Laurence Krauss - Why Religion Is The Death Of Intelligence

Full transcript: Lawrence Krauss on London Real

3:17 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, cosmologist and best-selling author. You’ve written over 300 scientific publications and nine books, including the bestsellers The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.

3:34 You’ve also served as the science policy committee for President Barack Obama, acted in Hollywood films, and run the Origins Project foundation dedicated to hosting public panel discussions and podcasts on science, culture and social issues. Lawrence, welcome back. Well, it’s great to be back here. It’s great to be in the new studio and be with you again. It’s ten bucks, but who’s counting.

3:57 And I should say, because of that, the foundation is a separate foundation from the podcast. They’re two separate things. Okay, get it. I have to say that, because the foundation is a tax-exempt or entity and the podcast is well put, well put. And you’ve been podcasting like a madman lately.

4:13 Yeah. new Chomsky on and Penn Jillette and a bunch of other people raised. Ricky Gervais is. Yeah, it’s a great mix of it’s an amazingly fun, eclectic and exhausting mix. You’re, you’re copying us.

4:26 Well, I’d like to think I’m complimenting you, and video super important for you. Yeah, yeah, and Lee. And if anyone hasn’t seen your movie The Unbelievers with Richard Dawkins, it’s really well shot. It’s a great film, and you have the same guys with the same crew that made that movie as May in the podcast, and we wanted to try and produce broadcast with really high production value, so you can listen to it in the car as a lot of people to some podcasts, but you can watch the whole thing, and it’s beautifully produced, and while we, I love your studio and what we built in a really neat studio in Phoenix where we have filmed some of them, but we, in order to get the people we’ve, we’ve had, we’ve gone around the world.

5:08 In fact, that’s the reason I’m in London now. We just recording a number of fascinating ones. I won’t mention names, right? Always cut across barriers and genres. I mean, people know you for having Johnny Depp on the stage, you know, with 3,000 people having conversations about all sorts of things.

5:23 How do you, how do you get to know all these people? You know, it’s a mystery to me. It sort of builds on, and I one thing happens and in another. I am fortunate to have a wide network of friends and people who know me obviously. It began for the most part, except for the scientific community, most of whom I’ve known through my science, but beyond that, with the books it sort of began, and it’s always surprising to me.

5:50 It still is when someone I really admire it knows who I am or is a fan. In fact well, with Johnny, I met him because he was, he came to a lecture of mine, and with backstage, and they said there’s someone back station wants to see you, and then, and I came in, and there he was. He said, you know, I watch you every day, and I felt like saying, well, that’s interesting, and and it was a surprise, and but you know, I’m a huge fan of Johnny’s, and we’re mutual admirers, but so it just picks up, and for me the connection between science and culture is really important, so I’ve tried in my books and in everything to try and point out science.

6:30 It’s just part of our culture like everything else. It’s not different than art or literature or TV or movies, and, and I’ve had fun to try and reach out in different ways, and, and so it’s just these things sort of happened, one thing after another, and I’m kind of surprised. I’m so surprised when people really agree to be on or do something with me, or for me. And then, anyway, it builds up, but it’s been, spin me, and exciting, and challenging. Tell me about London.

7:03 What are your feelings like when you come to a place like this? What do you think about London when you’re baking in the heat in Phoenix? Well, happily, by the way, I don’t live in Phoenix anymore. I moved up to Oregon, which is much nicer. Okay.

7:14 And I, and we film in Phoenix, so I fly down. I used to commute to Australia where my wife was. So, flaunt commuting to from Portland to Phoenix is much, much easier. I’m a big fan of London. I and will, and I hope to be a big fan of London in the future if London is still here after Brexit, but we’ll see.

7:35 It’s very comfortable. Actually, I have been teaching part-time at a place called New College of the Humanities. I would come in and give three or four lectures a year and stay for a period of three or four weeks, and it’s very comfortable for me. I grew up in Canada too, so that, so it’s, you know, I, the British influence was big on me there. Anyway, what about from a science perspective?

7:58 Oh, oh, well, I’ve always had great colleagues here, and that’s had to be serious. That’s always my initial concern about Brexit, by the way. Early on was all my science colleagues, because what I don’t think people realized, and maybe now they do, but the Britain gets so much in the way of science because of its connection to Europe. It’s the money. There’s money flowing in to support scientific research that’s going to disappear, and one of the first things that I thought is, well, in a mercurial sense, I thought, oh good, where this be a great chance to recruit all our colleagues from Britain, because they all want to move to the United States, but then we elected Donald Trump, and so that, and so it’s, we’ve had our own issues, but it’s a real problem, and at, but there’s a great research town, and I used to spend time up in Cambridge, and almost took a position just to succeed my friend Richard Dawkins actually at Oxford, and it was, it’s a position of public understanding of science, and I didn’t.

8:58 What I didn’t want to do though was move to Oxford full-time, because I think if you’re, if you’re talking about public misunderstanding of science, and you don’t have a foot in the United States, that’s because that’s probably the, of the heart of popular misunderstanding of science right now, our governor, it’s based on misunderstanding of science and so I didn’t want to move full-time, and that was a, that was a factor, but it’s it’s a vibrant and amazing city, and the UK in general, I, I learned to love it back. So, actually, when I was a graduate student, I was up in St Andrews for a month. That’s before I knew how to golf, and I’ve been back since there, and then 20 years later I went back to lecture there, so I have a long history of throughout the UK, Durham, and, and it’s a, a great tradition of physics, obviously, in science and education and so it’s a pleasure to visit, and I say I tried, make sure I interact with colleagues, and we actually filmed, happily, part of The Unbelievers in the Royal Society building, thanks to, at the time, Martin Rees, who now done podcast with, which he’ll appear in a little while, who was the president of the Royal Society, as well as having been head of the Trinity College in Oxford and the Royal Astronomer.

10:20 Yes, let us film there, and it was a wonderful place to film. I was at the Royal Society when the Imperial College folks did that presentation on the LSD research, and Professor David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris, so all of the whole crew was there. I was. It’s a great place. It is a neat place, and I was glad they let me, and Richard, well, Richard’s a member.

10:38 The Royal Society had that. Was I have to say, as a kind of, and the Canadian, and I sort of maybe a, I’m not sure an Anglophile in that sense, but if I’d taken as a Canadian, if I’d taken the job in in the UK I could have been eligible to be in the Royal Society in that, just sounded so good, would make your mom happy. Yeah, well, now it would. My mother was, you know, very unhappy when I decided to become a physicist. Really?

11:05 What does she want you to do? Be a doctor? Of course, of course. And, and in fact, when I was, it, I, I got my first job, was a very prism. It was a pretty prestigious job at Harvard right after I got my PhD, and right after I heard I got that job.

11:22 She, I was in Boston at the time, and she phoned my then wife, at the time we just got married, and and I was out of the house, and she, she said just there’s still time. He convinced them to go to medical school. What’s he wanted to get chalk on his hands over there anyway. Now she’s proud, but that for a long time she was. She wanted my brother to be a lawyer and me be a doctor, and my brother became a lawyer.

11:47 In fact he became worse. He became a professor of law, but I did pretty good ones. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, no, it’s okay. A Friday I went down to Westminster to witness the global climate protests.

12:01 Ah, and it was pretty fascinating. We actually took my film crew down there because we’re making a whole documentary about all sorts of things, from plant medicine to childhood drama to you name it, and I went down and I saw all these children protesting. I’d never actually seen that. Yeah, our parents and kids and a lot of 10-year-olds and 14-year-olds and it was massive and I had never seen that and I just wondered what your thoughts were. Well, I think it’s, well, we’ll see.

12:28 I mean, I’m always skeptical. The fact that young people are involved is particularly important. I was just having this conversation with a writer Ian McEwan, who I was talking to yesterday here in England. And you realize that there can be a sea change. The example that always hit me was gay rights.

12:49 I mean, 15 years ago, the thought that it would just be accepted in the United States to have gay marriage was just impossible. but when I realized what was going to happen when my daughter, maybe this was 20 years ago, and my daughter was a teenager and she had gay friends and it was nothing, and I realized for them being gay, it was nothing. And then I realized, well, no matter what old white men on the Supreme Court or in Senate think, the next generation, for them, it’s nothing.

13:17 And you can see things change instantaneously when generationally you can you can produce that change. And what’s really becoming clearer, I was more skeptical a year ago, but what’s becoming clearer is it does seem to be generational in the sense that it cuts across political lines, that young people are recognizing the impacts and need to respond to climate change in a way that just isn’t happening for older people. And when that happens, that means things can change quickly, which they have to.

13:49 By the way, I mean, it’s already in many ways too late, because climate change is already happening and having severe impacts. I actually just wrote a piece which I just got translated to German today, so I, we released it, but on the dark side of climate change, because there’s so many, there’s physical impacts of climate change, sea level rise, storms, and all the things people talk about, but I think almost more worrisome, because there are more immediate and may have made trigger effects that are much scarier for humans across the planet, is the socio-political impacts of climate change, and the example I use at the time was a big issue in the United States and to some extent in England, because it’s one of the hard spine Brexit. I think is question of immigration, of illegal immigration, and as I used to say in Australia, it’s nothing.

14:39 I used to, when the Australian government stopped their carbon tax, but at the same time was worried about boat people coming in, and, and putting, and they put them on this awful island outside Australia but let them come in. I said, well, you know, you have probably 500 million to a billion people who are gonna be displaced because of climate change in the next 30 years, say sea level rise and droughts or all sorts of things, and where’s the nearest place they can go with a lot of empty space? It’s Australia.

15:08 So if you’re worried about a few thousand boat migrants, you’re gonna have a flood of people, and the United States right now, of course, Trump and his wall, and worried about immigration from, since, Central and South America. You can already see that climate change is impacting, producing droughts, and what it causes is people to want to move, especially in agrarian society. So I did the data and point out that the same government that sort of denying or not attempting to do nothing to impact on climate change.

15:38 In fact, negatively impacting, because one of the ways to get people to not immigrate is to help them grow things where they are, but the aid programs that the United States used to do to help people doing that are being cut back, and so they’re worried about 50,000 now, but it’s estimated that maybe 10% of the population of Mexico may want to move over the last, next 40 years, because of that impact. So the dark, it’s called the dark side of of climate change, because, but migration will produce these incredible tensions, as it’s doing, and that breeds theme of xenophobia. It also breeds unrest in various countries, and so I’m I’m worried about those indirect impacts of climate change in a world that is connected, whether we want it or not and while the physical aspects of climate change can’t be stopped.

16:30 I mean, we’ve already put in the atmosphere enough carbon dioxide that will last over a thousand years in the atmosphere to have an impact of a few degrees. Okay, so we can, of course, try and curtail it and make it not 5 degrees, that that we should be acting, and I’ll tell you the reasons why we should act quickly on that, but but what will happen more immediately are the indirect impacts and tensions and wars, and it’s, it’s poor countries and places that are hotbeds from Gaza to Pakistan, and you, and some of those countries like Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and there’s so, there’s all of these indirect effects that we have to realize, and that’s why, by the way, in the United States, while certain people may deny the existence of climate change, if you look at the security compassion ‘el security community, they’ve been looking at that and recognizing the reality of it for a long time because they have to they have to look at the real world, not the world that’s trying to be sold to people, and they have to say, what are the security implications and how can we address them?

17:34 It’s like 40 million people try to emigrate. Yeah, well yeah and or or if or if it causes social disturbances in a country that has weapons of mass destruction or Arcon or countries that are allied or countries that say become unlivable but right now provide a significant amount of fossil fuel. I mean, there’s all sorts of social security implications, and they have to look at that, right? And so it’s just, it’s just like Noam Chomsky, who we’ve had in our podcast as well as an old friend for many years used to tell me when I was a student, did my PhD at MIT, and I would sit in on his classes that if you want to, see, understand what’s really happening, read the business magazines and the business pages, because they’re the, in order for those people to make money, they have to know what’s really happening, and they have to, so they’re not, you know, there’s all this loss and propaganda, this thrown out, but if you really want to tie in to what’s really happening in the world what you really want to do if you be a successful business person.

18:39 And so he used to say that it’s true if you look at the business or military, you’ll see what’s really happening. And can you expand more on this kind of one degree or two degree versus five degree and what we can do and why it’s important now? Well, let me first promote, we, I had a wonderful podcast which was already appear with Dan Schrag, who, who’s a professor at Harvard, a geophysicist, who was actually also, I advised Obama before he became president.

19:09 I was on that committee, but when he was president I was an advisor, but Dan was on his council, Council of Advisors, for eight years, and he’s an expert on climate change, and it’s an amazing episode about the discussing the physical implications of climate change, and what we might do to deal with it. It’s, it’s, it is, and the one hand terrifying, but on the other hand inspiring because it, the point is that by recognizing what’s already happened and what is inevitably happening, we can, we do have abilities, technological abilities to try and deal with things, not to necessarily reverse climate change, extracting carbon from the atmosphere, really wonderful, but that’s quite a challenge, but to try and find technologies that are going to either mediate it in the future or allow us to change the way we, we live as a society to deal with the impacts of climate change, but there are, their effect real, and of course is at which Trump wanted to buy, is of great interest because it’s, I guess, what when I first started to get concerned about climate change was looking at the record over the last five hundred thousand years of sea level rise and temperatures.

20:21 We can actually correlate those two things by looking at ice cores from in the South Pole and other places. We can actually measure the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the mean temperature, and the sea level. Rising sea level has changed by plus or minus, not inches, but eighty meters over that time, and, and so we, and when you realize that, you’ve got to say, well, it’s true that that predictions of global modeling and climate modeling have uncertainties, but when you have the possibility of sea level rise, not by inches but by meters or tens of meters, you got to ask, is it worth the risk?

20:59 Is it worth hedging your bets? And saying, well, you know, we can’t prove that things will necessarily rise by that amount, but here’s one example the, see, that right now the earth isn’t heating them up as much as it could, because that heat is going into the ocean. The oceans haven’t yet equalized that heat, but that’s good for us right now, but it’s bad in the long term, because it means that whatever we turn off everything right now, that energy is in the oceans, and the oceans are going to eventually equilibrate and a fraction of sea level rise that occurs right now is not from ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, but actually the fact that it’s a simple fact of physics that the coefficient of expansion, that water expands when it gets hotter.

21:47 So a fraction of the 10 or 20 millimetres of average sea level rise that’s happened now is just simply from ocean heating, but if we turn everything off, that ocean heating is going to continue, and that because it takes centuries for that energy to equilibrate and heat the whole thing up, and Greenland, which already is losing more ice than most models predicted, and could catastrophic Lee lose that lies, because what happens when the water melts on the surface, it, it goes down below and bracele grow rides a kind of lubricant for the ice to slide off, off into the ocean. If all that ice disappears in Greenland, you’re talking about meters of sea level rise, which is devastating now the first world, in some sense, can deal with it, although Florida is already, I was just reading, Florida there, they’re already mitigating it there.

22:42 There are places you can’t rebuild your house in Florida right now because of sea-level rise. Okay, and it’s gonna get only worse, but the rich countries, you know, New York can try and build a moat around it. Okay, but Bangladesh or various countries in South Pacific just can’t, and that population, and those are dense poor populations, and they’ve got to go somewhere. But here’s something interesting, just a tidbit that I was fascinated by in the podcast, one of the reasons to listen to it or watch it.

23:14 So global sea levels will rise when the ice melts from Greenland. Okay, but interestingly when the ice melts off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean, the sea level near Greenland will actually go down. Now, I could give you a quiz, why would that happen, but I’m not gonna do it. There’s also, you’re become better than my physics. Yes, no, well, I would never have guessed it either.

23:37 It’s the gravitational attraction. There’s so much mass on top of Greenland and ice that it attracts right now the water towards the giant Greenland. When that ice is gone, that gravitational attraction goes away, so near Greenland the water sea levels actually go down. The physics of this is fascinating, if it wasn’t in some sense, at terrifying at the same time, right? Anyway, what do you say to people that say that climate change isn’t human caused, that it’s just a natural cycle?

24:03 Well, there, I say it’s nice to say that, but there’s no, not only is there no evidence of it. I guess if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The point is, it’s not rocket science. You can, you know, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, as is methane, and other things, and you can, you know, the energy coming in from the Sun. You could do the energy flows.

24:23 You could say how much heat is being trapped by carbon dioxide, what what are the predicted, generic. I mean, a model, climate modeling in detail is very complicated, but what’s the energetics of energy in and every energy out and therefore energy stored, and you do that and you find out the impacts of what’s happening are completely consistent with what that simple prediction. Now you say well, maybe that could be just totally wrong, but when a simple calculation that’s basic physics gives you something that generically agrees with what’s happening, you should suspect that that’s probably the case, and as I say it’s not what people used to say was, while these models are uncertain, and there’s still some people who, some even some scientists who I’ve debated who would argue that, well, the modeling of exactly what, the what sea-level rise, what temperature increase is gonna occur are uncertain, and they are uncertainties, a key part of science, which is important, because we can estimate the uncertainty, but it’s not predicting in the future.

25:21 It’s the fact that it’s already happening. That you can see sea-level rise already happening. You can see ocean acidification happening, because what happens is that when there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some of it gets dissolved in the ocean water as carbonic acid, making the ocean more acidic, and you can see the pH level in the ocean changing by exactly the amount you’d predict if the carbon dioxide level is increasing. It’s just basic chemistry, and that, of course, is impacting, and will impact, on oceans 2.0, on ocean life.

25:54 So these things are really happening now, and I think that’s the more important aspect of this. Is that sure there’s uncertainties and weather in 2100, the temperature increase will be 5 degrees or 3 degrees or 10 degrees, which again doesn’t sound like a lot, but 5 degrees is more than that, then the temperature change from ice ages to the hottest areas we know we are, we are, creating Earth that hasn’t already, at the carbon levels in the atmosphere that has not been seen for over 5 million years. I mean, it’s Earth 2.0, and it’s already that way right now.

26:31 And the last little, you know, you got me on a soapbox, but the last thing I’ll say about this is people used to say well, we have one of the arguments that certain people use in the United States is to say, well, yeah, this may be a problem, but we can’t afford to deal with it right now. I mean, there, we’ve got other pressing financial problems. Now, of course, one of the responses is cleaning up after hurricanes. It costs a lot more than preventing, in some ways, and so money spent preventing problems usually is a lot less than cleaning up afterwards.

27:06 Plus, the economic opportunities that come from developing new technologies that address these problems is one thing, but it’s it’s more than that. It’s that, so, because every bit of carbon we add to the atmosphere now stays there. What we’ve added in all of human industrial activity is they’re ready, and if we want to keep the level below a certain amount, and it used to be around below 400 parts per million, or now 415. Already the problem is you say, what, what is required, what kind of breaks or changes to the world economy do you need to do?

27:43 Well, ten years ago, to keep the levels down to the IPCC target level you would have had to cut carbon 5% per year, but because in the intervening ten years, the internet’ we put in sixty billion tons of carbon each year, roughly, I think, into the atmosphere, because we’ve been doing that now. To reach the same level you’d have to cut it 9%, but if we stop, if we don’t do that, you see what happens is every year you continue to add, that the challenge to technology to keep things at the level you want at is much greater, so it’s not, you can’t push twenty years into the future and say, well, we’ll deal with this problem twenty years in the future, because the problem will be a very different one twenty years in the future. Are you hopeful?

28:24 Are we gonna figure this out? It depends on the day. I think that I I have great faith in technology to be able to address problems, and in scientists and creative, creative scientists and engineers being able to address problems, so in that sense I’m hopeful, and the children, and the children they get to, get back to original question, which we deviated from. The fact that young people seem universally to be addressing this problem means that certainly there’ll be a consensus, at least in the first world, that this problem has to be dealt with by people who will then be in political power and who will, in the interim, be able to vote gives me great faith, but at the same time, that the negative part of my, my, my consciousness tells me that what I’m worried about is humans’ ability to govern, to think globally, deal with the socio-political problems that are gonna result.

29:23 I think technologically we deal with it, but I, I just if I look around the world now and I see that what’s happening in terms of xenophobia and, and denial and it, and, and the, the ways that technology can impact on changing people’s views in a way that can impact on democracy itself. I’ve severe concerns. Yeah, this interesting point. I mean, it’s one thing when you know forty thousand people are trying to cross a border, is another thing when forty million people are leaving their country if you have boat because they can’t survive.

29:54 Yeah, and you can, you can, of, exactly, and you can, you can affect public opinion in two ways, and the way it will be affected is to make sure that the people, that, that, threats, that these people are viewed as threats, as they are being now. The simplest way, look at that manipulated Brexit. The idea that there’s a, that there’s a horde of people from illegal immigration in Europe that are going to be in England and then, you know, the England can’t be England anymore.

30:24 The most effective way to govern people is by making them afraid. It was, it was, I think Goebbels who said, from in, in or in, in Nazi Germany, that democracy or dictatorship doesn’t matter. You want to make people, do we want to make them afraid, and I think that that’s the effective way of dealing with things right now, and you make people afraid and they’re willing to vote or act against their own self-interest because of that fear. And how can you overcome fear?

30:54 Well, I’m an educator, so I’m biased, but it seems to me the only way ultimately is to, is to give information and trying to educate, and that’s one of the reasons why I do some things that try and do, and is to try and open up and get people thinking about these problems, and honestly, believing me or any of the people I have may have on, but get them interested enough to begin to research the problems, and that means in the modern world, not going into your echo chamber, not going into your favorite sites on the internet where you get all your information. We maybe wrong or biased, but we willing to look broadly, and it means training young people, the same young people who are not buying the nonsense that’s being thrown at them by the propaganda about climate change.

31:41 Skepticism in young people is to me the greatest hope, when and I grew up in the 60s, and so for me, I saw young people protesting the war, and it created for me at least the time, I thought a generation of people who would say we’re not going to buy this nonsense, we’re going, we’re not going to buy the lies, and I had great hope for the world as a result that we, that, but it’s, but that hope was misplaced in some sense, but the reading skepticism in young people is very important, and then training them to be skeptical and to figure out how to gain information, not in a world where education before, you used to be just sort of throwing things at kids in schools and amassing a certain amount of information, but that’s useless, because there’s more information in the iPad you’re holding.

32:35 If it’s an iPad, then you could get in all schools. There’s more misinformation too, and what we have to train young people to do, because it’s too late for the old people, is to be able to learn how to tell the wheat from the chaff in what they get from the internet. There’s how to sift out information, how to check sources. That’s the kind of training we need to do in schools. Of course we need to teach them how to read and write and do mathematics, but beyond that, the kind of learning tools that’ll be necessary to be a productive and viable adult, voting human being in the rest of the 21st century will be very different than it was before, and if you don’t have those tools then you’re much more easily manipulated by whoever is in power.

33:19 Yeah, they’re good thoughts. You were recently on this island in the South Pacific called Mala Koola. Oh yeah, and observing some of the geothermal activity, and I thought you made an observation that that humans maybe are just a tiny blip of insignificance on the planet in the long run. Yeah, well, I mean, I gave that in my ayahuasca ceremony sometimes. Well, we are, I think the illusion that we have significance is part of our problem.

33:45 I mean, obviously it’s part of the religious problem that somehow the humans have dominion over the earth, is a real problem for some evangelicals, for some, not, but I mean, the notion that it doesn’t matter what we do, God’s going to take care of us, so that’s a myth that has to be dispensed with, but more importantly, the recognize the humility that we are, in a cosmic sense, completely insignificant. I mean, that’s what I’ve written about in my books. The cosmos doesn’t care whether we’re here or not.

34:12 In fact, to some extent, trying to kill us all the time, but even in a human sense, the energetics, the long-term history of the earth, humans, there’s no doubt humans are the first species that have dramatically globally affected the earth. I don’t think any other species has done that. Particularly so, but we’re still a just a blip, and, you go to a volcano and you see the, the energy and this that that is harnessed in the earth, and you realize how literally insignificant you are as a human being.

34:50 It is a very powerful thing. It shouldn’t just disturb you, it should realize how fortunate you are that you have the opportunity to think, to act, to enjoy, and so I’m always amazed that, that especially some religious people talk about how it would be nice if scientists were more humble, and I always think, well, what’s more humble, recognizing you’re an insignificant cognitive being who, who has consciousness on a remote planet in the middle of nowhere, and in random galaxies in the middle of a universe that doesn’t care about us, or saying universe was created so we could exist. I mean, which is more humble?

35:29 I think I understand the answer to that one. Okay, and while we’re just finishing this up, what do you think about Greta Thunberg and what she’s done? I’ve been watching. I mean, I, look, I, I I’m always skeptical, especially people who catch the media’s attention, but she’s really impressed me as a young person. I tweeted a small speech, he said, just because, well, someone was, she was, too, she was testifying before Congress, and one of these Congress people basically more or less said, you know, why should we listen to the scientists on climate change, and she looked at him saying, what, you know, what kind of stupid, this is a 16-year-old, and she said, why would we not listen to the scientists?

36:13 I mean, it’s an obvious question, but the fact you need a 16-year-old to say it is remarkable, and she does it with such poise. I think she captured the imagination, and the fact that she’s impacted, you know, I’m the, this climate strike thing. I’m always a little worried of gimmicks, but the fact that it raises awareness is very good, and she is as a young spokesperson is remarkably powerful. Now, I don’t know what room she has behind her and the rest, and I’ve seen lately reactions that, that do worry me.

36:49 I mean, so I do events, and we’re running educational events. We’re taking a group to the Mekong to look at the one of the things the Origins Project Foundation is doing is running a trip with Richard Dawkins and a climate scientist, Richard Somerville, to the Mekong Delta in January, and there are still some berths available, so people should go and look, to look, number of things besides the culture of that region, but also, the, it’s an area it’s gonna be directly impacted by climate change in a large amount, and, and some people are saying, well, yes, but you shouldn’t travel. There’s all these people are basically saying, and I was told that the Heathrow was they were thinking about closing it or cancelling flights a few days ago because some climate activists were gonna be flying drones into Heathrow to try and limit that, because they’re objecting to planes, which, of course, do produce greenhouse gases.

37:42 But to argue that we have to stop global travel to deal with this, I think, is just, is impractical at best. It’s just unrealistic. We need people. There are other, you can, you can have an impact and not have everyone take solar-powered boats around the world. We just can’t sustain the global marketplace the way we do.

38:05 We have, and we can also design planes, of course, that use less, you use less fossil fuel so we can, do not, we can develop technologies, it’ll do that, maybe even, although I’m skeptical, maybe even, you know, electric powered planes at some point. But so still make the trips, because education is important. Well, I think we can’t, yeah, unknowingly that I actually think for young people the most important education they can get is to see another culture.

38:28 Right, and so when the reaction that comes, I, and I, it was nice of her as maybe a publicity stunt, or maybe she really believes it, to take the solar-powered boat from across the Atlantic Ocean to come to the United States. It was a demonstration that, you know, she could do that, but I don’t want people to get the wrong idea that we have to we have to, in fact, that’s the biggest way to get to stop people from taking action, to say that they have to give up everything they have in order to fight the problem. Right, we can’t do that.

39:01 That’s the wrong attitude, that’s the wrong attitude completely. We have to, we have to be careful and rethink certain things. We should try. I mean, those people who can become vegetarians probably become vegetarians because there’s no doubt that that meat industry produces a lot of climate change. If you can’t become vegetarian, eat less meat, sure, drive your car less maybe, and, and one big thing which is sort of the elephant in the room that’s often not discussed is the biggest contribution to pollution and climate change is population.

39:33 If and so think about the size of the family you want to have, and that’s one less child. And I hate to put it this way, people are gonna get angry and think I’m awful, but one less child that you have is one huge impact on reducing, because it’s the integrated lifetime of that child, and they go in, in the carbon that they’re gonna produce, and besides the impact on resources and everything else. And so I think there are many positive ways to address the problem without giving up everything you have, and the people who are trying to get people to react are threatening people.

40:16 Like Trump, for saying, well, these people gonna take away everything you have for this climate change thing. They’re going to destroy the economy. and you know, and then there are people who are hyperbole on the other side. Al Gore, who’s actually in London this week to speak at the same group I’m speaking to, the how-to academy. I’m gonna talk on Thursday, and I think he’s maybe talking today or tomorrow, but he’s pointed out that that this is an opportunity for people to make money.

40:41 It’s an opportunity to develop new technologies, and if viewed that way, and that’s what Obama used to say as well, that addressing climate change is an opportunity to develop new technologies that will productively help countries move into the 21st century at the same time as doing good. Yeah, and if it doesn’t make economic sense, it’s hard to get people to do it. You can’t really shame them into it, right? No, I mean, well, I mean you to something. Yeah, you can’t.

41:08 I mean, you can shame people. Are you basically look, I used to tell teachers, and I tell radio hosts and podcast people and and sales people the same thing. I used to tell teachers the biggest mistake any teacher makes is to assume their students are interested in what they have to say, but it’s true of anyone. If you want to convince people to do something, you can’t. No one’s gonna listen to me and talk.

41:34 What I have to do is go to where they are, talk about something that they hold dear to themselves, and try and get them to think about in those terms, and so yeah, you can’t shame some, but you can get them to think about things and maybe convince themselves, so I think that’s something you can do to some extent, but you’re right. If, if people feel that their livelihood is threatened, and the comfort and well-being of their children are threatened, they’re not going to act. And I think what we have to convince people of, because it’s true, is that if we don’t act appropriately, the livelihood and well-being of their children will be affected, and that the fact that the children are recognizing that and saying, you are the ones who are leaving us this future.

42:14 You won’t have the future to deal with. We’ll have to deal with it. And so you should be doing something now for your kids. That’s probably the biggest problem in dealing with climate change. It’s a long-term problem, even though it has impacts now.

42:28 Unlike, you know, I was for a long time, I was chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We do the Doomsday Clock, and when I came in, as that, we broadened it from just nuclear. It was, it was, it stud. The Doomsday Clock was about existential threats to humanity. Okay, and it was created by Oppenheimer and Einstein in 1947.

42:46 I was very happy now than to be the chair of it after all that time, because every year Oppenheimer FD was involved in Manhattan Pat. Yeah, after we stopped the ball back and said this is bad. Well, a lot of the scientist from Manhattan Project came and said we have to explain to the world the dangers of nuclear weapons so that we don’t have nuclear wars, and that was, and the Doomsday Clock was designed to be a symbol that would present how close to midnight we were, based on nuclear tensions, and so for tenure till 12 years while I was doing it, we’d set the Doomsday Clock every year, but we expanded it to include other existential threats, one of which was climate change, but at the same time as it’s apples and oranges.

43:22 Nuclear weapons are a huge threat. They remain so today, and tomorrow the world, in many ways, could be dramatically changed if there was a nuclear. Yeah, John McNamara always said that’s how we’re gonna go. Well, I don’t know, you know, I don’t. You just said it was one of the biggest.

43:37 It’s really the biggest. It is the biggest immediate existential threat, and, and they’re wet, and the point is there are ways to go. Let me just, as long as we’re talking disasters, obviously a global thermonuclear war is boom, world’s over. Okay, we already hit, we even though we’ve reduced the number of thermonuclear weapons, we still have, fought at least 5,000, the United States 5,000 and Russia. That’s more than enough to do in the world, but, but forget that for the moment, and forget the fact that by the way, a lot of them are still on, on trigger alert.

44:10 There’s no need, because we’re not, you know, we at this point still weren’t, we’re not yet back in the Cold War. We don’t need to do that anymore, but we do, and an accident, and we come so here, clear, you’re close to accidents over the last 50 years. Earlier means anyone fires, there, I’m gonna, yeah, yeah, and we’re not enough time to assess, and so the chain of command, you want to read there’s a, there’s two really chilling books to read. One is Command and Control, and, and Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, has written a book called The Doomsday Machine, about his, not just the time when he was working for the RAND Corporation, and security, all of the near nuclear not only nuclear threats, but when he discovered, for example, the one of the myths is that it’s only the president that can launch nuclear weapons.

44:55 Well, that’s a myth, and and and one of the other myths that many Americans think is the United States has a no first use policy of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t, never announce it, never said we won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons. I mean, it, there are lots of scary things there, but one of the scary things, there’s a realization that on distant nuclear war between say India and Pakistan, which might involve 200 nuclear weapons, or a hundred, or recently, about 10 or 15 years ago, there was a physicist did a series of estimates of what would be the impact of a limited nuclear war.

45:30 Obviously, in him and, and in Pakistan would be devastated, but a limited nuclear war with maybe a hundred to 200 nuclear weapons exchanged between those two countries, it would produce a global impact on the climate that would probably kill a billion people, because we approves global warming. Now that’s not, I mean, global cooling. Then that’s not the way we want to counter global warming, but but the particulate material in the atmosphere would affect the global temperature in a way that would affect crops around the whole world for at least a decade.

45:58 And so we know, country is an island. I mean, I brought up those nuclear threats to point out that we haven’t even dealt with those, but as hard as it is to deal with nuclear threats, deal with climate change is harder, because people keep thinking it’s in the future. And the way people do risk analysis, and as a business person, you’re familiar that people don’t think about risks in a rational way. And if and the way people do risk analysis is such that, if it’s, you know, if it’s 50 years in the future, it’s never worth dealing with it, and even if it’s 10 years in the future as far as people are concerned, and it is remarkable how people will be misplacing how they respond to risk.

46:42 I mean, the simple example is that, you know, I, I do travel a lot, and, and I, and it, I find it ridiculous that things I have to do to go through airports now, because of people’s concerns about terrorism on planes. Now, I understand it’s a concern, but you know, some guy like trysil a shoe and fire, and then people have to take off their shoes and, and go through these things. And I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t care about this, but let’s just talk about it from a, from a trophic status, to go exactly.

47:12 It’s just go perspective. Let’s say we lost three planes a year, to do. I mean, which is awful. Okay, but compared to the number of people who died, saying, in, in mass shootings in the United States, it’s nothing, but we won’t act on it, but yet people that threat and that fear is such because everyone flies, and and they assume they’re not gonna be involved in a mass shooting, you know, because it’s not, it’s they occur in pockets here. They’re the kind of things people will respond to, and not respond to, is very irrational.

47:45 You know, lots of people, Damn Economía and others have written about this, and that our perceptions of how, how we assess risk and how we’re gonna take actions are certainly not rational from a probabilistic perspective. Yeah, we talk about religion anytime you, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Oh, you’re known as the anti-religion guy. I mean, you made a movie about it with Dawkins. You’ve had debates, heated debates over the years with Islamists and Christians, and has your views on any of that changed in the last two years?

48:21 Well, I know if it’s changed. I used to describe myself as, I am NOT an atheist, but in deference to my late friend Christopher Hitchens, as an anti-theist, because that’s how he did, you know him too, you know, everybody. Yeah, yeah. Sad, lost the world, but yeah, Christopher. He was a wonderful man.

48:42 So he would said he was an anti-theist, I think, and I like that term because you know, because religion poisons everything, as he used to say, but I kind of evolved to be a NAPA theist, and in the sense that people have the illusion that this question of is there a God or could God have created the universe, is some pressing issue that physicists think about, but they don’t. God, I’ve been a physicist for 50 years almost, and and I’ve never heard it mentioned in the physics meeting. God isn’t relevant, because we know, well, you don’t need to think about God to try and figure out how the world works, because as far as we can see, there’s no, there’s the natural effects of natural causes, and at least as far as we understand, we’ve never need to invoke any tooth fairies, any magic, any supernatural stuff.

49:31 And now some people say, well, how do you know? You, we don’t know what, but we will never know until, unless we keep trying. We haven’t hit a roadblock yet that we haven’t been able to get past. And so one of the things I like to remind people of is that this issue of God when it comes to understanding how the world works is irrelevant. Now, what is true is that religion, unfortunately, tensed, does poison everything.

49:59 It’s not saying that, look, there are people who do good things because, because they’re religious, or at least said, you know, that book that resonates with their character, and they take some, some parts of scripture and use that and try and live a good life. They certainly don’t take all parts of Scripture. That’s everyone in England where we are now. The Richard Dawkins Foundation, maybe I know, maybe fifteen years ago, I forget now, did so. They took the census in England, and it was a big, it was a big development that at that time only 50% of adults declared themselves members of the Church of England, maybe 55, but it was a number that surprised people for being so low.

50:42 And what Dawkins, at all, did was take that set who declared themselves to be members of Church of England Christians and said, why are you a Christian? Do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe in transubstantiation? Do you believe in this? Do you believe in that?

50:55 And the answer was no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and they, and the final question is why do you, why do you think you’re Christian? The answer was, I like to think of myself as a good person because religion has appropriated morality, and the point is that, so when you talk about religion, there is no such thing as religion per se. Chris it take Christianity. Everyone’s Christianity is different, and almost everyone who adopts some of the world’s organized religions has appropriated some things.

51:24 What they do is they take the things they like and they don’t take things they don’t like. I mean one of the most immoral books you could ever want, read, is the Old Testament in the Bible. I mean, you’re stoning your children because they disobey you. I mean, it says it. Yet people just say, well, you know, that I’m not listening to that part, I like this part, and, and except for the fundamentalists, who in some sense you could, I suppose, have some respect for, because they say either the whole thing’s true or none of it.

51:49 I take them, none of it, but so people utilize religion as a shield for the good things they do, but what it, what the negative aspects of religion, besides the US versus them thing, besides the fact that in the extreme cases, of course, it produces violence and hatred, obviously, not just in, in extremist fundamentalist Islam, but the same thing in Christianity and and in Judaism too, and there’s a long history in all of those religions, but it’s also the fact that it stops thinking. If you believe you know the truth without even asking questions, then you don’t think, and for me that’s the biggest threat to, to be human is questioning. And one of the greatest developments that came from The Unbelievers for me that I didn’t expect.

52:49 I mean, I knew about extremists and all that. Were the people who wrote to us after that movie came out, or one of my books or Richard’s books. or, and I get these people saying, I’m just so glad to see I’m not alone. First of all, I live in a small town in southern, and a southern, in the South United States, and I know that I just questioned whether God exists, not, not even, not even. I just had that question, and I’m afraid to talk about it, and I know that, my, if I, my parents, or my neighbors, or my teachers, I will be shunned and I feel alone, and I feel like a bad person for asking those questions, and to realize that I’m not a bad person for us and those questions has liberated it for me, and for me that’s the greatest impact that that movie had, and some of my books have had, just that subtle fact that people feel they’re not allowed to ask questions is terrible, and the social pressures that organized religion imposes, shunning people, excluding them for potentially deviating from the, from the flock.

53:54 And what worries me more now is that’s gone beyond religion. We’re seeing that in the internet, that people, that if I have a religious fervor about everything, and so they will shun, and people and and and and you can’t even ask the question. If you ask a question, which is put it all provocative, but goes against the grain, now you just get, you get removed. It’s really a minute, he’s your fault, because I couldn’t follow religion, so now I’m a flat earther.

54:21 Yeah, exam Orange crowd. That is happening right. You get in these pockets of believers they want to belong to something, and they have a thing, whether it’s flat earthers or, or there’s a whole slew of things, and it’s, and it’s the affective ability of the Internet to cause for people to make claims that influence others and cause them to either shun, or, or do other things to other people. That it’s a great concern. It’s a kind of religiosity, and the religiosity doesn’t just exist.

54:48 And let me make it clearer, and it sounds like holier-than-thou argument. It’s not just religious people, of a religious, it, II. There are atheists who, who have a religion. Update. There are people, some say scientists.

54:59 You know, of course, well, scientists are people, which ELISA is a secret that we have to remind people of. It’s not well known, as science people. And the great thing about science is it overcomes the natural inclination of scientists to have biases, to it. That the process overcomes the people doing it, right? That’s the great thing of a sign.

55:18 So, so scientists are no, you know, have no monopoly on rationality in that sense, and what science tries to teach us is always to question ourselves, because we’re the easiest people to fool. But is that a comatose Aemon what’s that? Yeah, that’s a quadrature, fine, exactly. Richard Feynman, and but there’s a religiosity, you know, don’t accept evolution just because I say, you know, it happened. I mean, the point is what you really need to do was question things and think, and you can’t be an expert in everything, but you can try and assess who’s reliable and who isn’t.

55:51 And so the religiosity of saying, for me, God isn’t in, in the one end, is an excuse to say I don’t want to think about it. I just stopped thinking, you know? And in fact, is Ricky Gervais, Sit, was hunter program has said many times. In fact, in The Unbelievers, he said, you know, God works in mysterious ways. What’s that mean?

56:13 Means I, I can’t think, I don’t want to think, right? God works in mysterious means. What it means is I can’t understand that. I’m not gonna think about it. I’ll just say God did it, and for me at least that’s an anathema, that that we are we have evolved a consciousness, an ability to question and think, and is one of the things that makes being human worth being human.

56:35 The joys and tragedies of being human are involved in the fact that we can assess our place, assess ourselves, find out that, you know, maybe we’re not all that we thought we should be or can be, and and try and prove, or it’s the whole human condition, and to give that up is to give up being human, and that’s to some extent what religion does. Do you think 2,000 years from now there will be religion? I used to think in the 1960s we wouldn’t be religious.

57:01 Now, so, you know, what is true is that religion meets some human needs, definitely community needs, needs for the tribe, needs to feel, feel purpose. We undoubtedly evolutionarily have a Tio’s teleology, as people say, that we, we need to find purpose in things. And it’s, as I’ve talked about this before, it’s not me, but there’s obviously evolutionary reasons for that. If you’re in the savanna in Africa and the trees are rustling, you can assume it’s, there’s nothing behind, to do with it, or you can assume there’s some purpose, like, then maybe there’s a lion, and the people who assumed there was nothing there, they never lived long enough to procreate, and so assuming, looking for purpose, is definitely something that we’re hardwired to do by our, by our evolutionary background, and, but also feeling community, and maybe a natural kind of xenophobia.

57:56 My Origins Project once ran a big meeting on xenophobia, us-versus-them, has helped in tribes, and you can see it in chimpanzees and, and so there’s lots of things religion does that meet basic human needs, and sexuality as well. That’s kind of pre-written. religion, as I say, as user morality. I think, I think the argument that religion is responsible morality is just ludicrous. The people in that response for the Church of England said, I’m a good person.

58:25 Yeah, that’s such a great job they’ve done. We have, it’s 2,000 years of great press agents to convince people that, right? If they don’t accept that they are immoral. In fact, if you’re an atheist, you’re immoral. I, there was a Julia Sweeney, who’s, who’s another friend of mine.

58:41 She was in Saturday Night Live, but she’s using the well-known, an atheist, but she once said, which she first came out to her mother and said she was an atheist. Your mother said, oh my god, I can see you not believing in God, but an atheist, because then note, because though in the United States there was a survey done, and the people who were basically most distrusted, below rapist, was atheists. It’s, it’s, possessive connotation that if you just say, I’m not willing to believe in this invented deity, or I’m not willing to accept the evidence enough to believe in it, even if it’s that gentle, you are labeled and now you’re labeled to be militant, whatever that means, if you’re open enough to speak about it, and that’s, that’s, that’s sad.

59:31 So that, but that, but, but religion, you know, has create some rules. It certainly did in early tribes, the Ten Commandments etc. etc., and some of them make sense, some of them don’t. So the question is, you can’t just get rid of religion, or nor is it, I mean, first, many people, it’s a source of great comfort, the idea that they may not, there may be something after their death. I mean, death is an act as a universal human trauma, and that, so, so it provides comfort, and so the question, the idea is not to get rid of these things wholesale, but are there other ways that we could meet fundamental human needs like that without inventing fake stories that give us false comfort or false distrust, or inhibit our ability to, on things we should, at pickaxe, and so that seems to me the question.

1:00:26 Can you have this kind of social organizations that are much more healthy than religious organizations, of, and I, and I don’t know the answer to that, but I, I think I think the, that’s where we should be striving. Okay, and I don’t make predictions for something as short as 2,000 years in the future. I like to make predictions for two trillion years in the future, then I’m sure no one will be around to check them, and what do you make of the flat-earthers?

1:00:53 What do you see when you see that happening? I mean, I’m shocked in the 21st century by so much. I’ve had, I got a call recently from a French journalist, because there was a meeting of people in North Carolina. I think it was 200 people, PhDs, okay, flat earthers, and the journalist asked me the question, how do you know the earth isn’t flat? Uh-oh, what?

1:01:15 And so I like to kind of think of new, new ways all the time to try and counter that, like I used to do for young earthers, because they’re all used to saying, old radio activity doesn’t work. So I come up with another thing that would show them that the earth had to be more than 6,000 years old. Okay, and the fact that people, I’m not sure whether some of them don’t say it just to get notoriety, but I think it is a real, is what you said it is. It’s a reaction.

1:01:42 It’s a reaction to distrust of the scientific community, to distrust of, of what they may view as the military-industrial complex. It’s a, that drives them to such a ludicrous conclusion so that they can say, look, I don’t trust NASA, I don’t trust this, I don’t trust that, and to prove that I’m a skeptic, you know, I don’t trust anything, including the evidence of all evidence that we have that the earth is round. I’m going to show that I’m the ultimate skeptic.

1:02:13 So I think it’s more a willingness to believe crazy things because of distrust and fear, and to bring it back around, I think that’s what, what, why, why a fair fraction of older people voted for Brexit. Because of the distrust. Yeah, well, they don’t trust people in London. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s the case, and they don’t trust the elites, and Mañana’s played off, it’s Trump, does that, you know, don’t trust the elites, don’t trust the scientists, don’t trust the people who may give you information, because they’re, they’re not on your side, and that it’s always pot.

1:02:50 That’s what populist demagogues have been doing for a long time. Is building off that fear and driving people to illogical conclusions because of distrust and fear. It’s always the same kind of. Okay, what’s happening in the world of physics? Exciting stuff.

1:03:07 Well, yeah, one of the, one of that new aspect of the podcast, we have a new segment called Science Matters. I’m sorry, I’m gonna talk about it, because I’m a great promoter, man. I normally, I haven’t promoted much in my life about things like that, but I’m very excited by what we’re able to do, and it’s something, it’s fun for me. It’s a segment called Science Matters, where I take science stories that are in the news, or maybe should be in the news, and actually talk about them for 10 minutes instead of 30-second sound bites to try and get people to look at them, and understand them, or at least learn enough that they’re interested enough to think about them, or what maybe some things that they should that are in the news that are nonsense.

1:03:45 So there’s lots of courses, lots of amazing, every day there’s amazing scientific discoveries because of new tools. I mean, for me, and their ability to look at the universe in gravitational waves, and now is changing our ability to see things that we couldn’t see on promoting on Thursday, when I give a talk to the how-to Academy here, it’s gonna be on black holes, because we’ve learned an incredible amount. But the most recent Science Matters podcast had three, had three examples of exciting things.

1:04:15 One is new developments in understanding how life evolved. We know that, of course, we know how, since Darwin, how the diversity of life has occurred on earth by evolution. There’s no doubt. That’s not it. That’s no doubt about it.

1:04:28 We understand that, we measured it, we see it, but we still don’t know the origin of life. And Darwin thought we’d never learn about the origin of life, but that’s because he was living in the 1850s, and we’re coming incredibly close to understanding how chemistry can turn into biology. And that, by the way, is important, because I, you know, there’s a lot of money that NASA spends on what’s called astrobiology, looking for life, and we made great discoveries of thousands of planets.

1:04:54 You know, until 20 years ago we knew of nine. I still call fluid oil planet, but now we now know, around something that many of us astrophysicists already accepted because of the modelling that most stars have planetary systems around it. What we’ve learned, as we always learn when we look out and see new things, is that we’re surprised is that their planetary systems that we thought were physically impossible, that exist. We used to think the gas giants had to be in the outer part of solar systems, and their rocky planets inside, but we see the opposite.

1:05:24 In very almost anything that can happen does happen out there, which means there’s a lot more exciting out there than you imagined. But when people trying to say, well, what’s the possibility of life out there, one of the key questions it allows us to address, that which we don’t have the answer to yet, is how did life evolve on earth? Right, so when you hear about a habitable planet, be skeptical. Maybe there’s water on it, but even then it’s not clear.

1:05:48 For example, just to give you an example, so there’s a Goldilocks zone around stars, a region where the temperature of the planet is enough for liquid water, if it exists, to be liquid, not ice. Or yes, well, you might argue that the earth is in a habitable zone, and we are, but even the earth, if you look at the history of the earth, because of the distribution of continents, in the earth 600 to 800 million years ago, the whole earth froze over solid. It was ice.

1:06:15 And then how that dynamics of how that formed, actually Dan Schrag, who we had on the program, I talked to you about climate change, is one of the people who first explored that, that snowball earth hypothesis. At the time it was a hypothesis, now it’s a great deal of evidence. So even if you’re in the habitable zone, if things aren’t just right, the whole thing can be, can be frozen. So you have to take that with a great degree of salt. But, but even further, before we can make realistic estimates of what life there is in the universe, it would be nice to understand what conditions result in life on earth, and how, how it resulted, because DNA and RNA, even if we lived in an RNA world before a DNA world, RNA is an incredibly complicated molecule.

1:06:53 How do we go from no life to life, and animals to bio? And what, what is amazing, and a lot of work is being done in the UK on this, by the way, in laboratories in Cambridge and elsewhere. We’re getting closer and closer, I think, to seeing at least the conditions and the requirements to have natural chemistry produce complex organic materials and maybe self-replicating materials. Well, in this, in this podcast I just showed how a big new development, just understanding how the, how the proto-cells might form, because to have living systems they have to be protected from the outside world.

1:07:28 You have to have a cell, which allows the chemistry to be not disturbed from the outside. And I’ll just give you a simple example, because I did it on the program. It’s, so there are these things called fatty acids, and they look like tadpoles, and that, big head, and a tail. And it turns out the big head likes water. The chemistry of it is, it wants to be attracted to H2O.

1:07:50 The tail is repelled by it. Okay, so what happens if you have a bunch of them? They line up so the heads are facing the water, and the tails are inside. What does that do? What produces a circle or a sphere that the inside is protected from the outside?

1:08:04 Great. Could fatty acids be a natural precursor to cells? Yes, but there was a well-known problem. If you put them in salt water and magnesium or other things, they’re no longer stable. And of course the early oceans had salt water.

1:08:17 And so how could Algy have this? What, what? Some young researcher just discovered with her, with her supervisor, and they were in Washington, was magical, at least magical to me and magical to them, is that they were playing around, and they said, well, if you have amino acids, which are the basis of proteins, that, that that drives human biology, and amino acids, by the way, are prevalent throughout the cosmos, and they occur naturally in comets and asteroids and everything else.

1:08:48 But if you, if you put amino acids at the same time as have these fatty acids, we discovered is that if you fill up this sphere with amino acids, it’s stable. so here is the thing. So suddenly, you have, if you have the building blocks of proteins, they make the thing that might form a self-stable. So it’s just a remarkable. It means that naturally you can form a system that has all of the constituents that later on would, would you want to have for life, and it’s only stable if they’re all there.

1:09:17 What a wonderful, and now we don’t know how it happened, but I thought it’d be fun to talk about, and it’s the kind of thing I could talk about with a little diagram behind me. That was understandable. There’s another thing I talked about in the episode, which is, which is a claimed controversy that I was reading in the papers. Oh, cosmologies breaking down. I always read this every few weeks.

1:09:40 Some discovery means everything we know is wrong, which of course is not true, but it was, it’s a weird controversy. We try and measure the expansion of the universe in different ways, and we come up with different numbers, measurably different numbers. Now there’s two possibilities. Either the measurements are wrong or there’s something fundamentally wrong with our picture in cosmology, and a number of distinguished astronomers are saying there, the numbers are different enough that we have to reach, everything we think about about how the universe evolved from early times to now.

1:10:12 And so I wanted to explore that in a way that would actually give the data to the public, to say, is this the controversy? I don’t happen to think it is as bad as some, but I wanted to show the data, explain what it implied, and, and so we, I did that, and the last thing, which is very exciting, from a technological and business perspective is quantum computing and quantum teleportation, and all. And why is that interesting? Well, it’s interesting because it’ll change, those developments will change the way we do business, because for example, your credit card works because you can encode a key, and, and so that, that the bank knows it’s you, and and someone else doesn’t take money out of your bank account, and so encryption and key coding is an incredible part of what makes the bank system stable.

1:11:02 And the way it’s encoded is what are called large prime numbers. It turns out that if you take a large number, every number can be described as the product of primes, but if you take a large enough number, right now it would take any computer longer than the history of the universe to determine what the primes are that make up that number. So banks have big large numbers that they’ve created by the multiplication of primes, and they know what those prime numbers are, and they use that as a code, and so any, you can’t break that code.

1:11:31 But one of the things that was realized is that quantum computers, which can compute differently, and if you want to talk about them, we can. I certainly didn’t, the podcast, but they will allow you, in principle, to do khokana calculations that would allow you to figure out the prime factors of a large number in a finite time, and if you had a corner computer, therefore you could break the codes that all banks are using, and that would cause a problem. Okay, so that’s, so that’s why national security agencies and others are working on quantum computers, but at the same time, while there’s a problem, there’s a neat opportunity.

1:12:05 Quantum mechanics also, not allowed in principle, quantum computers, but something called quantum teleportation, where I can, where I can basically quantum mechanically reproduce the quantum state of one system very far away instantaneously. And we don’t need to go into that now. Again, I try to on my program, but that’s fascinating. it’s wonderful bit of technology, and it’s been shown people have now done in China and other places, have, have done quantum teleportation from here to satellites.

1:12:35 Okay, but what that does is, if you can do that quantum mechanically, you can actually, it Trent, you can encode things so that anyone who’s measuring something here can say, can see if there was an eavesdropper listening in between the time the signal was created and this time the signal was, was, was received, and that would allow you to see if anyone was, was eavesdropping and breaking your codes. So that what I wanted to point out is that the world of the 21st century may depend on quantum mechanics in ways that it hasn’t yet, and at the level of the sort of interface between forefront physics and technology, quantum mechanics is the place to be, and every new day, every day there are new discoveries that are fascinating, and the quantum world is crazy, but it’s, it’s fascinating, and it’s not just obscure.

1:13:25 It’s not something that’s just a domain of people like me and you. Speaking of flat-earthers, I mean, you depend on quantum mechanics every day. I, my phone wouldn’t work if we didn’t if we didn’t have semiconductors in quanta and used the properties of quantum mechanics. So, so these developments, from quantum computing to understanding the universe, are are not esoteric. They help us understand our place in the universe, and they’re also, I think, fascinating, and people can maybe not understand the details, not the mathematical details, but people can appreciate the context, and that’s why I think it’s important to talk about science in the news, because pretty well every aspect of our modern society in some way or another depends upon science, and too often we just think science is a black box, and we just shouldn’t talk about it in the news, or in the media, or in movies, or in fun discussions, but I think people are fascinated by it, and they can appreciate it, and it will impact on their lives, which is because – getting back to climate change, basic aspects of climate change are understandable and should be should be understood by every literate person, you know, in in a society, so that we can make appropriate Democratic judgments about how we’re gonna act as a society.

1:14:44 And why is science treated that way? I mean, you and I both went to MIT, and when we were kids, I don’t know about you, but I was a science geek. I was in science fair. Sure, I was programming computers, but, you know, I didn’t do music, and I didn’t do sports, and then I mean, either at MIT there’s not a lot of other things to do there besides science, and you also came, that you could have done sports. Yes, that’s true, but you know, why is it good?

1:15:06 I think, I mean, there’s, look, I’m not the first one to think about this, either. I, there’s lots of scientists are responsible for part of this, the, calving, keeping it a club, making it seem like only certain people could understand things. MIT gives you a kind of power, right? Which was the history of science. Yeah, yeah, and and scientists could do that, and partly physicists are the worst, the worst of the lot in a sense, because they, they could, they held the key to the atomic bomb, right?

1:15:31 The Manhattan Project, and that meant huge government, government dollars going into physics research, because physicists could produce things like bombs, and so you could, you could just keep feeding from the trough without making any attempt to explain what you’re doing. Eventually that stopped, you know, that, and physicists began to realize in order to get funding for large projects we actually have to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing. So I think scientists are part of the problem, but I think I think, our intellectual evolution, at least in the United States, is part of the problem.

1:16:10 I taught at Yale for a long time, and Yale, I like, I like to think of as a glorified liberal arts college. When I was there I mean, that there’s great science that’s being done there, but I can tell you that most students were proud that they never went up to Science Hill or took a class or had to waste their time, from, you know, moving away from English or literature or history to dirty their hands in science. Much more also that they just didn’t, you know, they, they just couldn’t do it, right?

1:16:35 And of course they could do it, okay, but the notion came that you could be an intellectual and an educated person, and it’s okay if you just couldn’t do science. In fact, it’s almost a badge of honor to be an intellectual, say, well, I’m, I’m brain doesn’t work that way. I’m good at math. Yeah, and of course, all those students at Yale could have. For a while we tried to introduce, we’re all, they all had to take calculus, and there, and eventually didn’t happen because the math department didn’t want to teach it, but, but all those students could do it, okay, but it was a badge of honor to say, well, you know, my mind doesn’t work that way.

1:17:09 I’m artistic. That’s a recent development. It didn’t used to be that way. You know, 100 years ago, where to be an educated gentleman in England, or so, you know, maybe 150 years ago, you used to have to at least have a cocktail party knowledge of science. Okay, you also maybe had to know Latin and Greek, other things that have gone by the wayside, but, but I think for me, as much of the, as, as we bemoan the teaching of science in schools, which is a real problem, I also view that the intellectual elites are part of the problem, because even those people who are interested in ideas somehow can think that being scientifically illiterate doesn’t make you illiterate, but in a modern world it should.

1:17:55 Yeah, and, and we teach science, and that we also teach science. We we move, we push people away from science early on in the United States, in the middle school level. Back when I last looked at this, which is again a decade or so, when I was writing about it, well over 80 to 90% of middle school science teachers had no background in science. They were cheated. What did that mean?

1:18:20 That meant they were uncomfortable teaching, and I saw when my daughter was young, even in grade two or three, when she’d go in and, you know, what are you learning in science? Well, that’s bright during the day and dark at night, you know. Me, but her science teacher, her teacher, when she was doing science, I could see that she felt uncomfortable doing that. What message does that send to the little kids? Okay, but then we also all, I think a big part of the problem is, and and we’ve tried to change that in various school systems, is the order of teaching science in high schools.

1:18:53 You tend to teach biology first, then chemistry, then physics, and since it’s now all electives, it means people never get to physics. Well, a lot of them. Okay, why do they do that? Part of the argument is that biology is, is natural, it’s easier for people to picture, it’s living systems, it’s something more if they’ll come more comfortable with. There’s less math, but the problem is that what it means is, and this is the reason I probably didn’t become a doctor, because biology was taught when I was going to high school, to dissecting a frog and memorizing the parts of a rock.

1:19:23 It means rote memorization. The problem is, what’s at the root of biology? It’s chemistry. What’s at the root of chemistry? It’s physics.

1:19:32 So once, if you, instead of taking the right order, learning some physics, learning about energy, which then becomes important for chemistry, which then becomes important when you understand these are processes, they’re not things you memorize and say, yeah, someone told me this is the way it is, but I can understand how it is the way it is. You don’t get that, because you’ve learned it ass-backwards. And so I think we need to understand that. You know, we need to teach people the scientific process, not the results of science, but the process of skeptical inquiry, testing, retesting, all of those things that make science worthwhile are vitally important for the public to make them responsible adults in a pseudo-democratic society.

1:20:15 Yeah. And when, the misinformation society and the too-much-information society, which didn’t exist 20 years ago, yeah. So it produces this incredible challenge, you know, people, who, many of whom are not trained to deal with this situation before, and are therefore open prey to a misinformation society. Right now we, and I don’t want to sound like, again, like we’re all prey to it. We all are subject to nonsense, and we all have biases and beliefs that are ridiculous, but what we have to do is to be trained to question, to question the question.

1:20:51 Yeah. The scientific method has served me well, and sometimes I’ll bump into people that just didn’t have a training with it. I mean, honestly, a basic science fair project, you know, is enough to get you the scientific method. I have a problem. I have a hypothesis.

1:21:04 I run my tests and I find out what the solution is. It’s not necessarily what my hypothesis was, that’s okay, that’s great, and then we give them the truth, and then we try to come up with a conclusion. Like that’s, like, simply, if that’s what you got out of a science fair project, it’s great. I’m too worried often now, and he’s so, penny, parents are involved in science, cooking practices. Well, you try and get pretty pictures in, pretty, yes, if you can get that.

1:21:24 That’s what I remember as a kid, and it’s, it also seems so basic, but I guess it wasn’t basic. Well, I think it should be, and it’s all. I mean, it’s also fun, although one of my crew just reminded me that one of our events, Richard, Richard Dawkins said fun is overrated, but Richard, but what I mean is, it’s not, it’s not as if science is just fun. It’s also hard work, but it is fun. The aha experience that you’ve had and everyone’s had at some point in their life is orgasmic.

1:21:51 It is thrilling to discover that the world behaves differently than you thought, or to understand something basic behind something you never questioned. You know, why do planes fly? Why is the sky blue? and so that primal enjoyment is something we need to, we need to enforce more. And you know, there’s a realization I had, which I should have had years before.

1:22:12 I was, I had just done a science movie. I was, you know, in a movie. It’s a wonderful movie called The Farthest. I was just one of the Talking Heads in about the Voyager program is produced by a wonderful Irish director, in fact, and the opening was in Ireland and I was there and I was talking to young person and it suddenly hit me again. maybe this is obvious to everyone, but to me it wasn’t until that moment that we should realize that every time a young person learns something new for them, it’s the first time in the history of the world that’s been understood.

1:22:45 It’s not repeating what’s already known. It’s discovery. The active learning is discovery, and gosh, we should be teaching that. We should make people feel that, realize and appreciate that they are discovering the world, they’re not rediscovering the world, they are discovering it because it’s the first time for them. And that act, I do think we’re hardwired.

1:23:06 We’re hardwired to solve puzzles. There’s lots of positive things as well as the negative things. We’re hardwired to do it. It’s pleasing for people to solve puzzles, to again, you cannot, the evolutionary basis for that, it’s kind of obvious, and so let’s play off the things that really are gratifying, as well as, as well as trying to avoid the things that aren’t. And so whether you call it science or not, and that’s why we’re out, the physical Star Trek, the first time.

1:23:32 Maybe a lot of people are interested in science, it’s just they don’t know what science they’re interested in. So if I, as I used to say years ago, when I, if I went to a party and I was, you know, people ask me what I did, I’d say, you know, I’m a physicist, and they go, well, how about those Yankees, you know? And then, but if he’s talking about time travel or warp drive or something that doesn’t intimidate people, and then there are lots of questions, and that’s why black holes are so great, because everyone, you know, it’s a great sexy term.

1:23:58 Then people realize, don’t they? They don’t realize that those are scientific questions, and it’s interesting them, and you can have a discussion, and people ask lots of questions. And so labeling something as science sometimes is another way of turning people off. Yeah, and, and and that’s why, that’s why I taught, you know, I try to get involved in Islam in movies and other things, because there should be a continuity of intellectual discovery and enjoyment, and science is just one part of it, as is music and art and everything else.

1:24:29 You want, of the teachings about seduction. Yes, that’s gonna kind of the story of your professional life. Like, it’s, it’s the reason you have Johnny Depp on the stage. It’s the reason you make movies with Dawkins, because you’re trying to engage with it. You’re trying to engage, and why seduction?

1:24:43 I mean, the good aspect, namely what I said before, if I want you to be engaged, I have to ask what are you interested in, not what am I interested in, but what’s gonna hook you in enough to listen. we all do it, and, and so the act of selling, teaching, anything is seduction in that sense, and that’s why yeah, that’s why it’s worthwhile having a discussion about weird aspects of the way the brain works with Johnny Depp. Why? Cuz people want to see Johnny Depp, but then we can have a discussion about creativity and madness, and in an open way, and get people thinking about it, or, or as I say, a movie with the great soundtrack with Richard Dawkins, or, or any of the other things we try and do.

1:25:26 They may seem sometimes like artificial hooks, but if people are more interested in the personalities and in the modern world, they are, then I love the fact that, and when, the reasons why I decided to do this podcast is that I can have people like him, or Ricky Gervais, Zahn, and then, and then Noam Chomsky on. And I mean, one, and one of the first podcasts we had in the studio together, although we did separate podcasts, we had Noam Chomsky and Penn Jillette, the magician, and had them in the studio together. We even did a little bonus of 15 minutes together, and I thought, how are we gonna do this?

1:26:01 In fact, those are two people I never would have thought would be in the same room, and what I love about it, and by the way, that you can see on YouTube for free, that clip is that in that 15 minutes it ends with a joke, and who tells a joke? It’s Noam Chomsky. A first time I’ve ever seen a joke. And so but anyway, I love the juxtaposition. You should, you don’t need to label people.

1:26:23 We all label each other, but that, that cultured people can be interested in science, and of course it’s accepted, and may be expected, that scientists should be, although some people say, those nerds don’t know anything. Okay, but still, to be accepted socially, scientists, you don’t have to know about current movies or music or, and it, it’s something we want to do, and, and so being culturally aware for a scientist is kind of a badge of honor, but for some reason being scientifically aware for a cultural icon isn’t, and it, there should be no difference. There should be no difference, and and you know, it’s interestingly enough, I remember I was in India, and I was at an event with the President of India, and what was that event?

1:27:10 That was, the President of India was answering physics questions from high school students at the time George W. Bush was president of the United States, and I just thought the contrast was too much, not to be, not to be recognized. I don’t like any American presidents. Oh, look, I, I suspect, I mean, being a politician is, uh, is automatically limits you. I, I’m disappointed in many ways about what Obama wasn’t able to do, but I certainly admired many aspects of what he, what he was trying to do.

1:27:42 So it’s there. It’s not that I don’t like any American presidents. I just think the, the buffoon we have now is an embarrassment to the world. Gotcha, gotcha. No, it’s more than just embarrassment.

1:27:54 It says it’s a danger, when you mean, when you have this populist demagogue who has no interest in anything but himself and no knowledge of anything. Literally does not want to understand anything. Just uses people to be able to exploit, and see himself more on TV. It’s a danger to the world, and shuns the science. That’s not just, shuns of science.

1:28:12 I guess it’s, yes, shun, say, of course he shuns the science, but it’s just discards it if necessary. I mean, oh, there’s all, me, all things are means to, what, an end, and it is, and it’s just himself, and he’s very effective at distracting. That’s what Noam actually talked about in our pod, and I’m partly, and one of the things is what Trump does so effectively is distract from the important issues, because and the newspapers, and I’m, fortunately, just incredibly disappointed with journalism, the journal, because of all the economic problems that newspapers are having, and, clay both channels, is, too, is this competition, because the internet and other things, is to get clicks or to get watchers, and that means they have to become, they have to look for clickbait or some salacious stories that will get viewers, and Trump is a wonderful salacious story, and focusing on, its foe paws, or as stupid statements, or anything else, distracts from climate change, distracts from, from, from all the, you know, infrastructure needs, the United States, from real immigration, probably shoes those so, so what Trump effectively has done is monopolize news and distract not just government from taking any action, which has happened, but the public from being even interested in this, because the newspapers and TV — focus on just this ridiculous man and what he’s gonna do next.

1:29:32 Yeah, understood. Yeah, and then the only last thing that the scientific method gave me was just the numbers. You know, it wasn’t my opinion, it wasn’t showmanship. It was always back to the numbers, and it was, and ultimately it’s numbers. You’re ultimately, I mean, it’s, there’s mathematical reasoning, and again, most people, but we can all reason.

1:29:51 I mean, you don’t have, first of all, what people don’t realize is you don’t have to be a mathematical wizard to be a great scientist. I have a number of colleagues of mine who have won Nobel Prizes in physics who were not the best in their class in mathematics. I mean, it’s, I’ve had a lot of kids write me and say, you know, I’m fascinated by this stuff, but I’m not the best mathematics wise. I’m just not the best, and I feel like I shouldn’t go into this.

1:30:14 So you don’t need to be a math you bftf to be willing to work hard enough to be able to master enough to be able to do it, but but there, it takes all types to be a scientist: pictorial types, creative thinking, and all sorts of things, but also we have this notion that that it’s okay to be a numeron, and people really have the ability. If you, if you spend a little bit of time to just teach people how to do estimates, it’s not beyond it’s not, it’s not a mystery. We accept that people are enumerate, but they don’t have to be, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, but now, of course, because of calculators, and now that’s old, but, you know, I go into a grocery store, and, you know, when someone, when I, when I buy something, it’s, you know, and I’m estimating, you know, it’s gonna be about fifteen dollars, and the bill comes to one hundred fifty.

1:31:05 I say, I think there’s a roaming wrong with your calculation, and print said, can’t the calculator, you know, but of course what they’re doing is they press something wrong in the calculator. You can simply estimate basic things that people don’t even do. Okay, so I always, I mean, for me I have fun because I try and beat the, the adding machine in the grocery store to guess what the total is, because I like numbers, but you don’t have to just do that. You can, you can work with numbers in a basic way, and we accept a numeracy in a way that we don’t accept, say, you’re right, and we shouldn’t.

1:31:36 Are you gonna teach again? Uh, well, I, I like that work. I’m not sure, actually. I’m not sure I’m a retired. this last year, my 65th birthday, and I still may, be teaching in at the New College of the Humanities, and, and I saw, and I like to lecture at universities around the world.

1:31:59 I think in terms of teaching classes, probably on a regular basis, probably not. I said okay, I’ve done that for 40 years now, and is there a different way of teaching, and that’s what I was telling you before we began the program. To some extent the podcast was an idea of teaching in a different way. I was limited by having a day job, in there, many things I could do, and I tried to juggle, and I’ve always tried to do balance, my research, I’m teaching, and also with public things, and writing in a way that both pleased me and I felt was useful, but there are a lot of things I couldn’t do, and I said because I’ve got responsibilities.

1:32:36 I have a Institute I’m running at the University, and I have my teaching at the University, and, and my graduate students to supervise, and so I’ve given up some of that, and I’m gonna try other things. So that’s part of the reason I’m doing what I’m doing now. You’ve always been teaching in different ways. Well, exactly. I mean, I started teaching at a, at a science museum when I was a kid, and that, by the way, was probably the best training.

1:33:04 It was like vaudeville, in a sense, you know, because I would do ten shows a day of the Elector with Van de Graaff machines, and you know, and what I learned as a kid was to hone what I was talking about, because I, again, I made the mistake of people assuming, initially, that people were interested in what I had to say, and then I learned that they weren’t, and what things would get people interested. So it was a wonderful training as a young person to think about ways to deal with the public. See, how I’m a teacher, and I’ve always, always be in that sense.

1:33:33 Oh, and hopefully always also a student. That’s the more important thing: is to always be a student. A student. Yeah, but, but but you know, what, working at the University is something I, I’m I’m, in many ways, been there, done that. Okay, do you have any thoughts on the issue, or final thoughts, or anything about leaving?

1:33:57 Well, I think, I mean, I think that the point is, I think I’m worried about university campuses in the United States and elsewhere, because of political correctness, and, and the point is that when it comes to higher education and education in general, nothing should be sacred. Everything should be open to discussion, debate. That’s the point of education, and and when, I used to say, that the, the one of the, one of the purposes of science, okay, is to is to confront our beliefs, okay?

1:34:36 The West, our mis-beliefs, and in some sense is to not a fan, to so much, but confront, okay, provoke. And when it comes to science, when it comes to social sciences, when it comes to history, if we, if our campuses turn into bastions of political correctness, on the right or the left, where you can’t, where where you do not want to hear from people you disagree with, then education ends. The purpose should be to hear the things, the ideas that you don’t like, that you don’t accept, and debate them, because that’s what learning is all about, and and so I guess I am worried about, about, about trends in higher education, where, where we’re seeing that students and others somehow feel that they should never have to confront an idea that offends them or disturbs them in any way, because learning ends there.

1:35:39 Yeah, it’s a strange time right now. You know, yeah, yeah, really, is, and, and, and, and I see it in colleagues. I see, I’ve, they’re friends of mine, who Jonathan Haidt wrote a book with a colleague of his called The Coddling of the American Mind, where he was saying, I was just with him in New York a four months ago in the book, and he, a public event, oh, is that saying that he, and, and others, but he in particular taught NYU had changed the content of certain of his lectures, because he knew that there would be objection, that students would object, and he could be fired, the things he would have talked about ten or fifteen years ago, but students would now object enough in an organized way to you know, shame him if necessary, or whatever, by pointing out this person is talking about something, it’s racist, or this is person is talking about something.

1:36:33 And I just think we have to ask ourselves the question. We have to really re-evaluate that when teachers feel they cannot teach. The extreme version of that was a recent, last week I was going to tweet about it. In Africa, in in Pakistan, a liberal arts teacher was beloved, was killed because someone heard that he was criticizing the Koran, okay, and Islam. It turns out he wasn’t.

1:37:02 Man, I mean, there was a death penalty for the person, and people beloved him because he was actually talked about ideas and provoked people. The kind of teacher you would have loved in high school, right? Is someone who provoked you and got you to come out of your shell. Well, if we, if, of course, in the extreme of it is not being able to talk about issues that might offend extremist Islam in Pakistan, but I’m worried about about that in the United States.

1:37:30 I was just talking to Ian McEwan, who died read in, in, in his new book which is coming out this week, called Cockroach, which everyone should, should get free in, and now there’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s about Brexit. I warned you, but but it was a one amazing statement that that, in an open society, all things are allowed except for that which is explicitly forbidden. Where is it a totalitarian society? All things are for bigoted forbidden unless they are sanctioned by the state.

1:38:03 Interesting idea, but what I realized in reading that, and asked him the question in the podcast that we’re gonna do, it with that. It’ll come up soon. Is ours, our open society turning towards the second? So if all, in an open society, all things are allowed unless explicitly forbidden, that’s fine, but if, if suddenly we live in a society where all things are explicit, about anything is explicitly forbidden unless somehow its universities accept it to be okay, then are we reverting to that closed society in a different way?

1:38:36 Not totalitarian, because it’s imposed by the government, but a closed society, which is the opposite of a healthy democracy. Things should be allowed unless explicitly forbidden, and all ideas should be, nothing should be sacred, and if we have this sacred notion of things we’re never able to talk about or do, or even ask the question, even to decide that it’s, it’s horrible, but to ask the question, is it horrible? If just asking the question is discussing X horrible gets you fired or gets students protesting.

1:39:09 That’s a dangerous situation, right? And we’re in it now. Well, I don’t yeah. We are, on the insert, in, so we’re, and we’re, we’re in it at one level or another, and we’re in it in society as well, and it’s, it’s, it’s dangerous. It doesn’t mean we can’t condemn things, but it means we, we, we the purpose of free speech is to guarantee speech with which you disagree.

1:39:40 Right, that’s the whole point. It’s, it’s guarantee the right of people to say something you hate. That’s what we should have enough in a mockery, and that’s the, that’s what we should enshrine in a bill of rights, the right of people who you disagree with to speak. And unfortunately that’s the opposite of what’s going on, and, and, and, and if that’s the case, you can’t have a healthy democracy. Do you think ASU was fair with you, or did they succumb to the political correctness of the time?

1:40:09 ASU was a university that is run by bureaucrats, and and is worried about the, about exactly those things. And in fact, how do you know? When the fact that I was an atheist would often produce, the president would get angry letters, and and the question is at what point do you, do you, do you try and act rationally? At one point you trying and and act for marketing purposes. And so I think it’s what’s going on in universities around the country, and the issue is no different than anything else.

1:40:44 Is that you’re seeing at universities are unfortunately, in many, on many subjects, unwilling to defend the rights of people to speak out and to enter and to, to to carry on the kind of intellectual activities that a university should be for. And I’m worried about it. It’s not just universities. I mean, we saw Neil deGrasse Tyson had some allegations against, and a poet of his shows on hold for like a year. Well, the problem is, you know, we can talk about that.

1:41:23 I mean, I don’t want to dwell in, but alligator that we are living in society where allegations, because the Internet, of any sort can can impact on people, and in, and and what happens is that that obviously due process and all the rest goes by the wayside, because if an allegation can impact you. I’ll take an example which will undoubtedly infuriate people, but, but Justin Trudeau, in in, can the Prime Minister of Canada, used to remember when his father was Prime Minister, is in a lot of trouble for having dressed up in a costume party about Aladdin with, with blackface, okay? And one can debate, all, in many ways, the, you know, what, that, whether that’s a reasonable thing to do.

1:42:09 But to dress up in a costume party 25 years ago, as in a costume party, where if he dressed up as Frankenstein, no one would have made a difference. He was, he was dressing up as someone else. He was, and some people are immediately offended because it was blackface, and maybe, and their issues, you can talk about, reasonable people can have a discussion, but I find it so worrisome that that hit the question of whether he might be re-elected as Prime Minister will come back to that costume party, and not to the actions that he’s done as Prime Minister, or the things he’s espouse.

1:42:45 Of course, you, you look at people’s character and everything else, but, but when we live in a world where we’re, that kind of thing can, can can cancel someone. That’s in this cancel culture. It’s, it’s worrisome, right? Because it means that people are going to be afraid to, if they think that something they believe in or talk about is going to potentially destroy their life. It’s the, look, it’s the extreme event.

1:43:16 Was back in the Soviet Union, right? When you knew there were things you could not talk about. People behind the walls talked about it, but there’s, you knew there was things you could not publicly say. We look back on that time as an awful period, but what, but what we’re doing now is, is censoring the kind of public conversations and an ability to act and behave as a, as a rational, sympathetic human being, by, by removing people, or being able to remove people that you disagree with, and one way or another that you like for one reason or don’t like, and for, you know, whatever actions or thoughts or words they’ve done, and that’s dangerous.

1:44:02 That’s dangerous. It’s not, but it’s, I don’t think that’s what’s interesting to me is that that’s why I don’t make predictions about the future. That when I look at science fiction, it always misses the important stuff. I mean, George Orwell’s 1984 is a, is a profoundly important book and a terrifying book, but the propaganda, the way the government did there, they didn’t need it. You don’t need to do that.

1:44:26 Okay, well, we need now. All you need to is manipulate. Sure, they’ve talked about manipulating information, and war is peace, but in a very, in a very crude way. Now you can manipulate the public to do what you want in much more sophisticated ways, and and, and, and still impact, get kind of mob rule by doing that. And we view the world of 1984, with war as peace, as an awful world, and what’s surprising is it’s not necessarily the government directly doing this, but we’re in a world where we’re perilously close in certain ways to imitating that awful world, because we, we, we are allowing, because of, because of the unexpected power of the internet that hasn’t yet been able to be dealt with, the ability for falsifications to be, have an effect, the ability for accusations, which in the old days would just be that, to be now promoted by clickbait desiring journalists or, or government, to promote, look, look, look, look, what’s happening in the United States right now.

1:45:36 There may, but there may be a crisis, a constitutional crisis, because, because Donald Trump apparently, you know, spoke to the head of the Ukraine about trying to, to investigate Joe Biden, and it’s, and his son, right? That that should be illegal, right? To get, to try and get another government to investigate your political opponent, right, and every, in a democracy that should be enough to, can you, okay? What I read in the, in the, in the right-wing press, and say Fox News is as they suddenly come up and say, oh, this is the end of Joe Biden, that scandal that he need to be investigated in, in Ukraine.

1:46:15 And so you can pervert things so efficiently by just repeating these lies over and over again, that you got to worry. You got to worry. Yeah, yeah. What are the next ten years like for you? What do you want to do?

1:46:28 I don’t. Look, the great thing for me, and that’s one of the reasons I’d already thought for a long time, him. I mean, academia is a very safe place to be. What people don’t realize, acne, it’s a really kind of safe environment, and I’ve always bought in some ways environment, and mired people who weren’t in it, because there’s no safety net there, but I also like to think, ten years ago I would not know what I was doing. Ten years now, I, I didn’t know, you know, when before I created the Origins Project at ASU that I’d be doing that.

1:46:54 I like to think in my research, while I would write down for the, for the, my funding agencies what I’d be doing in the next five years in order to get a grant, and everyone else knew that I certainly hoped I wouldn’t be doing in five years what I said I’d be doing, because if I was, and I and others wouldn’t be any discoveries in the interim. And so I like to think I have no idea what I’ll be doing five or ten years in the future. I planned a lot of seeds on what I’m doing now with this new foundation.

1:47:21 The tax-exempt foundations producing these things, and the podcast, are things I’ve thought of trying a long time ago, and now I have the opportunity for a variety of reasons, too, and I’m in a situation where I can try them. they’re exciting for me now, but I certainly hope that I’ll be doing something else ten years down the road. I’m MRI writing is important to me. Maybe I’ll be making more movies in different ways. One of the reasons I moved universities almost every ten years while I was in academia was for the same reason.

1:47:52 It’s very easy to do the same thing over and over again, and if you move, you can’t, you’re forced to not do that, and I think, you know, I found it, always found it very invigorating. So I plant a lot of seeds and see where they grow, and I hope that you know, I hope I’m doing something really different. Please, you know, life is, you know, it’s short, and it’s time to, it’s fun to try different things. Yeah, and it’s terrifying, and every time when you give up what you’re doing and trying something new, it’s terrifying, but it’s also exhilarating, and, ah, and look, I, I don’t want to preach.

1:48:27 Most people, many people are just working very hard to make ends meet on a given day, and they don’t have that flexibility. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have the, the success in my career and to be able to, to try new things and have that, that freedom sometimes of time, or to be able to try things, and so I’m a lucky person. I view myself as very lucky. I still do. Yeah.

1:48:49 What scares you? Ignorant, ignorant, and fear, and a worry that the world is governed by that, that drives me to do the public things I do. I think, yeah, that’s the, that’s the biggest threat to, to my own future and the future of other people, and so yeah, I mean, I like to think that some people, you know, some people have written to me, say, oh, you, you know, you’re so, you’re fearless or something like that, and I, I have no problem, never had a problem confronting ideology or ignorance on a professional level.

1:49:35 That’s, I don’t think that takes a lot, a lot of courage. At least I’ve never felt it. It takes a lot of courage to confront it if you’re in, in, in, in Saudi Arabia or in, in Afghanistan. I mean, those people are risking their lives. Okay, and I mean, I’m fortunate to be in a society where I get my hand slapped, or maybe you have to leave my job, but, but, but, but I’m, but I’m, you know, on the whole we’re in a very lucky society that we’re in but, but confronting it on a personal basis is a difficult thing, and then worrying about how to confront a movement that seems so large.

1:50:14 Yeah, is terrifying. Yeah. What would we be surprised to learn about Lawrence Krauss, besides the fact that you love waistcoats and flashy shoes? Well, you wouldn’t be surprised to that, right? Because I want that, and I can’t hit a gong to save your life.

1:50:30 I thought I hit the, your gong extremely well. I made a very big noise. Let’s see. Well, I wouldn’t want to tell me, because then they would be surprised afterwards, I guess, the, I guess that I like to play golf. That’s a new thing for, you know, I actually learned with a postdoc of mine years and years ago.

1:50:55 I have, by the way, some moral objections to golf. Many golf courses are ethical objections because of pesticides, anything else, but but there’s two things that, that, that one that surprised me about golf. You know, I like to go there because I wouldn’t think of anything else. I, it also was away. It was quiet and a pleasant thing, but what surprised me now is that I, my wife and I play golf, and and and I used to have this macho thing that the boys would go play golf, and we played a lovely park, just a par 3 course near a house in Oregon, and it’s a lovely way to spend time together, walking in pleasant environment, and it, and and while there’s a very famous book that wrote that golf is a good walk spoiled for me, since I don’t give it, since I don’t keep score and I don’t care.

1:51:45 It’s for me just a pleasant experience, and I also have the fortunate character flaw that I only remember the good hits, I think. Winston Churchill said is the great way to ruin a walk, golf. Yeah, when it’s, but winter. You know what, Winston, but my motto has always been, as I look at the, your dog here, they, who’s named Winston. Yeah, exactly.

1:52:09 When the thing that Winston Churchill said to me that has impacted on me and admire tremendously is when he just said never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. I think that’s just the bottom line. You just keep plugging away, and there’s adversity. You, if in science, as you said, you get to the wrong answer, you just keep, you keep plugging away. In life, this doesn’t work, you try that, and and and I’m Aviance in our last program I certainly said it a number of times that we don’t teach students how to fail effectively, that life is full of obstacles and you just, and you can’t let the bastards get you down.

1:52:44 You just keep, keep trying. Amen. Yeah. What keeps you awake at night? Um, usually good movies watching.

1:52:53 Um, what do you like to watch? Oh, I like, I love movies. I love all film, so I, I mean, uh, all types. I’m, and in fact, ya, I’m especially now in the making movies too. I’ve appreciated them more, but I like classic.

1:53:07 Yeah. I basically, there’s no type of movie. Well, the one type of movie I don’t like to watch is horror movies. I used to when I was a kid, although we may be making a vampire movie for a different reason, but, but, and and but I assume I’ll be able to watch it after I’ve done it. But what else keeps you awake?

1:53:22 Um, when I start. Well, actually, there are two things that would keep me up at night. There’s the good things and the bad things. The good things is when I start thinking of an idea. It’s from a physics idea, or something like that.

1:53:35 It’s a there’s, I love lying in bed on those rare days when I have an idea and I can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing it, so that, those are good nights. They don’t happen very, very often, but the rare good nights. The other one is when I start thinking about the challenges of what needs to be done, the challenges facing me and the world, the worries of fear and ignorance and how to combat them. I think that really does key, remember. Not oh, and the other thing, if I’ve said or done something that’s hurt my wife and I’m, feel miserable, and it’s hard for me to sleep.

1:54:12 Lawrence, always have a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up a magic quantum phone and call the 20-year-old Lawrence and give that young man some advice. What My life is consistent in learning how how little I know, how other people are so much better at me, and it’s so many things, and that’s a wonderful thing to learn. It seems people would be surprised to hear that you are humble.

1:55:09 Well, I don’t know whether I’m humble as a person, but, but at least I have the humility to realize that the acceptance over time of seeing people, not, I mean, it in physics, of course. I’ve always seen physicist colleagues, so I think are better than me at one thing or another, and in fact it’s very wonderful to be a professor and teach a student, and then see that student, you know, in whatever area, and that may not be better me or worse in general as a physicist, but to go beyond where I’m at. So that I start, T.

1:55:38 One of the best things about having graduate students is I start teaching them, and by the end of their PhD they’re teaching me, and that’s, that’s wonderful, so, um, I think I’m willing to – I’m amazed that that, that how almost everyone I know was better at me than in something, and I think probably when I was younger I wasn’t as open to that. Okay, second part of that question. Best advice you’ve ever received, could have come from a professor or one of the many people you know in this world, or from a parent?

1:56:13 Well, I think the – – people, people who mean a lot to me. One was Richard Feynman, who said, don’t care what people think. Okay, and then, um, and then a friend of mine, Vernon Hertzog, was a filmmaker who, who said many things that I admire, but once he went to look at me and said, chin up and down with the enemy. How’d you know Feynman? Where’d you meet him?

1:56:45 I was fortunate enough to meet him when I was a student. First I was in Canada, and I was a head of one of the heads of an organization called the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Association, and he came up for a conference where we could, it’s a long story but, but we could talk about why he was there, but at that I was there with my girlfriend then, at the time, who was one of the few women who was there, and so far, Feynman’s, fit most with us, and then so I got to, I mean, I had a weekend with him then, and, and he, and it was fascinating. He’s charismatic, and it was fascinating to learn, I mean, from all the reasons, in people like Lyman, and, and then periodically met him later as I lectured at Caltech before he died.

1:57:27 I think I wrote a book about Feynman called Quantum Man: a scientific biography, Richard Feynman, and, and I think I said in the introduction that it was a kind of cathartic to write it, because when I lecture, I gave a lecture at Caltech when I was at Harvard, and Feynman was in the audience and asked a question, and it was terrifying, of course, to lecture knowing Feynman’s in the audience, and and then afterwards he came up to follow up on it, and I had wanted to remind him, because I was sure he didn’t remember me from being a student years before, and I wanted to remind him of that time, and he waited, and then some annoying obnoxious assistant professor kept badgering me, badgering me, and badgering me, and Feynman eventually just, he walked off, you know, and I thought, okay well, I’ll get to tell him another time, and then he found me and died shortly afterwards, and it was, and so I always felt like I really should have taken advantage of that time to tell him what I thought, and I think, er, and some other people have encouraged other people to do that, to do it, do things at the moment and not, not later, and so writing that book about him was in some ways a chance for me to be able to to get that off my chest, and yeah, and so, but it was a scientific biography, which is, you know, Feynman was a charismatic person, but if that’s all he was, he wouldn’t have been worth writing about or learning about.

1:58:47 It’s, for in spite of the fact that Feynman loved creating the myth of Feynman and the mythology of Feynman, and he loved, he was a showman, and, you know, and I, and I admired that. Up, I am you late that to some extent there’s no doubt about it, but he still would say, and I think it’s absolutely true that what matters is the science, and what I found lacking from almost all the popular books and discourses by Feynman about Feynman and others was a discussion of his science, and I didn’t. I came, I was asked if I would write a scientific biography, and I, and I agreed to.

1:59:21 I had no idea how difficult it would be, but I thought if I could weave his science into his life, then people could understand what, what it was about Feynman that made him worth reading about, beyond the fact that he was charismatic and funny and had full of anecdotes and lots of, Ann was brilliant, but but but how he, how he manifested that brilliance in the scientific community, and what he did gave a new insights into the man. So I was very pleased with that book, and by the way, that’s the boat. Well, two things about that book that I won, not that I read, like to read views, but it’s the only book I’ve written.

1:59:54 It’s never gotten any bad reviews, but to one of the most enjoyable aspects of that book after the fact is another friend of mine named Cormac McCarthy, who was a writer, you know, everybody, but, but, read the, the hardcover, and and liked it a lot, which I was thrilled with. That Cormac wrote me and said, I’d like to edit the paperback edition, and and I, it’s a yes. He wrote to me in a way only Cormac could write. It’s almost perfect, but I could make it perfect.

2:00:28 And one of the things he said he won, he, I had to agree to, do, was take out all exclamation marks and semicolons, because there was no place in English literature for it, except exclamation marks or semicolons. And I said, whatever, sure. So the paperback version of that book, Quantum Man, says with Corrections, or with added corrections by Cormac McCarthy. And I, I’m just so, that was such an honor for me. That’s nice.

2:00:51 He doesn’t use exclamation points. Well, Ian, you know, I, I’m not sure anyone is consistent, and even Cormac, but he was certainly decided one thing was absolutely true, and I recognize it. I use exclamation marks way too often. I’ve always had editors for my book, strong, you know, may address this, because I tend to talk in exclamation marks, and so I, I write a lot like I speak and of course then refine it, because it’s different. Yeah, you know, and but yeah, I use way too many, and I acknowledge that fact, and sowing it, obviously have used too many.

2:01:22 Then it’s like crying wolf, right? Then, yeah, they lose all meaning whatsoever. Yeah. Feynman taught my dad freshman physics at Caltech. X is 16.

2:01:30 He took the famous Feynman Lectures and survived. Yeah, because they’re great lectures, but most, many people didn’t survive them, because they probably were too much for many undergraduates to, yeah, and they’re great books to read after the fact. Listen to him as well. They had the audio tapes. They have the audio tapes.

2:01:44 Yeah, and it turns out, so they weren’t particularly successful at the time, because they, you know, they were probably too much, too soon. They’re wonderful references and amazing references. Yeah, so he would have been. It would have been amazing in retrospect. It would have been amazing to take it, but then if you’re in the class, the worst thing you can feel like, if you’re taking your class, is to feel like you can’t, you’re a dummy, and it would probably have been easy to, in a Feynman class, to feel like you’re a dummy, and that’s the last thing you want to feel like.

2:02:15 I mean, sometimes it encourages you to do things, but if you get overwhelmed, you just give up. Yeah, and yeah, so it’s, it’s good to feel challenged as long as we encourage people to want to feel challenged. That’s another thing I worry about, when everyone gets a red ribbon for no matter what they do, then people don’t realize that sometimes you have to challenge yourself. Sometimes you know you you, you have to actually work harder to, you know. So I worry about this, the, the world we live in where every child is always praised, and and and is never challenged, never confronted, never offended, is never anything.

2:02:51 And so yeah, we want to encourage people to enjoy being challenged instead of being threatened by that. Last question. To that 20-year-old that’s out there watching us, listening to us, what do you say to them? What’s the advice? I don’t give it.

2:03:05 You know, okay, you know why? People ask me for lots of things. Advice, I hate to. I get letters every day asking for advice, and I say, I don’t like the advice. The only advice I can think of that I always tell them is, don’t let the bastards get you down.

2:03:16 That’s it. Chin up, and chin up and down with the enemy, down. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Okay, and I think that’s, yeah, that’s useful advice. Super useful.

2:03:26 Lawrence, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. I’ve always been flabbergasted by how many things you’re involved with, how many projects you’re doing, you know, and you got movies and podcasts, you travel in the world, you know you obviously know lots of people because they value you. They value the way you put yourself out there, and I just appreciate the, the mirrors everything you do, man, and then I appreciate it. I know I do. I really do, and and you know, I’ve, I have a lot of nervous energy.

2:03:55 I think I’m fundamentally lazy, which is why I do so many different things, but my feeling is that if you plant enough seeds, some of them grow, and so if any of them grow I feel very honored, and my wife, as did a lot. I used it for a long time I felt pretty bad about myself for years and years. It’s easy to do, and I guess because I worried that, because if you’re a well-known physicist, everyone thinks you’re the next Einstein or anything else, and you know you’re not, and and she convinced me that that that I was having a positive impact on the world, and it didn’t matter whether people misunderstood me or idolized me for the wrong reasons, that I was, that I was having an impact, and that I should appreciate that, and I can now do that comfortably and feel good about that, and that’s a, for me, a big development, that’s super powerful.

2:04:46 I remember last time you were here, I watched The Unbelievers, and I had prepped for you and watched all your old interviews, my baits, and I was really intimidated by you, and I was just really pleasantly surprised by like how nice and genuine you are as a person, and you know I appreciate that, because you have to think what you see is where you get, but, but yet I hope so. All right, well, that’s good, and I’ve enjoyed it too and I didn’t know where we’re gonna go, but I’m, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me.

2:05:10 No, thank you. Podcast. How do people find it and check it out? Oh, good. Well, podcast, you can go to the website which is originspodcast.com, or you can go to iTunes or any of those where you can go.

2:05:22 We we have some of the video clips. It’s a video podcast, much like this video. It’s, so video clips are on YouTube, highlight clips. The full video is on Patreon, because that’s the way we try and support the podcast, so with a very little small amount, and you saw, you can see the full videos plus some bonus content on Patreon. You can listen to it for free, and you can watch, those clips are free on YouTube, so any of those ways you want to do it.

2:05:49 And yeah, and it’s, it’s been fun, and I think what I hope is that people will find, their, the diversity of people we speak to will surprise people, and I think they’ll find something that they are interested in, no matter what they thought in advance. Yeah, I think so. It’s quite a guest list, and I know you’ve got many more in the pipe, so looking forward to that. And, and by the way, and this, what’s great for me by the way, is one of this. is one of the first since we created the podcast.

2:06:19 This is almost the first time I’ve now been back on the other side, and so it’s been fun to do that too. Yeah, how’s it feel? Sometimes a little less comfortable, but it’s one of the reasons, is what you taught me, is because I’m not used to promoting. Right, at least I, I, memo to ideas, but I never thought of promoting products so much, but now this is a there’s no doubt it’s a product, but I’m, it’s a product I’m proud of, so so so I’m happy to try and promote it.

2:06:45 I think you did a masterful job. Oh, well, thank you. My uncle was a big retail person, so my, uh, yeah, maybe it comes when I seen your plug. Yeah, Lawrence, thanks so much, really enjoyed this. All the best with your podcasts, and until next time.

2:07:00 Thank you. I hope there is an extra 96. you