In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with the world's foremost quantum physicist, Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson. We talk about his journey to becoming a professional physicist, how he got into the field, and what it's like being a nerd in the 21st century. We also talk about the importance of quantum mechanics, and why it's important to understand what we know about the universe and the laws of nature. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Additional editing was made by Annie-Rose Strasser and Matthew Boll. Our theme song was written and performed by Micah Vellian and our ad music was provided by Mark Phillips. Additional music was mixed by Ian Dorsch and produced by Patrick Muldowney. Additional engineering and mixing was done by Matthew Boll and Christian Bladt. Additional production assistance from Matthew Boll, who provided production assistance to the show. The show was mixed, edited, and mixed by Matt Boll, with additional engineering assistance from Mark Boll, and additional mixing and mastering by Patrick Moffat. Additional mixing by Patrick Boll. Music by Mark Boll and Patrick Boll, additional mixing by Christian Boll, Matthew Boll Additional mastering and mastering of the show by John Rocha, and music production by Peter Kuchta, and Mike McLennan, and Bobby Lord, and Jeff Perla, and Matthew Keyser, and Patrick McKirdy, and Alex Blanell, and Rachel Ward, with assistance from Patrick McEliza, and Ben Kacz, and Mark McElton, and James Ransom, and Andrew McKirden, and Michael Horschig, and Chris Clark. , and with additional assistance from Ben Kuchter, and John Cawthorne. Joe Rogans , we discuss quantum mechanics and quantum physics, and how to understand the universe, and the challenges we face as a human experience, and its impact on our understanding it, and our relationship with it, as well as what it means to be a scientist, and so much more, and we talk about how we can make sense of it all, and learn from it, and how it affects us all, and what we can do better, and more. and more, we hope you enjoy it! Thank you for listening to this episode, and tweet us what you think about it? Tweet us to let us know what you're learning and share it on social media!
00:00:58.000When you – being a physicist, being a person that really does have a much greater grasp of the concept of infinity and of time and of the – just the length that the universe has existed in its current form,
00:01:14.000how do you just get through your day and not freak out?
00:01:17.000Well, it's because my wife says, you know, you've got to cook dinner.
00:01:21.000So, I mean, there are things that you have to actually get done.
00:01:25.000But it does change your perspective in a significant way because you recognize...
00:01:32.000That the things that we consider to be oh so vital and important are just this blink of an eye on the cosmological landscape, on the cosmological timeline.
00:01:42.000And it does change the way you approach the world when you pay attention to it.
00:01:47.000It's hard to always pay attention to it, though.
00:02:05.000Because life is too powerful in its intrusion on the way you actually behave in the world.
00:02:11.000But because of your perspective and because of your education on this, do you feel like almost an obligation to try to expand people's perspective?
00:02:20.000I'd say that's part of what my goals of life is, to do just that.
00:02:25.000You know, I don't want people to not live their lives the way they have, but I want them to be able to broaden the experience by recognizing that everyday phenomenon is a small slice.
00:02:39.000Of the way the world is actually put together.
00:02:43.000And when you can see your life and your experiences, just a tiny sliver of a reality that's like bizarrely strange and utterly wondrous when you understand everything from black holes to time dilation to quantum tunneling to all that stuff that we have discovered over the last couple hundred years.
00:03:34.000But that's, no, people are very curious and interested in what physics has found.
00:03:39.000What's hard is getting them to not just take it in, but to take it in correctly so that they don't take the ideas and twist it into something else that suits whatever weirdness they may have encountered in the world.
00:03:54.000The number of times that I see people take the concepts of quantum mechanics And turn it into utter nonsense.
00:04:19.000But if you ask me what the challenge is, the challenge is breaking through that and getting people to really understand what it is that we found.
00:04:26.000And it's weirder than many of the things that the human imagination would go to.
00:04:30.000But it's harder because it's very specific and rigorous and mathematical, ultimately, and that's unfamiliar.
00:04:36.000Do you think it's the complications of quantum mechanics?
00:04:40.000It's such a bizarre field of study that it sort of lends itself being sort of occupied by people like the what-the-bleep-do-we-know type folks that kind of co-opt it and then spread nonsense?
00:06:20.000And, yeah, I think I mentioned to you once, I actually accidentally found myself at one of their headquarters in, I think it was in Washington State, gave a talk at a gathering, and it was so sad at some level because I saw people searching for truth but being misled by a charismatic speaker who's basically coming up with this nonsense,
00:06:52.000It's just more you hear quantum mechanics is weird, and then you hear something else is weird, and you say, oh, that must be quantum mechanics, because there's this general sensibility that the world is weird.
00:07:03.000But quantum mechanics is weird in a very specific way.
00:07:07.000I mean, Schrodinger, Erwin Schrodinger wrote down an equation, a mathematical equation that actually quantifies the weirdness in a very specific way that makes mathematical predictions that we can test in the laboratory.
00:07:20.000So that's not just like, you know, people in their minds coming up with crazy stuff and saying, wouldn't that be curious if that was part of reality?
00:07:27.000This is stuff that has emerged from careful study.
00:07:31.000So when you learn that the world evolves according to a game of chance, it's as if there's a throw of the dice that determines how things evolve from one moment to the next.
00:08:19.000Because when you talk about things being in superposition, or you talk about spooky action at a distance, you talk about these bizarre things that they sound like magic when you're talking about something that's both moving and not moving.
00:08:32.000It's in two places at the same time, or there's a probability of it being in these...
00:08:37.000Describing stuff like that, especially to the average person that doesn't have a background in this, they go, what is the world then?
00:08:52.000And the difference is we can then look back at the equations and say...
00:08:57.000If we're talking about quantum attainment, we can see how two particles far apart in space will have behaviors that are correlated.
00:09:04.000You do something on this particle, And we'll have some instantaneous correlation with what happens at that particle regardless of how far apart they are in space.
00:09:26.000So I don't know at some level if I'm trying to answer you human to human, but if I'm answering as a mathematician, as a physicist, I can see it in the equations.
00:10:33.000And ultimately I say the reason I believe the math is the math makes predictions that we can test in the laboratory.
00:10:40.000And then you say, well, then what kind of understanding is that?
00:10:44.000And some people would say that's the deepest understanding.
00:10:47.000All we really want of a physical theory is for it to give a rigorous mathematical articulation of what happens out there in the world, and it's the human brain struggling for some kind of intuition.
00:11:21.000So, Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a curious fellow, a very interesting life, but he realized, looking at the equations, that there was this quality of the math That if two particles come together and they interact for a little while and then they separate,
00:11:40.000they can no longer be thought of as independent or autonomous.
00:11:44.000I mean, the very basic quality of autonomy, you and I are autonomous because we can separate.
00:11:50.000We can go our separate ways and do whatever we want at our respective locations.
00:11:55.000So you would think that if two particles separate, they will also be autonomous.
00:12:00.000But he saw in the mathematics that they would not be autonomous.
00:12:04.000That what you did to one would have an effect in some quantum mechanical way on the other.
00:12:22.0001935 with two colleagues and leverages this idea.
00:12:26.000Writes a paper where he tries to prove that quantum mechanics cannot be the full story of the world because of this weird quality of what you do here affecting something over there.
00:12:35.000It's not until the 1980s that people really start to test this idea and by today this is used all the time in the laboratory.
00:12:43.000Quantum computing makes use of this quality so this is no longer an idea that's abstract It's something that's applied.
00:12:52.000Applied quantum entanglement gives us things in the real world in the laboratory.
00:12:57.000So this is beyond question real, even though Einstein thought it couldn't be, and Schrodinger considered it to be the strangest feature of the math of all.
00:13:10.000If you're going to allow for the most exotic possibilities, some would suggest that you are probing the many worlds of quantum mechanics.
00:13:22.000So in quantum mechanics, all you ever do is predict the probability of this happening or that happening.
00:13:27.000Electrons, you know, 70% chance here, 30% chance here.
00:13:30.000If you measure the electron and you do find it over here, what happened to the other possibility?
00:13:35.000Some say it happens, but just in another world.
00:13:39.000In one world, you find the particle here.
00:13:41.000In another world, there's a copy of you that finds the particle over there.
00:13:45.000Each of you's doesn't know about the other and thinks you are the unique version of you, the unique Joe Rogan, but now there are two of you, each thinking that the particle is found in one location or another.
00:13:55.000If that's the way quantum mechanics actually works, and some people do think this, Then quantum entanglement is, in some sense, less weird.
00:14:03.000Because what happens is that in one world, you have a certain correlation between the particles.
00:14:09.000In another world, you'd have a different correlation between the particles, and that's just what happens.
00:14:14.000So that's one, but you're allowing multiple universes in this explanation.
00:15:04.000So the idea is that there's multiple versions of you and multiple versions of everything that you've experienced, all the things you see that you consider to be Austin, Texas, or the United States, or the world itself.
00:15:19.000There's multiple versions of this happening simultaneously.
00:15:25.000Because the basic idea is that any outcome that is allowed by the laws of quantum physics, any outcome will take place in its own separate world.
00:15:35.000And so when you think about every decision you've ever made, every possibility that you've ever encountered, all of the outcomes happen, and that would happen throughout all of time.
00:15:47.000So in some sense, there's an Unending number of realities that are in the grand landscape of the quantum description.
00:15:56.000Now, you hear that and you say, that's nuts!
00:18:23.000They would say that I should convince you That there is no deeper intuition that you're missing.
00:18:31.000That the only way to understand what's going on is you learn the math, you do the calculations, and looking for anything else is looking for too much.
00:19:34.000And that wormhole means that they're secretly close together because of the shortcut.
00:19:39.000So they look like they're far apart, but there's actually a shortcut through a wormhole, so secretly they're actually right next to each other.
00:19:47.000And then when you do something on one and it affects the other, perhaps it's not so surprising because through the wormhole, they're right next to each other.
00:19:55.000Anybody that would discourage you from discussing these kind of very strange ideas and expressing them that way, you're going to discourage curiosity.
00:20:05.000Which is going to discourage interest in the field, which is going to discourage people to become physicists because it is fascinating.
00:20:12.000And when you're talking about this concept of spooky action at a distance, you're talking about wormholes connecting things together at far distances and things that we don't truly understand but that you can show mathematically are correct.
00:20:29.000And you have to look at the history, though.
00:20:32.000There was a period of time When people who thought about what's really going on got sidetracked, in the early days of quantum mechanics, what really needed to happen was develop the math, develop the equations, make predictions, go into the laboratory, have this We're good to go.
00:21:08.000We have quantum mechanics, at least as a working theory that we can use to do wondrous things.
00:21:15.000And so more and more people are thinking now about these kinds of questions.
00:21:21.000So I think it's kind of a pendulum has swung toward the more philosophical, toward the more what does it all mean?
00:21:28.000How can we describe what's really going on here?
00:21:30.000Whereas if we were having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, I would say virtually no one is really thinking about things in the language that we're talking about.
00:21:40.000That's really strange, because if you think about how long people have been trying to understand the reality of the universe itself and how recent some of these discoveries are, it really makes you think, like, what are we going to be able to show and prove is true 50 years from now,
00:21:58.000Because if you go back 100 years ago, you go to 1921, the understanding of the world itself is so grossly different than what we understand today.
00:22:10.000And the other side of that observation, which is exciting and daunting, is think about what science has done more or less to date.
00:22:20.000It's tried to understand things in the world that naturally form.
00:22:25.000Stars, planets, black holes, living systems.
00:22:29.000But from more or less now going forward, we're entering a realm where we are going to start to create the new things that we're going to try to understand as we modify the genome, as we perhaps create artificial life, as we use physics.
00:23:45.000It'll certainly be something that we approach in an incremental way.
00:23:49.000I'm not suggesting that tomorrow we're going to be developing terraforming new worlds or creating parallel universes, but there's a pattern that we certainly see playing out throughout the history of science, which is this.
00:24:03.000You're presented with some quality of the world.
00:24:08.000And then little by little you begin to understand that you develop theories, mathematical ideas being the most precise ones to describe whatever it is that you're talking about.
00:24:16.000And once you have those ideas nailed down, you can then use them to manipulate the world.
00:24:21.000That's what we do with quantum mechanics.
00:24:23.000At first we just wanted to understand atoms, right?
00:24:28.000Now we can manipulate the quantum world to create, you know, all sorts of technological wonders, the integrated circuit, which is at the core of every technological gadget that has transformed life on planet Earth.
00:24:41.000This is quantum mechanics in the hands of human beings.
00:24:45.000And so that pattern of going from lack of understanding to understanding to manipulation Is the pattern that will continue to play out going forward?
00:24:54.000So that manipulation, what will it be?
00:24:57.000Well, I think we're going to come to a time when we understand the structure of space far better than we do now.
00:25:03.000The structure of time far better than we do now.
00:25:06.000Does that suggest that we'll manipulate space and time?
00:25:23.000If we stick around long enough, if the pattern persists, that understanding ultimately gives you the lever to manipulate, Right now, if you ask me what's happening at the cutting edge of string theory, quantum mechanics, it's understanding black holes.
00:25:35.000It's understanding how quantum mechanics and black holes talk to each other.
00:25:39.000A black hole is a weird region of space-time.
00:25:42.000So we're trying to understand space-time itself at the deepest possible level.
00:25:47.000And so the next step would suggest that we will manipulate it at some point in fairly significant ways.
00:25:56.000So the ways we've used it so far, you mentioned integrated circuits.
00:25:59.000How is quantum mechanics used to form integrated circuits?
00:26:05.000So an integrated circuit, in essence, is a little device where you want an electron to follow a very specific trajectory.
00:26:13.000To carry out this or that computation or process.
00:26:16.000Now if you want to control electrons with that level of fidelity, you've got to use the mathematical laws that describe electrons with that level of fidelity.
00:26:26.000Newton's equations from the late 1600s, they won't work.
00:26:29.000If you think of the electron as a little baseball or a little billiard ball, totally inaccurate.
00:26:33.000It will not allow you to manipulate their motion.
00:26:35.000But with quantum mechanics, you can manipulate the motion of the electrons because you understand their mathematical underpinnings.
00:26:43.000And so it was only by applying quantum mechanics to materials, to structures that could give rise to this kind of control over little particles, that we could build these microscopic circuits.
00:26:54.000I mean, that's the proof in the pudding, right?
00:26:57.000And so that's a key example of quantum mechanics transforming the world as we know it.
00:27:06.000And right now, there is work in string theory that is suggesting That this notion of quantum entanglement that we were talking about before, that may be the key to understanding the fabric of space-time itself.
00:27:21.000I mean, we use this metaphor, fabric of space-time, right?
00:27:24.000But any piece of fabric, it's stitched together by threads, right?
00:27:29.000So what are the threads of the spatial fabric if we push this metaphor and try to really understand it more fully?
00:27:35.000And one of the suggestions is the threads of quantum entanglement That tie distant objects together, those may be the threads that hold together the fabric of space-time itself.
00:27:48.000So that would mean that everything is somehow connected, even if it's 13.7 billion light-years away, these things are somehow or another directly connected.
00:28:01.000Now, to avoid that turning into the Wu, you have to realize that When you have a lot of material and when you have a lot of time and a lot of space, these quantum entangled connections become so spread out that they become diluted.
00:28:16.000So it's not as though someone can say, you know, I thought about my best friend in California and then the phone rang.
00:29:02.000It's more diluted by the number of particles that are involved.
00:29:06.000So if you just have two particles in a pristine environment, like a total vacuum, and they're entangled, you can move them arbitrarily far apart, and the entanglement will not dilute.
00:29:27.000And there are a number of experimental protocols, procedures, but one concrete one is you take an atom.
00:29:34.000Like an atom of calcium is one example.
00:29:36.000You fire some laser on it and that excites the electron in the calcium atom to a higher energetic state.
00:29:44.000When that electron falls back down to a lower energetic state, it emits photons back to back.
00:29:51.000And because those photons were emitted from the same process, the electron falling down to a lower energy state, those photons will be entangled.
00:29:59.000So that's a concrete way where you can have back-to-back photons that will travel arbitrarily far apart if they don't encounter anything else.
00:31:28.000You can also use just the language of probabilities.
00:31:30.000So, if you have a particle, like an electron, normally in a classical world, you'd say it's either here or there.
00:31:38.000In a quantum world, our world, it can be in a mixture of here and there.
00:31:43.000If it's in a mixture of here and there, you can do calculations here and there.
00:31:49.000Whereas in a classical world, you could either do the calculation here or there.
00:31:53.000So it's basically substantially increasing the places where calculations take place, thereby substantially decreasing the amount of time that it takes these calculations to be accomplished.
00:32:11.000What separates quantum computing from regular computing?
00:32:14.000So in regular computing, you have quantum qualities, because like I said, the integrated circuit, you need it to understand quantum mechanics to guide the motion of the particle through the integrated circuit.
00:32:25.000But in the end of the day, A traditional computer, a classical computer if we will, stores information as bits, zeros and ones.
00:32:36.000So you have one bit that's either a zero, another bit that's either a one, and through that you can store information and manipulate information, and that's what computation is all about.
00:32:45.000The quantum computer changes the bit to the so-called qubit, What is a qubit?
00:32:50.000A qubit is a specially defined and constructed digit that can be in a mixture of zero and one.
00:33:00.000And specifically, the way we usually do this is we have what are known as spin systems.
00:33:04.000So an electron has a spin, like a little top.
00:33:08.000And it can either spin counterclockwise that we call spin up or clockwise that we call spin down.
00:33:14.000In a classical world, the electron is either this or this.
00:33:18.000In the quantum world, it can be a mixture.
00:33:21.000And so, literally, these quantum computers have these spin systems that are in these mixtures of up and down simultaneously.
00:33:28.000And that allows them to do multiple computations simultaneously.
00:33:32.000That allows them to decrease the time it takes to carry out the computation.
00:33:55.000You've got spin systems in arms of the chandeliers and you have cooling systems that are vital to these computers because – If there's heat that comes into the system, it can destroy this delicate mixture of up and down simultaneously.
00:34:12.000So they're far more delicate, and it is much more difficult to, at this stage, have the number of bits.
00:34:21.000So an ordinary computer can have as many bits as you want.
00:34:24.000As you say, just, you know, put more boards, expand, you know, the random access memory.
00:34:29.000You know, it's all up to you, the user.
00:34:31.000For quantum computers, you've got to make sure that all these qubits are working together in order that they can perform these calculations.
00:34:41.000And it's very hard to have a whole lot of qubits maintain the so-called quantum coherence that allows them to work together.
00:34:49.000So the maximum number of qubits in quantum computers that have been built is only at 50. I think?
00:35:14.000And in that way, in principle, being able to do calculations exponentially more quickly.
00:35:55.000Whereas, you know, you drop your laptop, you may crack it or something.
00:35:59.000But, you know, for the most part, you drop your phone and it's fine.
00:36:02.000And so there are those who say that we will never have these things in daily life.
00:36:07.000They'll always be highly specialized, you know, in laboratories that we somehow make use of as opposed to carry around in our pocket.
00:36:13.000But the same was said about ordinary computers, you know, 60, 70, 80 years ago when a computer in those days filled an entire room with all these vacuum tubes.
00:36:22.000Whoever thought that we'd be walking around in our pocket with something more powerful than that kind of device?
00:36:38.000And in fact, one of the hurdles right now in quantum computing is they're not reliable.
00:36:43.000These qubits, they can flip from one state to another, ruining your calculation very easily.
00:36:50.000So what some of the quantum computer specialists are developing are what is known as quantum error-correcting codes, redundancies in the information in the quantum system so that when this kind of Spin flip should happen.
00:37:04.000You can correct it down the line and not have to start the calculation from scratch.
00:37:46.000That on a quantum computer you can do in the blink of an eye that might take years or centuries on a classical computer, such as there are certain encryption ideas that have been applied to securing information in banks and things of that sort.
00:38:03.000In the old days it was basically you'd build these huge prime numbers and you'd multiply them together And it would be the challenge of the person trying to hack your system to have to factor this big number and virtually impossible to do in any reasonable period of time.
00:38:17.000There's an algorithm that people have come up with that works on a quantum computer that can factor these numbers instantaneously.
00:38:27.000It means that information that was secure might not be secure but of course then quantum computer scientists come along and they come up with a new encryption mechanism that's quantum mechanically based And that one would be unbreakable even with a quantum computer.
00:38:41.000So that's the kind of development which is actually already starting to happen.
00:38:47.000You know, a student of mine actually works for a company that generates quantum random numbers.
00:38:52.000You need random numbers in order to be able to have the security that nobody's gonna know what number you actually have.
00:38:59.000And there are quantum mechanical devices that have already been built to generate those kinds of quantum numbers.
00:39:06.000But the overarching from 30,000 feet view is that we'll be able to take on calculations that we could never even imagine doing before, and that could revolutionize artificial intelligence.
00:39:19.000I mean, what is general artificial intelligence about?
00:39:22.000Looking out at the world and seeing patterns, right?
00:39:25.000AlphaGo, this wonderful system that learned The game of Go and could beat masters in the world.
00:39:34.000It looked at a huge number of games and saw the patterns in that huge number of games and with that gained an expertise that allowed it to become the champion Go player in the world.
00:39:45.000So it's all about pattern recognition.
00:39:48.000And that's what a quantum computer in principle could be incredibly powerful at.
00:39:54.000So artificial intelligence in principle could take an incredible leap forward, simulating various quantum systems that we want to understand better.
00:40:06.000Now, when we simulate them on a computer, we're simulating them on a classical computer trying to mimic quantum mechanical behavior.
00:40:13.000Now, if you had a quantum computer, you could actually simulate it with the very physical ideas that are happening in the real world.
00:40:22.000So now you have a confluence between the methodology of the quantum simulator and the real world allowing you to do things that you couldn't do before.
00:40:29.000So it's just to say that in principle there's a whole lot of understanding of the external world that these devices could give us and that's why people have become so excited about it.
00:40:40.000I think it's so interesting that we look to games to find out how intelligent and how powerful computers really are.
00:40:48.000Like for the longest time is could a computer beat a chess master?
00:41:18.000I mean, tic-tac-toe versus chess, right?
00:41:21.000The difference is in tic-tac-toe, it's so simple that there's no creativity involved.
00:41:26.000You know, if you play it correctly, you'll always have a draw, right?
00:41:29.000But in chess, because of the great number of possibilities, there's a lot of creativity that comes into play.
00:41:35.000It's a universe with a fixed set of rules, it's simplified, and it has the opportunity for human beings to be creative.
00:41:41.000And so it's a wonderful testing ground for computers because if a computer can beat a human in that domain, now we can say, aha!
00:41:50.000That computer, in some sense, is creative.
00:41:53.000And the thing that we usually look to to define ourselves as human beings, how do we differ from other things in the world, the inanimate world?
00:42:08.000That's kind of how we define ourselves.
00:42:10.000And so when a computer starts to do that, it starts to challenge our humanity.
00:42:16.000And I think that's a good thing, right?
00:42:18.000I don't think that we are as different from the external world as we perhaps like to think.
00:42:25.000We are collections of particles governed by the laws of physics.
00:42:30.000And I think it's spectacular that a collection of particles under the ironclad rules of physics can be creative, can come up with ideas, can figure out quantum mechanics and general relativity.
00:43:35.000We come to it based on the fact that we're having a conversation and we observe each other's behaviors and all of that comes together to suggest that we are each roughly the same and therefore I assume that what's happening inside your head is roughly the same kind of processes that happen inside of mine.
00:43:51.000And we're going to have to infer it for artificial systems too.
00:43:55.000And, you know, if you walk down the street and there's an artificial system sitting on a park bench, you know, hand on its head saying, I'm so worried.
00:44:07.000And if it's real, you're going to say, wow, that computer's having an existential crisis.
00:44:12.000And there's a real inner world happening in there.
00:44:15.000What other conclusion could you draw, you know?
00:44:18.000Yeah, I think we have an internal bias about our own uniqueness in terms of our – because we're so unique in comparison to all the other animals and our ability to manipulate the world and our environment and our use of creativity.
00:44:37.000And if you took into a computer, specifically a super powerful computer like what we're assuming a quantum computer could become – Could take into account all the things that have ever been said by any human being ever, the motivations for those things,
00:44:54.000whether it's love or emotions or jealousy or narcissism or whatever these weird human quirks are, and they could figure out a way to create works of art.
00:45:07.000They could figure out a way to do things that are uniquely moving to us.
00:45:12.000And that's what's going to be really weird.
00:45:14.000If a computer can write a book that blows you away, a computer can write a better version of The Great Gatsby.
00:45:25.000Because look, what is it that distinguishes us as a species?
00:45:29.000Many people will point to different things, but one certainly is that we are deeply social as a species, and because of that we've been able to learn from each other And therefore not had to start each generation from scratch, right?
00:45:44.000Many other animals in the animal kingdom, they basically each generation kind of start from scratch.
00:45:49.000They don't have books that they can read about discoveries of an early rage.
00:45:54.000I mean some do, but they don't have teachers that can give them the corpus of knowledge going back hundreds of years.
00:46:00.000They probably don't have universities where they can learn about what happened over the last 500 years and therefore not have to start from scratch.
00:46:06.000And so When you talk about the capacities of artificial systems, they will be far more social than we.
00:46:17.000We typically learn from a handful of masters that had, you know, Albert Einstein's work, all physicists learn about it.
00:46:25.000You know, artists maybe learn about the work of Rembrandt or Picasso, you know, the masters.
00:46:31.000But an artificial system can learn from every single other artificial system.
00:46:36.000There's no limit to the connectivity between those systems.
00:46:40.000So whatever pattern a given artificial system figures out, they'll all know about that pattern simply by communicating among themselves.
00:46:49.000In our environment, we only communicate with a small number of other human beings over the course of our lives.
00:46:55.000And again, some of that knowledge is stored and therefore it becomes widely accessible.
00:46:59.000All knowledge gleaned by any artificial being within the network will be immediately shared by every other artificial being within the network.
00:47:08.000And therefore, the very thing that makes us special, the collective culture that allows us, each generation, to build on the insights of the previous and not have to go back to the beginning, that will be amplified enormously for artificial systems.
00:47:23.000So why wouldn't they be able to create the greatest work and the greatest novels?
00:47:28.000I think that will absolutely be the case.
00:47:31.000Yeah, we have information that somehow or another passed from parent to child, somehow, through genes.
00:47:38.000And we see it not just in us, but we see it in the animal world.
00:47:42.000Like, you can have a dog, and for whatever reason that dog knows it's supposed to lift its leg to pee on a tree, and no one has to teach it it.
00:48:08.000There's this whole area of evolutionary psychology which applies the ideas of evolution by natural selection Not just to the physical system.
00:48:17.000That's where we normally learn about it in school.
00:48:19.000You know, we see how a given species changes over time because there's a random mutation and that mutation allows that individual to better adapt to the environment and therefore that particular morphology, that change, spreads widely through subsequent generations.
00:48:36.000That's normally how we talk about evolution by natural selection.
00:48:39.000But as you're saying, it also applies to behaviors.
00:48:41.000There are certain behaviors that allows an individual to better navigate in the ancestral world, and that behavior If it had some genetic basis, can be passed on to the next generation and passed on to generations still.
00:48:56.000So yeah, lifting up the leg to pee is one example of that, but there are many other behaviors.
00:49:01.000I mean, a canonical example is we have a predilection.
00:49:08.000Well, the evolutionary psychologists have noted that in the ancestral world, those of our forebears We're good to go.
00:49:39.000We are able to store culturally information and breakthroughs from an earlier generation that may not have any relevance to our DNA, and yet we can pass that knowledge on, right?
00:49:53.000So Newton's ideas and Einstein's ideas, we will continue to pass these ideas on, and I presume they're not going to be imprinted in anybody's DNA. Maybe one day they will be, but certainly at the moment they're not.
00:50:04.000Your golden retriever, that kind of dog, you're saying it was a golden?
00:50:09.000The mother of your golden retriever and the mother of that mother and going all the way back, they pretty much all lifted up their leg and peed.
00:50:20.000And there wasn't a whole lot else that got passed through.
00:50:23.000From sort of cultural heritage of things that one dog discovered that could then pass on to subsequent generations.
00:50:32.000So what makes us special is we certainly have behaviors that are passed through the lineage in this manner of evolutionary psychology, but we also have culture.
00:50:41.000And culture allows us to store the insights, the breakthroughs of an earlier age, allowing us to get to where we have gotten.
00:50:49.000I mean, I've often wondered if I got stuck on a desert island, How much of the world would I be able to recreate?
00:50:55.000Even how much of the world of physics?
00:51:08.000I could write down the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and I could work out for them the mathematics of black holes and entanglement, that sort of stuff I could do.
00:51:17.000But there's so much of the culture that I... I have no capacity to reproduce.
00:51:23.000And that's our collective socialization that we're able to benefit from the fact that we all talk to each other and we all know about things that happened in an earlier age.
00:51:36.000And that is what we will also pass on to artificial systems because they're going to be able to do that too.
00:51:42.000It seems like almost a race in time to see if we can get to this quantum computing level in a personal way that you can use before we destroy ourselves.
00:51:54.000Because if you go back to think about culture and the way we interact with information, how much it's changed since the 1700s, the 1500s, Things had to be written down, then the invention of the printing press, and then all these different steps that have allowed us to access information more readily and easily to the point where we're at now,
00:52:11.000where you have a phone in your pocket you literally ask a question to, and it'll Google it and come up with the answer for you, and it's amazing, right?
00:52:18.000I mean, when we were kids, that would have been just a mind-blower, a device in your pocket that you could ask a question to, and it literally has Like, knowledge beyond your wildest dreams, access to scientific papers, thousands of years of people pondering the universe,
00:52:34.000and you can have the answers to almost any subject right there in your hand, but that's the tip of the iceberg.
00:58:29.000So the way I read that they did this was they took MIDI files, which would just be a computer-based audio, to recreate the music you're hearing.
00:58:40.000And then they did what we've heard done to your voice with fake speech patterns.
00:58:45.000It took like 30 songs to create the lyrics.
01:01:36.000If I'm being cynical, and I often am, that is what's going to lead us to become some sort of a symbiotic creature, some sort of an integrated computer-slash-biological entity.
01:01:57.000Look, man, you know more about this shit than I do.
01:02:00.000Well, all I'm saying is we've been on a particular evolutionary trajectory and for a long time it's been thoroughly biological and thoroughly by random mutations.
01:02:10.000If that now moves to a new phase in which we've got new kinds of materials and new kinds of ways of modifying the system that's not just random mutation and natural selection, So be it.
01:02:22.000It seems like that's inevitable when you think about how we have this insatiable desire to innovate.
01:02:45.000It seems like if we can manipulate matter and, you know, with CRISPR we're manipulating genetics, it just seems inevitable that we're going to one day be something unrecognizable.
01:03:20.000I often wonder about social trends, and there's almost a frantic desire to escape from a lot of the biological constraints that human beings are saddled with.
01:03:52.000When we think about aggression and war, it's more abhorrent now than ever before in human history.
01:03:59.000And as we move further and further, not just that, but even cruelty, bullying, there's all these things that are in the forefront of the conversation that we have about what's desirable and not desirable, what we tolerate and what we won't tolerate, and that these things...
01:04:15.000Bigotry, racism, homophobia, misogyny, but if you break down what they are, they're singling out individual groups for what some people who are ignorant deem as undesirable characteristics.
01:04:43.000And also, people are really concerned with mindfulness, being in the moment, being not externally motivated by negative thoughts and feelings.
01:04:54.000And we're moving towards some weird understanding of what we would deem to be We're good to go.
01:05:24.000What if they come up with some new method of replicating?
01:05:29.000Some new method that doesn't involve biological sex?
01:05:33.000I think it'd be helpful to many physicists.
01:06:14.000Well, once the thing that it's deciding to kill are the other, like the old representation of a human being that is damaging the ocean, polluting the atmosphere, all these different things that come along with being a person who has access to these incredible technologies that we don't have the discipline to utilize these things fully.
01:06:37.000And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that we haven't invented them personally.
01:06:44.000And you just go randomly running around shooting people.
01:06:47.000Maybe if you developed the concept of gunpowder and figured out how to put it inside a shell casing and figured out a bullet's trajectory and figured out rifling on a gun and all these different...
01:06:58.000Maybe you would have a greater understanding of what you've created and you'd feel more responsibility to be more cautious with it.
01:07:09.000Yeah, I feel that same way, though, when it comes to the stuff we were talking about before, being vegan.
01:07:14.000I feel like so many people eat meat, but they're not part of the process by which that meat gets to their table.
01:07:22.000And I think if they were, they would probably approach it differently.
01:07:59.000But tofu, peanut butter, And, you know, I think the amount of protein that people think that you need, and if you don't have it, you're somehow going to fall apart.
01:10:32.000And what brooding is, a chicken gets this idea that this egg that they're laying, even though there's no rooster, because chickens lay eggs with no rooster and those eggs never become an actual chick.
01:10:43.000But the chickens get this idea in their head that this egg they're sitting on is going to become a live chick.
01:10:50.000Because that's what they're supposed to be doing.
01:10:52.000They're supposed to breed with the rooster and the rooster gives them a chick and it comes out of the egg.
01:12:52.000And then he looked at the chicken coop, not that day, but like a couple months later, he's like, I think I can just run right through that fucking thing.
01:13:50.000With fire, all of a sudden, we could outsource digestion, cook the food externally so that we could have the amount of calories and nutrition that otherwise...
01:14:07.000Moments in our history that are pivotal that you don't focus attention on is necessarily that thing that made us ultimately who we are.
01:14:16.000So what things are we doing today that generations of the future or millennia in the future will look back and aha, that's when we went through the transformation.
01:14:47.000Well, this is like weird squared or something.
01:14:51.000But work over the last 20 years has established that When you have a black hole, actually even more general systems, but talk about a black hole, there's an alternate description of a black hole in terms of what's known as the holographic description.
01:15:05.000It's as if there's a two-dimensional world that surrounds any given three-dimensional world that has exactly the same physics as the three-dimensional world that we're familiar with and yet it describes it in a completely different language.
01:15:19.000So a black hole gravity is obviously essential.
01:15:24.000But in this dictionary that physicists have developed, there's a description of a black hole that doesn't involve gravity, only involves quantum mechanics.
01:15:32.000And the beautiful thing is the quantum processes in that quantum world Mimic the kinds of processes that people have been developing for quantum computing, quantum error correction code.
01:15:45.000And there's a dictionary that people have proposed for that quantum language on the holographic boundary with physics in the interior.
01:15:54.000And the dictionary shows that the quantum error correcting code may be the reason why space-time itself holds together.
01:16:02.000So there's this bizarre way in which everything that we know about in the world around us has a translated dictionary version in a different world that lacks gravity but has quantum mechanics.
01:16:13.000And so people are using some of the insights from quantum computing to understand questions about black holes in space-time.
01:16:26.000So as quantum computing expands, much like as computing expands, if you go back to the early NASA computers that filled up a whole room, we can extrapolate that as we get better at this and you look 50 years down the line from now, quantum computing will be the standard, it will be the norm.
01:16:42.000And it will probably radically alter our understanding of everything.
01:16:49.000So there's a real possibility that the language that we use for space-time and black holes may bear a profound imprint of the language that we are developing to understand quantum computing, quantum computers.
01:17:04.000I was just reading some article about black holes roaming through the universe and that some of them, they're detached from galaxies, right?
01:17:12.000I mean, oftentimes people think about black holes as these gargantuan structures that form from collapsed stars.
01:17:19.000There's a big one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, weighs four million times out of the sun.
01:17:24.000The photograph of a black hole in the galaxy M87 that got the world excited a couple of years back, 55 million light years away, billions of times the mass of the Sun, but the reality is Anything, if you compress it enough, becomes a black hole.
01:17:40.000If you take an orange and you squash an orange down sufficiently small, according to Einstein, it becomes a black hole.
01:17:46.000So these things don't have to be gargantuan.
01:17:49.000The flip side of it is we also typically have an intuition that black holes are really dense, right?
01:17:55.000That's usually the way we think about them.
01:17:57.000But if you make something sufficiently large, regardless of how low its density is, it will also become a black hole.
01:18:03.000So you can make a black hole out of air.
01:18:07.000If you have enough air, sufficiently large sphere of air, it would become a black hole too with the density of air.
01:18:16.000So all the intuitions that we typically have about black holes, that they have to be dense and they have to be gargantuan, not right.
01:18:24.000So black holes are just a part of the elemental structure of reality itself.
01:18:30.000Yeah, when you look at Einstein's equations, right in his mathematics, there's a little formula that you can see where it says if you have any mass m, whatever mass you want, And you squeeze it into a radius, r, that's less than 2 times Newton's constant,
01:19:05.000Because his Nobel Prize was for quantum mechanics.
01:19:09.000It was for a paper he wrote in 1905 about the photoelectric effect.
01:19:12.000But he never really believed that quantum mechanics was the true description of the world.
01:19:19.000And when he was developing the general theory of relativity, he was just thinking about gravity and not quantum mechanics.
01:19:24.000Stephen Hawking came along in 1974 and started to inject quantum mechanics into our understanding of things like black holes.
01:19:31.000And that's where Hawking proved that black holes are not completely black.
01:19:35.000He showed that black holes allow a certain amount of radiation to leak out of their surface, leak out of the event horizon, or leak out from just beyond the edge of the event horizon.
01:19:45.000And so, yes, when you think about black holes, as far as we can tell, they are a fundamental quality of the world, but you have to include quantum physics to truly understand them, and that's the cutting edge of what's happening right now.
01:19:58.000So they're a fundamental quality of the world but they're also in the center of every galaxy.
01:20:05.000The Sloan Digital Sky Survey did a wonderful study of a vast number of galaxies and I've seen these wonderful images where they put like a little red circle around all those galaxies that have a black hole in their center and there are red circles all over that imagery.
01:20:23.000So it seems to be a ubiquitous quality.
01:20:26.000That black holes are at the center of galaxies, and those are typically gargantuan black holes, millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun.
01:20:35.000Do we know why they exist at the center of the galaxy?
01:20:38.000You know, there's still a lot of uncertainty about galactic formation.
01:20:43.000You know, some have suggested that Early stars, which were quite large compared to more modern stars, when they exhausted their nuclear fuel and they collapsed in on each other, they created black holes that were large, and then they continued to suck in more material from the environment,
01:21:01.000and they grew larger and larger still.
01:21:02.000So that's sort of one rough way that people think about how these massive, enormous black holes may have formed, but it's uncertain.
01:21:10.000LIGO, this laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory, gravitational waves, it took headlines a few years ago when it detected the first ripples in the fabric of space.
01:21:21.000It detected them from two black holes that were 1.4 billion light years away, like 1.4 billion years ago, rotating around each other, going near the speed of light, slamming into each other, creating a tidal wave in the fabric of space,
01:21:36.000That rippled outward at the speed of light.
01:21:55.000When it's 100 light years away, a guy named Albert Einstein writes down equations that suggest there could be these gravitational waves, unknown that one is already racing toward the planet, right?
01:22:05.000And it continues to race onward two light days.
01:22:08.000It's two light days away when they turn on the newly refined version of the LIGO detector.
01:22:13.000And two days later, that wave rolls by.
01:22:16.000Planet Earth shakes the two detectors, one in Louisiana and the Washington State, giving us the first direct detection of ripples in the fabric of space and establishing that the story that I told you is true.
01:22:32.000And before the direct radio-telescopic imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope of the black hole in M87, that ripple in the fabric of space was the most direct evidence that black holes are real.
01:22:44.000Because when you took the way that the machine in Louisiana and Washington, it twitched for just a tiny fraction of a second...
01:22:51.000When you figured out, using supercomputers, what the cause of the wave must have been, you are led to two black holes that are 28 and 31 times the mass of the Sun, or 36 times the mass of the Sun, numbers of that sort.
01:23:06.000And that was the only explanation for the data.
01:23:08.000And so there's this beautiful indirect proof that these stellar-sized black holes are actually out there.
01:23:16.000And then, of course, we take a photograph of one in a nearby galaxy.
01:23:19.000So do we know why black holes would collide with each other?
01:23:23.000Are they attracted to each other because of their mass?
01:24:03.000A black hole whose mass is the same as the sun has the same gravitational pull as the sun.
01:24:08.000It doesn't pull any harder than the sun.
01:24:11.000It's just that you can get closer to it because it's so small and therefore you can experience the gravity more strongly.
01:24:18.000But, you know, a brick of mass M and a black hole of mass M, they exert the same gravitational pull.
01:24:24.000Okay, so we have this misconception that black holes are always these supermassive objects that have incredible amounts of gravity, and they're sucking in planets and stars and churning them up.
01:24:35.000Because we're thinking of massive black holes, like the supermassive black holes are at the center of the galaxy, which is like, what, one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy?
01:24:44.000So if our galaxy has, say, 100 billion suns, you know, and that guy is about 4 million times the mass of the sun, yeah, you're talking about, you know, a thousandth or something of that sort.
01:24:57.000Isn't that crazy when you say that, 100 billion suns, and you have to wrap your head around the idea of 100 billion stars?
01:25:04.000And that's just our little puny little galaxy.
01:25:10.000And this is just in the observable universe.
01:25:13.000I mean, do you know if you take your thumb and you put your thumb on a nice clear night and you block out a thumbnail worth of the sky, you're blocking out about 10 million galaxies.
01:25:26.000It's so crazy because those numbers, I hear you say those numbers, I can repeat those numbers, but I don't think I'm really internalizing them.
01:25:35.000You can't because they're so non-human scale, right?
01:25:38.000We've just never experienced anything like that at all.
01:26:08.000I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but on the other hand, there are some pretty iconic qualities of our environment that allowed life to form, and intelligent life to form is yet another special event on top of the unlikeness of life itself forming.
01:26:29.000You know, if a meteor hadn't slammed into the earth 65 million years ago, it'd still be the dinosaurs walking around, and who knows, maybe they'd Yeah.
01:26:55.000Yeah, it's one of those things that are—it's probably one of the biggest questions that the human race has ever contemplated.
01:27:09.000Like, if life really is so difficult to cultivate to the point where it gets to be able to alter its environment the way we do, if this really is a one in a hundred trillion opportunities— Well, to my mind,
01:27:25.000that gives us a certain profound responsibility.
01:27:31.000We could be the only intelligent life in the cosmos, and what are we doing with our time?
01:27:36.000Well, some people are making quantum computers that may revolutionize what it means to be a person.
01:27:40.000But if that's happening all throughout the galaxy, that's when things get really strange.
01:27:44.000If there's multiple examples of this, but not where we are, maybe 500 years ago, and maybe 500 years from, and maybe a million years from, dependent upon the vulnerability of their solar system, right?
01:27:57.000Yeah, and some people find that frightening, right?
01:28:00.000Some people worry that—I mean, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope is supposed to launch in October, I think it is.
01:28:08.000And it's going to have this refined capacity to look at planetary atmospheres.
01:28:14.000As planets go by their host star, they're going to observe the spectra of light that's absorbed by that planet's atmosphere— And so there's a chance that you might find biomarkers.
01:28:58.000Like, when we're saying that, we're talking about crude territorial apes encountering other crude territorial apes throughout history, right?
01:29:06.000When human beings have encountered other human beings, they've gone, what do you have?
01:29:17.000If we can get past this, like what we were discussing before, that the human race itself, culturally, is moving pretty far away from where we were when we had to worry about pirate ships pulling up through our docks.
01:29:28.000And that if we continue to go on this path, and we get to the point where we all look like those gray aliens with the little feeble bodies and the giant heads, I think that iconic image, I think that's almost like we understand where this is going.
01:29:44.000So the benign alien that we will one day become, if that's who we'd be contacting at some distant planet, then maybe it would be fine.
01:29:52.000And look, how spectacular would it be to encounter another life form?
01:29:57.000First, to see whether the biochemistry is the same.
01:30:01.000Is life this one-off chance it happened only once?
01:30:04.000On these two planets because there's some coincidence, or is it that there are many ways to get living systems and many ways to get intelligent living systems?
01:30:13.000That is the first data that we'd ever have of that sort, for sure.
01:30:18.000But, yeah, I mean, the question is, will we get to a place where they're not afraid of us, you know, if perhaps they're that much further ahead of us at the moment?
01:30:29.000Have you paid attention at all to the Pentagon's disclosure of these unidentified flying objects or what do they call them?
01:31:07.000But why would you assume that they're afraid of us?
01:31:08.000Why wouldn't you assume that they're curious and observing and making sure we don't blow ourselves up?
01:31:14.000If they're able to do that, I think that they'd be better at cloaking themselves, that we have no evidence that they're here whatsoever.
01:31:23.000Wouldn't you think that the best way to acclimate people to the concept of extraterrestrial life is to slowly expose people to things purposefully?
01:31:35.000Yeah, I don't know that I would do it in sort of a mystery manner if I was designing that level of sort of aversion therapy, you know, to try to get them used to this idea that there's other life in the universe.
01:31:50.000Nor would I take the approach, say, of, you know, the Twilight Zone episode, you know, the famous one, you know, to serve man.
01:32:03.000But the other thing to bear in mind that I think puts us in a slightly funky context and brings us full circle, if space goes on infinitely far, which is certainly a real possibility, then you can mathematically argue that not only is there other life definitely out there,
01:32:24.000An infinite number of copies, because in any finite region of space with a finite amount of energy, there are only finitely many ways that the particles can be arranged.
01:32:33.000And therefore, if you go on infinitely far, the particle arrangement has got to repeat, right?
01:32:39.000I mean, it's like you have a deck of cards.
01:32:41.000As you shuffle the cards, you get this order, that order, the next order.
01:32:44.000But you and I know you shuffle it enough times, it has to repeat because there are only a finite number of different orders of the cards.
01:32:50.000So if you shuffle it enough times, you're going to have to come back full circle.
01:32:53.000Similarly, you're going to have to come back full circle with a particle configuration if you go sufficiently far away.
01:32:59.000And so that would say that, yeah, of course there's other intelligent life out there.
01:33:28.000Again, it's anything that's allowed by the laws of physics.
01:33:31.000Any configuration allowed by the laws of physics in principle would happen out there.
01:33:34.000So, you know, some would argue that that means that space does not go on infinitely far because the conclusion's too absurd, you know, to accept.
01:33:56.000But it's a mind-bending possibility, which doesn't really reflect on the question of whether there's life out there in the usual sense, because we mean in the observable universe that we have direct access to, and these regions would be too far away.
01:34:10.000But in that sense, we would be guaranteed.
01:34:13.000That there would be life out there in this wider landscape.
01:34:17.000As we talked about, the concept of hundreds of billions of suns is so difficult for us to wrap our brain around.
01:34:23.000But that's nothing in comparison to the idea of an infinite number of universes.
01:34:55.000But it's kind of the best that we can do.
01:34:59.000Because again, the only things that we have intuition for are the things that we have experienced.
01:35:04.000And infinity is something that we have never experienced.
01:35:07.000So it's a concept that we kick around Fairly freely, but it's a hard idea to really wrap your mind around.
01:35:14.000But we're talking about in terms of distance, right?
01:35:17.000We're talking about infinite distance, and through this infinite distance, there's infinite possibilities, and through those infinite possibilities, there would be what we're experiencing here in infinite forms and infinite variabilities all throughout the universe.
01:35:29.000But when you're talking about the many worlds theory, you're talking about it Occurring not in a distance, but you're talking about it almost like in a...
01:35:41.000It's sort of a separate realm, that's how we normally talk about it, and those parallel worlds are somehow in existence but they're not touching us, they're not like directly connected to us.
01:35:51.000And even those parallel worlds have infinite universes attached to them that are different but connected.
01:35:59.000Now the weird thing that happened some years ago, and it's an idea that's still in development, Some physicists have suggested that the infinite worlds of the many worlds interpretation and the infinite worlds of infinite space,
01:36:15.000you know, that we're talking about from just having reality extend infinitely far, they may be connected.
01:37:01.000Yes, through this sort of quantum wave function that would have all these possibilities.
01:37:05.000But that's when people get real woo-woo, they open up this possibility that every decision you make changes reality itself because you're now in a different timeline, you're now in a different version of what the universe is doing.
01:37:17.000Yeah, but for any individual experience, as far as we know, each individual psyche It's not something that...
01:37:36.000Impacts me in a profound way because my experience is limited to the particular trajectory that I follow.
01:38:19.000But there's also this faith that we have to have that the reality that we experience when we wake up every morning is the reality that we've been experiencing our whole life.
01:38:46.000When we lose that capacity to hold on to memories, we lose everything, right?
01:38:51.000We lose everything that defines who we are.
01:38:54.000And that's one of the saddest things about people that have memory disorders, when you start to see them slipping away and not recognize their own children and not understanding what's going on or where they are.
01:39:04.000My wife's mother, I hope it's not too personal, but she has Alzheimer's.
01:39:12.000And yeah, she no longer recognizes her kids.
01:39:19.000There's a shell of an individual who's left, but without memory, there's no sense of who you were as a person any longer.
01:39:26.000Right, you're just sort of existing in this fragile state, dependent upon all the people around you to use their memory to sort of keep you going.
01:39:35.000And if you think about it, again, it's a whole distinguishing quality of being a human, right?
01:39:42.000Sure, I mean, all life has some degree of memory, and I'm not saying anything other than that, but most life lives in the moment in terms of the goal-oriented behaviors are fixated on solving an issue of the moment.
01:39:57.000Get the food, get the shelter, escape that predator, right?
01:40:01.000We are among the few species, and certainly we have the most refined version, where we can lift ourselves out of the cosmic timeline.
01:40:10.000We can imagine the distant past, we can make predictions about the far future, and we can see our lives within a temporal narrative that most other animals just have no awareness of.
01:40:22.000And to my mind, that comes with power.
01:40:26.000We can understand things so much more deeply, but it's also tragic because we're also the sole species who really understands death, right?
01:40:36.000I mean, some people say to me, what about elephants?
01:40:37.000And I say, yeah, elephants, they do have morning rituals.
01:40:40.000I'm not saying that they don't respond to death of a member of their group, but that is, again, responding to something of the moment.
01:40:49.000And sure, they, for a few days, will carry out a ritual behavior.
01:40:53.000We live our lives constantly aware of the fact that our time is limited.
01:41:08.000That singular capacity of our brains to stand outside of the timeline is what, to my mind, defines what it is that makes life worth living.
01:41:21.000Artificial intelligence can replicate that and do it in a much better, more efficient way.
01:42:30.000Whether they're innovating personally or whether they're using their labor to fuel the monetary success that they have from their labor and using that to fuel this innovation, but overall the species.
01:42:43.000Just like bees make beehives, people make things.
01:42:46.000Yeah, and that will ultimately be our undoing in a way that may be positive.
01:43:44.000Well, it's all a question of what energy we're able to conquer and bring within our capacity to control, right?
01:43:51.000I mean, when we controlled fire, we had a new energy source, and a new energy source allowed us to cook food, as we were talking about.
01:43:58.000That cooked food allowed the brain to grow, and as the brain grew, it allowed us to work together in groups to get bigger animals, and in that way, there's this wonderful cyclical There's a loop whereby there's this relationship between energy control and evolutionary development,
01:44:27.000We'll fully be able to use the sun's energy.
01:44:30.000Maybe we'll surround it with, I don't know, a Dyson sphere, this sphere that would capture all the energy and then beam it to wherever we needed it.
01:44:36.000So that will be a solar system level energetic control.
01:44:40.000And then at some point, we may go beyond that and be able to control the energy of many suns, maybe all suns in a galaxy.
01:44:49.000Is that really feasible to control, to make some sort of a sphere around the sun?
01:44:59.000Again, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics.
01:45:01.000Yeah, he imagined either you build a sphere or he also imagined a version where you'd have all these satellites in a spherical configuration around the Sun.
01:45:10.000So maybe it wouldn't be a solid sphere, but it would be a spherical configuration.
01:45:14.000And so the Sun's energy, which is mostly just radiating radially outward from the Sun, could be captured.
01:45:21.000And if you could capture all of the Sun's energy, then The things that you'd be able to do with that energy are radically different from the things that we're able to do with the energy sources that we now have.
01:45:34.000In fact, there have been, at times, it was always hype, I thought, but there have been times when people suspected that certain anomalous Yeah,
01:46:27.000But if it doesn't stop, the ways in which we will evolve—I mean, just think about what fire did for us, right?
01:46:34.000The ways in which we're going to evolve, I think, are going to be utterly stunning.
01:46:37.000And, of course, we'll be controlling that evolution by that point through the control over genomic systems or through our merging with artificial systems.
01:46:48.000Do you ever contemplate what that looks like, our merging with these artificial systems?
01:46:52.000You know, I— Not in any particularly creative way.
01:46:56.000I mean, I follow what people have done, and it's jaw-dropping, the interfaces that people have developed between brains and artificial computational systems.
01:47:29.000And I'm not by any means saying that we shouldn't.
01:47:36.000I think we need to be mindful of that in order that we perhaps can have the most fruitful partnership as we go forward.
01:47:50.000But yeah, I do think at some point we'll have to give up an An archaic sense of who we are, in light of the capacities that these partnerships, these collaborations, to put in the most positive light, will yield.
01:48:04.000In a way, that's what the Unabomber was terrified of, right?
01:48:10.000He thought that human beings were being foolish in their advancement of technology, and that technology, I'm pretty sure, that was part of his manifesto, that technology was going to replace us.
01:48:20.000Yeah, he had an interesting way of expressing himself.
01:48:41.000He became a professor, but just for a short period of time, so he could gather up the money to buy this cabin and then start his attack on people that created technology.
01:48:52.000All the people he blew up, all the people that he sent these bombs to, they were all related, I think most at least, were related to the propagation of technology.
01:49:53.000Yeah, and he relayed the thing that his brother had gone through with his parents.
01:49:57.000He had very cold parents, and the whole deal was really...
01:50:00.000There was a lot of elements that were in play to create a Ted Kaczynski, but one of them was that he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies.
01:50:08.000I mean, it's sad and tragic, but I don't know how you feel about it, but the fact that we...
01:50:16.000You've got this incredible paranoia about psychedelics, and maybe it was stories I didn't hear, I didn't know about the Ted Kaczynski connection, but certainly there was this irrational paranoia that emerged, you know, I guess in the 60s and 70s and shut down what was incredibly promising research.
01:50:36.000I'm not saying the Timothy Leary approach, but I'm saying there were people who were taking a very considered approach to psychedelics to deal with very specific issues.
01:50:45.000And now it's starting to come back, which I think is enormously powerful.
01:50:50.000Because look, I mean, you know, everything that we've spoken about here today, everything that we know about the world is filtered through the human brain, right?
01:50:59.000So when we talk about quantum mechanics and general relativity, we're talking about we look out at the world, we process it through this particular...
01:51:06.000Conscious state and using that we're able to come up with ideas that explain things that we observe.
01:51:12.000But there are other states of consciousness.
01:51:15.000I mean ultimately I think that we create, I mean I believe there's a real external reality, but we create our own narratives about that reality.
01:51:26.000And if with some additional substances we can Modify or enhance or enlarge the kinds of narratives that we're able to tell, the kinds of coherent stories that we're able to overlay on our experience.
01:51:59.000You know, that's where we've really been robbed, is that if they didn't pass the Sweeping Psychedelics Act...
01:52:05.000Of 1970, where everything turned into a Schedule 1, even things that weren't psychoactive.
01:52:09.000If they didn't pass that, we would have most likely entered into a stage of our history where we were running legitimate studies, and we got an understanding of the benefits of them like they're doing now with PTSD studies with MDMA,
01:52:25.000where they're realizing like, well, you know, this ecstasy stuff is not just a party drug.
01:52:29.000It actually can really help soldiers recover from some of the psychological wounds they have from combat.
01:52:35.000And then you've got what Johns Hopkins has done with psilocybin.
01:52:40.000There's psilocybin studies and they're about to enter into some of them with UFC fighters now.
01:52:46.000Guys who have had traumatic brain injuries and been knocked out and had head injuries.
01:52:51.000Because neurogenesis that occurs through psilocybin, it's very unique.
01:52:57.000Like psilocybin allows the brain to regenerate neurons.
01:53:01.000It's one of the rare things that does that.
01:53:03.000And they think there could be some therapeutic uses of that for people that have been in car accidents, soldiers, again, who've experienced head injuries, football players, the like.
01:53:13.000Anybody that's had problems with cognitive function, maybe even neurodegenerative diseases.
01:53:19.000Yeah, and all these things are just, we know that there are some mushrooms like lion's mane that have some cognitive benefits and neurogenesis properties, and they're hoping that there's some real therapy to these things, and they were denied the use of them for decades and decades,
01:53:38.000It's interesting, you know, when people hear me espouse my view that all we are are particles governed by physical law, A number of people who have had psychedelic experiences contact me and say, I've got proof that that's not right.
01:53:56.000And of course they'll communicate some kind of experience they've had.
01:54:01.000Under the influence of some kind of psychoactive substance.
01:54:06.000And it's interesting because, you know, I usually don't respond, but on occasion I felt the need to respond.
01:54:12.000And it all comes down to, do you view what happens during a psychoactive experience as tapping into some other deeper reality?
01:54:20.000Or do you view it, again, as just some product of this amazing thing inside of our head when it is influenced in an unusual way by some kind of psychoactive substance?
01:54:55.000But to me, that's the miracle of the brain as opposed to tapping into some other kind of reality.
01:55:02.000I guess that's the sticking point for people who think that there's got to be something more than this physicalist perspective of stuff and loss.
01:55:45.000Like, if you are really being transported into another dimension and communicating with other entities and then coming back to Earth, or whether or not you're imagining it, the experience is the same.
01:56:44.000We may not fundamentally know what the stuff is.
01:56:47.000But I think there's a real external stuff.
01:56:49.000And when that stuff is configured in the right pattern, such as a human brain...
01:56:54.000It can begin to have an inner world and inner experiences which is itself wondrous and mysterious, don't get me wrong, but that inner world is not tapping into Anything beyond its own inner experience.
01:57:09.000It's just this inner experience is infinite in its possibilities.
01:57:12.000It's infinite in its possibilities or nearly infinite in its possibilities.
01:57:15.000I mean – and so where do you draw the line I think is the real question between reality as experienced in the human brain and experiences in the human brain that you want to call reality?
01:57:29.000You have to at some point have a means of saying – There is real stuff in the world that our brain is experiencing and filtering in some way versus stuff that's generated from the inner world itself.
01:57:47.000And that distinction is hard to make precise, but I think it's utterly profound.
01:57:52.000Have you had any psychedelic experiences yourself?
01:57:55.000Yeah, we discussed this once a little bit.
01:58:09.000And I think as I get older and I become more aware of my own finite nature as the curtain begins to start to roll down from the rafters, I do hunger for a distinct kind of experience.
01:58:28.000There's a book that I think everybody should read.
01:58:32.000William James' book, Varieties of Religious Experience.
01:58:35.000It's old, written back in 1902. William James, great psychologist.
01:58:38.000He gave some lectures in Scotland, I think it was, at the turn of the century.
01:58:43.000And he interviewed a whole host of people in order to get a feel for the kinds of religious experiences, but really the kind of spiritual experiences that people would have.
01:58:53.000And some of them were generated through Some kind of psychoactive substance that people were using at the time.
01:59:00.000And his descriptions are so vivid that I feel like I've been there on some of these excursions, these mental excursions.
01:59:14.000I do have an urge to enlarge my own sense of what reality is through that experience.
01:59:21.000And look, the thing that we once discussed was You know, something that happened in Amsterdam and it was probably very mild compared to other things because I don't really drink.
01:59:47.000However, back when I was in college, I had some other experiences on other substances, again, all relatively mild, and those were far more enjoyable and mind-expanding.
02:00:01.000And I can see both sides, and I'm definitely, I feel compelled to explore more, and I think the world's getting to a place where it will become more amenable to people doing that.
02:00:14.000Yeah, they're starting to legalize psilocybin in a lot of states.
02:00:18.000That's the real gateway to these experiences.
02:00:21.000Once they make that legal, and then you develop...
02:00:26.000What we really need to do is develop places where you can, in a professional setting, where people actually understand the dosage based on your weight, based on how much psilocybin is in whatever substance you're taking, or whether it's synthetic, or whether it's in mushroom form...
02:00:42.000Because there's very strong psilocybin-based mushrooms and other ones that are more mild.
02:00:46.000And once there's real legalization, like you can go into a marijuana store, for instance, in Los Angeles, and you could buy marijuana based on the THC content.
02:00:57.000So you could say, what do you have that's mild?
02:01:02.000And they have space weed that really fuck you up.
02:01:05.000And then they have edibles, which are a totally different animal because your body processes through the liver and it produces a completely different psychoactive substance.
02:01:14.000So we know all that now because marijuana has been essentially legal since the 90s and legal legal since 2016 when it was voted in in California.
02:01:25.000So we have much more of an understanding of the real psychoactive effects and you can actually control it much more.
02:01:36.000I've read in some of these studies, the people who are newcomers to this, they actually have an individual who's experienced that sits with the individual and guides them on their journey.
02:01:48.000Oh yeah, they have services like that.
02:01:50.000California is much more advanced, and so is Colorado, and so is Washington State, and there's a lot of states.
02:01:57.000But here in Texas, it's still illegal, which is kind of fucking hilarious.
02:02:01.000Yeah, you see, my view is, so what do we do as physicists?
02:02:04.000We tell one particular story of the world at the level of particles and laws.
02:02:08.000The chemist comes along and takes our understanding and builds molecules and atoms from it.
02:02:13.000The biologist comes and takes those structures and builds cells and living systems and that kind of domain.
02:02:20.000Ultimately, you get up to the neuroscientist who studies the brain and the philosopher who's trying to see meaning that the brain is striving for and so forth.
02:02:28.000What it all amounts to is a variety of stories that discuss distinct qualities of the world.
02:02:35.000And the richest experience you get is from layering all those stories on top of one another so you can see the biggest possible narrative of all.
02:02:42.000Now, if these kind of psychoactive substances can give you new stories...
02:02:48.000That you wouldn't have access to through the traditional means, the academic means of, say, of science or through the philosophical means or artistic forays.
02:02:58.000If these psychoactive substances can bring in a new narrative, how wonderful could that be for all of us to be able to Layer an additional story or multiple stories upon our understanding of the world.
02:03:14.000Carl Sagan was a giant fan of marijuana.
02:03:16.000I did know that, but I've never seen any quotes where he's actually speaking about the experience.
02:03:24.000Yeah, see if you can find Carl Sagan on marijuana, because he had a direct quote that was very similar to what you were just saying, that he believes there's certain...
02:03:33.000Thoughts that you achieve and states that you achieve on marijuana that are impossible to get to without it.
02:03:50.000He's in it from a different time where he's traveling in all these circles with all these musicians and artists and all these different people.
02:03:59.000Because he was not just an astronomer.
02:04:02.000He was also like a Neil deGrasse Tyson.
02:04:18.000You know, this idea of the wonder and the majesty of the cosmos as opposed to just sort of, you know, the test that you had to take in third grade on, you know, something that you're meant to memorize.
02:04:29.000Also his elegant use of the language to describe it in a way that was so inspiring and so it was so moving the way he would describe the cosmos.
02:07:27.000There's a lot of people that are in jail for the rest of their lives for trafficking marijuana, which is incredible.
02:07:32.000Look, it's just a plant, folks, and it's not toxic, and it doesn't kill anybody, and it's not even addictive.
02:07:40.000In very rare cases, there seems to be some people that purport some physical addiction to cannabis, but there's no real mechanism for it that's widely understood, like We're good to go.
02:08:56.000It's amazing how people are exposed in their ability to navigate or not navigate the pandemic and what it's done in terms of different cities and how different places in the country have embraced freedom or embraced regulation and what it's done in terms of the impact that it's had on the businesses.
02:09:19.000Yeah, but the thing to bear in mind too is everybody's situation is different that will impact their views.
02:09:24.000So for instance, if I told you what we did, you'd probably think I was an extremist.
02:10:18.000The fact that you have a year to spend in an unusual circumstance where you rely on each other in a different way, when do you ever have that possibility?
02:10:28.000For instance, we never would eat dinner as a family.
02:10:31.000It would always be this chaotic thing in Manhattan.
02:10:33.000Everybody would just eat at their own moment.
02:11:32.000Other than Uncut Gems, which I think is fantastic, but in a completely different way, Uncut Gems is just this wild, chaotic movie that gives you anxiety.
02:13:11.000So their experience of the pandemic was fairly ordinary because they were going to school and you were here?
02:13:18.000Well in the beginning they were not because we're in California and they were going to zoom classes and then once we moved to Texas this year has all been in school and they both got COVID eventually.
02:13:46.000Yeah, because when people come over the house to do work and stuff, I was like, let's just test everybody.
02:13:50.000Because, you know, if you have someone coming over the house or someone doing things, and this way also...
02:13:54.000I knew, like, if my parents were going to come over, I wanted to make sure that everybody, my wife's parents, make sure that, you know, everybody's okay.
02:14:02.000So we tested her, and like, bingo, she had COVID. And then eventually my other daughter and my wife got it, but I never got it.
02:14:16.000Yeah, we quarantined them and made sure that we tested them up until the point where they were negative.
02:14:22.000And then when they were negative, we gave them three days of testing in a row to make sure that they're, you know, you want to make sure they're actually negative before you re-entry.
02:16:40.000Yeah, but it's obviously, you know, it's dependent upon your health, depending upon how much you exercise, what you eat, how well you take care of yourself, and then also what pre-existing conditions are.
02:16:53.000Yeah, now it's going to be which variant, too, right?
02:16:55.000Yeah, that's what's weird, is this variant coming out of Brazil they're worried about.
02:16:59.000Apparently this variant coming out of Brazil is virulent.
02:17:39.000I know this is a time where no one wants to fat shame because everybody's worried about body positivity and letting people think they're okay no matter what you are, but you're not.
02:17:47.000Your body, when it's obese, is much more likely to be susceptible to all sorts of ailments, and 78% of the people hospitalized for COVID were obese.
02:17:57.000It's a terrible number if you think about it that way.
02:18:01.000Presumably, you could have avoided 78% of the hospitalizations.
02:18:05.000I mean, because it is a thing that a person can avoid.
02:18:09.000It is physically possible that you could not be obese.
02:18:13.000It's not something like you're born blind or you're born with leukemia.
02:18:17.000This is something that you, by virtue of your actions or your diet or your genetics, you're more predisposed to being heavy.
02:18:26.000It's unfortunate there's no emphasis on that, that all the emphasis was about stay inside, wear three masks, keep away from each other.
02:18:36.000That's all well and good, but there should have been more emphasis on taking care of your body, taking care of your health, and it's just, there was almost none.
02:18:56.000It's really crazy, the former CDC director coming out and saying that it's more likely than not that this was an accidental release of something that they were working on, the Wuhan lab.
02:19:06.000And, you know, this is because of Trump, because that guy's such a...
02:19:11.000Anything that he said, everybody was like, well, fuck whatever he said.
02:19:15.000If that wasn't the narrative, if he didn't have this constant desire to call it the China virus and that people didn't hate him so much, people would have probably looked into that much more readily.
02:19:28.000You're talking about a level four lab that is in the same area where the breakout occurred.
02:19:34.000And in that level four lab, they work on, wait for it, Coronaviruses, you know, and then Newsweek now entertaining the idea and the CDC director, former CDC director, he comes out and says it's much more likely than not.
02:19:49.000I don't know anything about it, but all I can say is that as a scientist, the move from an era when nobody paid attention to facts or denigrated facts or denigrated expertise, at least moving in the direction of Where hopefully these facts and expertise actually matters.
02:21:11.000And, you know, compared to the amount of funds that we spend, you know, I hate to frame it as a zero-sum game, but, you know, you divert some military funds to this kind of research, they would never know the difference,
02:21:26.000and it would make an enormous difference To the ability of our kind of science to train the next upcoming generation.
02:21:35.000So the answer is absolutely no, there's not enough funding.
02:21:39.000And it's a tragic situation because there are these brilliant young minds who want to pursue these kinds of ideas.
02:21:45.000And look, some will say, some in government will say, well, look, that's all esoteric stuff, right?
02:21:51.000But those very same congresspeople or senators, if they were...
02:21:56.000In their position in the 1920s, I have little doubt they would have said the same thing about quantum physics.
02:22:34.000From a pure dollar and cents standpoint, it's a cheap investment for an incredible potential payoff.
02:22:41.000And we're being short-sighted by not funding it at the level that it should be funded.
02:22:45.000What do you think could enhance the public's perception of these things other than what you're doing, which is a great thing, by these speeches and going on podcasts like this one or by writing your books?
02:22:56.000What can we do to sort of allow people to understand the significance of this work and how it's really impaired by these decisions that you have to make to choose one student over another student or to be limited in the amount of students you could accept?
02:23:11.000I mean, certainly, as you're saying, you know, books and lectures, you know, television documentaries, I mean, all these things are really good for getting these ideas out into the public, into the culture, into the zeitgeist.
02:23:22.000But ultimately you've got to catch kids at an early age because it's the kids at an early age who are open to these ideas without having to be convinced that they might be of interest.
02:23:33.000And it's only when they get to fourth or fifth or sixth grade that their attention starts to turn away from science, which feels abstract and difficult usually because of the way it's taught in the classroom.
02:23:44.000So one of the things that we do, you know, I have this non-profit World Science Festival, it's all about creating experiences for kids and adults that allow them to immerse themselves in all of these ideas, from quantum mechanics to cosmology to nanoscience to personalized medicine,
02:24:00.000the whole gambit, without it feeling like school.
02:24:04.000And without it feeling like it's all about assessment.
02:24:07.000So much of our educational system, I know this is an overgeneralization and all you teachers out there who are doing a great job, you know, fantastic, but it's so much of our educational system is focused on assessment.
02:24:20.000I mean, my kids, so much of their learning of science and other subjects too, it's all about get to the next quiz, get to the next exam, and once they're through it, the material is gone.
02:24:30.000It's not there for the joy, it's not there for the wonder of it, and so if we can create experiences that For kids and adults, so it's a full family experience where it's just so thrilling to learn about black holes and the Big Bang and quantum mechanics and entanglement and all the stuff that we're talking about,
02:24:48.000then I think you've got a chance that the next generation looks at science in a different way.
02:24:53.000Yeah, like what do you think could be done to make it more exciting for kids?
02:24:58.000Like a documentary for sure is always a good one because a really good documentary excites people in an entertaining way.
02:25:06.000And one that's structured well and it's got a good pacing to it that sort of stimulates people's fascination with the subject.
02:25:13.000What do you think about, I mean I don't know if you've done any work with this stuff, but have you ever messed around with virtual reality?
02:25:20.000So I was about to answer virtual reality before you said it.
02:25:23.000So we have a nice partnership, it turns out, with Verizon.
02:25:29.000They have this new 5G network, and they're trying to find ways to revolutionize things using that.
02:25:35.000And so we won a nationwide competition.
02:25:38.000We won a handful of groups to create a virtual reality experience for middle school kids using the 5G network.
02:26:32.000You know, where you can sort of see the quantum entanglement and feel the quantum entanglement.
02:26:36.000Or imagine doing one for relativity where you can experience time slowing down at high speeds or time slowing down to the edge of a black hole.
02:26:45.000Then I think if that was an intrinsic part of the experience, Science would be taken in like a visceral way.
02:26:53.000And that's why we call this visceral science for that reason because it's a way in which science can kind of come into you not just through like studying but through experience.
02:27:54.000But if you just saw the wave and it was represented in a vibrant manner, a kid might be able to take in the gist of the idea, not be able to do like calculations, but to take in the gist of the idea.
02:28:09.000And moreover, imagine you have kids that...
02:28:12.000Go into this system, and it's a real well-developed system 20 years from now, say, and they do it from a really young age.
02:28:19.000They might develop a quantum intuition that you and I don't have.
02:28:23.000Like, you were earlier asking me, so what's the intuition?
02:28:26.000Like, how does entanglement work, you know, in a way that allows me to wrap my brain around it?
02:28:31.000Maybe you can't do it because your brain is too old.
02:28:34.000But maybe if you catch a young brain...
02:28:37.000And they experience these weird ideas from the get-go and may become part of their way of thinking of the world.
02:28:44.000And it may be much easier for them to visualize and get these ideas than without this kind of virtual reality experience.
02:28:51.000So I think there's a huge potential in there.
02:28:55.000Do you remember there was one of the things from What the Bleep that a lot of people took umbrage with was the Dr. Quantum cartoon.
02:29:54.000Abstractly teaching, you know, i h bar d psi dt equals minus d2 over dx squared psi plus v of x psi of x, rather than writing out the Schrodinger equation in this abstract piece of language, mathematics, if you can frame it in a narrative, if you can frame it in terms of how it was discovered,
02:30:11.000you can frame it in terms of maybe you follow the life cycle of an electron governed by this equation, whatever, if you can put it into a story-like environment, Kids and adults are going to get it more fully.
02:30:25.000What if you can take it and put it inside of a video game that's exciting to play?
02:30:31.000So the lessons of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement and quantum physics inside some crazy video game where you kind of have to understand what's going on in order to advance.
02:30:43.000Yeah, so you're speaking my language and you're taking away all my punchlines, which is really good.
02:30:48.000So right now we're working on a little video game where the player goes in and they manipulate the speed of light and they manipulate it by performing certain tasks.
02:31:01.000And to carry out the tasks, you have to get an intuition for special relativity.
02:31:06.000How the world behaves at high speeds, or in our case, as the speed of light gets lower, the relativistic effects become more manifest in the everyday world.
02:31:14.000So a game-like setting, where you have to gain an intuition for the weirdness of physics, I think is a powerful combination.
02:31:21.000Yeah, that would be amazing if there was some sort of a way where you could kind of Give them these little hurdles that they have to solve in order to advance.
02:31:35.000Yes, make it surmountable so it's not frustrating, but make it challenging enough and interesting enough that you try to get to that point.
02:31:42.000In some sort of a visual and exciting way.
02:31:59.000But if you then have a challenge that requires you to have an intuition about that weirdness, like maybe firing a laser down a street, but the street is now angled and curved because of the high speed, you can imagine that you get a feel for it.
02:34:35.000And as the planet goes into orbit, it then sweeps up more debris as it grows larger and larger, gravitationally pulling in the other rocks and dust in its environment.
02:34:46.000So this is really our phase one version of this project.
02:34:52.000We are refining the visuals on this right now.
02:36:41.000It was somehow that there was a mismatch between your movements in the real world and your movements in the virtual world.
02:36:48.000Because there was all sorts of stuff flying at her.
02:36:51.000This is an experience around like the rings of Saturn or something.
02:36:54.000And it was the disparity between her sense of movement in the real world and her sense of movement in the virtual world, and she had to immediately get out of the headset and go sit down and get out of it.
02:38:06.000But the difference here is, If you're not actually moving in the real world, but you are experiencing motion in the virtual world, that disparity, for my wife sent her into a seizure space, but for other people, it does make them feel sick.
02:38:59.000I didn't want to get on it because, again, if I get sick on Staten Island Ferry, if I get in a chair and I'm on like a roller coaster, forget about it.
02:39:11.000And so, yeah, if you could somehow create a consonance between your sense of movement in both the real world and the virtual world, then yeah, I presume you'd be okay.
02:39:22.000But look, I mean, there's a museum in New Jersey, Liberty Science Center, and they have one of these devices, these spaceships that you go into, hydraulic motion and 3D visuals around you to give you a sense of...
02:39:35.000And as they're closing it up, they say, oh, by the way, if anyone feels sick or panicked...
02:39:41.000You know, there's the escape button at the top, and it was all kids, and I was just in there with my kids.
02:40:18.000There's an older one called Star Tours that's been around for a few years.
02:40:22.000And then the new one is in, you know, they have a whole section of Disneyland that's all Star Wars experience that they spent fucking billions of dollars on.