In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Aaron Ross Powell to talk about his new podcast, Mindscape, and how he's using it as a platform to discuss anything and everything. We talk about how he got into science, why he decided to start a podcast, and what he's looking forward to doing in the future. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to do what you love with your time and energy. Thank you so much to Dr. Ross Powell for coming on the pod and joining the ranks of the podcasters. We need more people like him in the field of science and philosophy, and we need more of them like him out there. If you're interested in learning more about science, philosophy, history, economics, politics, or religion, you should definitely check out Mindscape. It's a great place to start, and it's a good place to learn and grow. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about what you're doing! I'll see you next week! See you then! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's your favorite topic? 4:30 - What are you looking for in a guest? 5:20 - What do you want to hear me talk about? 6:00 7:15 - Why you should listen to someone else's opinions about something else? 8:40 - Why do you have a problem? 9:00- Why you're willing to listen to your opinions about politics? 10:30- Why should you listen to somebody else's opinion about something? 11:00 -- Why you can't take the time to do it? 12:30 -- why you're not interested in those things? 13:40 -- What's a problem you're a problem that's a whole problem you should take the more than you can listen to it? 14:20 -- why I'm willing to let someone else listen to the opinions of someone else do it better? 15:50 -- Why I think it's absurd? 16:15 -- How do you should be willing to do the time? 17:00 | Why I don't listen to my opinions about things I'm a problem I can't make the time I don t have a whole bunch of things I can do that I'm interested in? 18:30 | What's the problem I'm gonna listen to? 19:00-- Is it a problem of that?
00:00:36.000The thing that tilted me over toward doing it, because look, I have a day job, right?
00:00:42.000I can't spend too much time doing this stuff.
00:00:45.000But what I realized, it was an excuse, a license to talk to people who are not just physicists, right?
00:00:51.000Because I have intellectual interests that go way beyond just what I do for a living, and in academia, you're not allowed to take seriously anything other than your Your discipline, your job, right?
00:01:01.000I'm allowed to be talking about physics but nothing else.
00:01:04.000So now I can talk to historians and economists and philosophers and psychologists and it's great.
00:01:08.000Well, you could have just gone to Evergreen State and then you could talk about anything.
00:01:13.000When you're teaching a professor, you could just – if you're a professor, you could teach them dance.
00:01:22.000So your podcast, you decided that this would be a great venue for you to just expand on subjects and just get into anything that you'd like.
00:01:32.000Well, you know, I have opinions about things and I've never been one who said you shouldn't talk about things unless you're a PhD credentialed expert, right?
00:01:40.000I think everyone should be talking about everything, but you should know what your level of expertise is.
00:01:45.000So if you're not an expert, you should listen to people and you should then make your own decisions, but you should first gather the information.
00:01:52.000And so I don't feel quite like I can go – I have a blog, whatever I want on my blog, but I can't really – I can expound on my theories of economics because what do I know about economics?
00:02:02.000But I can call up a very expert economist and chat with them on the podcast and both I will learn something and hopefully the listeners will.
00:02:10.000So you're going to just basically talk about anything.
00:02:12.000The shtick is we sort of try to pick an idea, right?
00:02:17.000So for the hour or whatever it is, I don't have your stamina.
00:02:19.000I can't do the two-and-a-half-hour thing.
00:02:26.000But yeah, for an hour, hour and a half, I'll get someone who's an expert and we'll dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on in sort of everyday people's language and how it fits into the bigger picture and things like that.
00:02:41.000Trying to mix up, you know, good old professors, which are my peer group, to sort of – I got some people coming out of left field.
00:05:08.000And that's really what the deal is with YouTube comments.
00:05:12.000It's just that the sheer number of people, the problem is that YouTube has a dedicated I don't know why, but that platform seems to attract some of the worst in people that comment.
00:05:27.000And I'm, you know, I cannot claim that I'm immune to reading it and getting annoyed, right?
00:06:23.000And so I think that part of the many hidden purposes of my podcast, one of them is to – Dissolve the boundary between science and the rest of our intellectual life, right?
00:06:34.000Like sometimes I'll be talking about science, sometimes I won't.
00:06:37.000Like we tend to silo off science as a thing and then like economics and history and political science is another thing that is out there and relevant to the world and science is something that is sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of people.
00:07:19.000So I put up with that but I'm not seeking it out.
00:07:22.000So I would like this utopia of rational discourse where everyone is talking about ideas in a dispassionate way and in good faith looking toward – moving toward the truth.
00:07:33.000It would be nice if we had like a system, like almost like a rating system for humans, like a Yelp for commentators.
00:07:58.000Yeah, I mean, I think we're probably going to move to some sort of a system like that.
00:08:02.000In fact, some people are actually advocating that for society to have some sort of a rating system for people and almost a new kind of currency, like a social currency.
00:08:20.000It's scary for people, though, because it's China.
00:08:23.000And, you know, China is a trippy place, and it's very trippy in terms of it's sort of got capitalism going, but it's also a communist dictatorship, and it's controlled by the government, and all the companies are also in...
00:08:45.000It's now the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world, and they're forbidden to work with US carriers.
00:08:53.000The United States government does not trust this company, so they've said, you know, this company has apparently done Some shading things according to them, not according to certain tech people who say it's nonsense.
00:09:05.000So now they're keeping them from selling their cell phones with AT&T and T-Mobile and whatever.
00:09:12.000But they're the number two manufacturer in the world now.
00:09:22.000It's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful because there are people who don't like it.
00:09:29.000There are people who rebel against the system but they've been so – the government has been so enormously successful at controlling information, controlling what you learn.
00:09:36.000Like you can't Google Tiananmen Square if you're there in China.
00:09:40.000You can't get those images or anything like that.
00:09:43.000Companies want to do business there, so they'll go along with it.
00:09:49.000I talked about this in my last podcast with Yasha Monk.
00:09:51.000I'm not sure that democracy is stable either.
00:09:53.000So when the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly, huge abuses and huge changes are on the horizon even if we don't know what they're going to be.
00:10:03.000I mean that's – That's my worry about the social credit system, right?
00:10:06.000Like it's so obviously abusable, right?
00:10:09.000Make the wrong people have bad credit, make the people you like have – I mean if this is run by the government, you're going to trust them to do it fairly?
00:11:22.000There was a Radiolab podcast where these people that were Trump supporters detailed being contacted By these Russian troll farms, where they organized these rallies, and they organized these protests,
00:12:45.000And what's the best way to preserve that?
00:12:46.000Well, someone's attacking me, attack the people who are attacking me.
00:12:49.000Yeah, you build yourself up by creating an enemy that everyone can agree on, right?
00:12:54.000One of the chilling things that Yasha pointed out, there's really – despite the rhetoric, there's never been a successful truly multi-ethnic democracy in the history of the world.
00:13:06.000Like democracies that have worked have worked because one group is the boss, right?
00:13:10.000And they give rights to the rest of the people and so forth and try to be fair to some extent.
00:13:17.000As the demographics of the world are changing, we're becoming more of the patchwork that we claimed to be years ago, and people aren't quite happy with that.
00:13:27.000They're not comfortable with it, and this is something that can be used to gin up emotional reactions.
00:13:45.000And it's – and I'm sympathetic with the real problems, right?
00:13:49.000There are real problems with inequality and With healthcare and with jobs and not just the number of jobs, but the jobs are changing.
00:13:56.000Not everyone is really tooled up to be a high-tech office worker in this day and age.
00:14:01.000And so I take those concerns really, really seriously.
00:14:04.000But those concerns are being channeled in very unproductive ways to scapegoat people who don't deserve it.
00:14:10.000One of the things that's fascinating to me that seems to be boiling under the surface is the possibility that we might need some sort of universal basic income to deal with what's happening with AI and automation.
00:14:28.000Cars, automation of normal jobs, food preparation, things that people have come to just take for granted that a human's going to be doing that.
00:14:37.000It's entirely possible that millions and millions and millions of people are going to be out of work within a very short period of time.
00:14:43.000And it seems to me that it's one of those really sneaky things that might just catch us before we're ready for it.
00:14:48.000Yeah, I think that if you extrapolate very far ahead into the future and imagine what utopia is supposed to look like or the far technologically advanced civilization, why wouldn't we imagine that work is done by robots and machines and human beings are free to be creative or artistic or athletic or just sit on their butts if that's what they want to do?
00:15:19.000I have no idea whether it works in practice.
00:15:24.000But I think it should be taken seriously as an idea.
00:15:27.000If you looked at it as a pessimist, if you looked at it with a cynical perspective, you'd say, well, people just – they don't have motivation.
00:15:34.000Then they behave like rich kids or entitled people or people who won the lottery.
00:15:48.000Who am I to tell people that they need to be virtuous by earning a living in some job that they may or may not be able to keep for very long?
00:16:00.000Yeah, and I always feel like the people that are actually ambitious...
00:16:03.000But the real problem, I think, would be growing up with that.
00:16:07.000I think if you got it as an adult, you'd probably recognize it as a safety net that it is.
00:16:13.000But if it was during your developmental process, you might rely on it as a constant, and so that might be a problem in terms of motivation.
00:16:23.000I think so and I think that – and you see it, right?
00:16:25.000I mean I have friends at various levels of income and class that they grew up in and you can always tell people who grew up in very comfortable environments because they don't have jobs.
00:17:23.000And your parents need to sort of encourage that.
00:17:29.000Parents matter when it comes to like if you are very wealthy, do you feel like you deserve it or do you feel like, oh, I should give something back because I'm really, really fortunate, right?
00:17:38.000Well, there's cockamamie ideas that come from people that haven't earned their money, too.
00:17:42.000One guy came to me with this crazy idea for this project he's doing and wanted me to get involved in it, and I was going over the details of it.
00:17:49.000I was like, I don't think this is going to work.
00:17:50.000Why is this guy so enthusiastic about it?
00:17:53.000And then the more I dug into it, I'm like, oh, he got all this money from his dad.
00:18:44.000You know, and actually I never tell people like follow your passion or find what you love because look, there's a lot of people who need to earn a living, right?
00:18:50.000There's a lot of people who just need to do work because they need to pay the bills.
00:19:04.000There are some things, though, that you can do for a living that you'll actually enjoy.
00:19:09.000Like, you need to make a living, but because of your temperament, because of your interests, you can find a thing, whether it's carpentry or whatever it is that you find to be fascinating and fulfilling when you're actually doing it.
00:19:22.000You're making a living, but you're also doing something that, man, this is very satisfying.
00:20:24.000I'm sure that there's depths to the country that I didn't perceive, but it was coming to life.
00:20:29.000Literally, the week we were there was the first McDonald's was opening in Vietnam, which is not good, but at least it meant we were there in a pre-McDonald's society, right?
00:21:35.000I'm like, oh, no, it was 1912. It was not a communist dictatorship at the time.
00:21:39.000And there's a great tragedy in the way that China has been sort of repressed for so long.
00:21:45.000I think there's an immense – There's potential and promise there but it's also the possibility that they just remain this autocracy forever and some people's lives improve and a lot of people's just drudgery for billions of people.
00:22:14.000And China found this little bit of balance where they still have the repressive dictatorship but they give enough freedom for people to be ambitious and try to get ahead and that improves the economy and they make some terrible mistakes, right?
00:22:28.000There are these huge cities that are built and no one lives there, right?
00:22:30.000And there's these spooky pictures, right?
00:22:33.000Trevor Burrus You've seen the recreations of other large cities like Paris?
00:22:38.000And sometimes like cities like Shenzhen, like right next to Hong Kong, it's a city of 5 million people that 30 years ago was 50,000 people, right?
00:22:45.000Like it just – they built it in a couple of years.
00:22:49.000And other places like, oh, we'll build a shopping mall here and it's just instantly – it looks like Detroit the next day.
00:22:55.000There's no one there and no one makes – No one builds anything.
00:23:02.000It's still a planned economy and there's pluses and minuses for that, no doubt.
00:23:07.000One of the big fears about China is their experimentation with genetics.
00:23:11.000Is that they're willing to do things ethically that scientists in America and a lot of parts of the Western world are not willing to engage in yet.
00:23:21.000Including the use of CRISPR on human embryos.
00:23:50.000But it's very unclear what it will mean because we're not any good right now at figuring out how genetics turns – how your DNA turns into a person, right?
00:23:58.000It might be that we find something that if you change this particular gene, sure, you can live twice as long, but also you'll have Parkinson's disease when you're 14. We don't know what the interdependencies are and stuff like that.
00:24:15.000I think that the idea that we will be choosing embryos to come to term and be people on the basis of their genes before they're implanted in A uterus is 100 percent.
00:24:43.000What I'm more worried about is that people figure out a system that will make – you can have a baby who's guaranteed to be tall and beautiful and smart and live for 150 years and it will cost you a million dollars.
00:24:59.000Then that will be a little bit unfair, right?
00:25:01.000That will be an issue that will come up.
00:25:53.000It's different psychologically because we think it's different winning the lottery than already being rich and therefore being able to afford something that changes who you are.
00:26:20.000But I think if you look at it objectively, if you look at the interactions of the species as a completely outside observer, you would say not only is this inevitable, but this is going to lead to some really spectacular changes in what a human being is.
00:26:36.000Like think about a big part of what Yeah.
00:27:58.000You can get one for a few hundred bucks, and it's way bigger and way better than what it was back then.
00:28:02.000Yeah, and I think actually that's very realistic, that maybe it will be a million dollars, but then 10 years later it will be $100,000.
00:28:07.000It has to sort of be a million dollars first.
00:28:10.000It kind of just like cell phones, like everything else, it has to be a really expensive thing, and then eventually it trickles down.
00:28:17.000Like cell phones and becomes available everywhere to everybody.
00:28:20.000Like if you look at the average person's cell phone, if you buy a cheap cell phone for like 300 bucks, it is way better than an iPhone from 10 years ago.
00:29:37.000The reality is that evolution programmed aging and death into us because once we have kids or once we've outlived our reproductive lifespan, we're not useful anymore.
00:29:53.000It might not happen 100 years from now, but it could.
00:29:56.000So I think that aging, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, all that stuff is going to – within the next 100 years totally change what it means to be a human being and we're totally not ready for it.
00:30:18.000My attitude was, no, actually we should think of the absolute craziest science fiction scenarios because I want to be prepared, right?
00:30:25.000Even if it doesn't come to pass, I want to worry about the least probable things because it might spark something that actually helps us down the road.
00:30:53.000Well, then if you thought you were immortal, if you thought – well, let's say you thought that your average lifespan was a million years.
00:30:57.000Would you suddenly become way more cautious?
00:31:00.000I'd start jumping off buildings and shit.
00:32:06.000It doesn't violate the laws of physics, but it's hopelessly impractical compared to anything we can do right now.
00:32:11.000The human brain is just not something you can read out, right?
00:32:14.000Well, my question, and this was something that really concerned me, was what's to keep someone from making hundreds of thousands of versions of themselves?
00:32:22.000Like, what if it takes someone from some, you know, really rich billionaire character that can afford to do this and say, I'm going to do this many, many times.
00:32:31.000Then I'm going to have my clones make clones of clones, and I'm going to fill up a whole island with me.
00:32:48.000What if you found out that 30 of the Sean Carrolls were smoking crack, and banging hookers, and driving fast on the highway in the wrong direction?
00:34:23.000It's a little too applied, a little too real world for my taste.
00:34:26.000For people to know what we're talking about, it's a new technique for editing genes that was discovered accidentally while examining the effects of...
00:34:47.000It's a little list of symbols, A, C, G, T. And they're in a row and that's it.
00:34:53.000It is handed down from parents to children.
00:34:55.000But the reality is way more complicated than that because different parts of the DNA do things and different ones don't.
00:35:03.000Some of them get turned on and turned off.
00:35:04.000We have mitochondrial DNA, which are not our DNA. We have these little sub-cells within us that get carried along for the ride and have their own DNA. And So CRISPR is this thing that was invented by nature, right?
00:35:53.000This is a little bit fanciful way of putting it, metaphorical, but they could train the bacteria to go in there, snip out pieces of DNA, and you can do that for any DNA you want, and you can replace it with something else.
00:36:06.000It's not really very high precision right now, but that's coming.
00:36:10.000And so in principle, this is a little way to change a genetic code.
00:36:17.000And then they figured out some other way that ordinarily, right, if you have two parents and you have like brown eyes versus blue eyes and blue eyes are recessive.
00:36:27.000So they both need to have the blue eye gene to give you if you want to have blue eyes.
00:36:31.000But they figured out a way that you can change the DNA and it automatically with 100 percent accuracy gets sent to all of your offspring, right?
00:37:15.000They're already manipulating genetics and trying to create super people.
00:37:19.000And I think that the chances that gives them a great basketball team are greater than the chances that give them a bunch of brilliant PhD scientists.
00:37:46.000And he decided to document what he wanted to do was compete in a race, a bike race, 100% clean, and then get a Russian scientist to juice him up.
00:37:58.000So in the process of getting this Russian scientist to juice him up, he stumbled upon a scandal.
00:38:05.000And in the middle of him making this...
00:38:07.000Yeah, but I mean, in a crazy way, because this Russian guy is the head of the anti-doping agency in Russia.
00:38:13.000And he was just sort of informing him how you would do this.
00:38:17.000So he teaches him, informs him how you can do this.
00:38:19.000While this is all going on, it turns out that the Russians had completely cheated their way through the Sochi Olympics.
00:38:56.000And so then he starts detailing the process and how they did it, and they use forensic tests to examine the urine bottles and show that they've been opened, even though they're supposedly not openable, and really, really interesting stuff.
00:39:42.000If you lost a leg and you have a prosthetic leg, could that potentially give you an advantage in a running event or something like that if it were a sufficiently good prosthetic?
00:39:51.000I don't know the answer to any of these questions.
00:39:54.000I think it's a little bit weird because – We set up these arbitrary categories for what is a sporting event and we invented them, right?
00:40:01.000They're not out there in the world and now we're faced with wholly different circumstances to what to do about it.
00:40:06.000But yeah, I think that there's the question of what we should do, which is hard.
00:40:10.000There's the question of what's going to happen, which is it's all going to happen.
00:40:46.000Well, this is what I was saying about the brain-computer interfaces.
00:40:49.000I think that's the real – that's even bigger frontier than synthetic biology or genetic engineering because computers are really useful for things.
00:41:00.000Human beings are just going to sort of blend in.
00:41:02.000It's not like we're going to have AI and super healthy humans.
00:41:05.000It's we're going to just have everywhere on that spectrum.
00:41:08.000Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well.
00:41:10.000There's going to be some sort of a symbiotic thing like a chip or, you know, they tried it with the Google glasses to try to get people to wear it, but they were goofy.
00:42:20.000I mean right now, companies that want to make money in the short term are building these non-surgical, non-invasive things.
00:42:27.000We like wear something on the front of your head or wear a cap or something like that.
00:42:31.000Which can detect frequencies of vibrations in your brain, and it's very primitive, but you can move things around.
00:42:37.000You can control drones, right, with your brain without touching anything.
00:42:41.000But yeah, if it ever becomes practical, which is very far from certain, but the thing to imagine in the far-out science fiction scenario is cracking open your skull, inserting some electrodes in there, closing it back up, and now you're part of the super internet without doing anything more than closing your eyes.
00:43:00.000Yeah, and there's also the possibility of enhancing various thought processes, too, with transdermal stimulation.
00:43:10.000They've performed a series of tests where they have people do certain tasks, and then they put electrodes into certain areas of the brain and put an electric charge, and that electric charge stimulates various aspects of the brain and then allows them to complete certain tasks quicker and more efficiently.
00:43:30.000I think – and this is just kind of uninformed belief.
00:43:33.000But I suspect that the human brain is pretty optimized for what it tries to do.
00:43:39.000I think that rather than improving the brain or stimulating it, the way forward is to augment it, like hook it up to calculators and internet and whatever.
00:43:47.000One thing that – I don't see talked about very much, but I think will be a real game changer.
00:43:52.000We talk about phones as if we're carrying around phones, but we don't mostly use our phones to talk to people on the phone, right?
00:43:59.000We check the email, check the internet, and we take pictures.
00:44:03.000Once you really have, and again, it might not be possible, but if you really had a direct connection between your brain and the internet, your eyeballs are a video camera.
00:44:14.000Everything you see you can record and store somewhere, right?
00:44:18.000So – and you can lend them to other people or people can subpoena them or whatever.
00:44:23.000Like there's literally no place in the world that human eyeballs aren't looking at that would not be subject to later inspection.
00:44:30.000That is weird and scary and bad, right?
00:44:46.000I think I absolutely agree that enhancing it with electronics is probably the way to go and that having some sort of symbiotic relationship with electronics.
00:44:56.000But I also think that this transdermal stimulation can enhance that process on top of it.
00:45:01.000I think there's going to be a bunch of different things going on at once.
00:45:24.000Yeah, and I think that there is a short-term versus long-term question here, right?
00:45:27.000Like even if what I said is a long-term truth, on the short-term, improving our thinking skills in direct ways with stimulation or whatever sounds pretty good.
00:45:35.000But maybe you can just do that through beta blockers or some drugs or something like that.
00:45:40.000Like I think that that's another thing very plausible that we'll have safe, super-efficient drugs someone can take in over the next six hours.
00:45:47.000They're way clearer thinkers than they were before, right?
00:45:51.000Is there any concern with what's the endgame?
00:46:06.000Yeah, a little challenge is helpful, actually.
00:46:09.000Well, in particular, if you develop immortality, if there's no concern about getting injured or killed, I think that people who envision super far ahead science fiction scenarios and especially people who envision uploading brains and consciousness underestimate the importance of our bodies to who we are as human beings,
00:47:33.000There's a lot of talk in the AI existential risk community, like worrying about artificial intelligence, about value alignment, like making sure that the AI's Value the same things that we do, like our existence, for example, right?
00:47:49.000But I think a little bit, at least what I hear, and I'm not an expert, but what I hear seems a little bit off the mark because they're talking about what to program into the AI. But if it's in any sense really an AI, it can reprogram itself.
00:48:10.000Artificial intelligences should be able to do the same thing.
00:48:13.000And in fact, they better be able to do that if they're going to be truly intelligent, if they're going to mimic what a human being can do.
00:48:19.000It can't be something where we program them to just do a task because that's not intelligent, right?
00:48:24.000So if that happens, yeah, then who knows what they're going to eventually be motivated to do if anything.
00:48:30.000Like you said, like what is their motivation even to do anything at all or even to exist?
00:48:34.000Well, isn't one of the big concerns is that in releasing artificial technology and giving it autonomy that what we're going to do is start a process that's some sort of a perpetual exponential domino effect Of technology where this new artificial life is going to create better artificial life,
00:48:56.000which creates better artificial life, which expands to godlike powers within a very short period of time and decides we're stupid and useless and just eliminates us.
00:49:07.000And then it gets bored and shuts itself off.
00:49:08.000Yeah, it goes, what are we doing here?
00:49:10.000The sun's going to burn out in X amount of billion years.
00:49:12.000These are hard things to even extrapolate because they're so far beyond our experience.
00:49:16.000But I do think that We're opening up doors that we never have before between genetic modifications of human beings, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces.
00:49:28.000We don't have the experience or the capacity to really even ask the right questions about these things.
00:49:57.000We want to save things for the future generations.
00:50:01.000And all these concerns that we have that are very biological, they just won't exist for artificial life.
00:50:07.000I think that's exactly right and I think that what we're really good at or what we're better at in terms of imagining the future is taking what already exists and just expanding it, right?
00:50:16.000Like so when people – I think maybe we talked about this on the last podcast.
00:50:20.000But when people first started imagining mechanical devices to carry you around, mechanical transportation in the late 1800s, They imagined a mechanical horse because they knew that horses existed, right?
00:50:34.000And the car was a totally different thing and people hadn't thought of that originally.
00:50:37.000And then when people did think of cars, they thought of flying cars because they saw they were flying animals, right?
00:50:41.000And the flying cars haven't appeared because we didn't – what they should have been thinking about is how are cars going to change our cities and our commutes and how we live, right?
00:50:51.000When people invented the internet, they weren't sure what they were going to do with it.
00:50:55.000And I think that the same thing is true when – If we can imagine blending the barrier between our biological existence and some virtual existence, we don't even know what questions to ask about that.
00:51:30.000Where they're going to replace stuntmen in movies that could potentially get harmed with these robots that can do crazy backflips and jump off buildings.
00:51:39.000The next big war is going to look very, very different than the last big war.
00:51:46.000But if it does, yeah, there's a big emphasis on automated things, not just drones, but physical things that are running around on the ground.
00:52:58.000I mean, we're doing it right now with drones.
00:53:00.000You know, if you talk to people that have paid attention and studied drone warfare and how Incredibly inhumane it is and how different it is from any other type of warfare in terms of the ability to rationalize targets when you're not there and you're nowhere near and you're just pressing buttons and you decide,
00:53:26.000well, there's a very good possibility this person's in here.
00:53:40.000If you looked at the amount of people that have delivered pizzas with drones versus the amount of people that have been killed by drones...
00:54:05.000You know, interfacing with computers, with this idea of drones doing some drudgery work, with this idea of giving people a basic income, everyone is just gonna sit in their rooms and write on their tumblers all day.
00:54:16.000I don't think they're going to be writing anymore.
00:54:17.000I think there's a real possibility that we're going to create virtual reality that's indistinguishable from regular reality and people are going to live in there like Ready Player One.
00:54:29.000I think the big flaw to me in things like Tron or Ready Player One is that they make the virtual reality look too much like the real reality.
00:54:36.000There's no reason why virtual reality has to have gravity.
00:54:39.000There's no reason why it has to be three-dimensional.
00:54:42.000There's no reason why you have any limit on how strong you are or how fast you are or anything like that.
00:54:48.000There's no reason why you have to have only one body.
00:54:50.000I mean, there's a million different ways in which it could be very, very different.
00:54:52.000Well, it also could be implemented with something like the tank, the float tank that we were talking about earlier.
00:54:57.000I mean, you could climb into that float tank with some sort of apparatus, hook these gloves on, put this helmet over, and literally not be subject to the whims of gravity.
00:55:09.000The effects of gravity will be inconsequential because you will feel like you're floating, and then from there you'll be able to fly around and do all sorts of...
00:55:18.000Yeah, I think like this weird period between the year 1900 and 2000 or 2100 or whatever it's going to be, it will be a weird transitional period in human history where we invented technology and not really put it to work yet.
00:55:32.000And there might be some equilibrium that we reach in 100 or 200 years where the whole mode of life is utterly different than what it is now.
00:55:39.000If you could put priorities in terms of like what you think people should concentrate on first, In regards to this kind of stuff, what do you think those would be?
00:55:50.000If someone said, Sean, you're a super smart dude, let's get on the ball here and figure out what direction should we take this in?
00:55:58.000I mean, what I do for a living is more like foundational, what are the laws of physics kind of things, right?
00:56:03.000So I'm not the person to speculate on this stuff.
00:56:22.000So I think that For example, an enormous amount of effort has been put into nanotechnology, building tiny little machines.
00:56:28.000I suspect that mostly the real advances there are not going to be in nanotechnology but in synthetic biology where you take bacteria or multicellular organisms that already exist and adapt them for your purposes.
00:56:41.000Make them do whatever you want because biology has already solved a lot of the problems that technology is still struggling to figure out.
00:56:48.000So the concept of nanotechnology is you're going to take almost like a cell-sized machine and many of them are going to go into your body and find areas that are damaged or that are problems.
00:57:42.000So why DNA? Because you think of DNA as carrying the genetic code, but DNA is a wonderful molecule because it is relatively stable, but it's not just a crystal, right?
00:57:52.000It's not just doing the same thing over and over again.
00:59:16.000So the difference is that instead of it being a zero or a one like it would be classically, quantum mechanically, it is in some superposition of zero and one.
00:59:26.000It's some combination of a little bit zero, a little bit one.
00:59:28.000And it's not that you don't know which one it is.
00:59:52.000So quantum mechanics says it's not that this one bit is in a combination of 0 and 1 and this other bit is also in a combination of 0 and 1. It's that the two-bit system is in a combination of 00, 01, 10, 11,
01:00:16.000So you take these two ideas that you have a combination of zeros and ones rather than just one or the other and the different bits can be entangled with each other and then you just say, well, what is a computer?
01:00:27.000A computer is something that takes bits in, does manipulations and spits out the answer, right?
01:00:34.000That's what's literally going on in your computer is a bunch of zeros and ones being pushed around.
01:00:37.000So a quantum computer is pushing around a bunch of qubits, right?
01:00:41.000A bunch of spinning particles or something like that.
01:00:43.000The spin of a particle that can either be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise is a qubit.
01:00:49.000And so these particles can interact with each other.
01:00:51.000They can become entangled and you invent a quantum algorithm, right?
01:00:55.000Like there's algorithms for finding the area of a surface or something like that, factoring large numbers, solving the shortest distance between two different points.
01:01:06.000You can do this using the rules of quantum mechanics instead of the rules of classical mechanics and the belief Which is not yet 100% established, but we think is true.
01:01:15.000There are some problems that are really, really hard to solve for a classical computer, which means that you can easily make the problem long enough that it would take the lifetime of the universe to solve it on a classical computer.
01:01:27.000Which quantum computers can solve quite quickly and efficiently.
01:01:31.000And so it's – we're not – we haven't proven that.
01:01:34.000It's not a mathematically precise statement.
01:01:36.000Why would they think that quantum computers would be able to solve it quicker?
01:01:38.000There's more information in the quantum computer.
01:01:41.000Like if you have two bits, zero, zero, zero, one, et cetera, there's only four things it can be, right?
01:01:47.000If you have a quantum computer, there's an infinite number of things it can be because it's any combination of those four things, right?
01:01:54.000So there's like a continuum of possibilities.
01:01:57.000It's analog rather than digital in some sense.
01:02:00.000And so what you can do, the quantum computer can just sort of – Take advantage of that extra power to look – I mean because of this entanglement, this is – I'm going to get in trouble with my quantum computing friends because it's not quite fair.
01:02:15.000But roughly speaking, rather than manipulating bit by bit, because of the entanglement between the bits, the quantum computer can move all the bits a little bit at once.
01:02:25.000So let's say that you're searching for something in a list, right?
01:02:28.000A very elementary computer science program is I'm giving you a list, find an element that is equal to a certain number, right?
01:02:36.000It sounds easy, but if that list is 10 trillion things long, that's hard, right?
01:02:40.000So what the quantum computer can do is say take every element in the list, nudge it a little bit towards zero if it's the wrong answer and towards one if it's the right answer.
01:02:50.000And you don't know where it is in the list, but you can do that nudging over and over again.
01:02:54.000And at the end of the day, you look for where is the one.
01:02:58.000So you can get the answer much quicker, it is believed.
01:03:01.000And so things like cryptography, privacy, right, are dramatically changed by this because one of the things that we think quantum computers should be able to do faster is factor large numbers, which is the – the difficulty in factoring large numbers is the basis for much modern cryptography.
01:03:19.000But also simulating systems that were just too difficult to simulate.
01:03:24.000It took too much computer power to do it.
01:03:26.000Now maybe we can do it because nature is truly quantum mechanical at the core.
01:03:30.000It turns out to be very hard because the problem is you have all these bits.
01:03:34.000If you touch one of them, if the outside world bumps into one of them, like a cosmic ray or an atom hits it, the whole entanglement is ruined between everything.
01:04:56.000So like I said, if photons hit it, if particles – if molecules of air and oxygen or nitrogen bump into the qubit, that will count as an observation and it will collapse as we say.
01:05:08.000It collapses the wave function and all of your quantum information is ruined.
01:05:12.000So you have to make them sort of very cold, very isolated, very shielded from external influences and the more qubits you add, the harder that is to do.
01:05:22.000Now is there a proof of concept to this?
01:05:29.000Scott Aronson, who's a friend of mine who's a genius theoretical computer scientist, used to joke that the quantum computers are able to say that the number 15 is equal to five times three with very high probability.
01:06:09.000Some people are using sort of features of condensed matter systems like two-dimensional systems where electrons are moving slowly and can wind around each other and things like that.
01:06:20.000This is way beyond what I actually know about.
01:06:23.000But also the sort of sidelight of this is that this existence of entanglement It's kind of a shared information between two different things in a way that classical physics just would not allow.
01:06:35.000And that's interesting and exciting because it opens up ways for sharing information that other people can't get to because you have some information, your friend has some information, but you need both pieces of it to get to it, right?
01:06:50.000Seth Lloyd, who's another friend of mine, an MIT professor, said that he was – he tells a story where he was in a hot tub with the Google guys, right?
01:06:59.000With Sergey and Larry and the heads of Google, the founders.
01:07:03.000And he said, oh, I came up with this brilliant new idea where we can use quantum mechanics, build a quantum computer so that a person who does a search – A Google search using this quantum computer, they can do a search and they can get their answer, but it is literally impossible for anyone else to ever know what they searched for.
01:07:22.000And the Google guys were very excited, and they went away.
01:07:25.000The next day they came back and said, oh, we realize this is the opposite of our business model.
01:07:29.000It's really important to us that we know what you search for.
01:08:01.000I would not say the actual technology is very far advanced right now, but I can't tell you how quickly it will happen.
01:08:05.000Wouldn't someone like Google just have to adjust?
01:08:08.000Because prior to these Google ads, you never really knew what someone was interested in unless they took surveys or unless they had purchasing history.
01:09:14.000That's like the killer app that we know about right now.
01:09:17.000Physicists of course want to use it to simulate quantum mechanical systems to learn about the behavior of materials like maybe you will build a better superconductor or something like that right away.
01:09:26.000Maybe you'll do better designing of your genetically engineered DNA on a quantum computer, right?
01:09:31.000Like there's sort of the generic thought that you'll be able to do computations faster.
01:09:37.000Then there's more specific things like if the system you're trying to simulate is itself quantum mechanical, then simulating it on a quantum computer might be the way to go.
01:09:46.000Yeah, to most people that just went, woo!
01:09:54.000Like one of the things that you said earlier when you were talking about quantum, you were talking about worlds that are very similar but with very small differences.
01:10:38.000The way that I put it in the book is imagine you had a website you could go to and you would say – If I threw a ball with a certain velocity in a certain direction, how far would it go?
01:10:47.000It would give you the answer right away.
01:10:48.000Trevor Burrus Depending upon the atmosphere.
01:11:31.000There's a long, unglorious history of people trying to think deeply about quantum mechanics and being shunned in the community for doing so.
01:11:40.000Because we've set up this weird thing where – I mean there was literally a memo that went around the major physics journal in the United States that said we will not even look at papers to try to think about the foundations of quantum mechanics.
01:11:53.000It's like we need to do like real work, like shut up and calculate.
01:11:57.000We need to build bombs and things, not think about the nature of reality, which I think is very much antithetical to what physicists should be doing.
01:12:03.000But anyway, so what many worlds says is – well, so when we do talk about quantum mechanics, let's say we have a qubit.
01:12:12.000We have this combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise, and so we call that the wave function.
01:12:17.000The wave function is just it's 10% clockwise, 90% counterclockwise or whatever.
01:12:23.000So to every possible measurement outcome, you give me a number, and that number is basically how I figure out the probability of that measurement outcome coming true, and that's the wave function.
01:12:33.000So for a long time, people thought, well, this is just a trick.
01:12:36.000This is just like some – it characterizes our inability to be precise, right?
01:12:41.000We have a probability of this, a probability of that.
01:12:43.000But someday they hoped – Einstein, for example, had this hope that we'll have a better theory and we'll know exactly how to predict everything with perfect precision.
01:13:11.000And the problem with that is that when you look at the electron spinning, you never see it as a combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.
01:13:23.000And Everett says that's because you have a wave function.
01:13:26.000You live as a superposition of different possibilities.
01:13:29.000And when you look at the electron, what happens is before there was you and there was an electron and a combination of counterclockwise and clockwise.
01:13:38.000Afterward, there is the electron was spinning clockwise and you saw it spinning clockwise.
01:14:13.000And when it comes to human beings, this is also randomly discussed because we talk about determinism versus free will.
01:14:22.000We talk about what are the possibilities that is created as Sean Carroll, and why do you think the way you think, and why are you going to say the next thing you're going to say?
01:15:00.000One question is how does the world work?
01:15:02.000The other question is what words should we attach to how the world works?
01:15:08.000Sam and I agree on how the world works, right?
01:15:13.000But I am what philosophers call a compatibilist when it comes to free will, which is I don't think that I have some ways of thinking my way into overcoming the laws of physics, right?
01:15:24.000Like I'm made of atoms, made of particles that obey the laws of physics.
01:15:28.000If I talk about myself, As a large collection of atoms and particles obeying the laws of physics, then clearly there's no free will.
01:15:36.000There's just the solution to the equations and sometimes the wave function branches and there's now two of me, but that's whatever it is.
01:15:42.000There's no spark of consciousness that lets me overcome what the equations say is going to happen.
01:16:34.000Like if you don't know the atoms and molecules in somebody's body and you're not infinitely computationally powerful so you can predict the future, then it's correct to talk about people as agents who make decisions.
01:16:56.000I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that really simplifies a very complex issue.
01:17:01.000When I looked at it and I have had this conversation with Sam as well, I totally see his point and I think he makes a hundred percent sense.
01:17:12.000I really think it's very rational, that approach.
01:17:15.000But I also think that it's very much like What we were talking about earlier, that it's not necessarily just a one or a zero, that it's a combination of these things.
01:17:24.000Free will, there is some mechanism that chooses to do one thing versus another.
01:17:37.000Inside of you, whatever it is, whatever that process is that's causing you to – I mean, how many times have people stayed up all night going over and over and over a certain idea trying to find a rational conclusion?
01:18:38.000So there's a whole other way of talking that says I'm a person and I kind of like coffee but I already had a cup this morning and there's a chance, there's a probability like you say that I would drink this and a probability that I would not.
01:18:50.000And those are completely compatible, although they're different.
01:18:54.000The only way you get into trouble is if you mix up those two different ways of talking.
01:18:58.000If you say, like, I chose to have the coffee because my atoms were in a following configuration or something like that, right?
01:19:04.000That's like talking about us as humans and then switching vocabularies to talking about us as atoms, and that's where you get in trouble.
01:19:10.000Yeah, it's a weird reductionist take on what it means to be a person that thinks.
01:19:35.000Yeah, so I think again, there is an interesting question about how much we will ultimately be able to unpack and understand about that, right?
01:19:44.000Right now, the brain is kind of just a mystery box to us and there's so much we don't know about how people make decisions, how they remember things, how they come up with new ideas.
01:19:54.000So where it matters is how we treat people, right?
01:20:00.000The obvious case is responsibility, blame.
01:20:04.000Like if you think that a person makes choices, then you can assign responsibility to them for making the choices they made.
01:20:12.000If someone chooses to rob a bank, we choose to put them in jail, right?
01:20:16.000And someone could come along and say – no one ever does this – but someone could come along and say, well, they're just a bunch of atoms obeying laws of physics.
01:20:41.000The fact that their brain was hooked up to violate the law in the future, is that enough to assign personal responsibility to them for that?
01:20:49.000Or do you do the opposite and say, well, it's going to happen no matter what.
01:20:53.000Well, and also, if you do catch this thought process before the actual action takes place, isn't it possible to correct that thought process with education or some sort of awareness training or something where you could shift the consciousness and abruptly sort of...
01:21:18.000So there's a whole kind of interesting set of ideas that are very popular among philosophers right now, which is the question of moral luck.
01:21:28.000So if you're driving down the street and you're buzzed, you're drunk, right?
01:21:35.000Maybe someone jumps in front of your car and you run them over because you don't have the agility or the reflexes because you're drunk, right?
01:22:44.000We're certainly not – like if you lived in a world where you thought that what happened in the world was preordained – That there was all the great playing out as a master plan or at the very least that there was some sort of karmic influence that made good things happen to good people,
01:23:03.000Then the world makes more sense, right?
01:23:05.000I don't believe any of that stuff but at least then the world seems – if there's something random, you can attach a reason why it happened.
01:23:13.000There seems to be something to karma in that when you do good things, you make people feel better, they feel about you better, and then they interface with you in a more positive way, and that sort of like has this outgoing effect.
01:24:00.000Like, if I'm in a yoga class, and my yoga instructor is talking about different energy flowing through different chakras or whatever, I don't care.
01:24:32.000Yeah, it's – because I've had – I mean if you've done yoga, you know like there's a whole spectrum, right?
01:24:39.000Like there's teachers who are basically just physical therapists and there are people who are complete crazy hippies who think that you have to think the right thoughts, you know.
01:24:48.000Yeah, but people are always searching for some understanding of really complex issues.
01:25:02.000Whether you feel good, whether you feel spiritually enriched, whether you feel positive about humanity.
01:25:10.000We're always trying to manipulate these states, whether it's through meditation, mindfulness training.
01:25:17.000Trying to figure out a way to positively interface.
01:25:21.000You know, it's true and it goes back to where we started talking about YouTube comments because, like I said, I do react badly to stupid YouTube comments.
01:25:31.000Well, I'm a human being, but I think that the internet does magnify some of our bad tendencies, right?
01:25:39.000And I think that among these – and so I totally include myself as a bad actor here in the sense that it's just so easy to be sarcastic and put people down and disagree in sort of dismissive ways.
01:25:55.000I would like to live in a world where people including myself – Even when we disagree with people, even when we disagree with people who are stupid and we're not trying to engage them or improve their lives, just get on with our own lives rather than trying to have a snarky comeback.
01:26:10.000Like I get that there's a purpose to snark and sarcasm and whatever.
01:26:16.000Like, you know, this is why people complain about Twitter and social media.
01:26:19.000Like, it's so much psychic energy just gets sapped by reading all these complaints on either side.
01:26:24.000There's no, you know, political bias, right?
01:26:26.000Like, whatever your feelings are, someone else is making you feel down on the internet somewhere, and it does weigh on you.
01:26:32.000There's also this weird impulse that people have with, whether it's Twitter or YouTube comments, this is reductionist take on things to reduce a person down to maybe one statement or misinterpretation of one position and then have that person be dismissed.
01:28:37.000But I think that she just misspoke that one time.
01:28:40.000I think that what she was trying to say was there are additional facts that we could also look at, right?
01:28:47.000And of course it's in a bigger context where she lies all the time and she lets other people – she is an apologist for other liars.
01:28:55.000But I think that – The idea that these people who I disagree with politically are so divorced from reality that they think they can just make up their own reality, no one actually thinks that way.
01:29:07.000Like the people who disagree with me about politics or religion or whatever, it's comforting for me to think that they are just – I'm going to disagree with you on that because I don't think that – first of all,
01:29:35.000I don't think that she's granted any sort of autonomous decision-making capabilities.
01:29:41.000And I think this is probably something that was sat down, that they sat down with a team of experts or, you know, air quote experts, team of people that were in that, you know, room, whether it's press people or...
01:29:56.000Spin doctors, where they're trying to figure out a best way to get out of this, and one of the best ways was this concept of alternative facts.
01:30:05.000Very similar to one of the ways where Trump was in that meeting with Putin, that very famous, awful meeting that happened recently, where he said, I don't see any reason why it would be Russia that's interfering.
01:30:20.000And then he said afterwards, obviously, I misspoke.
01:30:51.000He's not saying, why wouldn't it be Russia?
01:30:53.000Because he's standing right next to Putin, and he would be saying that in a much more measured, and he would be accusing Putin.
01:31:03.000Yeah, that was clearly a case where he did something really bad and he came home and all of his advisors said, like, no, we have to fix this a little bit.
01:31:12.000And they came up with a really clumsy, you know, incredibly— But that's all they had.
01:31:16.000That's all they had, right, because it was so blatant.
01:31:17.000And I think alternative facts is also all they had.
01:31:20.000I don't – well, you might be right actually.
01:31:22.000I didn't really study it very carefully.
01:31:25.000I think that it was just a spontaneous blurting out.
01:31:29.000Because – here's why I think that that's probably right because I don't think – like I was trying to say before, I don't think that's their self-conception.
01:31:36.000Like people often think that the people who they disagree with – I think that's very rare.
01:31:56.000Like if you're just a con man or whatever.
01:31:58.000But I think that more often than we want to admit, people are sincere in their very false beliefs, right?
01:32:04.000So I just find it implausible that – I mean Kellyanne Conway, again, Yeah.
01:32:27.000You gotta think that he's playing to the dumbest people in the room all the time.
01:32:33.000And fortunately for him, that's a big number.
01:32:36.000And there's a recent thing where he was defending his behavior, saying that anyone can act presidential.
01:32:43.000And he stood on stage and he did this sort of robotic, boring walk back and forth, and then he started talking in a boring way and mocking it.
01:32:55.000And what's interesting about the video is not just him doing this, which is very silly, but it's also the people behind him thinking it's hilarious.
01:33:57.000What's interesting is these dummies behind him.
01:34:01.000Like, while this is happening, one of the interesting things about this, to me, is that his back is to all these people, which is very odd, right?
01:34:39.000We have a way of giving people information that if you follow – I follow Fox News on Twitter because I want to see – It's a weird thing because it's not like it's all lies, right?
01:36:23.000I do worry that this is a hard thing to come back from because, you know, once you – another thing that Trump said was that, you know, don't believe anything you're told, right?
01:36:50.000And then after listening to this Radiolab podcast about these Russian troll farms and about how they implement these things, you've got to think, is all of this organic?
01:39:08.000But I also think that one example, like the New York Times is different because – The New York Times, I feel like because of the fact that it's actually writers and it's in text, you're not dealing with people that have to be comfortable performing in front of a camera,
01:39:24.000which eliminates a large swath of intellectuals.
01:39:59.000I was just going to say, don't listen to me.
01:40:01.000Before Donald Trump, I was really good at predicting who was going to win elections.
01:40:05.000I have no ability once he's in the game.
01:40:09.000But I worry that the people who sort of are on his side are going to feel even more disenfranchised and disenchanted and angry.
01:40:19.000I think that one of the reasons why I said it's entirely possible, and I don't know if he will win again, but I don't even know if I believe he'll win again, but I think it's a possibility.
01:40:30.000And I think that one of the reasons why I think that is I don't see who's the big candidate on the other side that's opposing him that stands out right now.
01:40:47.000I mean, it sucks you dry like a vampire that's hooked up to the back of your neck.
01:40:53.000It's just so, even with him, with his unique ability to sociopathically sort of navigate the waters of accusations and guilt, he still looks beaten down by this job.
01:45:14.000I mean it's tricky because – Yeah, I don't know.
01:45:20.000I mean if someone wants – part of me is a little bit libertarian when it comes to personal action.
01:45:24.000Like if someone doesn't want to deal with you, that's their right.
01:45:28.000But when whole groups are being subject systematically to discrimination like gays are, then the government steps in to protect them a little bit and I think that's OK. And a lot of this is doctors don't want to do abortions or health care providers or insurance providers don't want to pay for things because of their religious beliefs or Catholic universities don't want to do certain things and – I think that these are legitimate questions and we're not really having a grown-up intellectual conversation about them.
01:45:55.000We're just throwing feces at each other in this particular arena.
01:45:59.000Well, it's also strange when someone comes up with some sort of a new idea like that, that goes against the separation of church and state.
01:46:07.000And it's being promoted by a guy who's openly religious and says a bunch of really preposterous things.
01:46:15.000And, you know, generally someone who's not a very trustworthy source of...
01:46:52.000And whoever – however they're going to get that is good for them.
01:46:55.000But then there's a whole much more elaborate apologetics about how God is using Donald Trump as his instrument to make the country better even if he himself is a flawed vessel.
01:47:07.000Sometimes God works through flawed vessels.
01:47:10.000Well, if you position yourself as an ally, even if you have previously sinned, the beautiful thing about Christianity is all you have to do is say, that's not me anymore, I found Jesus.
01:47:20.000And I saw a pastor on television going on about that, and about, when you're talking about Trump, you're talking about the Trump before he found Jesus.
01:49:11.000This is why I can't – even though I'm an atheist, I'm very happy to explain why I don't think that God exists.
01:49:17.000But I don't blame religion most of the time for people's bad actions because I think that religion is just sort of a catalyst.
01:49:24.000It lets people find excuses for their bad actions.
01:49:27.000But it's usually the bad actions, the desire to do bad actions that comes first most of the time.
01:49:32.000Do you ever look at religion as a potential almost evolutionary software program that's allowed people to – I think we are a little bit quick to attribute ideas and cultural concepts to evolution.
01:50:03.000But certainly, you know, religion was not like just science done badly back in the day, right?
01:50:09.000Like what religion was was something much more expansive, interleaved with your life overall.
01:50:17.000So it was not just how the world was created and whether God exists.
01:50:34.000The underpinnings of the religion in terms of understanding how the world works have been removed by science.
01:50:41.000The other functions are still there and I'm a big critic of my fellow naturalists who have not put enough effort into replacing the other functions of religion now that the claims about the world are no longer viable.
01:50:56.000Aaron Ross Powell That's a great way to present it.
01:50:58.000Yeah, and it's really a problem when there's so many versions.
01:51:05.000So I mean one of the many, many reasons why I think that it's not really credible to be religious intellectually is because if – in the classic traditional Western religious sense where there's a god and he cares about us, right?
01:51:20.000So there's all sorts of questions about where we define the boundary of religion, whether Buddhism is a religion or something like that.
01:51:25.000But in the usual sense that we grew up with in this country – Aaron Ross Powell Surely, if that were true, God would have done a much better job of explaining himself to us, right?
01:51:37.000Like, why would God give us his message through a bunch of people in a tiny country who didn't write?
01:51:44.000You know, like, the New Testament wasn't written down until decades after the event.
01:51:48.000None of the people who wrote it down were eyewitnesses.
01:51:54.000Like, he could easily have showed up to everybody in the world, talk to them, explain how things were going, and let them make their own choices.
01:51:59.000That would have been a much more efficient way of getting the message out.
01:52:03.000And so it's just not really sensible to think that – so if God didn't exist, then what you would imagine is that in different countries and different parts of the world and different periods in history, people would tell their own stories and they'd all be a little bit different and they'd be adapted to their local circumstances and they'd be utterly incompatible with each other.
01:52:22.000Do you speculate as to what the origins of the concept of God are since so many different groups of people all over the world have a very similar idea, at least, that there's some omnipotent superpower that's controlling the destiny of everything?
01:52:40.000So number one, I think that the idea of omnipotence was actually somewhat late coming onto the scene, right?
01:52:45.000Like if you dig into what was happening before 2,000 years ago, you know, the Hebrew God was not omnipotent at the beginning, right?
01:52:55.000The Hebrews came out of a polytheistic society where there were lots of different gods around and you can trace how their god evolved over time and first became their god, right?
01:53:06.000Like this was one god that the Hebrews were worshipping and the Egyptians and the Babylonians would worship other gods.
01:53:14.000Then they started saying, well, our god is better than all the other ones.
01:53:17.000And then they started saying, well, the other ones don't even exist, right?
01:53:20.000And it was an evolution over time and omnipotence came late.
01:53:24.000Like you would talk about the gods quarreling.
01:53:25.000If you were a polytheistic, a pagan culture, it actually makes more – like a lot of the world makes more sense if you believe there's a whole bunch of gods out there who disagree with each other, right?
01:53:35.000Suddenly lots of aspects of reality come into focus.
01:53:39.000But the idea there's supernatural, very powerful – I mean that's just an obvious idea I think.
01:54:03.000Things work in a certain way because someone made them that way.
01:54:06.000We don't see that person hanging around so it must be up there in the sky or something.
01:54:11.000I don't think it's that hard to imagine that all sorts of different cultures would evolve.
01:54:15.000Trevor Burrus Do you think it's also a function of us growing up with mentors and father figures and leaders and chieftains and there's always someone who is the big kahuna.
01:54:30.000I think there's that and also the idea of your ancestors and ancestor worship or veneration, right, which is also very – almost universal in primitive cultures.
01:54:40.000Like you don't want to admit you died, right?
01:54:45.000I'm sure there are real experts who know a lot about the actual origins of these things.
01:54:49.000But my point is just that I don't take the commonalities between different sets of religious beliefs as evidence for anything other than this is a very human thing to invent.
01:55:00.000People search for meaning and they take meaning from whatever religion or ideology that they subscribe to and they use it as sort of a A reason why they're living.
01:55:21.000It's a very common theme among religious thinkers that if it weren't for the existence of God or whatever, there'd be no reason to live.
01:55:29.000There'd be no reason to be a good person and so forth.
01:55:32.000And, you know, I think it goes back to the motivation we have as having bodies versus being in a computer.
01:55:38.000Like there's plenty of reasons to do different things.
01:55:40.000Like in the big picture in my last book, I talk a lot about – it's OK to admit that we as human beings have desires, that there are things we care about, that we want to be true.
01:55:53.000And you can talk about why that's true from evolution, from biology and whatever.
01:55:57.000But it doesn't matter why in some sense.
01:56:05.000We want to have families, whatever it is we want to do.
01:56:08.000All that we put together in terms of morality and ethics and meaning and purpose comes out of thinking hard and carefully, hopefully, about how to systematize and grow those existing desires that we have into a way of living in the world.
01:56:26.000We don't need anything external to make that happen.
01:56:28.000We just need to sort of think about where we are already and try to make it better.
01:56:33.000But you as an intelligent person who's also an atheist, who thinks very deeply about things, what do you cling to as a purpose for life?
01:57:11.000The way you interact with other human beings and your effect on other human beings, Trevor Burrus Yeah.
01:57:19.000And even if I think that when I die, I will no longer exist and my feelings won't matter, I have feelings right now about what the world will be like even after I'm not here anymore, right?
01:57:29.000So I can still be motivated to make the world a better place in ways that will outlive me, even if I think that when I die, it's really the end for me.
01:57:38.000Trevor Burrus Do you get down sometimes?
01:57:43.000Do you ever – do you get like these periods of like – what is the purpose of all this?
01:57:48.000Especially if you see some ridiculous thing in the news or some horrific tragedy and … For horrific tragedies, no.
01:58:00.000I'm just fortunate enough to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to that stuff.
01:58:07.000I don't struggle with depression or despair or existential anxiety or anything like that.
01:58:12.000When I was a kid, when I was first starting to think about the universe and science and things like that, I would start wondering about, well, what if the universe hadn't existed at all?
01:58:23.000And that made me lose sleep that night.
01:58:26.000And I think like many people, there was a very definite moment when I realized that I and everyone I knew would die, right?
01:58:33.000So I woke up crying and my mom had to comfort me because I was like, you know, grandmom's going to die and you're going to die and I'm going to die.
01:58:43.000But as a grown-up, no, I think that I'm more or less – So again, one of the future podcast guests that I'll be – next week's podcast will be by a woman who's part of the death positive movement.
01:59:21.000We should accept it and we should deal with it in a personally and culturally positive way.
01:59:28.000So for example, like right now, especially in the United States, even compared to Europe or other countries, We're terrible at dealing with death.
01:59:38.000We take them away from their families, away from their homes.
01:59:41.000We refuse to admit that they're going to die.
01:59:44.000So we treat it as if the whole purpose of the game is to squeeze out as many more hours of life as possible no matter what the quality of that life is.
01:59:54.000And all that is just rubbish and we should be much more grown up about it.
02:00:00.000When Obama suggested that in the healthcare system there should be some planning for what happens when you die, Sarah Palin came along with death panels.
02:00:09.000That was a very effective rhetorical strategy.
02:00:32.000Life-affirming experience to die because the people around us who are there come across with an acceptance of what's going on rather than the feeling that we should just do everything we can to prevent it.
02:00:44.000I had a similar situation happen recently with a dog of mine who's a Mastiff who reached 13 years old.
02:01:36.000In some sense, it's even harder with the dog because you can't talk to them, right?
02:01:39.000You can't explain to them what's going on.
02:01:41.000They can't explain to you what their wishes are.
02:01:42.000So you have to be the responsible one.
02:01:45.000But yeah, so everything legally and culturally in the United States is we're not allowed to relieve that pain or that despair that you have near the end of your life.
02:01:55.000Some states, including California, are passing death with dignity laws where basically it's what used to be called assisted suicide, but we don't call it that anymore.
02:02:05.000A doctor is allowed to give you the means to end your own life when you're near.
02:02:10.000You have to be near a point of no return but still clearly thinking enough to be able to make that decision for yourself.
02:02:16.000And there's also an issue with our real concern is their fear and this experience being this terrifying sort of step into the great beyond.
02:02:33.000There's a tool to mitigate that and the tool that has been shown to mitigate that is psychedelics.
02:02:51.000There's quite a few studies that have shown that people, when you give them psilocybin, they're much more relaxed and much more comfortable with this idea of ending this life.
02:03:07.000It's gone through its course, and it's an inevitable thing, and it's really our biological limitations that are terrified and sparking up all these things.
02:03:20.000Yeah, I'm actually 100% in agreement there.
02:03:23.000My wife, Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer, wrote a book called Me, Myself and Why, Searching for the Science of Self.
02:03:30.000And one of our friends said, oh, if you're going to write a book about the self, you got to do LSD. And so we did, and she researched it, and it's a fascinating history, right?
02:03:40.000And Aldous Huxley, I don't know if you know about Aldous Huxley's story, and he took LSD to do exactly this.
02:03:47.000He had throat cancer, and it completely helped.
02:03:52.000It absolutely helped ease that journey in a very simple way.
02:03:55.000But just as we are a sort of immature society that doesn't want to face up to the reality of our eventual deaths, we're also very culturally conservative and squeamish about drugs, right?
02:04:08.000And so we don't even let people do research on some of these drugs.
02:04:12.000And so I think that, yeah, we have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to not just living a good life but also having a good death.
02:04:20.000And also paying attention to actual scientists who have studied these compounds and really understand what the effects of them are and have researched them deeply and have personal experiences with them and are saying, well, these things have been demonized.
02:04:35.000And they're tools that we can use to sort of mitigate a lot of the real issues that we have.
02:04:41.000Whether it's culturally or personally with these transitionary times, like death is inevitable.
02:04:47.000So now that we know it's inevitable, you tell me what the main problem would be with someone taking psilocybin before they die and letting them ease their way through this.
02:04:56.000But you know, it's the same reaction that doesn't want people to have a basic income.
02:05:02.000There is a sort of moral feeling that you're weak if you don't struggle against death, everything, and it's silly, right?
02:05:10.000It makes no sense, but it's very, very common.
02:05:13.000Yeah, it's so weird that the universal basic income topic is one of those knee-jerk reactionary topics that I myself, my friend Eddie Huang, Introduced it to me for the first time.
02:05:26.000And my initial knee-jerk reaction was, oh, you can't do that to people.
02:05:29.000Human nature, people are going to get lazy.
02:05:32.000And then the more I thought about it, I was like, well, if you just cover their food and their rent, is it really going to kill their ambition?
02:05:41.000Is our ambition uniquely tied to just survival?
02:06:17.000I mean I think that there will be people like that.
02:06:20.000There will still be other people who want to write poetry and build sailboats and build spacecraft, et cetera, or build artificial intelligence.
02:06:28.000I mean it wouldn't – what if everyone could do whatever they want when they were kids, when they were 10 years old.
02:06:32.000They were taught a good programming language and could make up whatever apps and programs they wanted.
02:06:37.000Like that would be a whole different world than what we live in right now and it might be very exciting.
02:06:42.000Well, creatively, it could possibly expand a lot of people's potentials, right, where they no longer have to have a job so they could do whatever this one thing is that they're thinking about doing, write a book, a screenplay, develop something.
02:06:59.000And in the short term, I don't know if a basic income works sort of economically, but I think that if we believe that there's more and more stuff that can be done by computers or by robots or whatever, automation, Then it's absolutely something that should be taken seriously.
02:07:12.000So I think that the whole theme, this is great because we've been talking in a lot of different angles about the fact that the shape of the world is changing in a way that makes what it means to be human changing.
02:07:24.000And facing up to what those changes are, the fact that we die, the fact that we make up purpose and meaning for ourselves and our lives, and the fact that – What we are physically in terms of bodies and machines and so forth is also changing.
02:07:40.000So part of the theme of my podcast, I hope, is that to think through some of these issues to sort of – I don't know the answers, but I want to ask the questions about who we are, what we're living, what should we be doing about it because God's not going to give us the answer.
02:07:53.000Well, I think podcasts like yours and, I mean, any podcast where people are really Carefully considering issues.
02:08:03.000I think what's important about them that really didn't exist before is that someone can sort of digest these very complex subjects through two people having a conversation about it that perhaps are more informed and have more data and have more thought about these particular issues.
02:08:26.000So what you can do and what Sam Harris can do and a lot of people can do that are creating these podcasts about these really complex issues is you start that conversation and this seed gets planted into someone's head and maybe they carry with them at work, they carry with them when they're on the subway or during their commute home and then they become a part of the broader conversation that we have as a culture.
02:08:49.000And that's why I sort of want to not draw a distinction between science and other ways of thinking deeply about the world because I want people to – I've often said this as a joke.
02:09:00.000I want to live in a world where people work hard in the factory and they go out for a drink afterward and talk about their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, right?
02:09:08.000I want that to be the kind of thing people are bullshitting about over beers.
02:09:13.000That would be a world I want to live in.
02:09:15.000Have you ever run into a quantum mechanics conversation at a bar?
02:09:18.000There are far too many people who think they understand something about quantum mechanics and are going to explain it to me.
02:09:22.000So I want the existing conversations to be a little bit more informed.
02:09:28.000Well, there's a few people online that someone has – you've got to get this guy on.
02:09:33.000And then I've listened to them talk and I'm like, I'm pretty sure – That that guy's full of shit, but I can't really point out how I know that.
02:09:44.000Well, I don't want to bring this one guy up, but I'll talk to you about it off the air.
02:09:48.000There's a lot of woo-woo out there, but also it's quantum mechanics.
02:09:52.000A lot of very respectable people who sound crazy if you don't know too deeply what they're saying.
02:09:57.000Well, that is the Feynman quote, right?
02:09:59.000If you think you know quantum mechanics, you definitely don't know quantum mechanics?
02:10:02.000Exactly, which is – the whole point of my book is to overcome that feeling because I think what happened is it's true that we don't agree.
02:10:10.000We physicists don't agree on what quantum mechanics says.
02:10:32.000Yeah, it's weird and that's why a lot of people – there's a lot of people who I know who are friends of mine who are professors in philosophy departments because they got a PhD in physics and they realized what they really wanted to do was to think about quantum mechanics in a deep way and they would never get a job in a physics department doing that.
02:12:01.000If you heat everything up, how much radiation should it give off?
02:12:05.000And the problem was it should give off an infinite amount of radiation at very long wavelengths, which is obviously false, right?
02:12:11.000It's obviously not how things really work.
02:12:13.000So there was this blatant disagreement between everything we thought we knew because in the 19th century, in the 1800s, People really thought in physics that they were close to the answer, right?
02:13:33.000A young man named Albert Einstein said, well, I know what's going on.
02:13:37.000Those little packets of energy are themselves particles, that light is not a wave.
02:13:41.000There's particles that are being given off, photons, what they were later called, right?
02:13:46.000And that's what he won the Nobel Prize for.
02:13:48.000Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for relativity.
02:13:50.000He won the Nobel Prize for inventing photons, basically.
02:13:53.000Trevor Burrus And then – so there was that – so that was – there were two tracks going on.
02:13:58.000Remember I just said in the 19th century it was – the world is made of particles and fields.
02:14:02.000So the first thing that happened is people started thinking about these fields, the electromagnetic field and Einstein says, well, there's something a little bit particle-like about it, right?
02:15:30.000And people are like, what the hell is going on?
02:15:32.000And then it was – so that took like another 10, 15 years before people like Heisenberg and Schrodinger built that up into saying it's not just – That waves of light have a certain particle-ness.
02:15:45.000It's also that particles like electrons have a certain waviness and there's a wave function and they're inventing quantum mechanics and we're still arguing about it to this day.
02:15:54.000Well, it's such a difficult concept to Wrap your head around that it's been distorted, right?
02:17:13.000That was what Einstein tried his best to do, right?
02:17:16.000He thought that he could do better than quantum mechanics and he did not succeed.
02:17:20.000The big difference is that when real quantum mechanics was developed between 1900 and 1927, at every step it was because there was some dramatic disagreement between the theory and the data.
02:17:33.000And right now, our theories are good enough that they fit the data really, really well.
02:17:38.000So we're trying to make – I and others are proposing new ideas to try to understand how space-time emerges in quantum mechanics and things like that.
02:17:47.000And you can try to do better than quantum mechanics.
02:17:49.000But it's all just on pure principle, right?
02:17:53.000On pure coherence and beauty and elegance because we have a theory that fits the data fine.
02:17:58.000And it's so much harder to make progress when you're just trying to do it in your brain rather than doing it by data.
02:18:05.000So as for right now, there's nothing else being contemplated.
02:18:11.000It is being contemplated, nothing promising, nothing emergent.
02:18:15.000Like there are people who think they can do better.
02:18:17.000There is no one who agrees that someone else is doing better right now.
02:18:20.000Are there any standout theories that people have sort of?
02:18:25.000I think replacing quantum mechanics or even improving quantum mechanics is because there's no guidance whatsoever from experiments.
02:18:34.000There's not even a sort of leading thing.
02:18:36.000In fact, I don't think it's the right way to go.
02:18:38.000I think that given right now, given the fact that we have quantum mechanics and yet don't quite understand it, our job should be to understand what we got.
02:18:48.000What has come out of the Large Hadron Collider?
02:18:52.000I know that there was some discussion as to whether or not they found the Higgs.
02:20:50.000The mass of the Higgs boson should be enormously bigger by sort of what our intuitive feelings about quantum mechanics and quantum field theory say.
02:20:58.000This has been known for a long time called the hierarchy problem.
02:21:02.000So even before we discovered the Higgs, we knew it wasn't that heavy.
02:21:04.000We knew it was much, much lighter than what it should be.
02:21:07.000So the hierarchy problem was a known thing.
02:21:09.000And people said, how could it be true?
02:21:11.000Well, you have to change the theory a little bit.
02:21:13.000You have to like add some new particles or predict some new features of physics going on.
02:21:17.000And many, many people, myself included, were very optimistic that the Large Hadron Collider would find evidence for what was going on, would find more particles than just the Higgs boson.
02:21:38.000So now we have a puzzle and no answers, right?
02:21:41.000And that's the most frustrating thing because there – I mean people don't want to say this out loud, but here we go since no one is listening to this, right?
02:21:51.000The last time particle physicists were surprised by an experimental result from a particle accelerator was in the 1970s.
02:22:00.000Since then, we found new particles, but they were already predicted and expected to be there.
02:22:04.000We've never found a particle since the 70s that no one had anticipated finding long before.
02:22:10.000Well, just the idea of a particle collider as a layperson, as a person just looking on the outside, like, you got to create crashes.
02:22:19.000Like, that's the only way to figure out what's going on with the basic building blocks of the universe.
02:22:26.000You have to crash things into each other.
02:22:52.000So what you should think about when you think of colliding particles, it's not little I think?
02:23:15.000But when these particles that you made in the Large Hadron Collider hit each other, that sets up vibrations in every field in the universe, like very faint little jiggles up and down.
02:23:25.000And then you look and you see, and quantum mechanics says there's a probability it will look one way versus another.
02:23:30.000So the way you make it – how in the world do you make a Higgs boson by colliding protons even though the Higgs boson is over 100 times heavier than a proton, right?
02:23:38.000The answer is really you're setting up vibrations in the Higgs field, which was always there all along.
02:23:44.000And then you very quickly—actually, you can't.
02:23:46.000The Higgs boson disappears so quickly you'll never see it.
02:23:52.000The vibrations in the Higgs field get transferred to vibrations and other things, and that's what we observe in our detector.
02:23:57.000So if you are able to do this sort of conceptual switch from particles to fields, then the reason why we need an accelerator and a collider to make new particles begins to make a bit more sense.
02:24:35.000That's one of the things that I had read about that they did What they had either discovered or were able to observe with the Large Hadron Collider was I believe it's called quark gluon plasma.
02:24:53.000The way they described it was something like something that was a fraction the size of a sugar cube would weigh as much as the Earth itself.
02:25:22.000So to do that, you take some particles that are pretty small like protons and you smash them together and that's how we discovered the Higgs and we're looking for other things.
02:25:31.000But maybe your goal in life is not to discover new particles but to understand the particles that we already know about, right?
02:25:36.000In that case, maybe you want to see what happens when you get, like you say, a huge number of particles together in the same place with a lot of energy and see how they interact with each other and make a plasma.
02:25:47.000A plasma is like what's at the center of the sun, right?
02:25:49.000But instead of electrons and photons, we're going to make it out of quarks and gluons.
02:25:55.000So instead of smashing together protons, a proton has three quarks each, right?
02:26:01.000We smash together the nucleus of a heavy atom, like an iron or a lead atom, right, which has, you know, dozens of protons and neutrons in it.
02:26:10.000So we get as many particles as we can squeezed together in the same place.
02:26:14.000So the energy is a bit more diffuse, but we get to study how they interact with each other because that's what conditions were like near the Big Bang.
02:26:48.000Like, you know, so I always – I get laughs when I give talks on the Higgs boson because I mentioned that the lifetime of the Higgs boson – I already said it disappears very quickly, right?
02:26:58.000So I say it's one zeptosecond, which is true.
02:27:02.000And just like, you know, you – when I said quadrillion, you're like, what is that number?
02:27:27.000It doesn't really affect your life in any meaningful way.
02:27:30.000What is going on right now with science that is particularly compelling to you other than things we've already discussed?
02:27:40.000I'm very interested in entropy and complexity, complex systems.
02:27:45.000There's a wonderful place in New Mexico in Santa Fe just called the Santa Fe Institute which is devoted to the study of complex systems.
02:27:53.000Physicists are really, really good at studying simple systems, a couple of particles at a time, right?
02:27:58.000There are certain techniques they have.
02:27:59.000This is why we have theories that explain all the data because we're asking questions about the simplest possible things that we can.
02:28:06.000Once you have a bacterium or an elephant or an economic system or an internet, these are very, very complex systems with many moving parts that interact with each other in complicated ways.
02:28:20.000And so you can start asking yourself questions about are there laws that govern the behavior of these complex systems that we wouldn't have noticed if we just studied them piece by piece?
02:29:24.000And he found that in biology, there are what is known as scaling laws.
02:29:31.000So if you look at different organisms like mammals or whatever, right, you can plot different quantities like their mass and their metabolism or their lifespan, things like that.
02:29:41.000And it turns out that they are related to each other.
02:29:43.000It's not – if you know how heavy a mammal is, you know how long it's going to live.
02:31:27.000And they are able to show that if the resources that our biology uses Travel through these fractal networks in a three-dimensional space, right?
02:31:42.000You get this universal behavior and it fits the data and now you can extend it to the behavior of things like cities and corporations and stuff like that.
02:31:52.000So when you get people in a city, they walk faster, right?
02:31:57.000Like people in little small towns mosey down the street and everyone in the big city walks faster.
02:32:17.000Like living in that dense environment changes the rate of innovation and things like that.
02:32:23.000So they're studying how we can try to extract these not quite as precise as particle physics but still very general robust relationships between these large systems and learn from that how to make things more sustainable,
02:32:40.000more creative, more innovative, more livable and things like that.
02:32:43.000So I think all this stuff is very fascinating.
02:32:45.000They've actually done studies where they've put cameras up on streets and they watch people walk by and the amount of footsteps they take per minute, they can accurately depict or they can accurately predict how many people live in that city.
02:33:15.000I'm not exactly sure but Jeffrey West has this picture of Dublin.
02:33:19.000There's this tourist area and so it's both a big city where a lot of people live but it's also a famous tourist destination where foreigners come in and wander around, right?
02:33:28.000And the locals who live in a big city and want to get where they want to go became so frustrated with all these moseying tourists.
02:33:34.000They literally made walking lanes for the locals where you have to walk fast, right?