In this episode, Dr. Steven McLaughlin joins me to talk about his new book, "The Big Bang: How the Big Bang Created Us." We talk about the origins of the universe, how it came to be, and what it means to be a part of it. We also talk about how the universe came into existence and how it led to the emergence of life, and the process of evolution that led to us becoming what we are today. Steven's book is out now, and is available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can also buy a copy of the book on amazon for only $19.99. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can get a free eReader app from Amazon so you can read my book on any laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet, or desktop device. Kindle $9.99, iBook $9, Paperback $99, Hardcover 99, or Hardcover 49, and Paperback 49, for $99.00. You must be able to read the book in Kindle $24,99, and Audible Free $49,99 or Audible free, for a limited time only. You can get the Kindle edition for $29,99.99 for 49,99 for a year. Audible is also available for trial only $49.99 with Audible membership trial, which includes Audible trial pricing of $99 plus shipping and shipping fees of $29.99 at Audible Prime and Vimeo membership trial. All other trial plans are available for purchase at +$99, including Audible, Vimeo, Audible. Vimeo Free trial pricing, and a limited edition of $179.95. Free trial offer, plus shipping & Vimeo trial, plus a limited number of Vimeo Prime membership trial pricing. Thanks for listening to the podcast! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. I appreciate your support, I really appreciate it greatly. -Bryan Green - Thank you, Brian Green, Sr. & Sr. John Raffaele M. -- Thank you so much, John Rocha, John Green, Jr., John, Sr., Sr. John, John, Jr. & Co., Jr., Sr., John R. & John, B. , Jr., Jr. & J. M. & K. B. Burt, Sr.. -- John, J. E.
00:00:23.000So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe, to the end.
00:00:28.000That's essentially what you're summarizing.
00:00:31.000Yeah, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book.
00:00:37.000I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing.
00:00:40.000How it started, How things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future.
00:00:50.000What's going to happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future?
00:00:58.000I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of co-mingle to create life.
00:01:06.000And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos.
00:01:28.000But the reality of the situation is more subtle because overall, entropy needs to go up.
00:01:35.000But that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way.
00:01:41.000And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever.
00:01:43.000Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings.
00:01:54.000So the net entropy goes up, even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky Appears.
00:02:02.000And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place.
00:02:06.000Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse, the universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it.
00:02:14.000There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.
00:02:18.000Steve McLaughlin Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange.
00:02:22.000That you have this thing, and ours is fairly small, right?
00:02:25.000It's a million times larger than Earth.
00:02:27.000And it's going to burn for billions of years and it's just hovering there.
00:02:54.000But you can also say that we are made of, you know, nuclear refuse, right?
00:02:59.000We are the detritus that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe, and it rains down on planets, and at least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and yields life.
00:03:12.000I mean, I don't want to sound like the Lion King here, but, you know, that's really what it is.
00:03:16.000Well, what I'm so interested about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that have to take place in order for all this life, in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going to go.
00:03:45.000But ultimately, you and I and everybody else, we're just bags of particles that are governed by physical law.
00:03:51.000And so there's this continuity between the stuff that of the world, the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the heavens, and us.
00:04:01.000We all come from the same fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws.
00:04:05.000Now some people find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense of desperation, a sense that we're not special, a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless.
00:04:19.000But, you know, my view on this is it's spectacular that we're made of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues you have on this desk.
00:04:30.000Because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do what we do.
00:04:37.000And I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity.
00:04:41.000We don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity.
00:05:37.000It's an idea and its powerful motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages.
00:05:45.000Otto Ronck was one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do.
00:05:59.000And then when I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death.
00:06:06.000I don't know if you've ever heard of this book.
00:06:07.000It was big in the 70s and won actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s.
00:06:12.000And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do.
00:06:19.000And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today, Until the End of Time, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting, because it's not just we that are going to die,
00:06:36.000it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time.
00:06:42.000Our best theories suggest to us that even protons The very heart of matter.
00:06:48.000There are quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles.
00:06:57.000And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all.
00:07:01.000What timeline are we talking about here?
00:07:05.000In fact, I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved.
00:07:10.000I like to use the Empire State Building.
00:07:13.000And imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the previous floor.
00:07:18.000So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor 10 years, second floor 100 and so forth.
00:07:23.000So you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building.
00:07:28.000And in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years.
00:07:35.000And as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future.
00:07:40.000And to answer your question, we think – And I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas.
00:07:48.000Protons will decay roughly in say by the 38th floor.
00:07:53.000So 10 to the 38 years into the future.
00:08:00.000The amazing thing, obviously, is it sounds trite, but time is relative, right?
00:08:05.000So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another duration.
00:08:11.000And on, say, the scale of the entire Empire State Building, up to, say, 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years is like...
00:08:26.000So you sort of have to be careful with your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long timescales that you necessarily need to if you're going to think about the very far future.
00:08:38.000Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist?
00:08:43.000We anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart.
00:08:49.000So if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor, most stars will have used up their nuclear fuel.
00:08:56.000There'll be dark embers just sort of, you know, smoky out there in the cosmos.
00:09:00.000But if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will all just dissipate into their particulate ingredients.
00:09:07.000So it's hard to imagine past, say, floor 38 that there's going to be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe.
00:09:20.000So the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small when you think about it.
00:09:28.000In terms of the entire cosmic timeline.
00:09:31.000So impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long but yet so small, like in the human mind.
00:10:27.000You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going.
00:10:32.000But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves.
00:10:42.000And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures.
00:11:34.000And it's a good question, and it's a tough one.
00:11:37.000I like to imagine That as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or whatever, augmented reality, whatever version of that kind of technology takes us over in the far future, we might be able to experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift,
00:12:03.000to change, so that we grasp The quantum realm, the way we grasp Newtonian physics, I can at least imagine that as a possibility.
00:12:15.000What it would take to actually get there and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know.
00:12:25.000But it's all about experience and survival.
00:12:29.000We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world.
00:12:37.000We've been programmed by evolution to survive.
00:12:39.000And those are two radically different propositions because you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive.
00:12:49.000And one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value to understand black holes or the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or entropy or thermodynamics.
00:13:00.000These qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world, go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us.
00:13:09.000But it's not something which obviously has any survival value.
00:13:15.000What's interesting is also how relatively recently people have been pondering these ideas in a sort of a quantifiable way where you can write things down and sort of express it with other scientists and try to figure out who's right and who's wrong in terms of these calculations.
00:13:32.000Human beings, I mean, when did we really start pondering the scope of the universe?
00:13:41.000I mean, if you think about the beginnings of modern physics, you know, you can start with Galileo, you can start with Newton, but in any event we're talking on the order of hundreds of years.
00:13:53.000And the amazing thing, in hundreds of years, we've gone from a complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world actually works to the development of Newton's equations where you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses or lunar eclipses or motions of the planets and so on.
00:14:13.000And then, you know, a couple hundred years after that, we migrate from that understanding, which is basically an encapsulation of the patterns that we can all discern with the naked eye.
00:14:25.000We develop a whole new body of physical law called quantum mechanics, which is so completely counterintuitive, which describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't ever see with the naked eye, but nevertheless, we can use the math to make predictions.
00:14:42.000And the predictions are borne out by experiment.
00:14:44.000And that progression only took, say, a couple hundred years.
00:14:51.000So it's kind of spectacular that, you know, we beings who are just coming of age here in the Milky Way galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper and a calculation, a pencil, and we can figure out magnetic properties of particles like electrons to 10 decimal places.
00:15:48.000It's not about the personalities or the people that have pushed the frontiers of understanding.
00:15:53.000It's the fact that we've got this body of insight that continues to grow and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand the natural world.
00:16:01.000And I think that's really what it's all about.
00:16:03.000Don't you think that there are some personalities like yourself, like Feynman, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, that because of their personality, because they're charismatic people, it actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes more people attracted to the ideas?
00:16:21.000And I think that's a vital point because...
00:16:26.000Without that impetus from outside the traditional educational system, I don't think we would have the kind of interest in science that I can feel growing in the world around us.
00:16:39.000I mean the unfortunate thing in the educational system is that we teach toward examination.
00:17:16.000It's just by the nature of how we teach in the current approach to educational philosophy that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas as a burden.
00:17:28.000I don't want to have to spend time learning about parts of the cell or how to balance reactions.
00:17:49.000I just want to know enough so I can do well on the quiz.
00:17:52.000And once the quiz is over, they just sort of leave the ideas behind.
00:17:56.000When did these ideas become attractive to you?
00:17:59.000Well, I was, I don't know, not unusual for a scientist, but unusual, I think, in the spectrum of kids in the world, because at five or six years old, I was just captivated by mathematics.
00:18:39.000So he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I was about five years old and then I would ask him to set me problems and he'd give me these 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers.
00:18:49.000I'd write them out on big construction paper and I'd spend the weekend just calculating away on these huge, you know, arithmetical problems of no interest to anybody on planet Earth.
00:19:00.000But to me, the fact that you could learn a little piece of math and then do something that nobody had ever done before, that was exciting to me as a kid, and that's really what got me going.
00:19:22.000What would have happened if X would have transpired instead of Y? In fact, I have to say, when I... When I graduated college, I had sort of a period of, I don't know,
00:19:37.000depression is too strong a word for it, but a period of what have I done?
00:19:42.000I went to college, I could have studied all the great ideas of the world and all I did was get a technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equation and solve Einstein's equations.
00:19:52.000And I felt like, wow, have I just like squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever had because I was so completely focused on just trying to understand physics and mathematics.
00:20:10.000I won a scholarship to go to England, to Oxford.
00:20:15.000And ostensibly, it was to study physics, but when I got there, I realized that I was completely free to do whatever I wanted to do at that point, and so I took a year to study literature.
00:20:25.000I went to the physics classes, so I was sort of showing up, but I wasn't focused on it at all, and instead I was focused, I got a, you know, in England, it's a tutorial system, so I got a tutor, which is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and you write papers,
00:20:43.000You literally go in and you read your paper out loud.
00:20:45.000It's not something where you just turn it in and it gets graded.
00:21:30.000Do you think that it helped you sort of appreciate what your original subject of interest was as well?
00:21:36.000Yeah, hugely so, because, you know, it's funny.
00:21:40.000It's the flip side of something I often encounter with people that are interested in science but don't know the math.
00:21:46.000And they always say, or some say, I'm never really going to understand this body of science because I don't know the mathematics.
00:21:54.000And I try to convince them, look, at some level that's true.
00:21:57.000If you really want to do research in the general theory of relativity, you've got to learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus.
00:22:05.000If you are really interested in the ideas, you really can grasp the ideas without the technical background.
00:22:12.000So I try to demystify something that can seem impenetrable because you haven't entered the field.
00:22:20.000And I think the same thing happened to me in reverse for the more humanistic explorations.
00:22:25.000It had this aura of grandeur that I was unable to penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas and by spending a year in those ideas, it didn't diminish them in any way, but I felt like it brought it back down to earth as another journey toward truth,
00:22:49.000And one that you don't have to have a degree in.
00:22:52.000You don't have to know the ins and outs of the academic version of that subject to understand it and grasp it and spend some time thinking about it.
00:23:03.000So, you think that for people studying anything, particularly those studying science and mathematics with very rigid disciplines, do you think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding their education into Philosophy or art or something that uses your mind in a different way.
00:23:24.000There are some people in the physics and mathematics community who are so intensely focused that it would almost be a shame to pull their attention away from the deep dive that they're going to do for the rest of their lives and the contributions that they're going to make and have made are substantial and exciting.
00:23:46.000But for – I think for many others and certainly for me – I mean look, I, as most people do, but not all, but I learned early on that I'm not going to be an Albert Einstein.
00:23:56.000You know, I can make contributions and I have had contributions to fields like string theory and cosmology, but they're never going to be at the level of shattering our understanding of the world, things that people are going to talk about 500 years from now.
00:24:14.000I think for somebody like that who's able to make contributions but pulling away from the technical work is not going to extract some vital insight into the nature of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered, I think there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying because by broadening your perspective on what What the work you're doing is actually revealing.
00:24:37.000It's part of the human quest for understanding and seeing it as an isolated discipline where it's all about the next equation and the better unified theory or the deeper understanding of the Big Bang.
00:24:50.000To see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding, I think, diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do.
00:24:58.000Was that a part of your initial ambition?
00:25:03.000Yeah, well, to go back to the comment that you made before about we being the only species that knows that we're going to die, I think part of that instills in many people, and certainly I see it in my own life, even though at the time that I was making various decisions,
00:25:20.000I wasn't literally thinking about these kinds of issues of mortality.
00:25:24.000But how do you deal with that recognition of the impermanence of your own life?
00:25:43.000I mean, part of my motivation in doing physics was Not merely to get the next decimal place in this or that physical quantity described in the natural world.
00:25:56.000It was to try to have some kind of insight that would rock our understanding of the world and have reverberations that would echo out for many, many years to come.
00:26:20.000And, you know, look, I think when you're doing any work whatsoever, the day-to-day, the moment-to-moment is a grind.
00:26:29.000You know, I don't know how you find it in the work that you're doing, but if I'm working on a research project, even if in principle the ideas are grand and wonderful and bold, the moment to moment is calculating away.
00:26:43.000It's trying to figure out that equation.
00:26:45.000It's putting that equation on a computer.
00:26:49.000It is not something that has that glorious quality that you might ultimately describe when you're finished and you look back and you think about the implications of your work.
00:26:59.000The moment to moment of almost anything that you do is a grind.
00:27:02.000So I think that's ultimately what is the driver of whatever you're doing in your life, the moment to moment.
00:27:10.000But yeah, there is certainly a part of me that would...
00:27:14.000Have a desire, a hope that the work would reverberate in a powerful way.
00:27:23.000I think that's true for most physicists, that notion that you can sort of sit at a table and think.
00:27:30.000And change the way we understand reality, the way Einstein did, the way Schrodinger did, the way Niels Bohr did.
00:27:38.000But what percentage of people have that revelation?
00:27:41.000Yeah, I think it's pretty few and far between.
00:27:45.000And everybody else is sort of just contributing.
00:28:01.000Yeah, to be the person who has the light bulb.
00:28:04.000Yeah, but I tell my students, and especially young students who come in and are still trying to figure out what they want to do, if you're not satisfied, I think we're good to go.
00:28:35.000It's being at the right place at the right time with the right DNA that somehow is attuned to the question that's being asked.
00:28:43.000So it's not even fully under your control.
00:28:45.000It's not sort of a matter of exercising your mind and building up the muscles of the brain in such a way that you are the strongest person to contribute to this and this idea.
00:28:58.000It's being there when the question's being asked and you happen to see the way forward.
00:29:04.000It's so interesting to me that there's so many people working on all this stuff, and that the average person that doesn't contemplate quantum physics or any of these equations, we have no idea it's going on.
00:29:17.000And that all this work that's so critical to our understanding of what the universe really is, the very fiber of the universe itself, all this is going on.
00:29:45.000So it's like – in a very concrete way.
00:29:47.000Now, the problem with that number is I recently looked it up to find the source of it.
00:29:51.000So I sort of went online and checked it out.
00:29:54.000And apparently I'm the source of this number.
00:29:56.000And I assure you that I've not done a calculation that really fully justifies this.
00:30:01.000But roughly speaking, you know, anything that has an integrated circuit – is the result, the beneficiary of quantum insights.
00:30:10.000So we use this stuff every moment of our technological lives.
00:30:15.000And yet, as you say, for the most part, most of us don't have a deep understanding of the reality that's responsible for the gadgetry that the science has given rise to.
00:30:27.000And it's a strange – quantum mechanics is an utterly strange reality.
00:30:44.000And again, it goes back to our brains just weren't under pressure to think quantum mechanically.
00:30:50.000But I assure you, you give me – A couple hours.
00:30:54.000I mean, books are one thing because it's a one-sided conversation.
00:30:58.000But you give me a couple hours in a back and forth, and I will absolutely get you to a place where you appreciate and have a sense of what these ideas really are telling us about the nature of the world.
00:31:09.000Here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you.
00:31:12.000What do you think was happening before the Big Bang?
00:31:18.000It's a deep question and a subtle one and there's sort of two ways that I like to think about that question.
00:31:25.000One is it could be that the Big Bang was an interesting event, but not the first event in the totality of reality.
00:31:36.000It could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space, but it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part, and that grander realm may have been there for a far longer period of time, It may have experienced its own Big Bangs,
00:31:52.000maybe a collection of Big Bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past.
00:31:58.000So it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is a lot of other Big Bangs or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality than we have direct access to.
00:33:02.000But when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say, hey, how do I go further north?
00:33:07.000They look at you and say, whoa, that question doesn't mean anything because this is where north begins.
00:33:14.000There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole.
00:33:18.000And it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time.
00:33:21.000Talk about a billion years ago, 10 billion years ago, but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang, that may be where time started.
00:33:30.000And you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself.
00:34:03.000What physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment.
00:34:14.000So if the molecules are moving really quickly, you've got a hot environment.
00:34:18.000If the molecules are really moving slowly, it's a cold environment.
00:34:23.000So temperature emerges from the motion of particles.
00:34:26.000So if you have like one particle, you can't really talk about it being hot or cold because you need a conglomerate.
00:34:33.000You need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion.
00:34:38.000And in that sense, temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas, the molecules and atoms that make up reality.
00:34:48.000Maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns, but fundamentally maybe there are atoms or molecules of time.
00:35:02.000Which when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with, don't yield time as we know it.
00:35:08.000Time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently.
00:35:34.000So there are ideas for the answer to that question.
00:35:38.000Look, all of this is tentative because it's very hard to – We have astronomical observations that we need to ensure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth.
00:35:50.000So we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas.
00:35:54.000But the idea that I think most physicists or cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity – Can have two manifestations.
00:36:05.000The usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version.
00:36:08.000You drop something toward the earth and it moves downward because the earth and the object pull on each other.
00:36:14.000That's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives.
00:36:17.000But Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive.
00:36:22.000It can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward.
00:36:26.000And this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky Object like the Earth is always the attractive variety.
00:36:36.000The gravity created by the Sun, again, a compact object, is always the attractive variety.
00:36:42.000But Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a rocky object that's isolated in space but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region of space, That that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity.
00:36:57.000Why is that important to your question?
00:36:59.000If the very early universe, that little tiny head of a pin that you're talking about, if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it the inflaton field, the name doesn't matter, but if it was filled with that energy, It would have been subject to repulsive gravity.
00:37:19.000It pushes everything apart, causes everything to rush outward.
00:37:23.000So the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart.
00:37:33.000Aaron Ross Powell And this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical?
00:37:36.000Have we observed any sort of element in the universe that …?
00:37:42.000But it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works.
00:37:54.000So number one, Einstein's equations have now been tested Over and over again in a whole variety of circumstances.
00:38:02.000The detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago is like the crowning triumph of Einstein's math.
00:38:08.000A hundred years ago the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space.
00:38:12.000A hundred years later we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space.
00:38:16.000So we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics.
00:38:21.000And right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing.
00:38:26.000You've got uniform energy in a region, repulsive gravity.
00:38:29.000The other thing is we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down.
00:38:37.000Since the 1920s, everybody thought that, yes, the universe is expanding, but it will slow down over time.
00:38:43.000Because gravity pulls things back together.
00:38:45.000You throw an apple upward, it doesn't go up faster and faster, it goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back.
00:38:53.000Everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole.
00:38:56.000It's expanding but expanding ever slower.
00:38:58.000The observations in 1998, culminated in 1998, which won the 2011 Nobel Prize, showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly.
00:39:08.000The expansion of space is speeding up over time.
00:40:31.000On rare occasions, the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region, become uniform, and then that region explosively inflates, grows large.
00:40:43.000So imagine you're looking at a pot of boiling water.
00:40:50.000The surface is, of course, widely undulating up and down.
00:40:54.000But if you wait long enough, very long time, since you've never seen it and neither have I, there will be a little patch on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out.
00:41:04.000That only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling.
00:41:14.000It will happen, it's rare, but if you wait long enough, it will occur.
00:41:18.000Similarly, the widely undulating fields in the early universe, if you wait long enough, a patch will flatten out, you get the uniform energy, plug it into Einstein's equations, that region explosively inflates.
00:41:32.000It can go from a size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe In far less than a blink of an eye, in 10 to the minus 30, 10 to the minus 35 seconds.
00:41:46.000That's how powerful rebulsive gravity can be.
00:41:51.000So before that, before this happens, you just have, in this theory, you just have all of this energy sort of randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects.
00:42:11.000There's nobody who is hanging around looking at their watch saying, good God, when is this big bang going to finally happen?
00:42:19.000So you can have this cosmological pre-show.
00:42:23.000You can have it last as long as you like.
00:42:26.000The only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later, a region flattens out and then the cosmological show begins.
00:42:35.000And if we're looking at this model of the universe being this infinite universes with different characteristics and different qualities to them, this could be happening throughout infinity, all over the place.
00:42:50.000Yeah, and in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject.
00:42:55.000It says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit, it was just one of many such events.
00:43:07.000And therefore there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated, but the details can be different.
00:43:16.000The physical details can differ from what we are familiar with.
00:43:22.000Temperature differences in one part of space versus another, or they can be far more significant.
00:43:27.000Even the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm.
00:43:35.000Their masses can be different, their charges can be different, their fundamental physical features can be different.
00:43:40.000So out there in that wider cosmological landscape, it can be the wild, wild west of realities.
00:43:48.000And they don't have to worry about proton deterioration.
00:43:51.000There may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart.
00:43:56.000The wild, the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically in analyzing these theories, You realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well.
00:44:11.000Many can be different, but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiated, occur out there in other realms.
00:44:21.000So you come to these crazy sounding, sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms.
00:44:33.000And moreover, small differences can also arise in these other realms where… Maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or, you know, maybe your name is, you know, Joe Green and I'm Brian Rogan or there's like strange realities that can be taken place.
00:44:49.000And this is not an overworked theorist imagination.
00:44:52.000This is the careful, dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations.
00:44:58.000Now, I should say there are some physicists who see this implication and say, whoa, You guys have fallen off the deep end.
00:45:05.000Your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them, that's the kind of theory that we have been trained to avoid,
00:45:22.000However, the more forward thinking I like to describe as physicists say, hey, math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years.
00:45:34.000And if this is where the math is taking us, it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves.
00:45:48.000It's like when people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe, that you're out there, or a version of you, or infinite versions of you.
00:46:28.000Yeah, you know, it's like that Star Trek episode where you've got like Spock and Evil Spock, you know, the one that had the little beard on.
00:46:44.000And the danger of kooky-sounding ideas in physics is that there are people who then jump off for it and say, well, if that's possible, then this is possible.
00:46:54.000Maybe I can, with my mind, affect what other people are – so there's all sorts of crazy ideas that can be inspired by the weird insights of modern physics, and you've really got to keep straight what's real and what's ridiculous.
00:47:23.000But that was one of those movies where a lot of people, like, there was all this quantum talk, and Dr. Quantum was in it with a little cartoon explaining particles and waves, and you're like, there's science behind this, but then at the end of it, really, it was something that was created by someone who runs a cult,
00:47:40.000who believes they're channeling someone who's like a thousand-year-old alien, like, that whole Ramtha thing.
00:50:41.000I walk into this barn and I cross the threshold of the barn and they all give me a standing ovation.
00:50:48.000And I'm like, okay, I appreciate it, but why are you giving me a standing ovation?
00:50:53.000And I go in, and I start to give my talk, and I say to them straight out, what I've seen here is nuts, okay?
00:51:02.000I say, if you're going to try to predict next cards in the deck, one out of every four times you'll get the suit, one out of every 13 times you'll get the rank.
00:51:11.000There's nothing in there but the pure probabilistic laws of mathematics.
00:51:16.000They rise up and give me a standing ovation.
00:51:19.000And I say, it's appreciated, but why are you applauding?
00:51:24.000I'm telling you that you're wasting your time.
00:51:33.000I finish my talk at the book signing and these people, they come up to me and they talk real softly and say, there's a lot of crazy stuff that's happening in this place.
00:52:14.000The problem is that the methodology that's being employed is something that will never take you closer to the truth, however much you may feel that you're among like-minded individuals.
00:53:27.000But I think that's the way that she brings people into the fold and gets them to spend the big bucks to enter on this so-called journey toward truth, Where she's, you know, channeling this, you know, made-up fictitious sage that somehow people buy into.
00:54:07.000I can sit down with the mathematics that I understand well, and I can follow the deductive chain of reasoning that gets us to some of these strange implications that we're talking about, multiple big bangs, other realities, and so forth.
00:54:18.000When it comes to channeling a 35,000-year-old sage, I don't know what the hell that even means.
00:54:24.000I don't understand the physical processes by which that could possibly happen.
00:54:27.000I don't understand how there could have been a being of the sort that she's channeling alive 35,000 years ago, because it doesn't have any agreement with the archaeological record.
00:54:37.000You know, so there's a vital distinction between weirdness that emerges from careful mathematical analysis and weirdness that emerges from an overworked imagination that possibly sees a business model whereby a lot of money can be brought in if you can get people to buy into your vision of how the world works.
00:54:58.000Well, it's sort of like what they do is they curate ideas, and then they run them through their sort of filter of woo-woo.
00:55:10.000And then they distribute it in a very palatable way that attracts people.
00:55:15.000That movie, I tell a story, I've told this before, so I apologize to people who've heard it.
00:55:20.000There was a friend of mine at the comedy store, had a friend that I don't know her name, But she came to the Comedy Store and she was so happy.
00:55:29.000And I'm like, she was like, I'm so happy.
00:56:10.000Things are just not going the way I thought.
00:56:12.000I thought because of the secret that everything would be great, but my dad is still a pain in the ass, and now he's moved in with me, he doesn't have any money, and I can't establish a good relationship, and I don't have the job that I wanted, and I don't understand because I've been using the secret.
00:57:17.000And just because of the fact that they've been able to have these extraordinarily successful lives while visualizing these things does not mean that visualizing these things creates an extraordinarily successful life.
00:57:30.000You have to think and you have to act and you have to do.
00:57:32.000And there's trial and error and there's a lot of lessons to be learned.
00:57:35.000But if you wanted to simplify it at the end once you're successful and boil it down to a philosophy that you could...
00:58:43.000And I said, look, what you're doing to me sounds really dangerous.
00:58:47.000It sounds like a really bad thing to be doing.
00:58:50.000And they took offense in that call back then.
00:58:53.000A year after the film came out, it was either the director or producer, I can't remember the gentleman's name, called me up and said, I want to apologize to you.
00:59:02.000I have finally realized what a bad film this was to be involved in, and I completely regret it.
00:59:10.000So that, I don't think, is the point of view of, you know, the romp, the school of enlightenment, which is behind this, or at least part of what was behind this, but at least the director or the producer, whoever it was, saw the light.
00:59:23.000And realize that this is not the kind of information that you want to put out in the world because it can change people's lives in a very negative way.
00:59:31.000I think your comparison to Olympic athletes is very good because The Olympic athletes are visualizing something that they already do.
00:59:41.000There's a great benefit in visualizing for athletics, for martial arts, for a lot of different things.
00:59:48.000Visualizing success, visualizing potential problems, failures of your process, how you're going to adjust on the fly.
00:59:56.000All those things are great because then when things do take place in real-life situations, you've already prepared for them.
01:00:06.000And in fact, I have to tell you, you know, in one of the later chapters of the book, I describe theories about why it is that we, for instance, tell fictional stories.
01:00:17.000I mean, could there be any evolutionary value in two individuals telling each other a story that they both know is false, that they know has no connection to the world around them, but yet we've been doing that since the emergence of language?
01:00:33.000And there are these interesting evolutionary scenarios in which what you're saying is brought to bear in that unfamiliar context.
01:00:41.000We tell stories because it's the mind's way of rehearsing for the real world, but it's a way of rehearsing for the real world that's completely safe.
01:01:12.000Your brain is more attuned to respond in a beneficial way because it's not as novel as it would have been had you not been engaged in this fictional account of telling stories.
01:02:00.000I mean, I think the vital thing is that your brain has had sufficient experience that it can weight these fictional accounts in a way that can enhance your response to the world but not set undue expectations of things that are just,
01:02:15.000you know, only going to be true in a fictional setting and not in the real world.
01:02:19.000It's just so strange to me that we desire those.
01:02:36.000Sure, you love to just snap your fingers and fix everything.
01:02:39.000But I actually see it in a slightly different way, relevant to what we were talking about before.
01:02:43.000I think that the whole hero worship that we have as a culture It comes again from our recognition of how powerless we are against the forces of nature, against the inevitable death that is facing us all.
01:03:00.000And therefore there's something deeply seductive about the possibility of a being that can transcend the limitations that we mere mortals are always subject to.
01:03:10.000So I think it's built into our DNA to respond To the way that we do, in the manner that we do when encountering a hero in the world.
01:03:22.000I mean, there's, you know, Joseph Campbell.
01:03:24.000Yeah, I was just going to bring him up.
01:03:26.000You know, so, you know, in The Power of Myth, but his more technical version, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you know, he goes through The whole notion of what it is to have a myth, and it's basically an individual that's called to action to rise above the kinds of activities that mere mortals will be able to undertake,
01:03:44.000resists the call at first, but then rises to the challenge, goes out into the world, conquers, comes back a changed individual and shakes up the reality from which that individual initially emerged on this journey.
01:03:57.000And there is Ample evidence that across cultures throughout the ages, we have constantly been telling these kinds of mythological tales because they speak to us.
01:04:08.000They speak to our urge and our desire to transcend the limitations that our physical form and the laws of physics necessarily constrain us to.
01:04:17.000Yeah, it is fascinating when you think of how many different languages and how many different cultures share those same archetypal themes.
01:04:25.000And I do think it all comes, if you Look way back into the history of the ideas.
01:04:32.000It comes from this initial recognition that we are mortal.
01:04:39.000And the fact that our brains are able to not just fix on the moment but can think about the entire timeline is the one that makes that a poignant realization.
01:04:50.000I mean, if we couldn't think about the future, what would it matter if we knew that we were going to die?
01:04:57.000But the fact that we can innovate and the fact that we have ingenuity that allows us to make the wheel, that allows us to build the pyramids, that allows us to come up with quantum mechanics and Einstein's equations and Beethoven's symphony and Picasso's work, the fact that we can undertake all of these expressions of creative will and the desire to transcend the world around us has a downside.
01:05:21.000And the downside is we recognize that we are not going to be here for very long.
01:05:26.000And I think that motivates a certain kind of engagement with the world.
01:05:33.000Darrell Bock Kurzweil is a fascinating character.
01:05:36.000Yeah, he thinks he's going to be around forever.
01:05:37.000Darrell Bock Yeah, that's why I was bringing him up.
01:05:39.000Have you discussed any of this stuff with him?
01:05:42.000You know, I don't know him personally.
01:05:43.000I have certainly gone to some of his talks and I think he and I had one exchange at some point in the past and I totally get where he's coming from.
01:05:53.000You know, he feels that we're perhaps the final mortal generation and how sad it is after, you know, a hundred thousand generations of humans if we could only stick around for one more generation.
01:06:09.000Science would come to a point where we would be immortal.
01:06:13.000And that feels like a tragic state of affairs.
01:06:17.000I don't think he's right and I think most people who think about this deeply don't think he's right either.
01:06:23.000However many vitamins you take and however much science is progressing, the notion that we are just a generation or two from immortality I think is wishful thinking.
01:06:34.000This is a strange concept of immortality too because it's not necessarily you.
01:06:38.000It's a downloaded version of you that will exist in some sort of a Computer.
01:06:53.000Well, I allow for the possibility that maybe it would be a way of being in the world that would have upsides that are hard for us as flesh and blood individuals to appreciate at this point.
01:08:30.000Well, I've spent some time thinking about this question.
01:08:33.000I think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or even humanity at some level.
01:08:39.000And my own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head.
01:09:02.000But the history of the reductionist program where we've been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients and the laws of physics leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness.
01:09:22.000Now having said that, There's a deep puzzle.
01:09:26.000It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is, and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world,
01:09:41.000how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles you can turn on the lights?
01:09:46.000How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience?
01:09:54.000And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered.
01:09:59.000My own feeling is when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate.
01:10:04.000We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding, maybe it's a hundred years in the making, maybe a thousand years in the making, and we'll say, aha, when electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts Welcome to my show!
01:10:36.000Electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality.
01:10:44.000They themselves are conscious beings of a sort.
01:10:48.000Now, it's not like you're going to have electrons that are crying or are Quarks that are anguishing.
01:10:53.000But if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and put them together, the idea is that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with.
01:11:07.000I don't buy into that, but there are people who do.
01:11:11.000Well, I take a position on this because – I guess my view is you look out at the world and what you do as a physicist is you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing and to move from our current understanding of the world to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious.
01:11:36.000And quarks are conscious to me is such a fantastically radical move that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding.
01:11:46.000There was a time Back in the 1800s when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing.
01:11:56.000How could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being?
01:12:06.000You have to inject a life force and that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles.
01:12:12.000I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today.
01:12:15.000I think most serious scientists say, yes, life is wonderful.
01:12:18.000Life is In some sense, miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms,
01:12:36.000and that's all that it takes to have something that's alive.
01:13:12.000Hard to answer that question, but I think a hundred or a thousand years from now we'll look back and smile at how we in this era invested consciousness with such mystical quality when in the end it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics and that's all there is to it.
01:13:29.000Darrell Bock Well what's interesting too to me is that as a human being my thoughts on consciousness are very deep and profound and this idea like what is this thing?
01:13:59.000During that creation of that language, we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts, and we've developed all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and emotions and contemplate the future as well.
01:14:13.000These things are continually getting more and more complex.
01:14:16.000If you go to single-celled organisms, work your way up to early hominids, and then get to human beings, you just see this ever-increasing form of complexity in every way.
01:14:28.000And in the way that the things see the world, of course it makes sense that there would be more complexity.
01:14:36.000But we don't think about that when we think of a parakeet.
01:14:39.000We don't think of a parakeet as being conscious.
01:14:41.000But a parakeet, relatively speaking, is far more primitive than a chimpanzee, which is, relatively speaking, far more primitive than a human being.
01:14:49.000And it's just going to continue to evolve Or if we survive, things will continue to improve due to natural selection and random mutation and all the other factors and will be something that makes this today look like the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever.
01:15:09.000Because we see small changes in DNA, a tiny fraction of a percent yields a radical change in what the being that has that DNA is able to accomplish.
01:15:18.000But at the same time, You made reference to psychedelic experiences.
01:15:24.000And I trust you agree, but tell me if you don't, that those psychedelic experiences were generated by a slight change in the chemical makeup of the particles coursing through your brain and your body.
01:15:41.000So to me, that's a great piece of data that speaks to the fact that all it is Is particles and chemicals coursing through a structure because if the mind was somehow external to the physical makeup and the laws describing it,
01:16:01.000then how would the injection, say, of some kind of foreign substance or, as you say, the brain producing some sort of substance that it didn't ordinarily have within its makeup, why would that be able to have such a radical impact The way I would look at it if I was trying to argue against that would be that your eyes and the organs of the human eye are taking in light and through that light are able to perceive physical objects in the world that they would not
01:16:33.000It's something that allows you to see and it allows you to take in depth perception and understand shapes.
01:16:40.000That the human mind, and particularly these glands that produce these psychedelic chemicals, when experiencing these chemicals, it allows the brain to experience things that might be there all the time, but that you cannot perceive with normal human neurochemistry.
01:16:58.000It needs to be enhanced, or the levels need to be changed and shifted.
01:18:12.000You know, We took the easy way in, like the novice version, and it did nothing to me at all that first night.
01:18:22.000So the next night when we went, I went right to the bottom of the list, where it was in Dutch or something, but it had like machine guns, you know, pointed at a brain kind of thing.
01:18:33.000So I did that version, and it was the most terrifying experience of my fucking life.
01:18:45.000And all of a sudden, the world changed.
01:18:48.000And what started happening is my brain started manufacturing versions of myself that would converse with me and convince me that the reality that I was experiencing was real.
01:19:02.000And then that version of me would destroy that reality.
01:19:06.000And the process would start over and over and over again.
01:19:10.000Is this something you smoked or you ate?
01:20:29.000Even flying home on the plane the next day, all I did is I sat on my seat and I put on the headphones and there was a Beatles channel and I just listened to Beatles for like seven hours and I was just in this place that I had never experienced before.
01:20:46.000Now, for our conversation, this just made it so intuitively obvious to me that my conscious awareness is totally dependent on On a few chemicals.
01:20:59.000That's all that's happening inside of the head.
01:21:02.000So in a way, it was a valuable experience.
01:21:04.000It's not something that I want to ever experience again, absolutely.
01:21:08.000But it was something that helped align my intuitive understanding of what consciousness is with the scientific recognition that it all relies upon the stuff that's circulating inside of your mind.
01:21:23.000Yeah, what's interesting about these heavy-duty psychedelic experiences, because what you took was, by most people's idea, very mild, but the more profound psychedelic chemicals that are also produced by your brain, if you just shift that ratio,
01:21:38.000and not by too much, really, you're talking about little small doses of this stuff.
01:22:18.000But it's in there, but then if you shift the balance and all of a sudden you have these incredibly profound visions, it makes you think like, What we have now in terms of our balance and our chemicals must be different than what this fella must have had,
01:22:37.000And primates before that, as the human – like, when you think of human evolution, do you ever stop to think, what are we going to be like a million years from now if we do survive?
01:22:50.000Have you ever done this sort of thought experiment where you say, okay, if things keep going the same way, we used to be very strong and very hairy and we're getting progressively softer as we don't need to use our bodies as much, our brains are getting larger,
01:23:06.000Do you do that sort of thought experiment to see what we're going to become?
01:23:10.000Not in a systematic scientific way because the The process is so fraught with incredible detail that I think it's hard for anybody, even experts in evolutionary biology, to really tell us anything that will hold water, that's really predictive.
01:24:19.000We're interested in them for very specific reasons, right?
01:24:22.000So typically we're interested either because we want to see the evolutionary development that yields this particular life form or because there's a general curiosity about how this object is put together.
01:24:33.000If these other beings are so far beyond us that those kinds of taxonomy questions are no longer of any interest, then hanging around here may not hold anything for them to make the journey and stick around long enough for us to notice.
01:24:50.000I don't buy that, again, for two reasons.
01:24:52.000One, because why would we assume that they're so far beyond us that they wouldn't be interested in these talking monkeys with thermonuclear weapons who dominate an entire planet?
01:25:19.000We've got to go there and check this out.
01:25:21.000But imagine that this civilization, the notion of lording over a planet is like us talking about, you know, the ant lording over a grain of sand.
01:25:31.000So they may be galactic as opposed to planetary in their hegemony.
01:25:37.000And the notion of some little tiny rock Orbiting some nondescript star in the suburbs of this completely ordinary galaxy off there on the side may not have the kind of pull that you imagine that it does.
01:26:06.000He learned it from people apparently, but it's still interesting nonetheless.
01:26:10.000Right, but I don't think a hundred years from now we're going to be as interested in these kind of qualities or a thousand years from now or ten thousand years from now.
01:26:17.000Well, why would we assume that these things that come here from another planet are more than ten thousand years?
01:26:23.000Well, that's a very good question, and I think the answer to that is we look at the history of the cosmos until today, and it's, say, let's just call it our universe to be concrete, 13.8 billion years.
01:26:35.000And we look at life on planet Earth, and it's, you know, a handful of billions of years old.
01:26:42.000So in a handful of billions of years, you can go from some complex molecules to human beings.
01:26:47.000I like how you say it like it's not that long.
01:26:49.000It's not that long because, you know, imagine that life began a few billion years earlier in some other system.
01:26:58.000You know, stars and galaxies, they were starting up, you know, a billion years after the Big Bang.
01:27:04.000So it could be that life in other worlds has a head start on us by a few billion years.
01:27:10.000And we know what can happen in a few billion years.
01:27:13.000It can take us from single cell to us.
01:27:35.000Does it seem unlikely when you're talking about the infinite size of the universe and there's perhaps an infinite number of Brian Greens out there talking to an infinite numbers of me?
01:27:46.000We're almost guaranteed, if the spatial expanse of the universe is infinitely large, that there are going to be places where it's within 10,000 years.
01:27:55.000But those are going to be a very small number compared to the places where it's not 10,000 years.
01:28:01.000Is that true, or would it be an infinite number of them?
01:28:22.000And within that ball, the number that are differing from us by 10,000 years will be very, very small compared to the number differing from us by, say, a billion years or a couple of billion years.
01:28:33.000Simply by the law of numbers, if we imagine that they're random processes that are generated.
01:28:38.000Now, there could be some physical principle.
01:28:41.000That prevents life from emerging before, say, 4 billion years ago.
01:28:47.000And if that's the case, and we're not aware of that principle, then you'd be absolutely right.
01:28:50.000That we'd all be roughly at the same starting point, and there's no reason to suspect that they would be so far ahead of us.
01:28:57.000But I don't know of any such principle.
01:28:59.000But you almost have a reductionist view of this, right?
01:29:04.000So if you had a guess, if you had $100 to bet, Has alien life ever observed us?
01:29:50.000And wouldn't you assume that a life form that is perhaps thousands of years more advanced than us with the exponential increase in technology, I mean if they ever got to the point where we are, that they would see these Goldilocks planets as well and recognize that Earth is one of them.
01:30:06.000However, if they are so far away, they're going to be examining Earth as it was hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of years ago.
01:30:15.000So if you truly want them to be examining us in the sense of human presence on planet Earth, then it's a much more difficult proposition to imagine that they've actually been doing that.
01:30:25.000Is it possible there's another way to examine things where you're not hampered by the speed of light?
01:30:34.000That we're aware of is restricted by the speed of travel, which is – now look, there's quantum entanglement, which is a strange property of the quantum world in which distant objects can behave as if they are one and in some sense respond instantaneously to an influence in one location at a distant location no matter how far apart they are.
01:31:00.000That's more realizing correlations between physical properties at widely separated locations.
01:31:05.000But I'm not aware of a means of leveraging that to actually observe what's happening in some distant location, even if you do have quantum entangled particles.
01:31:14.000For a long time, my operating theory on aliens was, when I see something that's interesting, then I'm going to pay attention to it.
01:31:23.000And it's part of the thing of, whether it's Ramtha or any of these wonky things, there's something about woo-woo stuff, whether it's psychics or channelers, that's really attractive to people in some sort of a weird way.
01:31:39.000The idea that if we were visited by something from another world, some far-advanced space daddy or whatever it is, that comes down here and is going to show us the way, that's so attractive.
01:32:01.000And I think it's an unfortunate feature of the human mind that we tend to look outward For weirdness that will inject into the world more than the everyday that we experience through common everyday encounters.
01:33:29.000But the other thing that's worth keeping in mind, and this I think is surprising to some people, you can do a calculation as to whether consciousness Can itself persist indefinitely?
01:33:44.000You can ask yourself, sure, Earth may go away.
01:33:50.000But is it possible that some kind of conscious being can continue to cogitate indefinitely far into the future or its progeny continue to cogitate?
01:34:00.000And you can pretty much establish that thought itself will come to an end in this universe.
01:34:07.000Thought itself is a limited lifetime phenomenon in the cosmos.
01:34:13.000So when, at least our universe, right?
01:34:17.000Yes, so I'm going to focus just on our universe.
01:34:19.000So the breakdown of protons when we get to that point, there's no room for thought to exist.
01:34:23.000No, that's part of it, but I'm willing to go further.
01:34:26.000I'm willing to imagine that even with the breakdown of protons, that there's some way Welcome to my show!
01:34:53.000That the relentless rise in entropy that we were talking about before ensures that any cogitating being that happens to still be able to persist in this unusual realm of particles will ultimately burn up in the entropic waste generated by its own process of thinking.
01:35:11.000So the process of thought itself in the far future will generate too much heat for that being to be able to release that heat to the environment And to avoid burning up in its own waste.
01:35:28.000It's always been interesting to me when I've really stepped back and looked at it that our ideas of the importance of thought are so egocentric.
01:35:38.000When we take into consideration the vast scope of the universe and how majestic, so much of what we see in the cosmos that there's no thought, at least as far as we know, whatsoever.
01:36:34.000And it's hard to not think in those terms.
01:36:39.000I encourage people, and part of the point of this book is to encourage people to think in a cosmic way and recognize the point that you're making, which are with these little, tiny, finite beings crawling around on this planet.
01:36:50.000We're here for a brief moment of cosmic time, and that's all there is to it.
01:36:53.000And some will feel like, oh my god, that's disturbing, that's distressing.
01:36:59.000My point is, hey, extol, celebrate the fact that you are here for this brief...
01:37:06.000The collection of quantum events stretching back from the Big Bang until today that had to turn out exactly as they did for you and for me to actually exist.
01:37:16.000Each one of these quantum events, and there are nearly infinitely many of them, could have turned out that way instead of this, yielding a universe in which neither you nor I nor anybody else would be here.
01:37:25.000And yet against those astounding odds.
01:37:47.000We can do things that inanimate objects can't.
01:37:50.000So this, to me, is where the value and purpose and meaning comes from as opposed to trying to look out and hope Space Daddy comes with the answer of, you know, flashing a neon sign saying, aha!
01:38:41.000And the fact that all this arose without a guiding intelligence.
01:38:46.000You know, that there are black holes and there are active galactic nuclei and there are black holes slamming into each other creating gravitational waves that we can actually detect.
01:38:56.000I mean, It is a wonderfully rich reality that we are fortunate to be part of.
01:39:03.000Do you experience much pushback or much conflict from religious people who don't like the fact that you describe things in that way that didn't need an intelligent force or intelligent creator to exist?
01:39:17.000It's an interesting question because the biological community, people like Richard Dawkins and the like, I think have I think we're good to go.
01:39:46.000They haven't pushed as hard on the quantum physicists and the cosmologists as they have on the biologists, but I have had conversations.
01:39:54.000Many of them are respectful as opposed to antagonistic, where the view is that I am wrongheaded, that I am missing the point.
01:40:05.000And some of these religious folks are fantastically accomplished scientists.
01:40:21.000And I thought it was called Science and the Spiritual Quest.
01:40:27.000And it was a bunch of scientists that were being brought together, and I thought it was going to be an interesting but ultimately one-note meeting.
01:40:34.000I thought everybody's going to basically say the same thing.
01:40:36.000There could be a God, there's no evidence for a God, we've got the laws of physics, and we're going to just press forward under the assumption that physics is all there is until the clouds part and God reveals him or herself or itself to us, and at that point we may change our tune.
01:41:25.000And there's one Nobel laureate in particular, I did say to him at the end, I said, when you look at me and you hear my view, what do you think?
01:41:32.000And he kind of put his arm around me in an avuncular way and said, you know, you're a real smart guy and you don't understand the true reality.
01:41:42.000And I think ultimately you will because you're open-minded and you're on a journey and I hope that your journey will finally take you to the place where I have been for many years.
01:41:53.000That was so unexpected that this Nobel laureate, who I respected for his concrete mathematical and experimental work, saw the world completely differently.
01:42:29.000Do you know William James' book, Varieties of Religious Experience?
01:42:32.000So it's a book that William James, a great psychologist, wrote in 1902. And it was based on a series of lectures I think he gave in Scotland.
01:42:41.000And it is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion and science that I think has ever been written.
01:42:49.000And yet most people don't know much about it.
01:42:52.000Because what he does is he goes through and he documents through his own research and through reading biographies and interviewing individuals the vastly different ways that people think about religion and why they think about religion and the value that religion has in their lives.
01:43:09.000And when you read that book, it doesn't convert me.
01:43:14.000I haven't changed my views on whether or not there is a God, but it has changed my views on the value of a religious sensibility, the role that it plays in people's lives.
01:43:26.000Now, look, it can be, you know, you talk to people like Sam Harris and, you know, It's a destructive force in the world, and it has been a destructive force in some ways, but that's not the full story.
01:43:37.000A fuller story is that for some individuals, it gives a connection to a historical lineage that's deeply valued.
01:43:45.000For some individuals, it puts their life in a larger setting that allows them to be in the world in a more productive way.
01:43:53.000So there are a whole range of roles that religious engagement can play.
01:43:57.000The problem is when you start to pit it against scientific insight, then you run into trouble.
01:44:03.000But religion was never developed to give us factual information about the world.
01:44:08.000Religion will never give us the electron magnetic moment to nine decimal places.
01:44:13.000That's the purview of scientific investigation.
01:44:16.000And if you can keep these straight in your mind, there's a definite and powerful role for a religious sensibility in the world.
01:44:24.000Yeah, I feel like it gives people in a lot of ways a scaffolding for ethics and morality and allows them some alleviation of anxiety.
01:45:15.000Look, we don't agree in totality, but I was saying to him, there are times I go around the world and I will do things that are utterly irrational.
01:46:11.000And yes, it's still part of somehow how we behave in the world.
01:46:15.000And I think there's a value to recognizing that that is what it means to be human.
01:46:20.000You will engage in the world in ways that are not necessarily strictly adhering to some rational perspective of how the scientific world operates.
01:46:28.000I would love to see Richard Dawkins outside of a haunted house saying, I'm not going in there.
01:47:14.000But if some of those individuals who go there find that it allows them to live in the world in a more productive way, alleviating anxiety, feeling like they're on a spiritual quest, so be it.
01:47:39.000Scientology or something along those lines that seems loopy on paper can provide them with legitimate structure and benefit their lives in a tangible way that they could describe to you.
01:47:50.000And my feeling is that I don't know this to be the case.
01:47:55.000Maybe some biologists will push back on this.
01:47:57.000But if there was a race of, for want of a better word, Vulcan-like individuals who approached the world in a completely rational manner, evaluating the data, figuring out the most sensible course of action.
01:48:12.000Competing against a crazy group of individuals like us who will come up with wild fictional ideas, gods in the heavens, you know, demons haunting the world.
01:48:24.000I think it's the latter group that ultimately would triumph because with that kind of freedom of thought, you get novelty.
01:48:36.000And so I feel as though this is part and parcel of who we are and why we have survived.
01:48:42.000And to sort of come at the world with a scientific club that's meant to smash away anything that disagrees with the scientific worldview is an unfortunate way of looking at the world.
01:48:56.000Yeah, there's something about creativity that it doesn't necessarily have to abide by any laws of logic, and it can still be beneficial.
01:49:03.000Yeah, and that's why it's so stunning when somebody comes up with something.
01:49:42.000Yeah, and it's amazing what that music can inspire as it reaches out to X amount of people and then causes different thoughts in their mind.
01:49:51.000And then that causes, in turn, another branch of creativity, another new line of thinking that they might have never pursued before.
01:50:16.000I mean, the experience of music or the experience of...
01:50:21.000Cogitating about the world, but not trying to overlay a narrative upon it, just feeling your way into reality reveals things about the world that I think are beyond linguistic.
01:50:34.000Do you ever listen to music when you're pondering an equation or whether you're going over a problem?
01:50:50.000That it would capture my brain too fully and I couldn't focus on the equations that I was trying to understand.
01:50:58.000But the funny thing is, in writing this book, for the very first time, I found that there were passages that I couldn't write if it was quiet.
01:51:06.000I needed to have music playing because, in some sense, by focusing too directly on what I was trying to say, I couldn't say it.
01:51:16.000I only found that I could make progress in certain kinds of descriptions by allowing my brain to fly off.
01:51:24.000Through whatever musical experience I was playing and allowing the freedom of thought to then emerge within that unusual, for me, environment.
01:53:07.000You've got to look off axis metaphorically, and that's the only way that you can accomplish what you set out to do.
01:53:12.000And certainly music is one of the ways to take one's attention and And shift it in a different direction to get that oblique view of what it is that you're trying to do.
01:53:21.000And I have found that it allows for progress that otherwise is unattainable.
01:53:26.000And is that the case also when you were writing this book?
01:53:28.000It absolutely was the case writing this book.
01:53:31.000I have a very – a wife is very understanding.
01:53:36.000So we have a house – we live in Manhattan.
01:54:00.000And I would find, you know, that it freed up a certain kind of creative thought process that to me was striking because I had never approached work in that way before.
01:54:16.000So how did you come to this idea of doing it that way?
01:54:20.000I was struggling, uncertain things, and I felt as though I am approaching this in a very flat-footed way.
01:54:32.000I want to write about this, you know, say I want to write about human creativity or I want to write about religious engagement and I am just doing what I've always done, which is I have this equation and I want to solve it.
01:54:43.000So I'm going to bring the tools of mathematics to bear to solve it and I was approaching this writing project in exactly the same mind frame.
01:54:51.000And as it wasn't working, I said, let me smack my brain around a little bit.
01:54:57.000And so one way of, you know, it could be psychedelics.
01:55:25.000And it's also a time-tested, you know, from Thoreau to – Yeah, and the funny thing is it never worked for me in the past because the focus, I think when I'm doing mathematics, it does need, at least for me personally, to be that kind of non-distracted,
01:55:56.000I had the dogs and it was just – like I said, I hardly ever drink.
01:56:00.000But it was an unusual creative experience, which to me opened up a different way of going about trying to create things in the world.
01:56:10.000As you write more and more books, do you find it to be more and more difficult or do you find it to be easier?
01:56:15.000Well, my early books were all focused on trying to bring scientific ideas out to the general public.
01:56:20.000The Elegant Universe was about string theory, fabric of cosmos, space and time, hidden reality is about multiple universes.
01:56:26.000And so in that role, I'm basically trying to translate from the cutting edge research into ordinary human language so that people who don't want to go to graduate school can get the basic idea of what's going on.
01:56:38.000And this book is a very different proposition.
01:56:41.000I feel like I've moved in a significantly different direction through this book because, yes, there's science, you know, entropy, evolution, the history of the universe from the beginning to the end, but the focus on why we humans do what we do, why we tell stories,
01:56:57.000the emergence of language, why we tell myths, why we engage in religious experience, why creative expression is so important to us, This felt like it was drawing upon things I've been thinking about for decades but never put into writing.
01:57:11.000So it was a harder exercise than anything that I did before because it was a different exercise but in the end one that I felt was even more gratifying because it was making clear why these ideas matter.
01:57:26.000As opposed to just trying to tickle the brain of the reader, I'm trying to actually, if you will, touch the heart and soul of the reader.
01:57:33.000And that's something which, if it's successful, feels very gratifying.
01:57:37.000I would imagine that would be very hard to end, to put the cover on it and to go, that's it.
01:57:59.000And you can always imagine going further in this direction or enhancing that description, but at some point you recognize that, you know, life is an ongoing process and a book is ultimately a snapshot of where the author was at the moment that the book was written.
01:58:15.000And that, to me, is really what happens here.
01:58:18.000This is a snapshot of my view of the human condition set against the cosmological unfolding.
01:58:24.000And how much of your perceptions of these things has evolved, you know, as an educator and as a scientist and as a person who's in the public eye?
01:58:32.000How much of your perceptions on these ideas have changed over the course of your career?
01:59:33.000You're at the blackboard, you're putting equations up there, you're trying to get the kids to be able to solve problems and understand what the mathematics is all about.
01:59:41.000So the only thing you're really ever doing is touching the cognitive part of their brain.
01:59:45.000For the last few years, I've been teaching a course, the students didn't know it, that's actually based on this book.
01:59:51.000So I wanted to try out the ideas with young minds.
01:59:55.000So I taught a course at Columbia called Origins and Meaning.
01:59:58.000And in that course, I had students from across the campus, not just the physics students.
02:00:03.000I had the neuro students, the anthropology students, the linguistic students, the theological, you know, so it was a whole range of students.
02:00:09.000And to see how their understanding of how their major or subject fits into the cosmological unfolding changed many of their perspectives on what it is that they're studying and what they're doing.
02:00:23.000And to have students come to my office and to feel shooken up, shaken up, whatever the right form of that verb is I think?
02:00:52.000I'm thinking about my life differently.
02:00:54.000And some of them, frankly, would be upset.
02:01:05.000Because they'd say, this course is kind of shaking my sense of who I am and what I am in the world.
02:01:12.000What was the key aspect of it that was shaking them?
02:01:15.000Well, for some students it was the notion of religion because many of them, or at least some of them, had a traditional religious upbringing and their academic life and their religious life were completely separate.
02:01:28.000And now when you have a course in which you're focusing upon how it would be that this institution of religion might naturally evolve on planet Earth based upon what we know about humans and human brains and the evolutionary pressures that we've been under, Some of them began to think about religion as a very different proposition than the one that they had when they were growing up.
02:01:50.000And I was in a position that I'd never been before of basically counseling a student and saying, hey, it's okay to have your world shake a little bit.
02:02:00.000You may come back to exactly where you were before this course, but if a collection of ideas can make you rethink your life, At least it'll cast it in a different light.
02:02:14.000And I never had a conversation like that when teaching Schrodinger's equation.
02:02:20.000And for me, it was the most gratifying pedagogical experience that I've ever had because you're reaching the whole person as opposed to just reaching this cognitive technique of solving equations.
02:02:33.000If you can talk religion with a really intelligent person who's objective, who has a belief, it's such an interesting subject because it requires suspension of disbelief in order to absorb some of the stories.
02:02:50.000There's clearly a history behind this of thousands of years of translations, and you're trying to get to the, what did they mean when they wrote this down?
02:03:50.000We tend to think there's a mind up there.
02:03:52.000When the river gurgles, we tend to think that there's a mind in there and this is sort of the seed for the kinds of perspectives that you'll find in many of the world's religions.
02:04:02.000So there's natural course of events that can lead to the arising of the institution or at least the ideas behind the institution of religion.
02:04:14.000And for students that have never encountered that idea before, it can really shake things up, and I think in a very valuable way.
02:04:59.000And I remember I went back home, and my dad was not a religious man, but we knew that he would want to have a religious ceremony, and we did it.
02:05:08.000And we had a minion of Jews coming to the house to recite the Kaddish prayer, because we weren't religious.
02:05:22.000In fact, I didn't want to know what they were saying.
02:05:24.000To me, it was just a collection of ancient sounds.
02:05:27.000But the sounds connected me across the generations to a culture that had been extended back 5,000 years.
02:05:35.000And in a moment of crisis, that was a very comforting and useful connection to have.
02:05:42.000Yeah, that is where I find people get the most out of religion and the fact that it brings communities together in this sort of cohesive ritual where everybody acts together and everybody, you feel like there's completion to it.
02:05:59.000Like you're putting someone into perspective and you're doing so with this religious ceremony.
02:06:06.000And when large groups of people get together and engage in a ritual behavior, something magical happens.
02:06:16.000You know, I've spoken to evolutionary psychologists like Steve Pinker, who's a wonderful thinker.
02:06:22.000And, you know, Steve is skeptical that this kind of ritual behavior can yield the kind of cohesive bonding that some people suggest that it does.
02:06:35.000But, you know, you probably have – I have on occasion engaged in these ritual behaviors, you know, mass drumming and movement.
02:06:43.000And I got to tell you, you are quickly, I find, transported to a place where you are now part of a collective and you feel yourself melting into the group and you are one.
02:06:56.000And if you've never had that experience, I think it's something that you should have because I think it's a vital part of our heritage.
02:07:01.000It is part of how we got to be who we are.
02:07:04.000Yeah, there's something about group acceptance and a group of people acting and doing something together that does create this very strange bond.
02:07:26.000It's somehow joining you together into this massive humanity that's all engaged in the same practice and somehow you feel as though your identity melts into the larger whole.
02:08:24.000Within this group mentality, you can imagine a certain kind of groupthink can take over, at least people imagine that this happens.
02:08:32.000So, yes, it has positive aspects and it can have negative aspects, but in the end, I think there is a long lineage in which those of our forebears who survive were the ones who could join together into these more potent, these more powerful groups,
02:08:48.000and that way we're able to triumph over other groups, you know, in the ancestral environment.
02:08:53.000You know, there's different readings of the archaeological record, whether it was a dangerous place in the hunter-gatherer past or a sort of placid place.
02:09:01.000But one reading says it was a very dangerous place, and therefore those groups that survived were the ones who were able to establish this kind of allegiance to the whole.
02:09:10.000And certainly I think this kind of ritual behavior may have been part of that.
02:09:41.000It's the knee-jerk reaction among a certain group of academics and it feels deeply unfortunate to me.
02:09:51.000It almost feels like a religion of its own sort when it's just the response as opposed to a careful, thoughtful, heartfelt analysis of the situation.
02:10:01.000I frankly wish That more people would read William James' book.
02:10:04.000Because I do think that it's the kind of – because here's a scientist, right?
02:10:09.000A deeply thoughtful scientist who knows how to analyze data, knows how to rationally engage with the world, who was plumbing the depths of religion in a very, very meaningful and sensitive way.
02:10:24.000And by the end of these lectures, I think it was lecture number 20 or something, he describes religion as this – As something that helps the journey toward the terra and the beauty of phenomenon.
02:10:37.000He describes it as the voice of the thunder, the gentleness of the summer rain.
02:10:41.000He describes it in terms of the sublimity of the stars.
02:10:44.000And this kind of transcendent approach to the religious experience, I think, brings it out of the academic guise that is often thrown upon it, which is something that is contravening everything we know about the world.
02:11:00.000It's causing people to think in ways that are irrational.
02:11:03.000I mean this whole trope that you hear, it's not that there isn't some truth to that, but it's an incomplete truth.
02:11:09.000And if you're willing to approach religion in a way where you discard the pieces that offend you, Throw away the parts that you think are utter nonsense, only keep those aspects that are useful to you in your life, then there is a place for it.
02:11:25.000I think therein lies the problem with a lot of people.
02:11:28.000This need for suspension of disbelief troubles them so much that they feel like fools if they buy into something.
02:11:34.000And we're also dealing with All religions, except the ones that are super questionable, like Scientology or Mormonism, that are very old.
02:11:43.000And the idea of maybe it would be better if we came up with something that we could all agree on in 2020. Maybe it would be wonderful if we have something that maybe has science in it, maybe something that has a genuine understanding of how human beings react and what the benefits of community and And having these environments where loving,
02:12:07.000conscious people communicate with each other in a very positive way, that this could be a new form of this thing that we seem to desire so greatly.
02:12:17.000And I have to say, I make this point in the book because the point that I make there is that to truly engage with the world, You have to use a variety of stories.
02:12:31.000Now, there's the reductionist story that physicists are well equipped to talk about with particles and laws of physics.
02:12:37.000On top of that, you've got the chemist story, the complex molecules.
02:12:41.000You've got the biologist story that begins to talk about cells and life.
02:12:44.000You've got the psychological story, the neurophysiological story that brings a mind and consciousness.
02:12:50.000And within that you then have all of the activities that conscious beings undertake which includes religion and includes telling other kinds of stories and includes creative expression.
02:13:00.000And to sort of say that the scientific account is the only account by which you're ever going to gain true qualities of the world is a very, in my view, Limited description of what truth is.
02:13:12.000There is objective truth in the world that we can measure, that we can describe with equations and so forth.
02:13:18.000But there's also internal truth, spiritual truth that you get to by self-examination.
02:13:24.000It's real in the sense that you're understanding how you respond to the world.
02:13:29.000And that is something which is deeply personal but utterly real.
02:13:33.000And whether it's through psychedelics, whether it's through ayahuasca, whether it's through a spiritual journey, whether it's through religion, regardless, all of this adds color to the story of what it means to be a human being.
02:14:09.000There was a lot of what you might call woo-woo stuff that was happening in the lectures, and in fact, the funny thing is, the guy giving the lecture...
02:14:17.000He did recognize me, and I could tell how uncomfortable he was giving his normal description because he kept looking at me sheepishly as he would invoke quantum physics and things of that sort.
02:14:36.000I'm just here to sort of see what's going on.
02:14:38.000But the idea of allowing the mind to be in a different mode of operation, which is sort of how I summarize the experience.
02:14:46.000You know, if you're reciting the mantra in your mind and allowing that to be a sort of pedal point, a driver of how your mind is behaving at that moment, That's a very different way of being in the world from thinking about grocery shopping or solving Einstein's equations.
02:15:02.000And I think that, to me, is the value of it.
02:15:06.000It's a systematic way to put your mind in a different mode of operation.
02:15:11.000And at times, I find it very useful to move into that place.
02:15:17.000When you started doing Transcendental Meditation, what about it was weird?
02:15:22.000Well, what was weird, number one, was doing this in this group setting, which is how you start on this course, and moreover, it being framed in a manner that I had trouble aligning with my understanding of how the world works by virtue of the lectures that were given to us for what it is what we were doing.
02:15:42.000But through the practice, I sort of found – I'm sure I'm just translating from what they were saying in the lecture into a language that I'm more comfortable with.
02:15:51.000And that made it less weird for me because – It's a chain of thought that is artificial because I'm sitting here forcing myself to recite this mantra inside my mind,
02:16:20.000but that's a very useful way of being because it's unfamiliar and it's novel and it allows my brain to operate in a different way.
02:16:28.000So when I translated it into that language, it all of a sudden made a lot more sense to me and became not weird at all.
02:16:51.000I don't feel that way, but there are moments when I say, whoa, I need to do it.
02:16:56.000And based on circumstance, based on what's happening in a given moment, it allows a kind of mental reset if that's a language that makes sense.
02:17:05.000And that reset I consider to be a valuable thing to do.
02:20:12.000There's a lot of benefit in that in the same way, in that it's so difficult and in the poses, if you can only concentrate on your breath, just balance and concentrate on your breath, you'll be filled with activity enough with things to concentrate on, with the balancing of the posture and then the breath,
02:20:29.000that it acts as almost a brain scouring.
02:20:33.000It cleanses the mind of unnecessary anxieties and a lot of other things.
02:20:39.000But you've been doing that for a long time, or is this a reason?
02:24:08.000Now the value of that is I have done so much reading over the last two months because I'm like up half the night and I only conk out when it's like utter, utter exhaustion.
02:25:00.000And he's like, well, a disc is compressed.
02:25:02.000Like, how do you get it to decompress?
02:25:05.000And he developed this machine that strengthens the back when you lift up the legs, but then in the lowering of the legs, it provides active decompression, and it alleviated his problem.
02:25:44.000A lot of chin-ups, sit-ups, a lot of lower back exercises, hyper back extensions, anything to keep things strong.
02:25:53.000Squats, making sure that the more tissue you have, the more strength you have in that tissue around, particularly protecting your joints and your spine, the healthier you're going to be.
02:26:03.000No, it's absolutely vital because the last few months have been hell, I have to say.