Lawrence Krauss - The Science Of The Unknown: Exploring The Mysteries Of The Universe

Full transcript: Lawrence Krauss on London Real

3:04 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Lawrence Krauss, the world-renowned theoretical physicist, commentator and best-selling author. You are the president of the Origins Project Foundation and host of the Origins Podcast, where you discuss science, culture and social issues. You’ve written over 500 publications on physics and astronomy, receiving many awards for your research, and have published 10 critically acclaimed books, including the New York Times best-sellers, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.

3:32 Your latest book, The Known Unknowns, Unresolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, explores cosmology’s greatest unanswered questions and the importance in science of not knowing. You believe the unknown possibilities of our existence are fascinating to everyone and ultimately the driving force behind all new discoveries. Lawrence, welcome back to London Real. It’s great to be back here again. I always enjoy Brian. It’s great.

3:57 It’s great having you. This is like your fourth time you’ve been coming on. Yeah, I’m like a pro at this now. You’re so good at this. And he’s been dazzling me with his magic tricks.

4:06 Go to our Instagram and you can see it. I’m pretty impressed. As a former magician, the skills are there. I can’t ask for any more. Yeah, that’s right. I’m working on… Just in case I have to have a backup and new career, I’m working on magic.

4:19 You never know. I want to dive into the book because there’s some fascinating stuff and people always want to know about the cosmos. They always want to know these things. But first, I got to get your hot take on some things that are happening right now. The first one is artificial intelligence.

4:32 Now, you have probably known people in the artificial intelligence field for decades. But obviously, ever since December last year when chat GPT got on people’s minds, now everyone is talking about it. There’s billions of dollars going into it. We’re actually investing in a company here through London Real Ventures. I’ve had a bunch of people on including MIT professor Max Tegmark from Future of Life Institute.

4:56 I’ve had Peter Diamandis, another MIT grad as well, who created I think Singularity Institute. I’ve talked a lot about it. What is Lawrence Krauss’s take on artificial intelligence? Well, you know, I’m not as… It’s a very useful new technology.

5:15 And like new technologies, they can go in many different directions. It will change the way we live. It’ll change what it means to be human. But so have so many things. I mean, that’s what…

5:27 I’m amazed at the fixation of concern about it. I actually signed on one of the things that said we should hold off at chat GPT moving past, mostly because I thought it was being trained incorrectly. It was a little too woke. But I am more interested in what it can do. And fascinated about what it could do.

5:48 And so I take the long view. Actually, in the end of the book, I talk about AI. And when people talk about how it’s going to ruin everything, I’m reminded of going back to ancient Greece, to Plato. Around that time, a little bit before, actually, a few hundred years before, the written language had come in. The Greek alphabet had come in.

6:10 And around the time of Plato, everyone said that’s the end of storytelling. There’d be no more storytelling because of writing. Because people won’t remember things anymore and face-to-face really matters. Well, that’s true, but writing didn’t destroy storytelling. And AI will change a lot about the way we live.

6:31 And whether it makes the world much better, much worse, is kind of really up to us. Fortune favors the prepared mind. And so you should think about those issues. And there are possibilities that are dystopic. But at the same time, I think at this point, it’s much ado about very little, I think.

6:51 Chat GPT is amazing, but it’s not thinking. But what it can do is amazing, and it can be useful. And people are worried that people use it instead of writing. But it can help you. And I suspect there’ll be many other areas that AI will help people.

7:09 And it will replace jobs. And that’s unfortunate, but many things replace jobs. Automation replace jobs. And again, you can imagine a future, which is probably the future, where the people who control AI control all the resources. That’s one way to go.

7:25 Or it could go in a way where, yeah, a lot of people don’t have jobs, but the rest of us could spend our time in coffee shops, listening to music, or reading books, and life would be better. And we can choose that. You know, it is interesting that the jobs that will probably replace are the opposite of what people thought. I think people thought about robotics replacing menial jobs. Those are probably more safe than doctors and lawyers.

7:52 And, you know, so it replaces all the lawyers. Well, that’s no loss, right? Anyway, so I have a mixed feeling about it, but I think we have to take the long view that it is every new technology has pluses and minuses. And, you know, even smartphones change what it means to be human. I was just on the tube and I was reminded, I was talking to a friend yesterday that 20 years ago, I remember when I was in Japan, everyone was, I’d go on the trains there and everyone would be staring down at something.

8:23 It wasn’t a smartphone back then, but it was maybe 30 years ago. But they’d all be staring at us. That’s just a weird thing. And now you go on the tube, everyone’s staring at us. So it’s changed what it means to be human.

8:33 Is it made it worse? Well, in some ways it has, but in other ways, just think of the things you can do that you couldn’t do before. Yeah, it’s weird because we can say a lot about things about mobile phones and it keeps you not present and social media can be toxic. But like on the flip side, I know this and a bunch of influences that I know that have been on the show, they said, I’ve met my best friends on social media because you find people like you all around the world that normally you would never bump into.

8:59 And so you can actually make some amazing connections. You can and you know, I’m always, not that this sounds weird, but I know sometimes when I respond to someone who’s with me, they’re surprised that they’re interacting with me and it makes their day. That’s great, I feel very fortunate about that. But I’ve had the same thing happen to me and it’s amazing who you can connect with. That’s one of the examples.

9:23 You can connect directly with people you would never have imagined you’d be able to connect directly to. And it’s just one of the small aspects. So yeah, it’s changed the world and it is unfortunate that kids maybe fix they do and maybe they don’t read so much and you can all the standard arguments against it. But no, I think AI is fascinating and it’s like quantum computing. In other words, it’s going to be fascinating but there’s a lot of hype and I’m always opposed to hype.

9:53 So in any area of science and technology and maybe people need hype in order to sell things and that’s okay. But so things are never as, the future that people discuss are never as near as the future really is. But the real future, what I love about the real future is you don’t anticipate it. That’s why I don’t, when someone says there’s a futurist, I don’t listen to them because it’s like science fiction, right? Which I supposedly get asked a lot about because of the physics of Star Trek.

10:24 We’re not driving, hovering, flying cars right now. All the future that people imagined in the 1950s and 60s, that’s not the future but the internet which people didn’t imagine is the future. So I like the fact that the future is totally unexpected. It’s not knowing and not knowing makes life exciting. My God, it would be so awful if he knew everything.

10:46 Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned Star Trek in that book that’s a bestseller for you. I met William Shatner this year at the, it was like a blockchain conference in Texas and one of our companies we invested in was doing his digital collectible. And I don’t fanboy very often, but I was like, I gotta meet Bill. And so we hung out with him and I watched a bunch of old Star Trek’s. And then there was one where he was actually talking to a computer and actually to create a summary and it was just very AI.

11:14 And he’s like, okay, computer, can you summarize all of this stuff? And it came back with a response. And I was like, wow, I never really realized that that was kind of chat GPT back in the 60s. Exactly, there’s a lot, and it’s often accidental. I mean, when I wrote the Star Trek book and there’s lots of things that have come to pass, but it’s only because creative people imagining solutions to problems often come up with similar solutions.

11:35 It’s not as if science fiction caused the science, but sometimes to scan you, right? Star Trek was created before even ultrasound, but obviously it’s better if I wanna find out what’s going on inside of you to be able to have some way of learning about without opening you up. And we were talking earlier about people who are older, and Bill, who happens to be another friend of mine, is 92. Yeah, 93. And we just did a podcast and it’s hysterical.

12:01 You should watch it. We’ve done a few things together and every time we do, it just breaks me up. He’s so interesting and funny and on the ball. Again, when I think of people, when I think of getting a lot older, I look to people like him and say, okay, there’s hope. Yeah, he just went into space.

12:21 He’s still completely irreverent, very opinionated. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody loves him. At the conference, everybody went gaga. Yeah, and because he doesn’t, because he is fun and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

12:33 And he’s, yeah, it’s hysterical. He reminds me of my uncle. I told him that on the, who’s now passed away, but was one of my favorite relatives. And yeah, and we’re both, of course, Canadian, which is really part of the, you know, another secret. Canadian mafia.

12:47 Yeah, yeah. Is there anybody you don’t know? I mean, you did stage shows with Johnny Deaf. You’re doing movies where you star in with Werner Herzog. I mean, come on.

12:55 There’s a lot of people, I’m sure I don’t know. Oh my gosh, you’re plugged in. But anyway. Just with AI quickly, you know, you’re a physicist and a lot of people make the comparison of technology that can be destructive to humanity by going back and looking at the atomic bomb and fission and fusion. Obviously, the movie Oppenheimer just came out.

13:15 And so it’s the only example people grasp to when they say, here are these scientists working on a technology that can not only kill the scientists but kill everybody else. And AI is the only real equivalent that we think of in that sense. Sure. In fact, I’m partly, I was for a dozen years the head of the board of sponsors of the Bolt and the Atomic Scientists, which by the way, was created by Oppenheimer and Einstein. They were the first heads of that.

13:37 And I felt very honored to have that position later on. But when I was, its primary purpose was to warn people about the dangers of nuclear war in 1947 created, you know, and scientists talking about the dangers of nuclear war. When I came on board in 2006 to 2007, we decided to broaden it to talk about all existential risks. So not just nuclear weapons, but the time we were concerned about biological weapons and eventually AI became one of the things. So it’s one of the things the bullets are now focused on.

14:06 I’m not involved in the Bolt anymore, but I’m a little, I have mixed feelings about having put all those things in the same box because they’re very different. Nuclear war can end humanity like that. AI has a potential exit central threat, as are some aspects of biological weapons, but they’re much longer term. And climate change was another one we added, but they’re all very different. But it is, you could imagine a future.

14:33 You can imagine the terminator future, right? Which is what people imagine. But it always amazes me that, you know, people imagine the Borg or that kind of thing instead of things where AI really is a useful tool.

14:52 And who says the future is human? I mean, it sounds awful to say that, but it could be the long term that biology has to incorporate aspects of what you would call artificial intelligence, which I think is neither artificial nor intelligent at this point. But it does have, you can imagine the technology, certainly, for example, if you put together AI and nuclear weapons, right? If AI had the decision when to launch nuclear weapons, then that’s really of concern.

15:23 But you know, of course it’s of concern, but right now, what most people don’t realize is in the United States, the president can decide to launch nuclear weapons without, and is the only person that can do that. No one else has to approve it. So do you feel better about AI or a few years ago, Donald Trump being, you know, so you got to work, we somehow think, oh, if humans are involved, better decisions will be made. But that may not always be so clear. So it’s, yeah, it’s a double-edged sword.

15:56 But all really fascinating technologies in one way or another have impacts for good or bad. I mean, industrialization did too, right? And it changed the world. And it caused a lot of problems, sweatshops and those kind of factories and in England early on. But we, in principle, in principle, we are rational human beings who can then look and try and improve things.

16:23 I mean, in principle, because it happens too little, but we can look at things and try and moderate them. And the best thing we can do is talk about the options in advance. So we’re prepared, as I say, because that kind of technology does evolve very quickly. Technology as a whole evolves very quickly, much more quickly than our ability as humans to fully adapt to it. But we can at least think about it in advance and try and imagine and discuss so we’re more prepared.

16:53 And who knows what the future’s gonna bring, but the future’s terrifying, but it’s also exhilarating. And that’s what makes it so exciting. Also, nuclear weapons are quite an example of us being in control of them. I mean, so far we have. It’s amazing, right?

17:09 Over 70 years, they haven’t been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I actually am surprised. And I have said, as I often say, I don’t make predictions about the future except for two trillion years in the future, where it’s easy and then no one’s around to check. But it would be surprising if nuclear weapons were not used against a civilian population sometime this century. Now, what will happen about that?

17:37 I don’t know, and I’d love to be wrong in that prediction. It’s still one of our most dangerous threats, one of our most existential risks. And people don’t talk, people talk about AI more than nuclear weapons when there’s still 1,000 nuclear weapons on each side of the US and Russia that are on hair-trigger alert. But people are some more worried about chat GPT. And it’s kind of interesting to me.

17:59 There’s a great movie called The Fog of War with Robert McNamara before he passed away. And at the very end, that’s his final warning, is that this is the most dangerous existential threat we face. And it comes on the back of a conversation I think he had with Fidel Castro 40 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he found him at some meeting and they were having dinner in the back, and he said, would you have pressed the button? And he said, you’re goddamn right, I would have.

18:21 And he said, even knowing it would have killed 90 million Americans and killed everybody in Cuba. And he said, yes, I would have. And for him, that was like this realization that, oh my God, even as humans, we can make such critical characters. Yeah, it depends on the day. I’m pessimistic.

18:38 But then as another friend of mine, I hate to be- Name dropping again, come on, I like it. I like when you name drop. You do it in a nice way. A writer named Cormac McCarthy who passed away, was a good friend. When I first met him, his futures are very dystopic.

18:52 And when I first met him, I was surprised at how chipper he was. And I said, you know, how can you be so- And he said to me, I’m a pessimist, but that’s no reason to be gloomy. Which is my motto now, if I have one. I love that, but The Road is a tough watch. It is, it’s a tough read.

19:11 I could only read three pages of that book a day because it just was so reading. And he wrote it for his son as a present, and who I know his son, and it’s an interesting present for your son. Wow, and yeah, it’s a tough read and still not an easy watch either. Mads is a great actor in it, so. Yeah.

19:30 And one final point about nuclear weapons, Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, big investor from Silicon Valley, was on Rogan’s episode recently. And he did make a good reminder. He said, there was never a World War III. And he said, that’s because of this threat of nuclear weapons. Well, so far, yeah, mutually assured destruction has worked up to now.

19:49 Unless it leads to mutually assured destruction. And so, yeah, what I think people would say, and again, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that, World War III will be the last one because, but who knows? But people always said World War I will be the last one, so you never know. I’m not so optimistic. You alluded to chat GPT and the fact that it was kind of spitting out wokeness.

20:11 And there was a lot of tests on it, and it was being trained on the internet. And the internet is being censored by typically Silicon Valley companies who have their own view of the world that they export to the world. Tell me about big tech. Tell me about fundamentalist wokism. Like, what are we dealing with today?

20:27 Because it’s an important issue to talk about. You’re probably one of the few people that will talk about it. Everyone’s experiencing this right now. It’s a topic du jour, even in England right now, because we have a very famous speaker, comedian, Russell Brand, being demonetized from YouTube. Members of government are reaching out, basically asking platforms to close them down, demonetize them based on headlines and accusations.

20:52 Yeah, without ever proof. Yeah, no proof, no law, no court of law, yeah. Yeah, which is maybe just an example of what could be in the future. What do you see? This has been happening for years.

21:03 Well, if you ask me about things that terrify me, that is something that terrifies me, because you take the area where I know best from my life’s experience, which is academia and science, which should be immune from this and isn’t. The biggest anathema is not being able to ask questions, is not being able to ask any question and say anything, no matter how offensive, if it leads to discussion. And what you see in the United States now is that that’s just been turned off.

21:37 In academia, people are afraid to ask questions. And when that happens, progress ends, as far as I’m concerned. And so I really see that as a threat. Now, it’s a threat in some sense, but it’s only a partial threat, because if it happens in the West, well, in China, they won’t be afraid to ask those, they’ll just try and get the best people to do the best science that they can. And China has its own issues.

22:01 Let me not pretend it doesn’t. But so yeah, you’ve talked about, I don’t know whether I coined it, but I talked about fundamentalist wokeism, because woke is well-intentioned. It’s trying to say, well, what are the social consequences of things? So I don’t wanna make it seem as bad term, but it’s like Islam in principle is no worse than any of the other religions, but fundamentalist Islam is really bad. But so, you know, and fundamentalism of any sort is, and fundamentalist wokeism is basically saying certain ideas cannot be discussed, certain things cannot be stated, certain things must be presumed to be true without evidence.

22:47 And that’s what you’re seeing. So some people say, well, you can’t ask the question, you can’t say, really, you can’t say there are two sexes, or what is a woman? And you’re not allowed to. It’s somehow dangerous to say that. Well, nothing should be dangerous.

23:07 Nothing should be sacred. Nothing. And that’s my concern. When we have a society where groups, and particularly groups that can control discussions, whether they’re academic groups, or Silicon Valley, say, you can’t even raise this question because it’s so dangerous to say it. Well, it does remind you of 1984 a little bit, doesn’t it?

23:29 And I think that that’s a bigger threat to progress in the West than almost anything else. And I write a lot about it because it really scares me. And I see many, if not most academics that I know, are afraid to say things. They won’t teach certain things for fear of the consequences. Well, when that happens, what’s university all about?

23:56 University’s not supposed to be safe. It’s supposed to be the opposite of safe. If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not learning. And yet now, you just see it. And I step away from it, and I can talk about it.

24:10 And I do, and I think money my colleagues don’t because, well, for the very simple reason, they’re afraid of the consequences. Well, I’ve always been not afraid to speak out of things in spite of the consequences, but now I’m more removed from it, so it’s easier as well. It’s dangerous because what you see on all sorts of platforms, academia, even a place like YouTube, is what happens is people self-censor. Because they know if they say something, they’ll be demonetized, maybe they’ll be thrown out of the university, and so sometimes, even without being conscious about it, they’ll stop talking about things.

24:44 And then they self-censor, and then you don’t even realize you’re doing it sometimes. I mean, we all self-censor in some extent, and it’s part of living in a society. We’re born free, but we live forever in chains.

24:58 And that’s okay, in certain circumstances, it makes sense. But when you’re talking about a classroom in some sense, well, again, the idea is not to overtly try and hurt people. But if you offend someone, that’s their fault. That’s their problem, if you don’t intend to. They own that problem, and then they can decide how to respond to it.

25:23 But you can’t, you know, if you’re speaking about important things, you’re gonna offend some people. That’s just life. And being certain of things is really the problem. And I mean, I don’t wanna bring things back to the book, but I will say, that’s why I said I don’t know are the most important words in science, but they’re the most important words in learning, because it’s an invitation to discover. If you know things before you even ask the questions, that’s religion.

25:54 Yeah, yeah, it’s true. This all goes right to the book, because you have to be willing to say, I don’t know. And that means you open your brain up, okay, let’s talk, let’s learn, that’s the way you should wake up every day. And parents should say it, and teachers should not be afraid to say it. Too many parents, when their kids ask them questions, are afraid to say, I don’t know, teachers too.

26:11 But yeah, let’s say, I don’t know, let’s discover, even if it means turning to the internet. I don’t know the answer, let’s discover this together, because education should be a voyage of discovery. And it should be exciting, it should not be regurgitating. I was in a movie once, and it was a documentary about going into space, about the farthest, about the voyage of spacecraft, and I was at some event talking about it. And this isn’t profound, but it was amazing to me that I’d never thought of it before, that each time a kid learned something, for them, it’s the first time in the history of the world it’s been understood, right?

26:48 So everything should be that kind of a joy of discovery. It shouldn’t be, oh, people knew this before, it’s, hey, I figured this out. And that’s what education should be all about. You mentioned 1984, I just recently reread that, or audio booked it, and he wrote it right near where I live in Hampstead, and man, that’s dark. You talk about the road, man, it’s really dark.

27:12 And you go deep down into the thought police, and the speak rights, and the monitors that watch you and can hear you, and it’s this technology that’s in place to monitor the society, and there’s no way around that. Yeah, and you’re seeing that, but it’s funny how people, he missed it, right? It was maintained by a secret police and violence, but you don’t really need that. That’s what’s interesting. He was thinking, he was more spurred on, I think, by the Soviet Union, and potentially, or the experience of what was happening there.

27:45 And again, it’s a case of life is more interesting than fiction, it is a scary book. And you’re right, when you read it, you see all these parallels to things that are happening. But secret police aren’t really needed to do it, right? That’s the interesting thing to me. Yeah, that’s the scary thing, and we saw that during all the lockdown, that your neighbors will enforce without even knowing that that’s what they’re doing.

28:14 People will censor each other. Or, and that’s the other thing to talk about, enforce. I mean, this is exactly like 1984, the Stasi Stanford, universities would invite people to anonymously report on their colleagues, students on other students. They were having a third, they hired a third-party firm to allow students to be informers. What does that remind you of?

28:39 That’s terrifying. Yeah, in 1984, the children are ratting on the parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you’re seeing students encouraged to rat on other students or professors, if they say something in class that they found offensive, it’s really, and that’s straight out of that. But it’s scarier in a way, because it’s the one, maybe because I’ve been an academic, and so I think it’s the one place that should have been immune from that. I agree.

29:09 And when it happens there, it’s really terrifying. So right now, we’re streaming on this service, Rumble, which has come out and said that they support freedom of speech, and they are not here to judge someone based on rumors. One of the House of Lords people here in Britain wrote them a letter last week saying, are you gonna demonetize Russell Brand like YouTube did? And they said, how dare you? How dare you reach out and ask us to do that?

29:32 Their response now is, we might block you in this country. And so you’ve got this media, government, industrial, pharmaceutical complex that has a certain agenda in mind that’s good for business, not even saying there needs to be a conspiracy. And then you’ve got a bunch of other people pushing back, and these digital media companies are more powerful than a lot of governments. And so it’s an information war, Lawrence, that’s what we’re in, and it’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out.

29:58 It’s concerning. Yeah, well, you know, but again, it’s like nuclear weapons or anything else. It’s got two sides. There are awful things about the internet. I mean, misinformation is huge.

30:09 But on the other hand, isn’t it amazing to be able to pick up, there’s more information in my phone, in my pocket right now, that I can access things that would take me weeks or months to find the answer to. I know, I mean, I started to write books. I remember I’d have to go to the library and look things up and would take a day to find a reference, and now it’s like a second. So the access to information is remarkable, but there’s also access to misinformation.

30:37 And that means we have to change how we teach people. It used to be facts were what was important in teaching, and it never should have been, but it was. But it should be processed. How to tell information for misinformation is the key tool that we should be teaching kids now because that’s gonna affect their lives more in the future. How to learn to be skeptical, how to compare sources, because the facts, they can access.

31:03 I mean, there’s certain skills you wanna teach kids how to read, how to write, how to do math, how to do math, and how to do math right, and realize it’s not racist to get the right answer, and, or to know how to get the right answer. And, but beyond that, it’s how to tell the wheat from the chaff. That’s what education should be doing in the 21st century. Need to teach our children how to think. How to think and how to be, how to think and how to be able to process other information appropriately, which is to not turn to echo chambers.

31:36 We all do to some extent. Yes, how to critically assess. While we’re on all the controversial subjects, I might as well hit them before we get to the book, but you’ve talked about

31:47 Academia’s missing men. I know at MIT right now, an institution that’s probably, I don’t know where it is actually, maybe it’s 60% men. 60 or 70% men, yeah. And I was there, it was 70% men. Yeah.

31:59 Now is run by mostly women and then also. Not mostly, a hundred percent. A hundred percent women. Yeah. In all the executive roles.

32:06 The chairman of the board, of the board, the president, the provost, the dean, and, and in this case, five of the eight engineering departments, okay. Which, I mean, look in principle, that’s okay, fine, but, but, but it clearly doesn’t represent the demographics of the Institute. So it indicates something’s being done artificially. And if they, and as I point out, if it were the opposite, which it could have been, you know, if it were 70% women and a hundred percent run by men, people would be noticing that and arguing there’s a problem.

32:37 And so that kind of tokenism is dangerous, I would argue, because it also minimizes the people who run the place, maybe, maybe the best people, but you are automatically suspicious when you see that, that the boxes are being ticked and that’s, that’s what I worry about. Okay, I appreciate that observation. And then you went in further with the white privilege, talk about that and how that’s also infecting academia and other pieces. You talk about papers being written about that.

33:07 Yeah, okay, you’re really getting me now. Okay, I’m gonna get after this program. But, well, look, we live in a, what bothers me is we live in a culture of victimization where people are proud to be victimized and to list and to check off the boxes of their victimization. And the point is we all are victimized in certain ways. And it’s more than white privilege, it’s socioeconomic privilege.

33:37 There is socioeconomic privilege, fine. But probably the group right now, and I was just reading this, that probably the group right now which is most victimized when it comes to the ability, let’s say in academia, are poor white kids for many reasons. And just talking about how you’re victimized is self-demeaning and suggests systemic issues

34:10 Which may or may not exist. But you have to demonstrate that they exist. You can’t say, oh, because I’m X, I wasn’t able to do things. Because I see, in academia, it’s just not the case. It’s just not the case.

34:24 No matter what the claims are, as a chairman of an apartment, I’ve seen there’s less sexism and racism in academia than probably anywhere else in the world, but yet people are calling it systemically racist and sexist. And then when we’re required, when they have these statements where it’s basically like the loyalty oaths in the 1950s against communists, when people can’t get jobs in academia unless they sign a loyalty oath basically saying the institution is sexist and racist and here’s how I’m working to counter it. Can you imagine some young string theorist who’s been working in mathematics his whole life and barely has gone out of his room.

35:08 Make it a him, it could be a her, but whatever. And then suddenly have to write a statement in order to get a job showing how they’ve been actively opposing race in their work, that their work is actively anti-racist or anti-sexist. You know, it’s just ridiculous, it’s ludicrous. Is that what’s being required now in universities? Yeah, yeah, and oh yes, these DEI statements, two years ago, Berkeley, so there’s this infrastructure, diversity, equity, and inclusion that are now permeating all universities, growing much bigger than the money that’s budgeted to the academics or to student loans or student support.

35:47 And they basically oversee hiring and promotion. And I recently say, Berkeley was looking for a faculty member in biology. Well, all the people who apply have to write these diversity statements showing how they’re doing this. Okay, fine, who cares, maybe. Except that 76% of the people, the first group that scans the applicants is the DEI bureaucracy.

36:15 76% of the applicants were removed from the pool before you could even look at their research statements of biology to decide what they were doing in biology. Well, that’s clear nonsense. I mean, it’s a worry. And you’re seeing that requirement. And some people would say, in fact, I just published a letter by a scientist, and often my colleagues who are most sensitive to this are people who grew up in the former Soviet Union, where you were required to pledge, you were required to pledge to the party before you could be in academia.

36:49 And whether or not you agree with the politics that are behind it, and again, it’s well-meaning. Look, we don’t want racism. We don’t want sexism. We want equal opportunity. It all sounds good.

36:59 But then if you’re required to pledge to the political goals in order to get a position in physics or mathematics, that’s a worry. I mean, your politics should be irrelevant. And moreover, an assistant professor, this is the other problem, an assistant professor or a postdoc is not gonna, there is racism and there is sexism in various parts of the world and in various parts of society, but you’re not gonna solve the problem at the level of an assistant professor of physics.

37:32 You’re gonna solve the problem in inner cities in the United States to make sure that there’s schools and there’s books. I lived in Cleveland and I used to go into the schools and I’d see how they didn’t have books. And of course, it immediately puts them in a disadvantage. Young black kids in Cleveland are at a disadvantage, but that’s how you’re gonna solve the problem. You’re gonna solve the problem by trying to improve family life and all sorts of things.

37:56 You’re not gonna solve it at the level of an assistant professor of physics. You also see these issues getting weaponized by political parties as well. And then they just turn up the dial and then they literally become weapons. At least that’s what I see sometimes. Yeah, and my politics has initially been more on the left, although I’m now often called a right-wing pundit because I write in the Wall Street Journal and other play, because that’s where you can talk about these issues.

38:19 You really can’t talk about them as much in the New York Times. That may be changing, but they are weaponized and it’s embarrassing for me to see that. And so I speak out, I mean, I’ve criticized the right for many years about certain things about scientific truth or at least scientific evidence. But I criticize the left when they’re bean counting, when it comes to, you know, I’m a big believer in merit, for example, and I understand demographics, but the profile of a certain institution need not mirror the demographics.

38:56 If it doesn’t mirror the demographic of the world, it’s not evidence of racism. It could be evidence of many other things. And so requiring that you check off these certain boxes when appointing people or anything else is demeaning to them. Once again, it’s not just demeaning to society. Yeah, I know.

39:13 It ends up infecting the whole self-esteem of everyone. In the long run, it doesn’t create better anybody. It doesn’t, and it makes people, you’re right. It doesn’t create better anything. It reduces people’s self-esteem.

39:24 It reduces people’s sense of security. And yeah, so that’s a big problem. Do you think this gets worse before it gets better? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, every five, four years ago, three years ago, people were saying to me, well, people are beginning to notice this now, but it gets worse before it gets better.

39:42 It’s true that this too shall pass, but it doesn’t mean it’s not gonna pass without a lot of victims and real victims and society as a whole. And we saw it in the communist scare in the 50s and we’ve seen it in many different places. And, but I see no evidence. I see evidence of growing awareness, but I still see evidence that, yeah, I think it’ll get worse before it gets better. More dangerous than AI, wokeism.

40:09 I don’t do things that way. I think of apples and oranges. So, you know, they’re dangerous and not dangerous. And I don’t know which is more dangerous.

40:21 But I know we have to talk about the things that are dangerous and the things that are, and yet not be so afraid of what’s dangerous to not realize that there are opportunities. As I say, the motivation behind wokeness is a positive one. Social justice initially is a goal to try and make the world more just. You can’t argue with that, but then it gets pushed. Same with AI.

40:43 It’s a tool that can assist us. Look, you know, people say we give up our freedom with AI. Well, you walk in an elevator. I walk, you know, I didn’t walk in an elevator to come in here, but there are elevators in your building. And when you walk in an elevator, you’ve given up your freedom already to one of the earliest forms of computers.

41:01 You press that floor button and you hope it’s gonna take you where you wanna go, but you don’t know. Anyway. Well, to be continued, I’m glad we can have these discussions, because what you really need is a long-form, nuanced conversation to understand. Exactly, not sound bites. Yeah, unfortunately, we get reduced to sound bites.

41:19 And then a lot of people judge someone without ever actually listening to what they said. It’s a headline or a clickbait title based on what they said. Yeah, when I write something, and unfortunately, usually it’s an editor that chooses the title, which sometimes relates to what I’ve written and sometimes not. The discussion that follows on Twitter is, no one actually reads what I say. It’s the title, or not no one.

41:41 But you worry about that, that people don’t actually read. And when I write a book, you know, I’m happy for people not to like it, but I’d like them to actually read it before they decide. Right, these days. It’s similar about a movie. I usually, I anticipate, and I have biases also, but you know, so I anticipate whether I’m gonna like something based on someone’s past work, but I like to give them a chance.

42:07 Yeah, I think we all need to listen a little bit more before we make our judgments, which kind of comes to the book, which is this admission to this phrase of, I don’t know, and how maybe we need to embrace that a little bit more. Honestly, Lawrence, like the evolution of this show was me saying that same thing. Actually, usually I put myself in this room with people I don’t agree with. I’ve had people, I fundamentally disagree with everything they said. Sometimes I can barely sit in the seat.

42:36 But I found, sometimes two years later, that I agree with them now. So it was allowing that open mind to say, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, tell your ego to shut up for a bit, listen to someone, and actually let it soak in, as opposed to the headline of what they are. And so this book, The Known Unknowns, Unresolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, you’re trying to get people to embrace this concept of not knowing, and then opening the mind to discover. Well, that’s how we, I mean, it’s talked about, it uses the title, by the way, The Known Unknowns in the UK, Not in the US.

43:09 I know, I heard, tell us why, I love this concept. Yeah, because it’s a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, which one of the, it was a really intelligent thing. He said, I’m not a fan of Donald Rumsfeld, let me make it clear. But he talked about the known unknowns in terms of the Iraq War. There’s the known knowns, the things we know we know, the known unknowns, the things we know we don’t know, and the unknown unknowns, which are things we don’t know we don’t know.

43:32 Now, as a scientist, by the way, the most interesting thing is the unknown unknowns. But if I wanted to write a book on that, it’d be a very short book. But what we can say is we know what we don’t know, which is fascinating, because that’s what drives scientists, that’s what drives scholars, that’s what drives many people. So saying I don’t know, recognizes what remains to be known and encourages you to learn about it, encourage me as a young man was when I finally realized that not everything was known in science.

44:00 I talk about that when I think it was, Richard Feynman wrote a book, the character of physical law, when I finally realized, gee, it’s not all known. It wasn’t all done 200 years ago by dead white men. There’s a lot left to learn. And that should spur us all on. And I try to make my books be different.

44:19 It’s easy to write the same book over and over again. And by the way, I wrote 12 of them, not 10, but it’s okay. But anyway. And you open this with a quote by Richard Feynman, which starts off with him saying, I don’t feel frightened at not knowing things. He actually taught my dad freshman physics at Caltech in 1961 when he did a guest lecture.

44:38 That’s actually being recorded. And so my dad said he used to kind of hang out with all the freshmen and sounded really epic. He was, yeah, I met Feynman when I was a student and it was epic. And yeah, he’s a role model in many ways. Although I’m no Richard Feynman, I can say that.

44:54 Why? Why do you look up to Richard Feynman? Well, for many reasons. I mean, he was a brilliant scientist. He liked to play.

45:01 He liked to discover things for himself, but he also was a great educator and great, and his enthusiasm for science, I think in a way, my modeling of the way I discuss things, I like to think, well, I think has been affected by him. But the unpretentious nature of it, he had a Brooklyn accent, well, not a Brooklyn, it was Long Island accent. But you can’t listen to him and not be excited. And to have met him too was just, yeah, you couldn’t be, but he was famous for, which I wrote a book, one of my books is about scientific biography of Feynman, which is a labor of love that I wrote.

45:43 But he insisted on rediscovering everything for himself, which was a failing as well as a strength. It meant he had an incredible ability to attack new problems, but he also wasted a lot of time as a former friend and mentor of mine, he’s now dead, Sydney Coleman at Harvard, once said he told Feynman, the other guys aren’t all bozos, you know. I mean, they actually, you can benefit from having learned what they were talking about, but Feynman was big on that and being inventive.

46:16 And loving to explain things and loving to learn. And the excitement about learning is for me, that’s what’s infectious. And hopefully if I pass other things on, that’s one of the things. And so you break the book down into five sections where you kind of go into these concepts of time, space, matter, life, and consciousness. Very interesting.

46:34 That’s when you could go into AI at the end. But I would love to cover some of those things. I mean, again, what’s always amazing to me, Lawrence, is that the average person finds this stuff fascinating. Well, you know, but why is that amazing? Because you know what?

46:49 I realized when I was writing the book, I wanna talk about the ideas at the forefront of science. But the same ideas that all of us have, the same questions all of us has, are we alone in the universe? You know, what does it mean to think? You know, when I see green, it’s the same green you see. How did life originate?

47:06 How did the universe begin? How will it end? These are the questions we all have, we give them up, but we all have those questions. So it’s not so fascinating, it’s not so surprising that questions at the edge of science fascinate people because they are the very, they’re always the kind of unknown threshold that provokes us when we’re kids, when we look up at the sky at night, you know? Yeah, to talk to me about time, because I think most of us would have never have thought twice about time until we started hearing about some Einstein’s theories and you started thinking, okay, well, this doesn’t happen and how does that not happen?

47:40 And time is actually a variable and it’s not what we know of the clock ticking in the kitchen. Yeah, well, that’s the big surprise is that time isn’t what we thought it was. You know, some people think time isn’t real and I like to say in the book, well, tell that to someone who missed the train and lost their job, you know, job interview. But, you know, Einstein was asked about time and he said, amusingly, you know, time, well, you know, the relativity of time.

48:06 And he said, well, if you’re talking to a fascinating person, an hour is like a minute, if you’re sitting on a stove, a minute is like an hour. But it’s more than that. It turns out that time is very personal and our perspective of time is not the perspective we always have, which is really what science teaches us, that our perspective of the world is very myopic. And it’s amazing that we’ve learned that your time and my time don’t have to be the same. And then it comes up into the questions about time.

48:35 You know, did the universe have a beginning? The real thing was time travel that fascinates people. And the fact that we, when Einstein, what Einstein demonstrated is that time and space are really different aspects of the same thing. They’re tied together in what we now think of as a four-dimensional universe of time and space. But that immediately begs the following question.

48:55 I can come to London and back, which I’m gonna do, which I’ve done this week and I’ll hopefully return home tomorrow. So why can’t I go to the future and back? Or to the past and back? An interesting question. And sure, the general relativity allows that possibility in principle.

49:11 Does it allow in practice? And then you have to ask all these questions. The answer is we don’t know, okay? There are lots of arguments for why we think it’s probably unlikely, but we really don’t know the answer. And the arguments that were given were, you know, Stephen Hawking, he used to live, my friend Stephen Hawking used to live in here here, is famous for having talked about time travels impossible.

49:35 And one of the ways he said that is he actually had a party for time travelers from the future and no one showed up, he announced a party. But I, you know, he said if time travel were possible, we’d be inundated by tourists from the future. And I countered him by saying they all went to the 1960s and no one noticed. That’s pretty good. But the point is, but they’re paradoxes, right?

49:57 I mean, more seriously, they’re paradoxes. What happened if you go back in time and kill your grandmother before your mother was born? Well, then your mother wouldn’t be born, but then you wouldn’t be born. And if you weren’t born, then how did you go back? The gist of many fantastic science fiction stories is because of those paradoxes.

50:14 But just as we find the paradoxical doesn’t mean they’re impossible. It may mean we’re thinking about things the wrong way. The universe doesn’t care what makes us comfortable. And so it’s up to us to determine if the universe allows it. And it’s an open question at the forefront of science.

50:32 There are many good reasons, and I give them in the book, for thinking about why time travel is highly unlikely, but we can’t say it’s impossible. Okay. When did the world start? I mean, that’s something- 6,663, no. Well, it’s amazing that our universe, the universe of our experience began, we can now date it reasonably precisely, precisely about 13.8 billion years ago, plus or minus maybe a hundred million years, which in that sense is not large.

51:05 But it’s amazing that we can say that. I should say when I began my career as a scientist, we knew the age of the universe to within a factor of two, say between 10 and 20 billion years old. And I had a colleague when I taught at Yale, a very senior colleague who said the universe will conspire so that we’re never able to measure these fundamental quantities better than a factor of two. Because at the time, it always seemed that way. Every time someone came up with a method to do it, you’d find there was some systematic uncertainty.

51:34 Well, we have a new, a whole bunch of observables that I would maybe never have imagined we’d be able to have in the 1980, the Causing Microwave Background, which we can measure things to not to factor two, but to three decimal or four decimal place accuracy, has changed the picture of our universe. And now it tells us that we can not only determine with great accuracy what the age of the universe is, but the geometry of the universe, the fact that we live in a flat universe, which many of us suspected now with one percent accuracy, things that, and then the greatest surprise of all, which one of my books is about, and I’m happy to say we anticipated in my research 25 years ago, is the fact that the Spanish universe is speeding up, not slowing down. That it’s dominated, the energy of the universe is dominated by the energy of empty space.

52:23 You take all the particles and radiation away and there’s nothing there, but it weighs something. What the hell is that all about? We don’t know. It’s the biggest mystery in science, which makes it even more exciting. That was one of your big breakthroughs when you observed that.

52:36 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we proposed that that was the case. I didn’t really believe it when I proposed it. What I did do was- It makes no sense. There’s nothing there.

52:46 It makes no sense. How could there be energy there? It makes no sense, absolutely. But what we did do was analyze the existing data of cosmology in 1995 and show that all the data was not consistent unless you gave space energy. And I proposed that because that was the conclusion that we drew, but I expected that the answer was that some of the data was wrong.

53:11 I was really suggesting that maybe some of the data was wrong. It turned out to be exactly right. They discovered it was exactly right. The people who discovered it was exactly right won the Nobel Prize for it. And because it was so surprising that why should empty space have energy?

53:25 It’s the biggest mystery in fundamental science. And that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about it. And it’s nice not to know the answer. It’s kind of permanent job security in a way, right? So you kind of embraced that stuff.

53:40 Yeah, of course. I embrace, you know, I like to say I wake up every day. I’m surprised if I’m not surprised. If I’m not surprised, it’s not a good day. On this note of the universe and constantly expanding and expanding even faster.

53:55 I got to ask you the question that’s on everyone’s mind. And that is, are there other people out there? Are there other sources of intelligent life? We’ve seen in the last year, people testifying in front of Congress. We’ve seen Air Force pilots.

54:09 We’ve seen the video of these things that seem to defy laws of physics. Come on, you can’t just put that aside as saying it’s nothing. Really? Okay, but besides that- No, no, you can say it’s on more unlikely. What you can say is there’s lots of things we see out there that we don’t understand.

54:23 That’s a true statement. Okay. And attributing them to aliens is when you think about it logically, and I’m gonna have a little debate in New York City in a few months about this with a true believer. An alien, an alien believer. Well, I mean, it’s not really a true believer.

54:40 He’s a sensible guy, because I don’t talk with a UFOologist because they’re peddling stuff and I’m not interested in debating things with people who are peddling stuff. But if you think about all of the issues carefully, the least likely possibility to explain any of the things we’ve seen are aliens coming from some other star system. Now, is there life elsewhere? First of all, the answer, of course, is guess what? I don’t know.

55:08 Right. Okay, but I would, it’s strongly likely, given what we know, that not only is there life elsewhere in the universe, but it’s ubiquitous. Now, life is different than intelligent life. There may be life elsewhere in our solar system. I’m betting there will be in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus under ice caps.

55:29 And we may discover that in the next 10 or 20 years that there are other genoces, independent genoces of life. If we discover that in our solar system, that’s amazingly important. Because if there’s more than one genesis of life in a single solar system, it really implies it’s ubiquitous. We’re also being able to now look at the atmospheres of planets, exoplanets around other stars. We may look for biosignatures.

55:51 Oxygen is a kind of biosignature. What people don’t realize is that there was no free oxygen on Earth before life, which is important. If there had been, there wouldn’t be life. Oxygen is a poison. It oxidizes things, which means it takes the energy away from them.

56:05 And so, if there’d been free oxygen, all of the precursors, the building blocks of life, would have basically begun to oxidize early on and life wouldn’t have had sources of energy to be able to evolve. So it’s really important there was no free oxygen. So if you looked at the atmosphere of a planet and saw it as a lot of free oxygen, well, it turns out there are other ways to make that. So it’s not proof that there’s life, but it’s the first indicator that there may be life.

56:30 So I suspect in the next decade, in my lifetime at least, that we’ll know about, that there’s other biologies outside of our solar system, which will be profoundly important. But the thing that people are really interested in is not microbes. It’s intelligent life. That’s a much more difficult question. I suspect intelligent life is rare in the universe because we took almost four billion years for the kind of intelligence that can produce technologies that another civilization could learn about if they listened long enough or looked hard enough.

57:03 That took four billion years on Earth, all three and a half billion years, or four and a half billion years, sorry. It took four billion years from the time life started. It’s about a half a billion years after the Earth form to now, because the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or so. And we’re in a very special place in our galaxy. We’re kind of a boring suburb.

57:23 Most of the star systems are where it’s much more dense, where you expect there’d be interferences, large comets or other things that could destroy life on Earth would happen more often there. But the great thing about the universe is it’s big and it’s old. So rare events happen all the time. So I suspect there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The trouble is it’s a big universe.

57:44 It’s a big galaxy. And so I’m agnostic about whether we’ll ever know about intelligence elsewhere. It’s hard to learn and it’s big, it’s long. And maybe if intelligent civilizations only last 10 or 20,000 years before they destroy themselves, there’s another reason why we won’t learn about them. So there’s lots of, it’d be a great discovery, but I’m not counting on it.

58:08 And then if we are actually the creators of AI, and then that continues to evolve. Well, yeah, I mean the intelligence we may discover in other systems may be AI, what you would call AI. You might say it’s silicon-based instead of carbon-based. Again, I don’t like the name AI so much, but it could be that, as I suspect may happen on Earth, that the dominant intelligence may not be biological. And that may be what we detect.

58:35 Who knows? Are there infinite number of galaxies? Well, the answer is guess what? We don’t know. In our observable universe, we can say that now there are several hundred billion galaxies, but that’s in our observable universe.

58:49 But we’re pretty darn certain that our observable universe isn’t everything there is. Moreover, actually, we’re pretty confident, maybe confident, the most likely possibility is our universe isn’t even the only universe. That there may be an infinite number of universes. So, and there are reasons to believe that, which I go on to in describing the book. And that’s amazing, it’s true.

59:12 We kind of call it the multiverse. And it’s not something we created because we like the idea. Anymore than we created quantum mechanics because we like the idea. We’re dragged kicking and screaming. Because they’re realities that are very difficult to picture and uncomfortable to picture, but they happen to be true, at least quantum mechanics does.

59:33 And so, people who are religious say we only invent the multiverse to replace God, and we didn’t. We’re driven to this idea that there may be many universes. But that changes a lot of our discussion. If our universe is an accident, if the laws of physics of our universe is an accident, it changes everything. I became a physicist because I wanted to understand why the universe had to be the way it is, right?

59:56 But maybe that’s a bad question because maybe the laws of physics are an accident. And you could imagine other universes with different laws of physics that work well. And maybe life like we see wouldn’t exist, but who knows whether there wouldn’t be other kinds of life that could exist in that universe. It raises a whole bunch of different questions. But again, in fact, someone the other day said, well, aren’t there trillions of galaxies they wrote to me?

1:00:20 Because it turns out if you look back in time, there may have been trillions of galaxies, but many galaxies merge. So now today, there are probably hundreds of billions of them. People wonder why people say trillions and now hundreds of billions. Because our Milky Way galaxy is in its present form because it cannibalized other galaxies. Other small galaxies came and merged together.

1:00:43 And we see the large and small Magellanic clouds, which are small galaxies you can see in the Southern Hemisphere. They’re basically gonna merge with the Milky Way galaxy. They’re orbiting around and will be coming. And then Andromeda, which is this beautiful galaxy that looks like our own, that’s two million light years away. When we look at it, it’s fine, but it’s actually heading towards us and maybe at 100 kilometers per second.

1:01:11 So in about five billion years, it’ll collide with our Milky Way galaxy. What’ll happen? Not much. You won’t even notice it in the night sky. First, you’ll see it get big, but the night sky won’t look that different because most of the galaxies are empty space.

1:01:24 What it’ll mean is in our far future, our galaxy won’t be a nice spiral galaxy anymore. After that collision, it’ll mix up, it’ll become a spherical galaxy, big deal. But it is heading straight towards us on a collision course. Anyway. You mentioned God there.

1:01:38 You famously did a movie called The Unbelievers with Richard Dawkins, who was here on the show, I think about a year ago. It was great talking to Richard. Have you changed your opinions about God? No, why would I do that? You’re older now.

1:01:52 Yeah, and principle, I’m socially wiser. I don’t believe in fairy tales then, I don’t believe in fairy tales now. Look, I would change my opinion if there was just one thing, evidence. And all of the evidence is that there’s no need for a creator, there’s no need for intelligence. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but there’s no, people seem to think that this issue of God is really important in science and it isn’t.

1:02:20 I’ve been a scientist for most of my life in 50 years and I’ve never heard the word God mentioned because we try and understand how the world works and the issue never comes up. So I used to call myself an anti-theist because my friend, Christopher Hitchens, late friend Christopher Hitchens, used to call himself an anti, because he rightly said if there were God, he wouldn’t wanna live in a universe with a God like any of the gods that have been proposed. So he had a predilection that he wouldn’t wanna live in such a universe.

1:02:51 And I guess I’m that way, but I’m more of an apathyist. God’s just irrelevant. It doesn’t enter into the discussion. And if God exists, it’s really irrelevant to everything I’ve ever investigated. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

1:03:06 Aliens, you’ve said that if we’ve only been putting our radio signals for 50 or 100 years, that’s not enough time for anybody even to travel here anyway. So let’s just finally finish this session on aliens. Talk to me about that and talk to me about what do you make of these videos that we’ve seen with these objects, traveling, and breaking all laws of physics? Is it just a bunch of weirdos and cookies and people that just don’t realize? Look, there’s lots of weird things you can see and you can jump to conclusions about them.

1:03:33 Did you watch them? I’ve seen some of them. And some of them sure not to be frauds. There’s no doubt there’s a fraction of things that are frauds. There are fractions of things where you misperceive.

1:03:45 I just did magic for you beforehand. You know it’s not magic. True. I’m tricking you. A human perception is we wanna believe like Fox Muldar.

1:03:55 We all wanna believe. And so there are lots of things we see that we don’t understand. But as I say, for so many reasons, not just that aliens wouldn’t have had enough time to come here, but to come here in a spacecraft powered by internal processes require more energy than the power output of a star. Why would they come all the way here just to do weird sexual experiments on psychiatric patients of some Harvard psychiatrist? Feynman famously said, aliens are more likely due to the known irrationality of humans than the unknown rationality of aliens or UFOs.

1:04:32 And so when you think about the possibilities, it’s hard for people to realize this. In physics, we think of more likely and less likely. And if you think about the likelihoods, almost any explanation of those things from swamp gas to weird reflections of lights in the sky to balloons to anything as contrived as it may seem, like the magic bullet in John Kennedy, okay? As contrived as it may seem, it’s more likely than the likelihood of aliens coming from some distant star system to here to hide out or crash or do weird acrobatics in the sky.

1:05:11 Do you think there’s any devices out there that would allow propulsion like that? I mean, you’re a physicist. Well, no, you know what? Yeah, I am. And the thing is, there’s a lot we don’t understand.

1:05:21 That’s what my book is all about. But by the same token, it doesn’t imply that we don’t understand anything, okay? And what we know is that the physics that we don’t know is not gonna change the physics we know. It’ll change our perspective of the universe. But we’re here in England now, and famously, if I take a coin and drop it now, it’s gonna be described by Newton’s laws.

1:05:48 Newton was right when it comes to the motion of pennies or cannonballs. And whatever we learn about quantum gravity, it’s not gonna mean if I take a penny, it’s gonna fall up. And so, there can be lots of things we don’t understand about propulsion, but it’s never gonna violate the things we know to be true by experiment. And when you make a right-angle turn going a gazillion miles an hour, the G-forces are gonna destroy the ship or destroy the people in it, unless you’ve developed inertial dampers and impact on gravity.

1:06:21 But then you can show, to do that, you need more mass than there is in the galaxy. And so, you can ask these questions about what’s required. And so, things that violate the known laws of physics are suspicious. Let me say that. Fair enough.

1:06:38 Are you surprised these conversations are happening in our capital building? I’m not, I’m old enough not to be surprised by, well, I’m so surprised by humans. I didn’t think we’d be talking, I didn’t think we’d be talking about God, frankly. And when I was a kid in the 1960s, I didn’t think in 2024 or 2023 we’d be talking about God. I am not surprised that we’re talking about this.

1:07:01 I’m surprised that people take it seriously in a way. The biggest, the biggest, it’s like I used to say, the biggest surprise about Star Trek was not all the technology, is that they assumed everyone in the 24th century or whatever was literate in science. That surprised me more. And similarly, the biggest surprise about aliens is that people think there’s this vast government conspiracy that somehow could be kept secret for 70 years when a single person could become a gazillionaire if they just presented real evidence.

1:07:34 With that option of making so much money by being a whistleblower, can you really imagine it’s likely that this vast conspiracy is kept things secret when nothing is kept secret ultimately? I mean, to me, that’s more implausible than the alien thing. You make a good point. What’s life, Lawrence? That’s a good question.

1:07:56 And interestingly, I begin that chapter about what’s life, thinking about even asking that question, when you start to ask that question, you realize maybe I don’t understand things. Because you can say, what’s life? Maybe life is something that has metabolism, that’s self-replicating and reasonably

1:08:15 Viably self-replicating. And I say, okay, well then, is fire life? Fire metabolism burns things. It replicates, okay, that’s a big problem. And it’s kind of reliably self-replicating because if you have hardwood burning, and it depends upon the type of forest it’s burning, okay, so clearly that kind of definition of life is not good enough.

1:08:38 And you may say, well, you require a more complex definition of life. And you can create those things and not just metabolism, but self-regulating metabolism, which fire doesn’t have, right? I mean, and homeostasis is probably the key to life. The fact that systems have evolved to be able to regulate their metabolism so that they can self-replicate reliably. And then the real question and the unknown is not, how do we get the diversity of life?

1:09:13 I was just at Darwin’s house yesterday and I’m still amazed at Darwin and what he did. But the big open question is how does life originate? How did you go from chemistry to biology? And the answer is, we don’t know. But it is an area, I think, of all the open questions in my book that I talk about.

1:09:32 The origin of life is perhaps one that will be really reliably addressed in the perhaps the next decade. Partly by maybe looking for life elsewhere, looking for other genoces of life. But there’s also an amazing amount of work that’s going on to demonstrate life seems so unexpected and miraculous because it seems to violate the laws of physics, right? You know, entropy, things get more disordered, but life involves things getting more ordered. Well, it doesn’t violate the laws of physics in spite of what some crackpots write me regularly say.

1:10:09 Because the second law of thermodynamics is a closed system will always in some sense either remain the same or become more disordered. But life is most importantly not a closed system. We require energy from the sun or donuts or whatever in order to continue to function. And, but how can you build a complex, even at its basic form, a cell is incredibly complex. It’s one of the reasons people will talk about intelligent design because they don’t see how seemingly random, so they’re not random, but seemingly random systems can produce such a complicated system.

1:10:51 But there’s been a lot of work in the last 20 or 30 years to understand even, so we think a precursor to a DNA world is an RNA world. That RNA is still incredibly complex. How could you get there? Well, recently there’s been work showing that natural processes can produce the base, the bases, the nucleotide bases of RNA. And amino acids are founded comets.

1:11:16 And, you know, so there’s a lot of, what is really interesting, and maybe not surprising in retrospect, is that in exotic environments, processes that we think should drive us, chemistry that would drive us one way, normally takes complex things and breaks them down, can naturally take simple things and build complex things without any external shenanigans and these supernatural shenanigans. And what’s been discovered is in the extreme environments, either maybe associated with deep oceans or even in comets, that processes can happen that could naturally take organic materials and build up complex things like the bases of RNA. And that’s been recent developments in the last 10 or 20 years.

1:11:57 And so we may not, I’ve had this debate with my friend Richard Dawkins, in fact, will we know the origin of life? And the answer is he argues maybe not, but what we will do is maybe have a path that seems so likely that we say, oh yeah, that’s probably how it happened. But I think one of the quotes in my book related to consciousness was from Schrodinger, the physicist who developed quantum mechanics. He said, consciousness is a singular of which we don’t know of any plural.

1:12:27 But the same’s true for life. Life is a singular of which we know plural if we consider life to be all life on earth. What may teach us about life is to discover life elsewhere. Because if we discover, for example, life in the oceans of Europa, which has been separated from us, but we discover it uses ATP as power, it has the same DNA base pairs, it may tell us that there’s one unique chemistry that produces life. A lot of people think maybe that’s not the case.

1:12:55 I kind of, again, I’m miveling, I kind of think maybe it is driven to the same thing. We’ll find out. So we may find out more about life on earth by finding out about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Funny how that works sometimes. Why did you love Darwin’s house so much?

1:13:11 Because I admire Darwin so much. He’s such a remarkable human being and his life was every day based on waking up. And A, being a kind of fun father, who liked to play around with his kids, but also every day was experimenting. Every day was an experiment and thinking logically, you know, there’s this worm block, I think it’s called, where for 29 years he was trying to figure whether earthworms affect basically how soil and things build up and get destroyed.

1:13:44 And so over 29 years he measured the position of this rock to see how earthworms would take soil and put it up on the rock and the rock would go down. And I mean, the kind of things you wouldn’t think about doing, everything was fascinating for him. Every day was fascinating, these insect-eating plants and even his children in some ways became expressed, not in the same sense that B.F. Skinners might have, but he was just a consummate, curious human being and also had one of the most important ideas in all of science.

1:14:17 So for me, it’s just amazing to be there and be in the study where he wrote The Origin of Species, partly because I’m taking a group to the Galapagos in January and I just read The Voyage of the Beagle, I just wrote a piece on how amazing, I mean, he was not just a great scientist, but what a great writer. I mean, I thought it’d be boring sort of discussions of things and it’s great to be able to be able to do that. And it’s gripping, it’s an adventure story.

1:14:45 And he risked his life as a young man. It’s amazing to read The Voyage of the Beagle because you see all of the adventures he had that led him of course eventually to develop natural selection and evolution. But the adventures he had on the way are quite amazing and his reflections are fascinating. So I just wrote a piece on claiming that he was the greatest scientist writer. And it was based on the fact that years ago, I don’t think as I’ve told you before, hierarchically generally, but I was forced once to ask who’s bigger, better, more important scientist, Galileo or Einstein.

1:15:17 And I think Galileo, I mean not Galileo, Darwin or Einstein. And I said Darwin, because Einstein of course is a hero, but Einstein was a theorist. Darwin developed the most important theory in biology, but wasn’t a consummate experimentalist at the same time. He spent eight years of his life and you see this in the house, cataloging every kind of barnacle that exists in the world. And I heard when I was in the house that one of his kids said to another kid, what kind of barnacles do your father study?

1:15:52 You know that for him, all fathers study barnacles. But it was, evolution was based as much on incredibly careful observations as well as brilliant ideas. And so that made him the prototypical scientist because he was an observer, an experimentalist and a theorist. And that’s why I put him above Einstein. And Feynman always admired that as well, right?

1:16:17 He said you had to be able to do the work. Yeah, he once told me to, the way he put it, as I remember, and who knows if my memory is accurate, he who can do nothing knows nothing. But what he said on his blackboard, after he died, the words were written, there were a bunch of things on his blackboard. One was, if you can’t build it, you don’t understand it. So he was a theorist, but he was in touch with experiment.

1:16:41 And often demonstrated when experimenters, there are a few notable cases where experimenters have made claims based on experiments. And he looked at it and he said, no, you’re jumping inclusions. Because you want to know. In fact, it’s a bolt that’s in your experiment here that’s giving you this effect that you’re claiming is the discovery of a new particle. Right, okay.

1:16:59 He was great. It was because he was a prototypical skeptic. And of course, the Challenger disasters when the world saw that, when people were trying to figure out what was the disaster. He was a consummate showman. And he took this O-ring, people who were young don’t remember this, and put it in ice water on TV and showed how it wasn’t flexible any longer.

1:17:20 That was the O-ring was responsible for the Challenger disaster. He was involved in that. Yeah, he was on the commission. Yeah, and that was, and how did he find out about it? He went and talked to the engineers.

1:17:31 He didn’t read reports. He went and talked to them. And he loved that. He went and talked to them and tried to figure out what the problem was. And the way he demonstrated it was all much more show, like Barry Mason or Gil Perrault, but it was still fun.

1:17:46 Important part of it is the showman part, as you know. Yeah. What’s consciousness? Guess the answer to that is that- I’m surprised you put that in there. No, but well, I wanted to do it because I wanted to hit the key questions that people are interested in in science.

1:18:00 And I was scared of doing consciousness in a way because I’ve been suspicious. It’s the hardest thing. I spent the most time in that chapter because I’ve always been suspicious. Well, one of the reasons I became a physicist instead of biologist is because physics is so much easier. And I wanted to study the brain when I was younger, but it’s just so much more complicated.

1:18:21 And I was suspicious of consciousness because there’s so many books written about it. And I have a friend of mine in Phoenix who weekly will tell me, oh, this is a great book. This guy’s understood conscious. And then next week and next week, and then I read someone wrote once that you can tell how much we know about a subject and how much is written about it. The more that’s written, the less we know.

1:18:40 And I was suspicious about it. And then I discovered, well, I can’t even define consciousness accurately. But then as I started to look in this and I read those books by people, that’s why I write books too. It’s fun to learn and forces me to read books I wouldn’t read otherwise. And I became clear to me, no one understands consciousness.

1:18:59 Even the people who are doing it don’t define consciousness. And even in discussions I had with Chomsky later on, he said consciousness may be a red herring. Some people like time. They say consciousness may be an illusion. Well, big deal.

1:19:14 The world of our experience is an illusion. These chairs that are solid are really mostly empty space. That’s not interesting to say it’s an illusion. The question is how does that illusion arise? So consciousness is clearly an illusion.

1:19:26 I mean, it’s some clues we have put together of some linear sequence of events that are happening. It’s clear everything we know about the brain works. That’s probably what’s happening and we’re rationalizing, we’re creating realities in order to justify what we see and experience. And I give a great experiment, the split brain experiment of Gazzaniga and others that shows that the left brain and the right brain when they’re disconnected, the left brain which is where speech is, will make up explanations for why you see things that are not the case because that’s the way we work.

1:19:59 So the really interesting question is how does that illusion of consciousness arise? And we don’t know the answer. We learned a lot about the brain, but it’s probably the biggest unknown. And in my mind, the hardest one, perhaps I don’t know whether it’s gonna be a long time. I think because the brain is so complicated.

1:20:19 But like life, the way we may learn about consciousness is creating another consciousness, AI. So we may learn about how complex systems arise at self-awareness by creating a self-awareness in other places. And that may be the way we’ll learn about it. Again, I’m suspicious that it’s gonna take a lot longer than people think. One of the arguments that I think is very cogent is that consciousness arose in humans because of actually a homeostasis.

1:20:54 The need to self-regulate is central to life. But when you start to have a brain, when you start to have a complex body, you need a complex nervous system to self-regulate. And then you need to have feelings, actually feel pain. Pain is a big issue, a pleasure. And so those concepts of pain and pleasure arise at a very later stage in the part of the brain and how the prefrontal cortex addresses amygdala and stuff.

1:21:23 And it’s been stated, well, you know, an AI that can’t, and so if you’re gonna self-regulate, you gotta have nerves that feel, that probe the outside world as well as what’s going on inside. You gotta know whether you’re feeling pain or uncomfortable and all the rest. But you gotta feel the outside world. You see whether it’s hot, okay? And so it’s been argued that maybe you can’t ever build up a self-awareness in a chat GPT or something that doesn’t basically have nerves, that isn’t interfaced to the outside world in a real way.

1:21:58 These are interesting questions. It is interfaced to the outside world. Well, yeah, but in a direct way. So it can self-regulate itself. So it can know how it’s, it can address how it’s behaving.

1:22:09 And maybe we can do that with software. Maybe we don’t have to have robots that have sensory organisms. I don’t know the answer, but these are all interesting questions. It’s been interesting to see people’s reaction to can AI be sentient? And I do a lot of teaching on this.

1:22:25 I see a lot of students and I get the hands raised and the hands down and a bit like your magic tricks. It teaches you a lot about that person, right? Because, oh no, they could never be. It’s just a computer and we humans are all powerful and I’m this and that. And it’s interesting to see people kind of react, but then you say, okay, we’re a carbon-based life form.

1:22:44 This is a silicone-based life form. Now let’s take chat GPT in 10 years. Okay, let’s take it in 10,000 years. Okay, what’s it gonna look like then at the rate of innovation? Okay, then could it be possible?

1:22:55 Then what is sentience? And we start asking ourselves questions about ourselves, like you said. Of course, and you see how people are. People say, I’m scared that this can do things I can’t do. But there are other people and I happen to have this inclination.

1:23:07 I’m excited. I’m excited to meet people who do things I can’t do. And it’s the same with magic. People get angry if they’re tricked. I’m fascinated, because it’s neat.

1:23:16 And I’m fascinated by meeting people. And the older I get, I’m happy to say the more people I meet that do things I can’t do. I used to think I could do everything. And so I find AI fascinating because of the possibilities. For me, it’s the possibilities that are exciting, even though some of those possibilities are terrifying.

1:23:37 But that’s what I find about science in general, is the possibilities of the future are what make the future worth living for. One of the analogies that some of the AI scientists said, I thought was very interesting, I’m curious what you think about this, is that they talked about the way that we learned how to fly. And we didn’t do it by modeling a bird, even though that would seem the most obvious thing to do. But later, in retrospect, they said, but a bird has to all come in an egg, and it’s gotta then expand and create this flying machine.

1:24:06 And we realized all you have to do is, well, not all you have to do is get the tears shaped and put it over, and then all of a sudden it flies. Same with the artificial intelligence or whatever they’re doing now with the large language models. It’s not like a brain, actually. You dump all this information in, and these neural nets seem like they can actually output something that seems interesting. So then, maybe the way to create new consciousness or new intelligence is not the way that our brain.

1:24:31 Who knows? Who knows? But the point is that all the major developments are unexpected. If we wanted to build computers, if you just asked Bell Labs to build better computers in the 1940s, they were the wheels and pulleys, right? But then they invented the transistor, which had nothing to do with computers, but that created, so all the important discoveries are unforeseen.

1:24:53 Otherwise, they wouldn’t be discoveries. People always ask me, what’s the next big thing? And my answer’s always, if I knew, I’d be doing it. Right, right. Consciousness is definitely you going somewhere where you normally don’t go before.

1:25:06 Yeah, well, and people say, how dare you as a physicist deal with life and consciousness? And the answer is, well, first of all, they’re open, first of all, as a scientist, and I can say, if I can’t try and understand at least what the issues are, then how can I expect anyone to? So I wrote a book on climate change, and people say that you’re not a climatologist, and I say, well, if I can’t discuss climate change, then how can we have a sensible discussion in society?

1:25:33 But more importantly, actually, both life and consciousness, the early works on both have been done by physicists. And there are physics questions at some basic level.

1:25:47 How reductionists, understanding the brain is an interesting question. But many of the, I told you, Schrödinger was thinking about these things. He motivated, Schrödinger’s book, What is Life, actually motivated Jim Watson to not be an orthologist, but to go into genetics, right? And Max Delbruck was a physicist, well-known physicist, won the Nobel Prize for biology, again, related to life, because these physicists can ask these questions. And Schrödinger’s statement, consciousness is a singular, of which we don’t know the plural, is a very fascinating issue.

1:26:23 And so I think you can approach these questions as a physicist and learn. And so is consciousness a physical process? It’s a physics question at some basic level. And so, yeah, I remember someone writing me, how dare, actually I was on a trip in some obnoxious, actually a biologist who was there with a group of biologists, and believe me, I had, you know, many biologists. But basically he said, how dare you infringe on our domain by talking about life and consciousness?

1:27:01 That’s nonsense. Because part of the interesting thing is in the 21st century that 19th century disciplines, chemistry, physics, biology, are 19th century disciplines, but 21st century questions aren’t questions of physics, chemistry, or biology. Physics and biology, when I was a student, and many times I was discouraged and wanted to quit when I was doing my PhD, I thought of doing biophysics and doing a PhD and an MD, and making my mother very happy by being a doctor.

1:27:28 And I remember going to, at that time, the chairman of cell biology at Harvard, who was an uncle of a friend of mine, and saying, should I do biophysics? He said, don’t do biophysics. I said, why? And he said, because it’s not of interest to physicists and it’s not of interest to biologists. But that was then.

1:27:45 Now it’s the questions of physics. Many of the most interesting physics systems are biological systems, and the tools of physics are central to understanding biology. So these artificial subject boundaries are just that, they’re artificial. Do you think we’ll have conscious AI in the future? Who knows?

1:28:02 Silicone-based life forms. I don’t see any obstacle to it. I don’t see anything, I think all the evidence I can see is consciousness is physical, emergent. I don’t know what it takes to be emergent, but I don’t see, if it’s physical, then there’s no obstacle to ultimately creating it. So I see nothing about the brain that gives me evidence that’s impossible to have a conscious system.

1:28:29 But whether we can do it, already I know that there are, I know that it’s different. Because I know, and I think I put this in the book, and the numbers have changed a lot even in the last 10 years. And in the books, and probably the numbers have changed in the last few months since I wrote the book. So if you try and model what the computational ability of the human brain is, and that’s an open question, and say, how much energy would you have to have for a computer right now, an electronic computer?

1:28:55 They used to say 10 terawatts. Okay, and that’s as much energy as all of humanity uses. The human brain uses about 10 to 20 watts. That’s a factor of a million, million difference. So there clearly a difference in the processing, in the way the brain processes information.

1:29:11 Now, those numbers have changed tremendously. You know, by factors of a thousand or a million in terms of how much energy it takes for a computer to process things. But this is a million, million. And so there’s clearly some things where we don’t know. And we’ll see.

1:29:28 Will neural networks and AI allow us to do it? Will quantum computers allow us to do it? I don’t know, but I hope to be here to find out. You’re fresh from Darwin’s house. Is it possible that they will be the fittest and that we were just a part of the story to launching AI out into the universe?

1:29:47 Well, I certainly think we’re part of the story. The notion that we’re the ultimate apex of evolution is a conceit that Darwin realized was a conceit. Are we the extinct part of that species? Well, 99.9% of species are extinct. But you know, so who knows?

1:30:05 But we may be able to be a building block to something better or something worse or something different. I’m sure we’re a building block even if the future building blocks are humanity and a different type. Because right now, the real issue with humans, and this has to do with consciousness too, is that the chains that are happening to us are driven more by culture than by biology. First time in history, in the history of life, that culture changes the world and that changes at a much faster rate than biological systems can accommodate.

1:30:42 Biology, evolution is a very slow process. Culture is a very fast process. And so that collision of culture and biology is happening right now and where it leads, I don’t know. Let me ask you a question only you can answer. Right now, we see these AI scientists developing technology that could exterminate them.

1:31:08 And we saw maybe the same thing happening, you know, at. Nuclear weapons for sure. Yeah, in Los Alamos, you know, back in the day. And yet, if you see someone that’s dedicated decades of their lives, they grew up with this thing that one day I’ll solve this problem that seems unsolvable. You see a scientist that’s faced with creating something that could literally kill him or missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime, maybe the opportunity of a species to do so.

1:31:37 You know, I would argue that you probably are a mind like some of these minds and you work with these minds. And I had brief brushes with people like that at MIT. Well, what’s it like to be in that brain, an Oppenheimer brain or a brain where you’re looking at this problem that it’s just so tantalizing. It’s so sweet as I think Feynman may have said or someone, I think Feynman said, they put aside the moral or the ethical issues that problem itself was so seductive.

1:32:05 And the point is you look, scientists have to be true believers in some sense. The big difference is when they find out they’re wrong, they’re willing to throw that out. But you can’t spend 20 years of your life working on something without being driven to think it’s the apex of human existence or true. You know, string theorists have been working for many years. It may not be true, but they work very hard on it.

1:32:27 And so I think it’s like anything else. You’re driven, humans are hardwired to want to solve puzzles. That’s what makes it exciting. And these are tantalizing. And people are driven, sometimes driven to madness.

1:32:41 The great thing about science is it isn’t done by one person. When one person working alone on something for 20 years ends up producing something that’s nonsense, almost 99.99% of the time. If you lock the best physicists in the world in a room that didn’t let them have any access to what’s going on in experimental physicists, they come up with theories that are nonsense, okay? That’s why you always worry. I get letters every day from some people who are saying, I’ve been working on this my whole life and I’ve come up with a theory of everything, okay?

1:33:10 Science is a dialectic. It comes from a confronting and people being willing to be confronted by, critically, other people. It’s not safe, but that’s great. Not being safe is what it’s all about. And so I think that people are, of course, driven by their biases and predilections and interests.

1:33:32 But science progresses. The whole scientific process has been worked because it surpasses the myopia and the solipsism of individual human beings. It’s a dialectic that allows you to, you come up with something. It’s been questioned, it’s tested, and then if it works, okay, but it’s tested again. And so the scientific process has brought us in 400 years from Newton to us because it overcomes the vicissitudes of human life

1:34:07 And individual biases and predilections. Scientists, like it or not, are human beings. It’s a secret, but it’s true. And science, however, is something different. So it’s good that they get obsessed by these issues.

1:34:22 It’s okay because then it’s okay as long as you have the scientific community. So the community progresses by having this dialectic, by having this willing and open, active, critical discourse, which is what’s being so restricted in academia nowadays. So science can only progress if you not only have

1:34:46 My favorite line from the publisher of the New York Times. I like to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out. And science progresses only if you can have that critical conflict if the community will constantly question aggressively your ideas. So it’s great to have people follow their interests and most of them are wrong because then every now and now you’ll be right. And so science progresses by having a lot of people following their interests.

1:35:18 And most scientists are not trying to save the world. They’re just doing what they like to do because you couldn’t do it for a whole life if you didn’t enjoy it. You said culture is outpacing biology and we’re at a point where maybe there’s not critical review of ideas. Where are we going next, Lawrence? What do we have to do?

1:35:36 I told you, I don’t make predictions about things less than two trillion years in the future. It could be wonderful or awful and it’s up to us. I wrote a phrase in my climate change book that I like a lot. It’s that the future is racing towards us like a freight train but it’s doing so on tracks that we built. So it’s up to us.

1:35:56 Up to us and fortune favors the prepared mind. So we have to keep thinking about what the possibilities are. But one thing is certain is the most exciting things in the future are those things we have and the slightest idea about now. That’s for sure. And what do we do if we are frustrated by some of the things we talked about today?

1:36:14 The wokeism, et cetera. Because you can’t point your finger at that because there’s a little bit of that in all of us somehow. Of course there is. We first have to question ourselves and it’s the hardest thing to do. What we can do is try and fight it.

1:36:26 Okay, I think, I forget who said it. I was just reading the quote. And there’s Einstein who said the big problem is not bad people but people who don’t do anything about bad people. But we can try and do something about it. And many of us feel helpless whether it’s climate change or I prefer to think of it as ideology.

1:36:47 And the answer is some of us have bigger soap boxes than others. And so I think we’re obliged if we have the soap box to speak out and not to be afraid to speak out. And I like to think that’s been something I’ve felt my whole life. But we all have neighbors and communities and children and interactions with others so we can speak and we have an obligation to try and speak out against those things or at least raise questions among ourselves and among our neighbors and children and friends so that these issues are openly discussed.

1:37:23 Because I think that’s the only way we’ll go forward. And it’s the bias of an educator. It’s the only tool you have to hammer. Everything looks like a nail. And I think by asking questions and raising questions at home and in your community, that’s the only way we’ll move forward.

1:37:40 What do you do when people try to censor you or cancel you or block you? What do you do? I just go on and do what I can do. Just keep doing what you can do. I can’t control it.

1:37:49 And a lot of times I say I can’t control whether I’m canceled in some places I am and I can’t control when I’m censored but I can just continue to do what I’m gonna do. I’m a big believer that Sisyphus was smiling as Kim would say. Push that, walk up the hill and just keep pushing it. That’s something Robert Kennedy said recently. He said that the thing they don’t tell you about Sisyphus is that he was enjoying himself because he had something to do.

1:38:17 Well, that’s what, yeah, but that’s Kimu’s famous line about Sisyphus, is Sisyphus was smiling. And I talked to you before and about the well-known people I know have been canceled attempting to just do the work. Just do the work. Focus on what you can control. Because what else can we do?

1:38:34 What else can we do? I mean, we were here for a little while. Might as well do it. And luckily, you have lots of people you’ve met throughout the years that you continue to collaborate with. You’ll be speaking in Birmingham with Richard Dawkins and you have a lot of people that you continue to create with.

1:38:48 Happily, there are people who still talk to me. Right. The book is called In the UK, The Known Unknowns, Unresolved Mysteries of the Cosmos in the U.S. It’s called The Edge of Knowledge. Right.

1:39:01 And it was that way because my publishers had now thought that a quote from Donald Runsel would be too contentious. And the interesting thing is that my publishers are not left-wing publishers, they’re right-wing publishers, but they still thought. And I agree with them about the context of not turning people off before they even read the book. And you know, you want to, teaching is seduction, so you want to at least have someone have a willingness to keep their mind open.

1:39:27 But because that quote is not known as well. And I will say that the title wasn’t mine, it was my British publishers. And I think it’s a lovely title, The Known Unknowns. It’s a beautiful title. It’s a fascinating book.

1:39:38 I’m so glad you went into the consciousness. Me too. It’s great to see you in your element. There’s a great lecture where you’re talking about this online where I can just see just, you come alive when you talk about this stuff. You’re fantastic in front of audiences.

1:39:50 And like, this is what you’re a curious guy, always asking questions, always there to entertain people. And all you can do is keep moving on, right? Yeah, let’s keep moving on. And as I say, I think, you know, if you want to see someone who really watch Feynman and as I say, I try and channel Feynman if I can, but I’m no Feynman. That’s a beautiful thing to do.

1:40:12 And look, I would just say to anybody who’s watching or listening that we are in some interesting, challenging times. And these issues are here, they’re all going to be here for a while. And yet, if you had someone in the room with you and you could have a conversation face-to-face for an extended period of time, you’d be amazed as the common ground you could come to. Yeah, conversations, common ground. And disagreement, as I said, science proceeds by disagreement.

1:40:38 Doesn’t mean we hate each other. It means we disagree and we, but you’re willing to say you’re wrong. The, you know, it was long before, long before it was probably Hume, but long before Hitchens said this, you know, free speech is not, the purpose of free speech is not to have people, give people the freedom to speak. The real value of free speech is people have the freedom to listen and find they’re wrong. That’s what it’s all about because you’ll never find out you’re wrong if you don’t talk to someone who disagrees with you and say, you know what, they’re actually making a point.

1:41:14 And it’s easier, maybe it’s easier the older, some people they become more entrenched. But being wrong is a wonderfully liberating experience. And I’ve said this for years, the purpose of education is to make you uncomfortable. But my hope is that every student, and if they go to higher education or even secondary education, that sometime in that education, they’ll have an idea that they think is central to their being proved to be wrong. Because boy, there’s nothing better than that than opening your mind to realize that the way you think the universe is may not be the way the universe really is.

1:41:50 So true, so true. If I look at the evolution of me over the last 12 years on this show, each major step has been me realizing I was wrong. And that’s how I went forward into this brand new reality that was like, oh my gosh, this is it. And I was blocked in my head before a mental block because I was like, oh no, that’s wrong. And it usually involves someone coming, having a long-form conversation, and me meditating on it for weeks, months, and years.

1:42:18 And then I literally evolved Darwin like into something. You adapted probably more than evolved, but anyway. And in 2020, when we were being censored, I kind of went deep and thought, what is freedom of speech? And I had Michael Schirmer come on, and he said the same thing you said. He said, it’s about having the freedom to be able to listen to someone.

1:42:36 And what you’ll find out a lot of times is when you have to listen to someone or even have a conversation about it, you’ll realize that all of your assumptions about your point of view sometimes are just this kind of paper house of cards that you actually haven’t thought it through, your ideas haven’t been tested. And when you think about it, you’re like, actually, why is that? I don’t really have a good answer, right? And you’ll start to question the assumptions you made.

1:42:59 That’s, by the way, I’m sorry to interrupt you because it’s profound what you’re saying, but that’s one of the reasons why I write books. It’s easy to say stuff, but when you write a book and you write it down, it seems more, you suddenly think, I really didn’t understand that. You feel that it’s more permanent and you take it much more seriously. And I have learned so much from writing because the things I thought I understood before I wrote a book or before I wrote about them.

1:43:27 And so that’s, for me, the joy of writing books. They say, if you wanna learn something, teach it. Yeah, absolutely. And teaching is another example in the process of teaching. There’s lots of subjects in physics where I thought I understood it till I taught it.

1:43:40 Yeah, so I’d say to anybody who’s listening or watching, get yourself in a conversation with someone who maybe opposes your views. So if you’re anti-woke, people hang out with some woke people. Woke people hang out with some anti-woke people and really try to understand their perspective and have it test yours and also understand that they’re human. They actually probably want a better world just like you do. And they’re not some weird alien thing and that maybe you can find some common ground.

1:44:07 Yeah, you might find common ground or you at least change your mind and or at least find out that you don’t know and be willing to be excited about the known unknowns. What a beautiful concept. All right, I wanna find out more stuff I don’t know. There’s the book, again, The Known Unknowns, Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos. Lawrence, thanks for being you.

1:44:24 Keep being you, keep doing all your stuff out there and let’s do this again next time you’re in love. Yeah, it’s a great, I really enjoy it. I always enjoyed my conversation with you, so thanks. And I love this one too. All right, thank you sir.