from nothing?

34:56 Lawrence Krauss: Well, of course, it really depends what you mean by nothing, as it upsets some people when I say you have to understand what you mean by nothing and maybe even redefine it.

35:06 People say, well, you know, you scientists just redefine what you mean by nothing, so you’re going to answer the question. But redefining what things mean is called learning. I mean, and so nothing is the absence of something, I would argue, and then you have to understand what something is. And of course, empty space is not even nothing. Empty space, due to the laws of quantum mechanics, is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence due to quantum mechanics and relativity.

35:32 But the bottom line is, if quantum mechanics governs the nature of gravity at very small scales, then space and time, which are the dynamical variables of gravity, become quantum mechanical objects and that means they can fluctuate. And that means you can pop whole universes into existence out of nothing. And by universes, I mean space and time that didn’t exist before can spontaneously appear. Most of them disappear in a fraction of a second, but under certain conditions, such universes could persist.

36:03 And if you ask yourself the question, what would be the characteristics of a universe that could live long enough and be large enough for us to evolve in it? If it came from nothing, when we’ve looked down and measured it, what’s amazing is those characteristics are precisely the characteristics of the universe we live in. Does that prove it came from nothing? No, but it’s highly suggestive. And it’s certainly much more reasonable than imagining some figure deciding it would exist for some purpose that we don’t see.

36:37 And certainly, we’re just a brief side show. Most of the universe is not made of the same stuff that you and I are made of. 70% of the energy in the universe resides in empty space itself. If I take space and I get rid of all the particles and radiation, it weighs something. We don’t understand why.

36:56 I proposed it did a while ago.

36:58 Brian Rose: It was a long time ago, didn’t you?

37:00 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, in 1995, and then it was discovered in 1998. But then that’s 70%. 30% is made of particles that are probably different than any of the particles in this room.

37:09 In fact, they’re probably streaming through this room right now, and through you and me, we’re building devices to try and measure them, another area of interest. Only 1% is everything we see. You could get rid of all the stars and galaxies and everything we see in the universe, and it would be essentially the same. We’re a little bit of cosmic pollution in a sea of dark matter and dark energy. So to argue that the universe is somehow made for us is kind of so ridiculous as to in some sense not be worth discussing.

37:35 But this possibility that through quantum mechanics, it seems like a miracle that you could end up with a universe with 100 billion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars. It seems to violate the laws of physics. How do you start from nothing and end up with all this stuff? Turns out when you include gravity, the energy of the universe can be zero. There’s positive energy and matter and negative energy due to gravity.

37:59 You add it up, the total energy universe can be zero, and then it doesn’t seem so crazy that you could create it from nothing. And so it’s plausible. The biggest miracle seemed to be creating stuff from no stuff. But it turns out that’s not a miracle at all, and we can do that in physics all the time. And to me, that’s worth celebrating.

38:16 And that’s partly what I wrote my last book about.

38:19 Brian Rose: The Higgs discovery. How does that change things, and how did that affect your mindset, and what does that take us for?

38:25 Lawrence Krauss: Well, it affected my mindset because I really didn’t believe the Higgs existed because it just seemed like too slippery a solution to a big, deep problem. I thought nature would be more inventive.

38:36 But it just changed everything. In fact, my new book is more or less about that in a general context of the greatest intellectual journey that humans have ever taken. But what it really tells us, the Higgs tells us that the universe we see is even more of an accident than we thought. If this background invisible field hadn’t settled into the configuration it has, like water freezing in a certain configuration in a window, then we wouldn’t be here. If it had settled in any other configuration, then the particles that make you and I up wouldn’t have mass.

39:11 So the mass we have is an illusion. It turns out it’s only there because there’s this background Higgs field that all the particles are interacting with. So it tells us there’s a hidden reality underneath our existence which is fascinating and maybe even simpler than the reality we see. But it also tells us that we’re a cosmic accident. And it also tells us that we may be ephemeral.

39:33 That this Higgs field could change its nature and then everything we see may disappear. So once again, we’re not the ultimate purpose of creation. We could just be a momentary side show. And again, I find that energizing, the fact that our cosmic insignificance I find very motivating because it makes every moment I’m here more precious. So it should excite people, not make them feel over humbled.

39:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, it should.

39:59 Lawrence Krauss: And if presented properly, I hope it does. But some people would rather imagine that there’s eternal life somewhere and makes them happier. Why? I don’t know. Who would want to live forever?

40:16 Forever is a long time. As Woody Allen said, eternity is a long time, especially near the end. And it’s a different than a long time. So eternity with your friends might be acceptable with your in-laws. Come on.

40:30 Brian Rose: Why jump into the religious argument? Your plate is full and poreth over with all the stuff you do with science.

40:38 Lawrence Krauss: Because I think I don’t, I jump into it because I point, because I like to provoke people into thinking about why they think about what they think about. And also because religion gets in the way. It gets in the way of a lot of progress.

40:54 And I think therefore, ultimately, even, you know, I don’t really care what people believe, I care what they do. But your beliefs influence your actions. And therefore, ultimately, a believing myth and superstition ultimately leads you to irrational actions one way or another. And so I think it’s important that we, the world as it is is fascinating enough. We don’t have to create all the nonsense around it.

41:24 So, you know, I don’t, my purpose is to get people excited about the universe. My purpose isn’t to destroy people’s religions, to get back to that question of Richard. But part of accepting the beauty of the universe is being willing to accept the universe for the way it is, is opening your mind to that. And if I have to open people’s minds sometimes by provoking them to think about what they had accepted or their parents told them to accept when they were too young to really think about it, then that’s a good thing because we, I’ve already said religion, teaching children religion is child abuse.

42:04 Because they’re too young, these are really deep concepts. Exposing them and telling them what to believe before they can really think about it is really unfortunate. As parents, we all have done that to some extent. Our children, really, we should be encouraging them to ask questions and be willing to say I don’t know when they ask them. But religion is an institutionalized form of that.

42:29 Brian Rose: I had Zoltan Istvan here who ran for president with the transhumanist party. And he said, Brian, I’m the only atheist who’s ever run for political office, for presidential office. And I was like, what? And he’s like, everyone else was always affiliated with a religion. And it just made me think, I mean, I live in the UK now, but religion is highly entwined into politics into America, right?

42:49 Lawrence Krauss: Oh, yeah. Into so many other things.

42:51 Brian Rose: Do you find that America is hard to separate religion from the rest of its daily life? More so than here in the UK or Europe?

42:58 Lawrence Krauss: Well, I think more so than the UK.

43:00 Although it happens here too, especially with fundamentalism and especially with Islamic fundamentalism rising in the UK. But it is unfortunate, and I just wrote a piece for the New Yorker on this, but it’s unfortunate that recently in a Pew poll that people were asked what characteristics would make you likely or unlikely to vote for someone in office. And you can take all these factors, inexperience, financial impropriety, sexual impropriety, even now being a Muslim, all of them fall above atheism.

43:43 The most negative characteristic for the American public for a presidential candidate is atheism, which really is what upsets me because religion has appropriated morality so that lack of religion is now equated with lack of morality with not being good. And most people who say they’re religious don’t believe the nonsense. They claim to be religious because it makes them feel good about themselves. And we have to just convince people it’s okay to ask questions.

44:10 I get letters every day from people around the world who tell me, I now realize I always ask questions and I felt I was a bad person for asking questions. People should realize they’re not a bad person for asking questions. In fact, nothing should be sacred. Everything should be open to question. The very idea of sacred is a bad thing.

44:32 Brian Rose: Right. We associate religion with morality when in fact it doesn’t mean that.

44:38 Lawrence Krauss: No, in fact, if you took it literally, it’s immorality. If you look at the actual biblical texts, all of them are full of vicious violence, misogyny, genocide. They’re not moral guides no matter what people say.

44:55 And that includes the New Testament as well as all the rest.

44:58 Brian Rose: I remember reading Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. And he said something about how, you know, if he was confronted by a group of men on the street, whether he’d want them to be coming from a religious ceremony or not. And he made this whole argument about how we’d rather not be because his safety would be in jeopardy more so. And he talked about all these cities, which I think started with the letter B, but that he’s been to all around the world and his argument from there.

45:23 And it was very fascinating for me.

45:25 Lawrence Krauss: Well, it is. And it’s really an example of the kind of propaganda and the kind of brainwashing that occurs so that people naturally think that religion is a good thing. And it’s been very effective because it’s been around for a long time in different versions in all human societies that we know of. And it’s certainly been institutionalized as a power structure for at least a few thousand years.

45:49 And therefore, you know, you get them young, right? You get them while they’re young. And so part of the… I wrote a piece on it once. You know, religion is only one generation away from being gone.

46:00 Just like, you know, if you look at gay rights movement in the United States, a generation ago would have seemed impossible. But what happened was the young people realized they all know people who are gay or families that are. And if you ask people 16 or younger, they don’t understand what the issue is. It may be debated by old white men in the Senate and in robes, in courts, but it’s a done deal. The next generation has said that they don’t understand what the whole problem is.

46:30 And so educating young people to think for themselves is really the point. Richard and I were asked, I think, in Australia at one event, you know, big event, you know, how do you get people to follow you? And we both said the same thing. We don’t want people to follow us. We just want people to think for themselves.

46:47 Brian Rose: Do you miss Christopher Hitchens?

46:50 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah. Oh, it was an incredible loss. Yeah. In fact, he affects me every day in what I do, in a real sense.

47:01 And I don’t mean to be presumptuous here, but I remember the day he died, CNN called me to do an interview. And after the interview, I remember before, when I was thinking about the interview, I thought, I’m going to… There’s a huge hole that he’s left, and I’m going to do whatever I can to try and fill it a little bit. I decided then and there that I would try and carry on his legacy in some way because he was so important in confronting power structures and provoking people to think in an amusing, literate way.

47:46 As I said, when I used to be at his house, I’d get him out, usually drunk in the middle of the night.

47:53 Brian Rose: It’s hard not to drink around him, right?

47:56 Lawrence Krauss: It was impossible, but I would just say, well, first I would just say, I can’t believe I’m Christopher’s friend, but I would also say, I want to grow up and be an intellectual. So, carrying on that excitement and that, well, I guess excitement is one way of putting it. The thrill of ideas is so seductive that you want to try and promote it.

48:21 Brian Rose: Was the cause or the promotion of an atheistic mindset, was it really set back with the loss of Christopher?

48:29 Lawrence Krauss: You know, would have, could have, should have. You know, Christopher has a legacy and he was an important person and he established and he helped push things forward in many different ways, some of which I disagree with, by the way, but it’s a loss. As a human being, the world lost something when Christopher died and, you know, where we go, you know, I don’t predict the future except for two trillion years in the future.

48:59 Brian Rose: Where are we going? What is the future of the universe?

49:02 Lawrence Krauss: The future of the universe is miserable, as I say, but only in the long term and that’s what’s, you know, I predict the future of that long advance for two reasons. One, it’s simpler and two, no one will be around to check me anyway, but the future, the universe is expanding faster and faster and faster and if that continues, if that continues and we don’t know for sure, it’s if not when, because we don’t understand the nature of the stuff that’s causing the universe to expand ever faster.

49:28 But if it does, all the galaxies we now see in the universe will disappear. The universe will become cold, dark and empty in the far future. Two trillion years from now, there’ll be just one galaxy our own that we can see or that beings who evolve around, I’m still allowed to use the word evolve, who evolve around stars and there still will be stars then, will do science and they’ll look out and they’ll see the universe we thought we lived in 100 years ago with a single galaxy and eternal empty space.

49:57 And that’s a sad thing and then all the stars in that galaxy will burn out and it really will become cold, dark and empty. So as Christopher used to say when I told him about that, he said, so nothing is heading towards us as fast as we can, as fast as it can. And if you ask the question, why is there something rather than nothing, the answer is just wait, there won’t be for long.

50:19 Brian Rose: Just back to religion really quickly, you said that in a generation, it’ll probably be gone, the same way that racism and gay rights could be.

50:27 Lawrence Krauss: Well, probably, it could be. It could be. I mean, you know, religion is persistent, it’s been around for a long time. But for people who give up hope, I say, look, it could be. I don’t think it’ll be gone.

50:38 Although in the educated world, in the first world, religious faith is monotonically decreasing. The number of people who declare themselves to be of one faith or another has been decreasing at a regular rate over the years. In spite of all of the verbiage and all the noise that’s being made, even in the United States, which is ostensibly a very religious country, the number of people who declare themselves having no religious affiliation is now 20-something percent.

51:04 Not all of them declare themselves atheists because the reason is atheist has a bad name.

51:09 Brian Rose: Right. And you said before that Islam is just 500 years behind Christianity. Christianity was doing all these horrible, kind of backwards thinking things five years ago.

51:19 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, their crusades were, yeah, and the Inquisition were just as vicious as anything you’re seeing now.

51:25 And it is. The only difference is, what makes it worrisome is that there’s mass media unable to communicate around the world, and there are much more destructive weapons. So that’s the worry about this kind of primitive fundamentalism. The real concern, the real difference between Islam in my mind and the other Judeo-Christian religions is that, and I’ve seen this having debated Islamic individuals, is that the Qur’an is taken to be perfect. Every word of the Qur’an revered.

52:02 And it used to be, and very few people view the Old Testament of the Bible that way. So, for example, even the fundamentalist Christians or Jews don’t say, well, yeah, you know what, you should stone your kids, kill your kids if they disobey you, even though it’s in the Bible. Similar ridiculous claims and admonitions are made in the Qur’an, but they’re taken literally. And so the only difference is that at this stage in the evolution of that religion, those words are taken literally.

52:36 And you don’t see that in the Christian or Jewish tradition at this point. You might have, I mean, for the most part, you might have 500 years ago. So once we can get over that taking the Qur’an literally as if every word is the word of God and has to be taken literally, then it’ll be like the other religions. And hopefully that plays itself out because it’s got another 500 years to go. Well, one hopes it’ll happen in less than 500 years.

53:01 We can’t afford for it to take 500 years because the world moves faster and there’s lots of potential for damage.

53:08 Brian Rose: Do you ever worry about your safety? I mean, we’re close to Holland here where, you know, writers before have been, you know, stabbed Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Yeah. Do you ever worry about when you make these statements that obviously, you know, you’re not holding back.

53:23 You’re like, this is how I feel about this. Do you ever worry about your safety?

53:28 Lawrence Krauss: Well, I hold back a little bit. I try to be appropriate to the occasion, perhaps. But I do say what I think needs to be said, and I think it’s bad if you don’t.

53:38 I don’t really worry too much. I mean, there have been times when there have been threats that Richard and I have done things that had to be, you know, protection. Richard and I did a event in Belgium right after Charlie Hebdo and we weren’t allowed to check into a hotel under our own names and I’d never had that happen before. But I wasn’t worried because I think we’re really, and we’re not under the radar, we’re over the radar. The kind of things I’m talking about are relatively sophisticated on issues and I just, I don’t think, you know, that they are the things that people are worrying about who care about violence.

54:14 But, you know, you can’t, life is a risk at some level. And so I’m aware of it at some level and I don’t seek it. I’ve been in situations that are, here in London actually, when I was debating in an Islamic group that were a little unnerving, especially with the women in the burkas. Those are the ones who scared me the most because you don’t know what’s under there. But I liked, but on the other hand, you know, my purpose is to get people to have, to enjoy, you know, to be excited and enjoy themselves even if I’m, even if I’m provoking them.

54:52 And so I like to think that that humor and provocation leads to some level of common humanity that means it’s less of a threat. But, you know, there are places I would avoid. I mean, I wouldn’t go to Pakistan and talk about this stuff right now. And I admire those people who are there. You know, people say I have courage and I just don’t – there are people who are risking their lives in a real way every day who in places like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or much less Iraq and etc., Syria, who are taking this and really, really are much more courageous.

55:32 I don’t think – maybe it takes some courage. It takes courage only to worry about being vilified in public. Maybe that’s the only courage that it takes to speak out like I do. But religion separates people much more than unifies me. I hate this argument.

55:46 It’s true that religion for many people provides a sense of community. You can’t deny that. They can church, you know. But nevertheless, religion is based on us versus them mentality because we have the absolute truth and they don’t. And so religion – you know, if there was one religion, maybe it’d be different.

56:03 And of course, all these religions want to be the one world religion. But the fact that they all exist, the fact that they’re mutually inconsistent somehow doesn’t dawn on people that they can’t all be right and they’re most likely all wrong. But you’re absolutely right. It’s because they were – you know, Richard talks about something. He’s raised my conscience.

56:24 You know, some people say he’s more provocative or more whatever than I am. But nevertheless, he can raise people’s consciousness. And I remember him once raising mine early on. He presents a picture from a newspaper of a Christmas time and it’s a beautiful picture. He’s four little kids, you know, two or three, three years old.

56:44 And they’re playing together and here’s a Muslim kid and here’s a Catholic kid and here’s a Protestant kid and here’s a Jewish kid and here’s a Hindu kid. And you say, how dare we call this a Catholic kid? I mean, we could say here’s a neoliberal kid. Here’s a conservative kid. These are three-year-olds.

57:03 We label them by their religions even though they don’t even understand what the word means. But we accept it. We all say, oh yeah, there’s a Catholic kid. In what sense can a three-year-old be a Catholic kid except that his parents are forcing him to go to church and do things that he has no understanding of, he or she? And so, but when that’s given, when that’s forced upon you as a child, it’s very hard to get rid of and it causes people to grow up and do these ridiculous things and think of other people as enemies when there’s a common humanity.

57:38 For me, that’s the great thing about science. It tells us we have a common humanity and it shows, it demonstrates. At the Large Hadron Collider, there are 10,000 physicists working in 100 different countries, speaking dozens of different languages, dozens of different religions, all working together for a common purpose. Science demonstrates that we can have a common humanity. It is an example of the fact that we can be bonded by an interest that’s greater than our own and religion doesn’t demonstrate that, no matter what people say.

58:09 Brian Rose: What’s your next big project on the horizon? Is it something you want to create in the media space? Is it something you want to research?

58:16 Lawrence Krauss: It’s all of those. I told you, I’m not strategic.

58:19 I do many things. I’m working on my science and there’s a bunch of big problems I’m trying to solve related to dark matter and dark energy to some extent and maybe new clues from the early universe, new ways to detect things. I’ve just finished my new book, which I’m quite excited about, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, which addresses another existential sort of human question, sort of which is why are we here? How do you get something or nothing from what, why are we here?

58:51 But I’m also involved in a lot of media things because I think it’s really important to reach out beyond books and so I’m involved in a number of other projects, including producing and appearing in a new movie and this is a major motion picture, which is not a documentary but one which will hopefully, like many of the media projects we’re trying to do, will get reason and rationality infused into culture. So I’m getting more and more involved in that aspect of Hollywood and movie making and television because I think it’s important to do that. We’ll see where all these things lead.

59:31 Politically, we’re trying to get the presidential candidates to talk about science at some level, which is a difficult thing to do but it’s relevant. So there’s a lot of balls in the air and we’ll see which ones lend softly and which ones take off.

59:46 Brian Rose: You were involved in the Obama campaign in a way?

59:49 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, I was involved in the sense that I was on his, ultimately on his science advisory committee. He had many committees and so, yeah, but I wasn’t involved in the administration after the election.

1:00:01 Brian Rose: And when you look at like the best place to apply your force, I mean, documentaries are great. A live event would say, Johnny is a great thing. Is your time best spent lobbying government? Is it best spent on maybe a live action movie that gets people to think about science?

1:00:16 Lawrence Krauss: Well, who knows?

1:00:17 It’s not up to me to decide where it’s best spent. It’s up to me to do the things I enjoy that can make an impact and that I feel are useful and then we’ll see.

1:00:26 Brian Rose: What about when we teach kids about science when they’re 10 or 5? Do you think that we’re doing that in a wrong way?

1:00:32 Lawrence Krauss: Well, yeah, we’re teaching kids in the wrong way in many ways.

1:00:35 We’re teaching kids answers. But the important thing is to get kids to ask questions, especially – look, right now in this world, kids are flooded with potential information. The real tool that we need to teach them is not what the answers are, but how to filter. You know, you can Google anything. And we have to teach kids the techniques for how to tell the wheat from the chaff, how to determine what’s sensible from what’s not, how to be skeptical about what they read and how to test it.

1:01:07 So those are the tools we need to do. And what kind of questions to ask? The answers aren’t important, really, because the kids are going to ask – it’s a process of learning how to ask questions and learning how to try and seek answers that are reasonable. And so that’s why, you know, when my books are important to me, because I have people who told me that, you know, when they read them, when they were a kid, they caused them to become a scientist or do whatever they’re doing.

1:01:33 And so, you know, I don’t know which of the activities I do is most important, but I think they all revolve around education in one way or another. And as I’ve often said, one of my favorite quotes is, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I’m an educator. And so all of those things in one way or another involve education. And I think education is the key to a better world.

1:01:59 Brian Rose: What’s the hardest part about being an actor in a Hollywood movie?

1:02:06 Lawrence Krauss: Let’s see. I think it’s, well, the hardest part, no doubt, is the boring work around the acting and where little time is spent acting. A lot of time is spent doing other things, waiting to act. I think probably the hardest part after that is remembering to not take yourself too seriously.

1:02:35 Brian Rose: In acting, okay.

1:02:36 Lawrence Krauss: Yeah, I think in acting, and in the response to acting, it’s a quality of celebrity after that is not worrying or taking seriously press clippings that come. But I think in acting, I think it’s really playing. I mean, I enjoyed it, and I enjoy it, but I also realized I couldn’t do it full-time because it’s just, and what I do in the rest of my life is playing too, but it just seems, this is just like playing full-time, and it’s fun, but I don’t think it would satisfy me.

1:03:15 Brian Rose: You might be right there. Debating, I had to ask you about debating because, again, I go back to the Snow Out in 1978 in Cambridge. The last thing you thought you would be doing is going head-to-head on the Q&A show against some very intelligent, you know, sometimes intelligent, sometimes not very intelligent. Well-spoken.

1:03:32 Lawrence Krauss: It’s more fun when they’re a little intelligent.

1:03:35 You know, low-hanging fruit is just, anyway.

1:03:37 Brian Rose: How do you practice to become a good debater? How did you learn how to debate?

1:03:42 Lawrence Krauss: How do I practice anything? How do I do it?

1:03:44 A writer, you do it. I mean, you learn, you make mistakes, and you learn from your, if you’re reasonable, you learn from your mistakes. So some things work, some things don’t. I think, first of all, you know, you have to be comfortable in, you have to remember who you’re talking to, which is not the person on the stage. You’re talking to the person who’s watching, and you’re never going to convince the person on stage of anything, or generally.

1:04:09 I mean, there may be an aha moment, but that doesn’t happen very often. So you’ve got to tailor what you’re talking to, the people who are on the outside, who are on the whole well-meaning and may not be too knowledgeable, and they look, and it looks like two reasonable people, so how do you know what to believe? Just thinking of, always think of the audience whenever you’re doing anything. What are they asking for? What are they interested in?

1:04:32 And the rest is just, well, watching other people, like Christopher is useful, but I think doing it, the only way to write well, I think, is to keep writing. I wrote a lot when I was even in graduate school because I got mad and I would just write, but the only way to write is to keep writing, and the only way to improve in that debating thing is to do it and to learn different contexts what to do. And if you’re fortunate enough to be able to, be in a situation where I’ve had that experience, I don’t like debates, per se, and I try not to do any formal debates now at all because formal debates are completely rhetorical.

1:05:10 They’re not information producers. They’re all based on rhetoric, and so I don’t like that debate format, which is really not meant to educate. So even when I do debate, I like to try and do it as a dialogue, a discussion, where there can be a give and take instead of this person talks, that person talks, then this person talks again, then that person talks. No one’s ever talking to each other. It’s more like a staged fight.

1:05:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a staged fight, a stage in a really artificial way, where you really never have a chance to have a give and take of ideas.

1:05:42 Lawrence Krauss: And so I generally won’t do that. And I don’t want to appear, there’s a lot of people who regularly want to debate me either in that format or others. And I don’t want to be, most of these people just want to be on stage with someone like me or Richard now because it increases their profile. And I don’t want to do that.

1:06:02 So I pick and choose what I do. Sometimes I regret it, but you never know.

1:06:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, I agreed to do this program, and so far I’m…

1:06:10 Lawrence Krauss: So far so good.

1:06:11 Brian Rose: I’m going to ask a few questions from YouTube because you had so many people ringing in, so I’ll hit you with a couple of randoms and you can choose to answer as you would like.

1:06:22 But one of the top ones was, what do you think about psychedelics and the theory that the world is a linguistic construct?

1:06:29 Lawrence Krauss: Well, psychedelics. Well, I mean, look, the world can be a construct. I don’t think it’s… That suggests that there’s no external reality.

1:06:37 And I tend to think the world is not my invention. Okay. It may be affected by what I… my observations at one level or another. But even if we live in a matrix, it doesn’t change things to me because my interest is to try and figure out how the world works.

1:06:59 And I want to figure out the laws that govern the way the world works. And, you know, whether that’s an illusion of something else doesn’t matter in some sense. Maybe I can find out about the underlying reality. That’s what I talked about in the Higgs particle, tells us that really the world we see is really window dressing on something much more fundamental. But I don’t like this idea of…

1:07:21 I mean, I’m repelled by this notion of linguistic creations, that somehow there’s no objective reality. I taught at Yale for a long time, which was a home of deconstructionism, and it’s mostly vacuous, useless. Although religion does affect people’s realities. It affects the reality that they interpret, but the world is the way it is. The Big Bang happened, whether you believe it or not.

1:07:48 The world is 14 billion years, 13.8 billion years old, whether you believe it or not. So it affects people’s perceptions of reality, absolutely. And so… And part of what science is all about is learning how to get out… which constructs we’ve been taught are wrong, and how we have to open our minds up to new possibilities.

1:08:09 So we have a view of how the world should be, and we grow up, and it helps in an evolutionary sense. You can understand why it happens. But the great thing about science is it’s taught us that that doesn’t happen… that that doesn’t apply universally. It’s a great aspect of travel.

1:08:27 Going to see different cultures is to suddenly see that the things you thought were universal are not, or the ways of what seems reasonable is not. And that’s good. It opens your mind up. But it’s the ultimate solipsism to argue that the world is a linguistic construct. It is true that we’re humans, and we think and reason by language.

1:08:53 One of my discussions with Noam Chomsky, we talk about that, that he argued the purpose of language was not to communicate, but was to allow you to think. And so it’s true, but happily, we’ve learned that there’s a language that describes nature, mathematics, that seems to work. The proof is not whether we like it or not, but it makes predictions that we can test. And the tests are not consequences of our language. The sun shines with the colors it does, not because the theory that described that was determined by dead white men, as if the sun would suddenly shine differently if it wasn’t done by women of color today.

1:09:36 The point is that the world is the way it is, and our challenge is to try and break out of that, of our limited view and our myopia, as I talk about it, and try and grasp some elements of that reality. That’s the challenge and the beauty of living.

1:09:54 Brian Rose: You mentioned Noam Chomsky. Someone asked, you spent time with both him and Sam Harris. Do you get involved in their debate?

1:10:03 Lawrence Krauss: Well, Sam asked me for Noam’s email, which I didn’t give him, but I did let Noam know that Sam wanted to contact him. No, I didn’t get involved in that. I actually personally think it’s an unfortunate thing. It was a dialogue that was initially meant to be private, and I don’t think there was much revealed by putting it on the web. No, I have too many things to do to worry about that.

1:10:30 I know Sam and I know Noam, and I understand where they’re both coming from. But I don’t worry about their debates with one another, and they haven’t really. They had an interaction and that was it. I understand the criticisms one has of the other and I see both of their points in certain ways. I think like everything, there’s a certain truth to both, what each of them has to say.

1:11:04 But if pushed too far, it distorts reality.

1:11:07 Brian Rose: Richard Feynman. I remember his joke, Shirley your joking, Shirley’s joke, Mr. Feynman. My dad used to tell me stories about Feynman because funny enough, when he was an undergrad at Caltech, I think Feynman taught the basic freshman physics class.

1:11:23 When he became a series of books called the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and there’s an audio of that as well, and he’s got that strong Boston accent.

1:11:34 Lawrence Krauss: Not Boston, New York, Long Island.

1:11:36 Brian Rose: Okay, that makes sense. Why write a book about him? What can we all learn from Feynman?

1:11:42 He was very young when he worked on the Manhattan Project.

1:11:45 Lawrence Krauss: Of course he was very young, yeah, absolutely. I wrote a book about him because I was asked to and it was an honor to do that. I wanted to ask him to write a scientific biography. There’s been a lot of, including Feynman’s own book, anecdotal biographies of Feynman the man.

1:12:00 But what made Feynman the man worth understanding was Feynman the scientist. Because if he hadn’t done the science he has, he wouldn’t have been anyone worth writing about. He was still a charismatic, fascinating individual. But it was his science that really made the man fascinating. I was given the opportunity to write about his science.

1:12:21 There aren’t that many people who could do that, I think. And I was honored to be asked. And in the end, very happy I wrote it. I got to read all of his papers as a result, which is the reason I agreed to do it. And I think it’s illuminating to see the process, not only the science, but how the man carried out the science and the things we can learn about the scientific process by seeing one of the bravest scientists.

1:12:50 And by brave I mean a man who was willing to forego in almost all respects everything he might have believed in advance because of the science.

1:13:02 Brian Rose: Can you make an example of that?

1:13:05 Lawrence Krauss: Oh yeah, sure. The example I use most often in that sense is when his wife died. When he was in the Manhattan Project he was married to a childhood sweetheart who had tuberculosis and was kept at a sanitarium near Los Alamos, actually not that near, in Albuquerque actually, it was a long drive.

1:13:29 And so he would hitchhike each weekend to go see her. But when he learned that she was dying, he quickly left, it was a few months before the bomb was finished, and went to her side, it was with her when she died. And then he learned that the clock, right beside her, stopped at the moment she died, and the clock was there, died. And a lesser man, I mean this a man, so this is a moment of profound grief, this was a deep deep love, would have been susceptible to kind of myth and superstition at that moment, thinking there’s something, that was saying the cosmos was telling him something that was significant, there was purpose, blah blah.

1:14:09 And he thought about it, he said, you know what, it’s an old clock, the nurse probably picked it up to check the time of death and put it back down, that could have caused it to stop. Here was a man who would not let his skeptical mind stop working, even in a moment of profound personal grief. And I think that’s telling.

1:14:28 Brian Rose: Right, that’s powerful. You’ve got Johnny Depp coming up soon, who are three people that you’d like to have a conversation or a dialogue on stage, doesn’t mean it would have to be…

1:14:39 Lawrence Krauss: It has to do with everyone I want.

1:14:41 Brian Rose: You do, right? Is there a world leader or anyone that you think that would be fun, or that would be challenging even for you?

1:14:47 Lawrence Krauss: Sure, I think it would be fun to talk about with some well-known politicians after they’ve been politicians because they won’t ever say anything while they’re politicians.

1:14:55 Brian Rose: Will they say anything after either?

1:14:57 Lawrence Krauss: Well, you know, it’d be nice to, as Richard said in the movie, it’d be nice to ask them if they really believed that crap of the religious stuff they were spouting, for example. And you wonder about the people who need to hold that mantle of religion who’ve been president. So, of course, there are people you’d like to explore to see what they really think. And then there are great thinkers you like to meet and talk to to explore their mind. It would be great to have Nome on, for example.

1:15:29 And so, yeah, there are lots of intriguing personalities around the world that, and I’m fortunate, that I know a lot of people as it is. And I like being surprised and having my stereotypes dashed. And, you know, Johnny is one example, I suppose, but there are others. And so it’s interesting to find in all walks of life people who are fascinating and think deeply about the world in ways you hadn’t appreciated before. And so, you know, we’ll all keep doing it and those people on my list will hopefully, you know, that list will go down that list.

1:16:12 But I don’t determine things in life by favorites or lists or hierarchies. People always ask me, what’s your favorite this or who’s your favorite that? There are a lot of interesting things and I tend to say that they’re all interesting. But I don’t tend to think in terms of this versus that. Who will be next? We’ll wait and see.

1:16:34 Brian Rose: What if you could grab a scientist that had died? Who would be?

1:16:38 Lawrence Krauss: Well, you know, there’s all, of course, it’d be fun to talk to Newton because he would have been hospitalized in the current world. He was basically insane.

1:16:47 Brian Rose: How so?

1:16:47 Lawrence Krauss: Well, he was obsessed. He didn’t eat for long periods. He didn’t have any relationships. He was paranoid. He spent most of his life as an alchemist or trying to decipher the meaning of the Bible.

1:17:00 Only he was a scientist part-time. He was a crazy man. It would be fascinating to talk to him. He’s buried right in Westminster Avenue. Yeah, yeah.

1:17:09 Brian Rose: Einstein, was that?

1:17:10 Lawrence Krauss: Of course. Of course, okay. They’re the greats you’d like to talk to and it’d be fun to talk to Einstein about the modern world and see what he would think about where science is going. I suspect he would be disappointed in some ways and amazed in other ways.

1:17:25 But yeah, you’d love to talk about those people who helped create the world. You know, Galileo, to me, would be fascinating. Galileo is one of my favorite scientists because he really created modern science and his books are, as I often tell people, we force students to read Ulysses but his dialogues are funnier and wittier and more insightful, I think, than many things in literature. He would have been an interesting guy to talk to.

1:17:52 Brian Rose: Do you ever get out to the Greenwich Observatory here and look around there?

1:17:57 Lawrence Krauss: No, in fact, I’ve been near Greenwich so many times and I haven’t spent time at the observatory. I spent time at the Paris version because Greenwich usurped it originally because the British Empire became predominant but the original center of the world was in Paris and I’ve been in the Paris Observatory where they have the crosshairs, which was the center where things were determined from. There’s a brass plaque where the longitudinal goes through and so I’ve been there but I haven’t been at Greenwich.

1:18:26 Brian Rose: String theory?

1:18:27 Lawrence Krauss: We may. We’re going to film probably in Greenwich because Greenwich can mock up as London so we’re probably filming Greenwich in this next film. Most of the time you film in a city, you’re not filming in that city, you know, I’ve discovered in my, you’re using other places that are cheaper to film.

1:18:42 Brian Rose: Is this a period piece, maybe?

1:18:44 Lawrence Krauss: Maybe.

1:18:44 Brian Rose: Okay, all right, that just came to me. String theory, I know you’ve given Brian Cox a bit of a hard time in the past with string theory.

1:18:53 Lawrence Krauss: Not Brian Cox so much, Brian… Green.

1:18:56 Brian Rose: Green, yes.

1:18:57 Lawrence Krauss: Mind you, just got me going there. Brian Green, who’s a friend of mine. Yeah, I’ve given him a hard time. Well deserved, but anyway.

1:19:04 Brian Rose: But I think he’s come around to agreeing with…

1:19:11 Lawrence Krauss: Well…

1:19:12 A decade ago when I said that string theory wasn’t… It wasn’t a front to the word theory to call string theory theory. It did mean things like evolution and stuff. Theory is a really high level thing in science. And I think…

1:19:25 And Brian was upset at the time, but he would agree with me that now. I think it’s an interesting hypothesis and it hasn’t yet risen to the level of theory.

1:19:33 Brian Rose: What advice do you have to someone…

1:19:35 Lawrence Krauss: It’s well motivated, by the way. I mean, I wrote a whole book about it.

1:19:38 There’s a lot of reasons for people to do string theory. It just hasn’t done much yet.

1:19:42 Brian Rose: Anyways, sorry, go on. What advice to a young man or woman watching this, maybe they’re in their teens, that wants to make a career as a physicist?

1:19:50 Lawrence Krauss: Don’t let the bastards get you down.

1:19:52 It’s hard. No, but it’s true in life in general, but you’re going to be encountering lots of issues and teachers who aren’t good or other things. Remember why you want to do what you want to do. And do it because you enjoy it. Not because you want to get a job or whatever.

1:20:10 And follow your passion. And that means don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep remembering what excites you.

1:20:17 Brian Rose: Right. Can I ask you a couple questions about your daily routine, like some of your success secrets?

1:20:23 Do you get up early? Do you meditate? You do train. You do train, right? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy.

1:20:33 Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meet-ups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. When you think of the word successful, someone living, who comes to mind? Who’s someone where you’re like, okay, that guy or girl has it together?

1:21:01 Lawrence Krauss: I’m pretty convinced that no one has it together.

1:21:05 We all are stumbling through life in different ways. And some people have talents and strategies. And there are a lot of successful people, but there are obvious names of people you’ve heard of in some way or another. But there may be many successful people I haven’t heard of. I think that we have this illusion that people have it together.

1:21:25 And I think most of us confront life without any training and are momentarily terrified every day by the awesomeness of existence. And what we have to do is turn that terror into joy. But we do it sporadically and periodically. Life is a struggle, makes it sound bad, but it is an eternal struggle to make it through each day.

1:21:58 Brian Rose: I always ask my guests at the very end, one question, I’m going to hit you with this.

1:22:06 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Lawrence and roll your eyes and give that man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? You were studying in Canada.

1:22:17 Lawrence Krauss: This too shall pass, I think it’s the same thing. It’s a different version of don’t let the bastards get you down. You know, there’s a lot of challenges and obstacles and things to worry about.

1:22:29 And if you just keep plugging away, then even those things which seem like they are insurmountable can be passed through. And so really to focus on, to try and focus as well on what’s important, not take yourself seriously and not worry, well, Richard Feynman’s advice, don’t worry about what other people think.

1:23:01 Brian Rose: How does London treat you when you’re here? Do you think when you’re in Portland, I’m going to London, and you’re like, yes, that’s the home of Greenwich?

1:23:16 Or are you like, okay, the people are a little weird, but they really like me?

1:23:20 Lawrence Krauss: I like, well, every place is different. I spend a lot of time in London over the years, and I like the city in spite of the traffic and other aspects, in spite of the officiousness of Britain. But I grew up in Canada, so I kind of have some experience of that. London is an exciting place, but again, I, well, you have to realize also when I travel, and I travel a great deal, that I don’t get to do tourism as much as often at all.

1:23:45 I’m very busy. But I try and take advantage of opportunities. Feynman said to me when I knew me, you know, seek out adventure, and he meant that intellectually, but I try to experience the character and take advantage of the place intellectually as well. And so London is an exciting, dynamic city, one of the most exciting dynamic cities in the world, so it’s great to visit and try and get a little bit of the jewel that is this wonderful old city. And have fun.

1:24:25 It’s always an important part.

1:24:27 Brian Rose: Lawrence, thanks so much for your time. Very much enjoy your movies, your debates, the way you challenge, and the fact that you’re not afraid to go anywhere because you’re being yourself. And I think a lot of people, even in the science community, are kind of taught, even from a university standpoint, you can’t talk about this. Or you have to be a professor or whatever.

1:24:46 Lawrence Krauss: It’s true. I like to think that, and it’s self-serving, and it is self-serving to say it probably, but for better or worse, with me, what you see is what you get. So if you wonder what I like, then you just have to listen to me. That’s the way I am. And that’s served me well and poorly over the years.

1:25:10 Brian Rose: And I like to see that science is not becoming cool again because that’s a little bit trite, an explanation of what’s happening. But when I graduated in 93, there weren’t a lot of people. It was Carl Sagan from years past. There weren’t a lot of people that were selling out big shows, doing pure science things. It’s nice to see you.

1:25:25 Lawrence Krauss: I like to think it’s sexy, and I’m doing my part.

1:25:27 Brian Rose: And it is sexy. And it makes me remember that I spent four years at a sexy institution learning sexy things, and I’ve kind of forgotten about them. And oftentimes, Lawrence, I’m talking with someone, and I realize I’m having an argument with someone who never has had any scientific method training that I assumed everyone had from being at MIT. And I’m like, wait a second.

1:25:44 This is now ridiculous. And so I know I carry a scientific method in my head even when I look and consider things non-scientific. It affects you.

1:25:53 Lawrence Krauss: And if we all utilize certain aspects of that, as I say, in the rest of life, they can be really, really useful. And that’s one of the reasons why I try and teach that in one way or another.

1:26:04 Brian Rose: Excellent. As we say in London Real, it’s about the journey. Come see us again sometime. I love the shoes.

1:26:08 Lawrence Krauss: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

1:26:10 Brian Rose: Take care. Thank you, Lawrence. I appreciate it.

1:26:35 Lawrence Krauss: Thank you.