Top Scientist REVEALS: We Invented Heaven, God Is A Human Invention! | Prof Brian Greene

Professor Brian Greene reveals the biggest questions science still can’t answer, whether we’re living in a simulation, why AI may deserve human rights, and what happens at the end of the universe! Professor Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University, where he also directs the Center for Theoretical Physics. He is a leading researcher in string theory, the co-founder of the World Science Festival, and the bestselling author of several books, including ‘Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe’. He explains: ◼ Why most physicists believe time travel into the future is already possible ◼ Why he believes humans don't actually have free will ◼ How string theory could reveal what everything in the universe is really made of ◼ Why the "Pale Blue Dot" changes how you see your own life and problems ◼ Why the search for meaning may matter more than finding the answer itself Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:22 The Big Question Science Is Trying to Answer 00:03:49 How String Theory Could Explain Our Universe 00:04:44 How Could We Ever Prove String Theory Is Real? 00:06:17 What Makes the Strings in String Theory Vibrate? 00:07:52 Can String Theory Explain Why We’re Here? 00:09:16 What If We’re Living in a Simulation? 00:11:23 How Can Physics Explain Human Emotions? 00:17:23 Could Humans One Day Manufacture Emotions? 00:18:53 Would Knowing We’re in a Simulation Change Anything? 00:20:24 Could Humans and AI Eventually Merge? 00:20:59 Could Humans Ever Achieve Immortality? 00:24:57 How Knowing We’ll Die Shapes Every Decision We Make 00:26:59 Why Are We Here? The Optimistic and Pessimistic Answers 00:30:24 How Did Gods and Religions First Emerge? 00:33:33 What’s the Most Compelling Case for a God? 00:36:41 How Can We Comprehend Billions of Years? 00:40:12 Does Our Place in the Universe Make Us Insignificant? 00:42:48 How Big Is the Observable Universe, Really? 00:46:59 What Exists Beyond the Observable Universe? 00:47:56 Why Are Humans So Obsessed With Aliens? 00:51:45 Ads 00:54:26 What Is the Meaning of Life? 00:56:26 Is Free Will Actually Real? 01:00:41 What If Consciousness Is the Foundation of Reality? 01:08:05 Are Animals Conscious Like We Are? 01:10:11 What If the Universe Isn’t Infinite? 01:12:12 Could Aliens Have Already Visited Earth? 01:13:03 Could Humans Ever Travel Across the Universe? 01:15:53 How Time Travel Could Actually Be Possible 01:18:55 Who Was the Smartest Person Who Ever Lived? 01:21:26 Could AI Become the Next Einstein or Newton? 01:24:37 Ads 01:28:20 How AI Could Accelerate Science—and Even Tackle Mortality 01:29:48 Could AI Evolve Faster Than Humans Ever Could? 01:32:47 Could AI Become an Existential Threat to Humanity? 01:40:51 Can AI Ever See the World the Way Humans Do? 01:45:01 What Happens to Humanity in an Age of Abundance? 01:47:39 Could AI Ever Become Truly Conscious? 01:50:29 Why Go Vegan? The Case for Rethinking What We Eat 01:53:56 What Happens at the End of Time? 01:56:38 What Could Matter More Than What You Value Most? Follow Professor Brian: X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3UrBK3y Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7ah5tbw Website - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4GQfbDy World Science Festival - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4ltduUF You can purchase Brian’s book, ‘Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe’, here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/GQngff0 The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://thediary.com/products/one-percent-diary ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://thediary.com/products/the-conversation-cards-2nd-edition ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Stan - Visit https://coach.stan.store/?ref=stevenbartlett&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=episode11 Linkedin Talent Solutions - http://linkedin.com/DOAC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I can't convince you that we're not in the Matrix. Why? We could be. Is this table real? Am I really here? Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer? Maybe there's a kid in 29th century Earth. Then they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. And here's a big assumption. Can you create a computer program that has consciousness? Nobody knows the answer to that. But I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that ChatGPT is conscious. And in the back of my mind, I do think it's possible.

• 0:30Steven Bartlett?

  But if we considered robots to be conscious, would they then get rights?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  I think that's something we should think about now, actually.

• 0:36Steven Bartlett?

  Professor Brian Greene, what is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  We find ourselves thrust on this planet. We're trying to figure out why we're here. Is there some ultimate purpose? We're a little dot on planet Earth. And you begin to see our sun, one of many stars within the galaxy. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  And what's beyond?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Well, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  There's a version out there of me that just loves wine.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:12Steven Bartlett?

  So should I feel insignificant?

• 1:14Speaker 00

  I would urge you not to. Because the fact that we can understand that we are so small, that's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger.

• 1:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it could lead us to God?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  If you mean the kind of God our forebears often have spoken, that feels to me very much a human creation. I will tell you why I'm skeptical of that. But another thing we should think about is the end of the Earth. Because if we go arbitrarily far into the future, the Earth is going to spiral.

• 1:41Steven Bartlett?

  Stop when it gets scary.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Well, it's scary the whole way.

• 1:48Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:22Steven Bartlett?

  Professor Brian Greene.

• 2:27Steven Bartlett?

  What is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  The ultimate question I would say is, what is the true nature of reality? We find ourselves thrust on this planet. And we look out and we're trying to figure out why we're here, what it's made of, is there some ultimate purpose? Or is it just some interesting accident that allowed us to have self-awareness and ask these kinds of questions about the nature of the world? And I think that, to me, is the deepest kind of question that we humans can ask.

• 3:01Steven Bartlett?

  Do you feel like over the last 30 years of your career, you've gotten closer to understanding the answer to that question?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Yes, but you know, it's kind of like picking up grains of sand on a beach, right? You pick up more and more, and that pouch of sand gets heavier. So your understanding is deeper, it's weightier. But you look out and there's just almost infinitely more grains of sand that are out there. We understand the world better than we once did. But does that really take us some significant way toward assessing the big, deep questions of, say, why is there something rather than nothing? Maybe that's the deepest question of all, but which I don't mean empty space. I mean, nothing, nothing at all.

• 3:49Steven Bartlett?

  Well, will Inez Conversation go in the pursuit of that answer? To tell people who you are and to let them understand the journey you've been on academically and through your career, where did you study? Where have you worked over the last couple of decades?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in Manhattan, right across from the Hayden Planetarium. I would wander the hallways of the planetarium and come upon a meteorite. And the universe was sort of my backyard because of that. And that really set me on a trajectory that I continued following when I went to college, went to Harvard and studied mathematics and physics. Then from there was to Oxford, where I got my doctorate, pursuing work in a field called string theory. And then through the academic ladder, Cornell, and ultimately Columbia, where I've been a professor now for 30 some odd years, you know, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University.

• 4:44Steven Bartlett?

  If you were to explain string theory to me like I was 12, how would you do it?

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would simply say this. Your 12-year-old self probably knew that matter was made up of stuff called molecules, that themselves are made up of atoms that are stuck together. And the atoms are made of smaller things. Electrons in orbit around a nucleus that has neutrons and protons. And neutrons and protons, they even have smaller particles, particles called quarks. The question is, is that the end of the story? Is it electrons and quarks and you're done? Everything is made up of them? Or might there be a finer level of structure inside the electron? Inside the quark? You take a powerful microscope and you look deeply, would you see anything else? And the idea of string theory is, yeah, you would.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Inside an electron or inside a quark, you'd see a little tiny vibrating filament. And the different vibrations of the string yield the different particles. So much like a string on a violin, when it vibrates in one pattern, you hear it as a C or an A sharp. The different vibrations of the strings in string theory, they don't produce different musical tones. They produce different particles. So a string vibrating one way, electron. A string vibrating another way, a quark. So matter at its most fundamental level, if you were to take a powerful microscope and look deeply inside of any piece of matter, you'd see all these little vibrating filaments, these vibrating strings. That's the idea of the theory.

• 6:17Steven Bartlett?

  So I have two questions come to mind when you say that, which is, how do you know? And the second one is, what if you zoomed in even further?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, good, both good questions. How do we know? We don't. Everything I just said could be utter nonsense. I don't think it is. But the only way that you know if an idea in science is correct is you need to make predictions that you can go out and test, measure and see whether you can confirm the ideas. We don't have the technology to look sufficiently deeply into matter to see the strings. We don't have the particle accelerators, the particle colliders with enough power to slam things together to access this finer level of structure that the theory is suggesting. So you might say then, where do these ideas come from, right? Answer: mathematics.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  The power of mathematics is that it can take us to places that we can't yet go, literally, using equipment. When we look at the mathematics of quantum mechanics, the mathematics of general relativity, and we put that math inside the math of string theory, all of a sudden, the equations work. They come together harmoniously. And we're like, whoa. The math of quantum mechanics, we're confident in that. We have predictions and observations. The math of general relativity, we're confident in that. It makes predictions we've confirmed through observations. Now, we're willing to go where the math takes us. And the math takes us in this approach to these vibrating filaments.

• 7:50Steven Bartlett?

  These vibrating strings?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  These vibrating strings.

• 7:52Steven Bartlett?

  So if you pass me the string here.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 7:54Steven Bartlett?

  So essentially, if you zoom into every cell on my body, you will find that there's different shaped strings vibrating?

• 8:01Speaker 00

  That's the prediction.

• 8:02Steven Bartlett?

  That's the prediction.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 8:03Steven Bartlett?

  And what is causing them to vibrate in a certain way? Who's telling them?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. The idea is, we recognize that the universe has energy. If you're to ask me, where does the energy come from? Nobody can answer that. That is the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The something is a fundamental currency called energy. If string theory is correct, then that energy manifests as these vibrational patterns of the strings themselves. If the theory is wrong, then the energy manifests through other things, like motions of particles and the way in which spacetime warps and curves. But if string theory is correct, the energy of the universe is manifested in the vibrational patterns of strings. Now, when you say like, who mandates that that string vibrates in one pattern?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And that string vibrates in a different pattern? If we go back to the Big Bang, the energetic explosion that resulted in space expanding, the detailed way in which that happened ultimately dictates how this or that string vibrates in the aftermath of that rapid cosmological explosion.

• 9:16Steven Bartlett?

  Does this string theory idea tell us anything about why we're here?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  I would like to think that it does. It's very indirect. And we are aggregates of a huge number of particles. Or if string theory is correct, a huge number of strings. I mean, inside your body, you've got something like a billion, billion, billion particles. And if string theory is correct, each of those particles is a vibrating filament. It is a gargantuan challenge to understand why those billion, billion, billion particles came together to yield you or me or somebody else. But again, that's a historical progression. And I think we understand the broad outlines of that narrative, that there was some initial event called the Big Bang that resulted in space expanding.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  The energy of that Big Bang ultimately transmuted into particles. Those particles were wafting through space. Gravity caused collections of those particles to clump together. Some of them clumped together into stars, like our sun. Some of them clumped together into planets, like our Earth. And on our Earth, some of those particles began to coalesce into more exotic and refined forms, giving rise to atoms, giving rise to molecules. And over the course of billions of years on our planet, those little molecules grew into more complex structures, ultimately giving first cells. And once you have a cell, cells divide.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  And they come together into larger multicellular aggregates that give rise to the beginnings of life in the ocean. And those life forms evolve further until they can walk out of the ocean and begin to live on land. And they begin to stand upright. And after a billion more years, you and I are sitting here at this table. And so, yeah, there is a story. That's the brief version that takes us from the Big Bang to us on planet Earth.

• 11:23Steven Bartlett?

  Is it theoretical that this is all just a... I was going to say perception, but the other word might be a simulation of sorts. Theoretically, we don't even know if yesterday exists. Or if it was just, we were just implanted with the memory of it.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely right.

• 11:36Steven Bartlett?

  We're in this age of AI now. And I wondered if this insurgence of AI and how powerful it is, and if you imagine it on a sort of an exponential curve, has it made you question some of your like fundamental assumptions about that overarching question of why we're here?

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. In fact, even before AI, we were tussling with the very notion that you mentioned, which is, all we ever have access to is now, right? We can try to remember yesterday's now. But as you say, that's happening right now through patterns that are in my brain or yours that we think reflects something that happened yesterday or the day before. But that's a leap of faith, right? So there's a kind of skeptical nightmare scenario where we begin to question everything. Is this table real? Am I really here?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer right now? Are we in the Matrix right now? These are the kinds of things which you naturally can come to when you take a deeply skeptical attitude to the nature of reality. Bottom line is, I can't convince myself, and certainly I can't convince you that we're not in the Matrix. Why? We could be. It is logically consistent and sensible to imagine that you and I are sitting in some computer. Maybe it's not some dark dystopian computer the way it was in The Matrix. Maybe there's a kid in 29th century Earth who's in his or her garage right now. And they came up this wonderful computer program,

• 13:25Speaker 00

  and they're simulating historical episodes in the past. And they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. I don't know how to prove that that's not the case. What I can say is, if I'm willing to buy into that, everything falls apart. I can't trust any, I can't trust my reasoning. I can't even trust my thinking that it's logical to imagine that individual. Because that individual may have implanted the false reasoning that it could be logical for us to be sitting here. What do I do at that point? And so, as a scientist, what I say is, I'm going to allow that as a possibility. And then I'm going to park it right over here. I allow it, I look at it. Every so often, I say, that's scary, that possibility that we're in a simulation.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  But I'm not going to let it overwhelm me because then I'll be stuck.

• 14:14Steven Bartlett?

  The simulation argument popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom relies on probability. It essentially says that if an advanced civilization, which I would argue we're an advanced civilization, ever develops the technological capacity to run conscious, high-fidelity computer simulations of their ancestors, they will likely run millions or billions of them. And because these simulated realities would vastly outnumber the single, raw, physical universe, any given conscious observer is statistically almost certainly living inside a software code rather than base reality.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  The big assumption is, can you create a computer program that has self-awareness? That has consciousness?

• 14:57Speaker 00

  You know, nobody knows the answer to that. I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that ChatGPT is conscious, who think that Claude is conscious. Now, I talk to them and I'm respectful. That's the kind of person I am. But in the back of my mind, I'm like, are you kidding me? You really think that ChatGPT has feelings? That it thinks about its own existence and has anxieties? I think it can simulate that. But regardless, I don't think today's technology is there. Is it possible that tomorrow's technology, broadly defined,

• 15:37Speaker 00

  a year, five years, 100 years, really will yield self-aware, sentient, artificial systems? Yeah, I do think it's possible. Now, not everybody agrees with that. I mean, no one knows, right? It's a logical possibility, but you don't know. Let us assume, following Nick Bostrom, that consciousness can be created in a mechanical box.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  If that's possible, then Nick simply says, look, our progeny in the future, they're going to be fascinated with creating sentient systems. And so they're going to create millions and billions and trillions of sentient systems in the box. And they're going to get really elaborate and create a version where the sentient beings are led to think that they're on a planet. And in fact, they're going to do it 1,000 billion, trillion different ways. Some are going to be a planet like Earth. Some are going to be on a planet like Mars. Some are going to be a planet like around some star in the Andromeda Galaxy. There are going to be an enormous number of simulated beings, enormous number of universes that are simulated.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  So the question is, if we have one real universe, let's say this is real, and a gazillion artificial ones that are created in various laptop computers of the future, we're one of a billion, trillion, zillion instantiations of people who think that they're real. Now, one truly is real, the other are not real. So if you're just talking about odds, the odds are, anybody who thinks they're real is not. The odds are, anybody who's got a self-aware sense of the world is probably in a simulation.

• 17:22Steven Bartlett?

  You used anxiety as a sort of proxy for consciousness, almost, like being able to feel these things. I guess the question then becomes, like, what is it? What is anxiety? Is it an electrical signal going through?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  I do think it is. I think that love and hate and anxiety and jealousy and gratitude and grief and all human emotion is nothing but electrical impulses going through our brains. And an electrical impulse is just particles moving or strings moving along various connections. I think that is all that it is. Now, some people hear it and they're like, wow, that is a pretty bleak way of looking at life. We're these wondrous beings who can have all this emotion, right? The emotion captured by Shakespeare in the sonnets, right? The emotion captured by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony. You can't reduce that to electrical signals in the brain? I say, yeah, you can.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  I really do think that you can. I don't think that diminishes the wonder of what we can feel and sense and articulate and express through the various ways that we have, be it through music or theater or art or literature or poetry. Yeah, I am as awestruck by our capacity to create as anybody else. But in the end, I think it all does reduce to electrical impulses going through this gray piece of meat in this bone cage that's sitting on our shoulders.

• 18:53Steven Bartlett?

  And if you imagine any rate of improvement from today, presumably at some point in the future, our future progeny, you called them? Would be able to create.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Why not? That's my view. I don't think there's something special about the brain as a substrate. I think as long as you have the same electrical impulses, if they're housed in silicon inside a metallic box, I don't think that makes them fundamentally different than what's happening inside of our heads. Now, philosophers argue this, psychologists argue this. They say, no, no, no, no. It's not just the brain. It's the brain, it's the connection to the body. It's the tactile sense of the world. It's the olfactory sense of the world. It's the visual sense. It's only when you put it all together that you get the full experience of what it means to be self-aware, a self-aware human being. And my view is, well, maybe that's true.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  But if so, give the artificial version tactile sense and olfactory sense and visual sense. We will have the capacity to do this. At that point, I just don't see a fundamental difference between the artificial version and, shall we call it, the organic. And so, yeah, I think there's a really interesting argument to be made that simulations will outnumber real worlds. And therefore, there's a chance that right now, we are in one of those simulated worlds.

• 20:25Steven Bartlett?

  Does it change anything, even if that's true?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Nah, I don't think it does. And I think that's the beauty. If I'm in a simulation, I'm gonna live out my life in this simulation to the fullest. Now, I'd like to think that as a physicist, what I do, what my colleagues do is try to figure out the laws of the universe writ large. But if we're in a simulation and all we're doing is figuring out the laws that that 15 year old futuristic kid decided to impose on this artificial world, hey, that's not a bad way to spend your time, too.

• 20:59Steven Bartlett?

  On this subject of AI, do you, I mean, a lot of people that have sat here, people like Geoffrey Hinton have told me that it's quite inconceivable that when there is a more intelligent life form on this planet, i.e. AI, which is accelerating in its intelligence towards superintelligence and AGI and all these terms that these smart people use, it's inconceivable that we will remain in control.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:19Steven Bartlett?

  Logically, that kind of also stacks up.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  It does, but I think there are alternatives. We tend to speak very much at the extremes, right? Humans are in control. AI is in control. AI wipes us out for reasons that might be benign or might be dystopian. It seems to me that what will likely happen is something more in the middle, which is we are going to work with artificial systems. We're doing it right now. And look how quickly we have acclimated to a world that would be unthinkable in 2021. There are many examples now, but there's a beautiful one that's on my mind.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  An 80 year old mathematical conjecture, this called the Jacobian conjecture, was solved very recently by a mathematician using AI. I see us blending with AI, not necessarily that we have implants, but maybe we will. But there will not be a sharper distinction between the biological intelligence and the artificial intelligence. And that, to me, if that ultimately yields a new life form that no longer can be called human, that may be the way things evolve.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  And so, evolution is something that is inherent to how we got here.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Why would we think that this moment in the evolutionary progression was the end of it all? We weren't gonna continue to evolve. And maybe the continuation of our evolution is in partnership with the artificial intelligence systems that we ourselves create.

• 23:13Steven Bartlett?

  That we give birth to.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's us, right? It's our creation. You know, it's not an alien. We haven't been taken over. And so, yeah, I think that is a real possible way that this story plays out.

• 23:28Steven Bartlett?

  How do you feel about it?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  I am fine with it. You know, I think that we tend to become very attached to the way things are. And we gain a sense of the way things are is the way it will always be. I think that's a natural way that we humans have lived our lives. Why? Because the time scales for change in our past have been relatively slow, right? We lived, what, 30, 40, 50, call it 80 years, 100 years, whatever. But the time scales for change were typically much larger than that. The time scales for political change and the time scales for technological change, much larger.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  So as a species, we've grown accustomed to the thought that, yeah, what we see is how it will always be. But of course, as we look back through history, we can see the changes. And so, we're uncomfortable with change because we're unused to living through that kind of change at the kind of speed that we are and will continue to encounter. But I think we just have to get with it. Now, look, I don't want AI system to wipe us out, don't get me wrong. But I think if we recognize that change is happening, will happening, we can embrace it in a way that will have an outcome that will be acceptable, that will in fact be wonderful in the things that it will allow us to do.

• 24:57Steven Bartlett?

  I'm quite curious. You talked about AI being able to solve that complex math problem. I'm wondering if with accelerating ever more intelligent AI, there's a bunch of other things within physics that you think might become possible in the near term. I mean, one of them I was thinking about, we can talk about some of the others that I have in my mind, and any others that you think are interesting. But one of them is us being able to live forever.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:19Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think we're gonna be able to live forever?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be a, that would be a good one. I don't think that death is inevitable in the sense that death can be thought of as the increase in entropy, the increase in disorder in a physical system. And when the entropy gets too large, the system can't function the way it once did. And that's really what we call death, right? That's really what it means. And so, in principle, we can imagine harnessing some of the processes that have caused the degradation in the human body that have naturally resulted in us typically not living more than 100 or 120 years.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  I mean, people like David Sinclair, who I've spoken to about things like this, yeah. You know, I think we can forestall the kinds of degradation. Now, if you're talking to me, I think on time scales that are so much longer than a human life. I think about time scales that speak to the entire timeframe of the cosmos from beginning to the closest that science can take us to the very end. And on those scales, I don't think that we will be able to forestall death. But please note, the time scales I'm talking about are ludicrous compared to any time scale that we are familiar with.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  100 more years, 200 more years, maybe 500 more years. I don't think anybody can really say for sure. I do think that is within the possible range of what science and medicine will ultimately be able to accomplish. And I will say, though, you know, I read a book, I don't know if it was about in my 20s, called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He was a social psychologist, I guess sociologist, who believed strongly that so much of what we do in our lives is driven by our awareness of our own mortality. And as I began to think more and more about that, it made more and more sense to me, which had a dual effect on me.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Very interesting framework to think about your life within the context of recognizing its finite nature. But the flip side of that is you're constantly thinking about your own death, you know, which is a curious way to go about your life. But I don't think the denial of death, that human motivation, would go away. If we lived 200 years, or 300, or 500, yeah, we'd have longer lifespans, we'd be able to do more things. But you know, if we lived to 500, you know, as we approach 450, 475, we'll be thinking the exact same thoughts that we think now as we approach 70 or 80. It'll be no different.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  And so, from a fundamental perspective, yeah, I would choose to live longer, but I don't think it changes anything fundamentally.

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  I find it quite interesting. I was actually writing a letter about this, sort of an article to myself really about this yesterday, about this idea of long termism, and how when you just change the time horizon of something, the decisions you make today are different.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:29Steven Bartlett?

  And a simple way of explaining this through the context of like business would be if I told you to build a business, then I gave you one year and unlimited resources, but you had to build it as big as you could, you would take certain shortcuts. And you would maybe not think about the foundations. But if I gave you 20 years, you'd really make great foundations and then, you know, you'd build up from there. And I think about the same in our lives, because we do have this sort of inbuilt time horizon, okay, I'm gonna live maybe 80 years, and then I'm 30, and then 40, and then kids, and then I start to, you know, change. And maybe at some deeper level, we are making a certain set of decisions based on that time horizon that we wouldn't make otherwise.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, when I was 20 or 30, you know, even though I had this mindset that was inculcated by reading Becker's book, there was a certain sense of an infinite horizon that somehow was infusing your decisions, you know, to write a book. Well, that's like a four year undertaking, but you know, when you're 30, you're like, yeah, sure, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Now, I'm gonna choose those books with a certain kind of care, right? You know, there's a different kind of mindset that is brought to bear. So I certainly agree that the time horizon has a profound impact on the moment to moment choices.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  But the pattern that we humans go through from birth, you know, to adolescence, adulthood, middle age, to ultimately old age, if we're lucky, and then, you know, we disappear, that pattern will persist regardless of what the ultimate scale of it is, whether it's 80 years or 800 years. I think that we would go through a very similar kind of rhythmic variation in how we approach the world. If we were immortal, that would change a lot. But I don't see immortality in our future.

• 30:24Steven Bartlett?

  What is the sort of the least inspiring possibility of the sort of answer to the big question of why we're here? And then I'll ask you the most optimistic possibility.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the least inspiring would be if, what if in the end of the day, it's all just an accident? There is no deep explanation for why the world is the way it is. There's no deep explanation for why there's something rather than nothing. And if that's the truth, I'm on board. But it wouldn't feel as enriching as it might be, if I can now jump to the other side of your question, you know, if there is a true fundamental answer to the question of why there is anything at all. And I recognize that that answer dovetails with everything else that we've been developing. That answer ultimately yields quantum mechanics and yields the general theory of relativity,

• 31:17Speaker 00

  maybe even yields string theory. That would feel deeply satisfying. Why did our brain evolve? So we could get the next meal, so we could get shelter, so we could get a mate and have progeny, allowing our genetic material to propagate into our descendants, right? This is what the brain was meant to do. And yet, this brain can do so much more than that. It can figure out the equations of physics. That's, that's a miracle right there. And so, the deep gratification would come from this brain being able to figure out some stuff. And then it dovetails with the deep explanation for why there's anything at all, giving us

• 32:00Speaker 00

  a coherent narrative from the beginning until today and perhaps on into the far future.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:08Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's gonna happen? Do you think we're gonna answer that question?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  I don't know. Nobody does. I think all vectors are pointing in a direction that suggests that there are real explanations, that it's not just happenstance. There are these particles we mentioned before called electrons. Here it is, my spinning electron, right? And so, when an electron spins, it derives to a little magnetic field, sort of like a trillionth of the strength of the magnetic field of a magnet on your refrigerator. We can use the math of quantum mechanics to predict the strength of that magnetic field. And we can do it, and it comes out 2. blah, blah, blah, 15 decimal places long. We can do the math.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  We then can measure the magnetic field, and it agrees digit by digit by digit by digit by digit with what we calculate. Our prediction is borne out by our observations to 15 decimal places. I mean, that's breathtaking. We should not have been able to do that in some sense, to understand the world that deeply with a brain that really was focused upon, you know, getting the bison. And so, the fact that we can do that suggests to me that there are these deep patterns in the world that will ultimately stitch together into a coherent story.

• 33:32Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it could lead us to God?

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Well.

• 33:36Steven Bartlett?

  Or religion?

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it depends what you mean by God. You know, if you mean the kind of God that our forebears often have spoken of, and people today as well, a kind of anthropomorphized being, you know, sitting on the throne in some heavenly place, I suspect not. That feels to me very much a human creation and a wondrous human creation. I'm not of the mindset, as some of my science colleagues are, that religion is an enemy of science and needs to be wiped. It can be, but anything can be an enemy of anything else. It depends how you use it.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  I see religion not as a structure that tries to explain the world in terms of its workings. I see it as a structure that tries to quell our anxiety, our existential anxiety. Where did religions come from? They came from our forebears recognizing that they would die. So, you know, our forebears had these elaborate rituals of burying their dead. There are these wonderful caves in various parts of the world that have been excavated where the grave goods, as they call it, involving, you know, animal teeth stitched together, care, it would take a single individual years to create the grave goods that are buried with an individual.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Why would they spend the time on that? Well, they were imagining that death is not the end, that that individual needed those grave goods for their next journey into the afterlife. And why were they thinking about that? Because it's too terrifying to imagine that death is truly the end. And so, from that, you can see the glimmers of a religious sensibility emerging, where we want to have something that suggests that death is not the end. So we invent these beautiful structures called religions. And I say that even from a personal standpoint. I don't believe in any of the traditional religious practices, right?

• 35:44Speaker 00

  I'm Jewish, I was raised sort of Jewish, more culturally than religiously. Do I pray on occasion? Yeah, I do. Do I believe that I'm praying to an actual God? I do not. But the act of going through the kind of ritual that our ancestors did and giving yourself over momentarily to something that you imagine as being more powerful, I think it's deeply in our nature.

• 36:12Steven Bartlett?

  So who are you praying to?

• 36:13Speaker 00

  I am praying to the universe, if I have to give a word to it. Recognizing that this prayer is gonna fall on deaf ears because there's nothing else out there to hear it, but it makes me feel better. And so, there's a part of my mind that's willing to allow the scientific understanding to have its place, but the irrational human side to have its place, too.

• 36:41Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most compelling argument or idea or experience you've ever encountered for a God, like the ones we read about in the Bibles?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Very little, very little. You know, somebody died in the operating room and they were able to leave their body and see things that they could not possibly have seen. And then they reported back when they were revived and people were like, oh, you must have died and left your body. That's the only, no, no, no, no. The human brain has this wonderful imaginative capacity to see things inside of its head that it doesn't literally see. That's what we can do. And so, I've never seen a single example where I couldn't feel that I could give a logical explanation which was more compelling than the supernatural explanation.

• 37:27Steven Bartlett?

  What about the Big Bang, then?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Good. So the Big Bang is a question of how it got started.

• 37:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  And over time, we have been able to push our understanding ever further back. So in about 19, call it 29 or so, Edwin Hubble, who was a great astronomer, noticed through powerful observations through the telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, that the distant galaxies all seem to be moving away. Interesting. Others, Georges Le Metre, who is a Belgian priest, as it turns out, who also knew Einstein's general relativity, said, well, look, if all the galaxies are moving away, just wind that cosmic film backwards. Back in time, they must have been closer and closer and closer together.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Way back in the beginning, they must have all been on top of each other. And then, everything running the film forward must have swelled out, or in a Big Bang like explosion.

• 38:26Steven Bartlett?

  Let there be light.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Let there be light, yeah. And so, starting in 1929, we began to have a scientific account of how it is that the universe may have been billions of years ago. And in our era, other scientists took the story even further, suggesting that there was an earlier era when the universe was just infused with a kind of uniform energy. You could say, where did the energy come? I don't know. But if it was infused with this uniform energy, they showed that the math required that the universe underwent this rapid swelling, the Big Bang. And so, era by era by era, my point is, we can push our understanding ever more deeply,

• 39:12Speaker 00

  trying to get at cosmic origins. We have not been able to push back to time zero itself, but because we're able to push our understanding further back and make predictions about, for instance, what's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, this is heat that we can observe today that was left over from the Big Bang. Big Bang was very hot. The universe has cooled ever since for 13.8 billion years. We can detect the residual heat from the Big Bang. And so, this gives me confidence that we're inching toward the answer to the question that you asked. Now, will we require God at some point?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  By which I mean, will we say, we've gone as far as we can? Will we have to invoke something else? I can't say no, but I don't see any reason at this point to envision that we won't be able to push all the way to a full understanding.

• 40:12Steven Bartlett?

  Most of us don't really understand, I guess, how scale and time have a relationship, which means that, you know, I've been alive for 33 years now. It feels like a long time.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:26Steven Bartlett?

  But I'm presuming the further and further you zoom out and the sort of, the bigger, the wider the scale gets, time is experienced differently? So actually, I could have been here for a second in a toddler's universe who's created this simulation.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Yes, all of this is possible when simulations are part of the story. But if you put that to the side, and just look at our universe, yeah, the time scales even there are shocking. I mean, Carl Sagan used an analogy. He said, look, if you want to understand the time scales of the universe from the beginning until today, which is billions of years, like 13.8 billion years, he said, here's one way to do it. Imagine that all of cosmic history from the beginning until today, you compress it down to one year.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Now, in that scheme, that means each day is about 40,000 years. But you can then put all of the milestone moments in the evolution of the universe on the calendar. So imagine you have the Big Bang as January 1st. Then the Milky Way galaxy forms like something around, you know, March 15th or something like that. And the Sun and the Earth form sometime, you know, in May, you know? And then the first, you know, life on Earth is sometime in December, like December 2nd. And then, you know, the first modern humans, they appear like on New Year's Eve, right?

• 41:50Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And then all of civilization takes place in the last 10 seconds, right? So at like 1155, you know, it's the, it's the rise of the Buddha, 1156, the fall of Rome, 1158, the Renaissance, 1159, like one second to the stroke of midnight, you get modern science. So like modern science is like one second in this cosmic calendar. And so that helps you get a feel for the time scales that are involved when you're talking cosmologically. Because you're right, 33 years in a lifetime, you know, I'm going to posit you're going to live to 99, let's say.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  That's one third of your life, you know, that's, that's not small, it's not big, but you know, it's a significant part of it. On cosmic terms, 33 years, it's zero. It doesn't register. That's how tiny it is on the scales that we're talking about cosmologically.

• 42:48Steven Bartlett?

  So should I feel insignificant?

• 42:50Speaker 00

  You can, I would urge you not to. One of the reactions to all this certainly can be, look, we're a little tiny speck in space, right? I mean, you can give the same kind of context for space itself, right? Because we're on a planet around the Sun. The Sun is one star of 100 billion others or so in the Milky Way galaxy.

• 43:14Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got a?

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a little version of this thing here, if we can get this guy to go on. Right, yeah, so if you sort of start like here, right? Here we are in the studio, right? And if here, we then begin to pull out to planet Earth, like we're a little dot on planet Earth. And then if you pull out from there, this is Earth within the solar system. You begin to see how tiny we look even on the scale of the solar system. But of course, here you can pull out further and you begin to see our Sun, one of many stars within the galaxies. You only see a few here, but you know, there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And then you can go even further than that. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe

• 44:01Speaker 00

  that has at least 100 billion other galaxies. So we, as a little tiny speck around our star, our star is one of 100 billion stars in a galaxy that's one of 100 billion galaxies. That can certainly make you feel small in space. The beauty, though, is that our minds can reach out to the edge of the cosmos. The fact that we can understand that we are so small is what gives us heft. That's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger. I imagine that fish don't realize that they're like in one ocean of many oceans on the Earth. It's one planet.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  I don't think, maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the fish are like, ah, yeah, yeah. But, but assuming that the fish don't know that, they don't know that they're insignificant. They don't even really think in those terms per se. But the fact that we can do that, the fact that we can realize how insignificant we are when you talk about the expansive space, you realize that there are other measures of significance. And one measure of significance is your ability to understand your own predicament. And the fact that we can do that is what, to me, is wondrous.

• 45:18Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know we're not just, that whole universe there isn't just a, we're just a, a microbe in the, in the gut of a, of a fish?

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, we could, and again, that's much like this simulation argument. But let me give an example on here that helps give you a sense of why we believe this stuff. This here is the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the heat left over from the beginning. Now, it's color coded. The different colors correspond to different temperatures in space. This is a picture of space with a device that measures the temperature at each location and assigns it a color.

• 45:58Steven Bartlett?

  How much of space or just a segment?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  This is a segment of the observable universe, the segment that we can see. Now, space can be much larger than things that we can see, that's absolutely the case. But my point is, these tiny color variations correspond to tiny temperature differences. We can use mathematics to predict the pattern of the temperature variations. And what we predict matches this image to incredible precision. And so the fact that we can do a calculation right at this table with a piece of paper, a pencil and a computer, and generate an image that agrees with what we see, we say, look, yeah, we can be skeptical.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Maybe we don't have the full answer, but that agreement gives us confidence that we've got something in the direction of truth. And that, to me, is what gives us something that counteracts the feeling of insignificance.

• 46:58Steven Bartlett?

  And on that, if you just pull that up again, so this is the observable universe?

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:02Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, I mean, how big is that?

• 47:04Speaker 00

  The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. So you'd think that the universe, the distance we could see would be about 13.8 billion light years, the distance light can travel in one year. We can actually see a little bit further, more like 45 billion light years. So you can think about this as, here we are, we look out billions of light years that way, billions of light years that way, billions of light years in every direction. And this is like a big sphere that surrounds us and we're measuring its temperature, the temperature of space, the photons that have traveled to us from about 300,000 years after the beginning.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  So this picture is a snapshot, in essence, of what the universe was like a mere moment in cosmological terms, 300,000 years after the beginning. That is an amazing picture.

• 47:57Steven Bartlett?

  And what's beyond?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't have any reason to suspect that reality radically changes just beyond the place that we can see. I think it's incredibly unlikely that the world is so consistent with our scientific understanding for it to all be a ruse.

• 48:19Steven Bartlett?

  So is it infinite?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  It could be. And if it is infinite, there are some really weird things if what we have been talking about isn't weird enough, right? You know, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out into space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there and a copy of the Earth out there and a copy of our galaxy out there. It's virtually impossible to imagine a universe that goes on infinitely far and doesn't repeat. You know, in fact, I see a prop here, I can sort of tell you why, right? So here's a deck of cards, right? And I think it's a new deck, yeah, so everything is in order, right? It's all perfectly ordered like that.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Now, if I was to take this deck of cards and I start to shuffle it, right? So I'm not a particularly good shuffler, but you know, you get the basic idea. You know, I keep shuffling and of course, the order changes every time, right? So if I now, you know, I'm not a great shuffler, so there probably still, you know, some things that are still, you know, in numerical order, but it's more mixed up than it was before. And I can keep on doing this. Now, sooner or later, if I continue to shuffle these cards over and over and over and over and over and over again, sooner or later, it will get back to the completely ordered arrangement. Why? Because there aren't enough different arrangements to go around, right? That idea applies in the universe in the following way.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  In any region of space, there are particles. Those particles can be arranged in a variety of different ways. Here, they're arranged so that you and I are sitting at this table and we got the cameras and everything. This is just a particle arrangement. There are only a finite number of arrangements of particles in any given region of space. This you can establish from the laws of quantum physics. So if you go out far enough in space, region by region by region, the particles will have different arrangements, but they have to repeat, much like the order of the cards has to repeat. So there has to be a place out there. In fact, if it goes on infinitely far, if you imagine that I shuffle these cards infinitely many times, I'll get that nice ordered arrangement infinitely many times too.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Similarly, there are infinitely many copies of you, of me, of everything we're familiar with, out there in the cosmos. And so if the universe is infinite, it kind of challenges a little bit our sense of self, right? Like, what does it mean to be who you are if there are other versions of you having the exact same thoughts? They had the same childhood, they had the same history, because again, that's just an arrangement of particles over time and it has to repeat.

• 51:04Steven Bartlett?

  There's a version out there of me that just loves wine.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  There you go, right? In fact, it's even easier, I should say, for the particle arrangement to almost, but not quite exactly replicate what we're familiar with, which would mean there's a universe out there in which you and I are interchanged. Or you grew up in New York City and I grew up something, yeah. Because those are, again, almost replications. You've got the Earth, you've got the Sun, but the detailed particle arrangement is close to, but not identical to what we are used to. So yeah, an infinite universe brings in some fairly strange ideas.

• 51:45Steven Bartlett?

  But even in the observable universe, I mean, this transitions nicely to the subject of aliens, which people are

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:50Steven Bartlett?

  very obsessed about. I guess there's two questions here, which is, why do we care so much, I guess philosophically, about aliens?

• 51:57Speaker 00

  You know, I think we, at least in this country and elsewhere too, we love the idea of conspiracy. We love the idea that the deep state is hiding things from us. And by we, I don't mean me, I'm sort of meaning the zeitgeist, you know, loves the idea of this Area 51. You know, so I think there's a, a, a desire for there to be more than what's apparent on the surface. And wouldn't it be exciting if, you know, we've long known that there are these aliens, they've visited us and it's been kept under wraps? That's like the deep conspiracy, that feeds that hunger for there to be something that's being hidden from us.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Now, I think the other reason is we're deeply lonely as a species. Sure, we've got people around, but you know, I think this sense, the desire for a God, I don't think is that much different from the desire for there to be other life out there. It's the desire to be part of something bigger. Now, if you ask me, do I think there are actually other life forms out there? I'd like to think of it in two ways. One, yeah, I think it's hard to imagine that we're the only life. I mean, the more we look, the more we find the organic molecules necessary for life, you know? Amino acids, nucleic acids, you know, the, the raw material seems to not be too hard to come by in the cosmos.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  So to imagine that there's other, you know, bacterial life or viruses out there, that seems to me a reasonable working hypothesis. But if you then say, but what about intelligent life? And by intelligent life, let's just call us intelligent. And it's debatable, but let's just say that. You know, that is a harder question. I mean, even on our planet, right? There was an asteroid 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and in that way opened up the evolutionary pathway by which we came to dominate in the way that we do. Without that, it could still be the dinosaurs are grazing around on various plant life

• 54:05Speaker 00

  and other life forms on the surface of this Earth. And without that kind of accident on some other world, maybe intelligent life is rare or even so rare that we're the only example. So I don't consider that an absurd perspective as well, that there is life, but there may not be any intelligence beyond us.

• 54:27Steven Bartlett?

  Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you, am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about. And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration.

• 55:09Steven Bartlett?

  And sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stan.store now to get started. I've heard I talk to new founders, they all carry the same belief that the biggest threat to their small business is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture. And I get it, when you're starting out, you need A players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews. So you hire fast to fill the seat, but this ends up costing you even more in the long term.

• 55:53Steven Bartlett?

  What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent without stalling momentum. That's where our long-term sponsor LinkedIn and LinkedIn Hiring Pro can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Nearly 60% of hirers who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week. Hire right the first time around and get started by posting your first job for free at LinkedIn.com/DOAC. That's LinkedIn.com/DOAC and terms and conditions apply. If one of your children came to you and said, Dad, what is, what is the meaning then of this life? If we're alone in this universe, it's a gazillion miles away from anything interesting in the cosmic spectrum of things,

• 56:37Steven Bartlett?

  what is the meaning of all of this, Dad?

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, they do.

• 56:40Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, they do?

• 56:41Speaker 00

  You know, unfortunately or fortunately, because I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and writing about it, it's sort of in, in the familial zeitgeist at home, if you will. But you know, my answer generally is, I don't think that hovering out there in the depths of space, there is the answer. You know, I, I think, you know, this, this urge to look out and have the answer brought to us, I think that's, needs to be inverted. I think that we need to come to the universe with our answer to that. And I think the charge of every sentient living being is to come to their own rationale for their life,

• 57:25Speaker 00

  their own answer to your question, their own set of activities and desires and achievements and relationships that gives their life meaning and combine to make me feel connected.

• 57:41Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that does make me feel connected is just knowing that the particles that I'm made out of existed at the Big Bang?

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Isn't that wondrous? You are the universe constructed in a way that you can reflect on the universe. Now, some would say, no, no, no, we're special. We're like these divine offspring, you know, made in the image of God. And sure, I mean, I like the way that that sounds, but I find it much more satisfying to describe it the way you did. There were particles that emerged from the Big Bang that coalesced into a form that allowed us to momentarily, because we're here for a brief flicker of cosmic time, to momentarily reflect on our own existence. That's a connection.

• 58:31Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that actually helped me a lot through my life, funnily enough, is, is kind of watching what you just showed on the screen there, which was, I watched a video when I was younger of them just zooming out from Earth.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:41Steven Bartlett?

  And we talked about feeling insignificant earlier. I mean, there's some of them here, I'll just pick one at random, like this one here. Well, it's just a lady sat on some grass and she, she zooms out further and further and further. And when I saw this, I must have been, hmm, it was a video like this one. I must have been about 14 years old. And at first I had the thought that a lot of people might have, which was, oh, like, none of this matters because we're so insignificant on the grand scheme of things that, like, what's the point? And then I, I had this other thought, which has stayed with me ever since, which is,

• 59:13Steven Bartlett?

  it liberated me from worry.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:16Steven Bartlett?

  Because if, if all of my worries are just a speck in this bigger thing, which are a speck in a bigger thing and a speck in a bigger thing, it meant that I could take more risks in my life.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:27Steven Bartlett?

  And not be encumbered by what will happen if and what will people think and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which kind of liberates one to go and pursue whatever they want to pursue.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Carl Sagan with the pale blue dot, you know, if you're familiar with that terminology, he, he had the Viking spacecraft when it was going by Saturn. Turn around and take a shot of planet Earth through the gossamer rings of Saturn. And in that photo, the Earth is this little tiny pale blue speck, sort of as we saw in the film as it went by there. And he, in this wonderfully poetic passage, described how everything we care about, everything we love, everything we fight, the rivers of blood that has been spilled to conquer a tiny little fraction of a pixel in space.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  That gives you a setting where the concerns that you're mentioning of an individual human life, of, of countries, of nations, you realize how utterly small it is in the cosmological setting. And again, that to me isn't insignificance, as you were saying, it's liberation.

• 1:00:41Steven Bartlett?

  We have this, this spectrum of, I guess, confidence

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Steven Bartlett?

  in front of us here. And on one end of it, it says low confidence, on this end it has high confidence. And there's five little figurine type things there next to you.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Steven Bartlett?

  And what I would like you to do is to place them in line with your confidence that the thing is real. So the first one that I'm going to ask you to place is those mini scales, which represent free will.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  This guy here, free will?

• 1:01:05Steven Bartlett?

  That's free will. Do you think humans have free will? Are you low confidence or high confidence? I'll push it further towards you so you can.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Well, I do not think we have free will. And I have high confidence in that assessment, which I guess means low confidence that we have free will.

• 1:01:23Steven Bartlett?

  What is free will?

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  To me, free will is really just the everyday sense that you are the ultimate author of your actions, that the buck stops with you when it comes to the decisions that you make for how you are going to respond one way or another in the moment-to-moment existence of life. I don't think that freedom of the will is real. And I can give you a quick sense why. It really is an extension of everything that we've already spoken about, which is, you know, when I look at you, I see a man. But I also imagine that I'm looking inside you and I see your particles. And so you are a man-shaped collection of particles.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  That is what you are. And each of those particles and the agglomeration of those particles are fully governed by the laws of physics. I don't say that we have those laws yet. We have an approximation to them with Schrodinger and Einstein and all those folks. But I do believe that there is an ultimate set of principles that guide how your particles behave. You do not have the capacity to intercede in the lawful progression of your particles. So if you raise your hand, it is not you who's doing that. It is the laws of physics guiding the particles in your brain, sending an electrical signal down your arm,

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  causing your muscle to contract or expand, resulting in your hand going up. You don't control the laws that govern those particles.

• 1:02:59Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't make the decision.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  You did not. You felt that you did. And so the feeling that you and I and everyone else have, that we make decisions and those decisions result in our action, it's a powerful, it's a seductive sensibility. But no, I do not think that you are the place where that choice, if you will, occurred. The choice is actually within the lawful unfolding of the particles. And I can't control that particle motion. Therefore, I can't control the decision. Therefore, I don't control the motion of my arm.

• 1:03:34Steven Bartlett?

  Therefore, I don't control my life?

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  You don't, in some sense. If you buy into it fully, it can be paralyzing. Or you can recognize it, which I do. And I say, okay, within that structure, I'm gonna live my life as fully as I can. And I am able, not always, because I'm a human being, but in the best of moments, I can pull back and have a certain objectivity about the things that happen in my life. And I observe them at a remove, as opposed to being completely wrapped up in the moment to moment. Now, that doesn't make me an aloof person. It doesn't make me somebody who somehow is detached.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  No, it's just I can analyze the world at multiple levels.

• 1:04:24Steven Bartlett?

  So who is and what is guiding those particles to make the decisions that those particles are making?

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  The best I can say, and I think the best that we can say right now, is that there is some body of law. Now, what does that mean, a body of law? There is some patterns that repeat in the world. Now, you drop an apple and it falls on Newton's head repeatedly. You can rely upon certain kinds of particle motion because there's certain regularities in the world. And the regularities in the world are what I mean by the laws of physics. They may be articulated mathematically. Our best guess is, as of today, that math is the best language we have for describing those laws.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  But out there, I think there are some fundamental patterns. And those patterns ultimately are what determine how the particles move. And so that's all that we are. We are a body of particles that move. And that's responsible for why things do what they do. And remarkably, our brains allow us to self-reflect, to look at what we do and analyze it. And when we do that, we tend to ascribe authorship to ourselves. But that's a story that we tell ourselves. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel part of the unfolding. It perhaps has an evolutionary utility that if you feel responsible for what you're doing, maybe it helps you to survive.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Maybe that's why this way of thinking was inculcated over the course of generation upon generation. Maybe there's an evolutionary explanation, but fundamentally speaking, I don't think it's real.

• 1:06:05Steven Bartlett?

  I was gonna say then, well, maybe the particles are trying to survive in this form. But even as I thought about that, I thought, so maybe my particles are making the decisions they make to raise my hand, to go on a holiday with my fiance, to have kids, because they want to survive in this form. But actually, I disappear at some point.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:26Steven Bartlett?

  But my particles don't.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:28Steven Bartlett?

  They then become dirt or someone else or whatever, or a child. It doesn't seem that they care much about necessarily being in this form.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  They don't. I don't think they do. So I don't think they care. I don't even think the word care is applicable to them. The notion of caring is a high-level construct that only emerges when the particles are configured sufficiently to yield a complex information processing system called the human brain.

• 1:06:54Steven Bartlett?

  And consciousness.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  And consciousness. Now, if you ask me where consciousness comes from, I don't know. Sort of as you discussed before, I think it's just physical processes. Let's go with that. Assuming that's the case, this conscious self-awareness invents the idea of caring because it's a useful concept for us to organize our lives and our experiences. This conscious self-awareness invents all the other words: happy, sad, meaning, purpose, morality, activity, action, choice, decision, freedom, will, all human-made. These concepts don't exist out there in the universe. There's no notion of freedom of the will floating in space outside the Andromeda Galaxy.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  This is a selection of ideas that we humans as a species have found to give us utilitarian advantage in organizing our experiences. That's all that it is. That doesn't diminish it. I don't go around trying to erase my sense of self. I accept my sense of self, but I also see it for what it is, a human construct.

• 1:08:06Steven Bartlett?

  Does that mean that consciousness and everything that I am could theoretically just be, as you said earlier in the sort of pessimistic version of events, random, totally random? Like consciousness itself was just, the particles came together over a long enough period of time and then they found this form and now I can...

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  It could. And maybe it was random and happened only once on this planet, right? I mean, again, maybe there is life out there and maybe there's even complex life out there. Maybe even like as big as us or bigger. But maybe when we encounter those life forms, they have no idea of what it means to have an inner world.

• 1:08:44Steven Bartlett?

  This, I think it was a physicist said to me that it was a bit of a spiritual, esoteric idea, but they basically said to me that they think consciousness could be, it could come from this sort of original source. And it's divided itself up into the humans, the bees, the birds, to go out there and understand the nature of the universe.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Steven Bartlett?

  And that when we die, we kind of return to the source. But, you know, I'll give birth to a baby. They'll go off into different corners of the earth and look at different things and have different experiences. And it's all feeding back into the central consciousness, which is sole objective is to understand itself.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny because I heard this idea from this physicist. And then I was in a, somewhere in Europe, and I was driving down the road. And I saw all of these tourists just like looking up at a mountain. And they're just like looking out at the sea. And they were looking at things that were interesting.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:09:30Steven Bartlett?

  Which is what we do as humans.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Steven Bartlett?

  And I thought, kind of makes sense.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:33Steven Bartlett?

  That we're like, we're actually just like, consciousness is...

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  No, there's a philosophical position called idealism. And idealism holds that the fundamental truth of reality is consciousness. But fundamentally, everything that I've seen throughout my life suggests to me that that's not how it is. I can't prove it. I hope it's true. But if you ask me what I think is really true, I think that consciousness is something that emerges when there's a sufficient amount of information processing that itself is carried by the motion of particles through various interconnected structures.

• 1:10:11Steven Bartlett?

  Is my dog conscious?

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  It is, but I think it's got a different level of consciousness. You can tell when they're feeling good, happy, or sad, or frustrated, or intrigued. The ears change, the eyes change, the shape of the face. You can't help but ascribe an inner world to that. And again, I always worry that the dogs like the fish or like these humans think they're so damn special, but we actually are well-developed, well beyond them, and we're just playing along. In fact, in New York City, who picks up the poop, right? We pick up the poop. So the dog walks along as like this, you know, king-like being. And we behind them in these little plastic bags. So who's really in charge? But putting that to the side, I do think that the dogs and the cats have a level of conscious awareness.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  And I think you go down through the animal kingdom. If you were to ask me, does an insect have consciousness? Hmm, then I'm less clear. I suspect not. If you ask me whether a virus or a bacterium has consciousness, I don't think so. I don't think there's adequate information processing capacity in those structures to have the kind of rich inner world that we would normally ascribe to a conscious being. But that's all that I think it is. I don't think that there's some uber-universal consciousness that's out there that we go back to when we die. Not that I wouldn't like it. I just don't think it's true. Moreover, I can understand why humans would introduce this idea. Again, it's Ernest Becker and the denial of death.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  How wonderful to say, yeah, our bodies die, sure. But our consciousness, it doesn't die? Our consciousness, it floats off and it rejoins the universal... Wow, that makes you feel good. And we tell these stories that make us feel good, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, I do think it's important that we see them for what they are, which are human-authored stories to combat our own recognition that we are mortal beings.

• 1:12:12Steven Bartlett?

  Moving on to the next one.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Steven Bartlett?

  Is the universe there on the little card? We talked about this a little bit and you've given your answer already. But do you think the universe is infinite?

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  I don't know, but I'm gonna put it sort of around here. You know, in fact, lately, I should tell you, the work that I've been doing has imagined that the universe is not infinite. So I've been doing a lot of scientific exploration with mathematics with a handful of colleagues and the kind of weird things that can happen if it's not infinite. And it's very interesting. There's a lot of mileage that you can extract from a universe that you go off in that way and you wind up coming back to your starting point, much like you would on the surface of the earth. It's a finite extent. But if you ask me, in my heart of hearts, if I was forced to make a choice, I would say infinite with a medium level of confidence.

• 1:13:02Steven Bartlett?

  What about, do you think life could exist outside of Earth? And I'll say intelligent life.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Intelligent life.

• 1:13:10Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think intelligent life exists outside of Earth?

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for intelligent aliens, I'm gonna definitely go a little bit more over here. You know, I put it as, it's possible. Obviously, it happened once, therefore it could happen again. Obviously, intelligence is not somehow contradictory to the way the universe evolves. It can support conscious and intelligent beings, but I think it may be special.

• 1:13:35Steven Bartlett?

  Is there not a bit of a contradiction here, though?

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Steven Bartlett?

  With these two things, that you think the universe is infinite?

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Oh, when I say this, I should say within the observable universe.

• 1:13:44Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in the entire expanse of the universe, as opposed to the observable part, which again is a part that even in principle, we could have connection with, then yeah, I would absolutely put in exactly the same place because there'd be copies of us out there. But if we talk instead about, are we gonna get a signal? Are we gonna be visited? Then I put that at much lower confidence. And in fact, I would say one thing about the visitation, because you mentioned the interest that people have on aliens. I find it really odd that people are taken with these photographs that are meant to sort of just catch the alien ship as it was racing.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  If an alien could travel across the galaxy, say, to reach us, they are so technologically advanced that the idea that our archaic airplanes and their cameras could capture a photograph of them is ludicrous. They will be able to evade us in so simply that the idea that we just barely caught them on our cameras is absolutely ridiculous. Moreover, if they could travel to us, again, I'm talking about traveling across light years, right? I mean, our galaxy, 100,000 light years end to end, right? To be able to traverse that requires a level of technological sophistication

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  that is so beyond anything that we can do. To imagine that beings that advanced would be interested in us? So interested that they would like kidnap us? That'd be like saying, I was walking to the park yesterday. Don't tell anyone, but I kidnapped an ant. There's an ant walking along and nobody was looking, and I sort of kidnapped it. We don't do that because it's not interesting. Similarly, we would not be of interest to the aliens because they're so incredibly advanced that this idea that they're abducting us is just ludicrous.

• 1:15:54Steven Bartlett?

  Is it gonna be possible? You know, we're talking earlier on about the possibilities that artificial intelligence is gonna unlock. Is it possible within the laws of physics for us at some point, when we get sufficiently intelligent, to travel across the universe?

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a great question. It's a tough one. So if the technological advancement was simply making our ships faster, no. Because even if you traveled near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed limit, you know, to go to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take you four years, even at the speed of light, to get there, right? And then if you actually want to go not just to the nearby star, but to actually across the galaxy, again, you're talking 100,000 years to do that. So that brute, straightforward approach will not succeed. However, there are exotic ideas of things called wormholes you've probably encountered.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  These are these ideas of, a wormhole is like a tunnel. What is a tunnel? On Earth, a tunnel is a shortcut that gets you from here to here without having to go over the mountain, right? Tunnel it right through. There's an analogous idea that people floated in the universe, where to get from here to there, there may be a shortcut, a kind of tunnel that connects them and is a quicker way of getting from point A to point B. We don't know if these tunnels through space exist. We don't know if they existed, whether we could actually get through them. And so it's a highly speculative idea. But if they do exist, and if we one day can create them and manipulate and control them,

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  then at least in principle, we could take two distant locations, like this corner and this corner. But imagine that we could manipulate this surface, fold it together to bring the two corners next to each other and build a little tunnel between them. Then we could go from one end to the other by going through that shortcut. That's a very far-out idea.

• 1:17:55Steven Bartlett?

  But there's no evidence of it.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  There's no evidence at all. Now, now, let me just say again, much as we discussed earlier, this idea is not just some wild, late-night musing of a physicist. It comes out of the math of Einstein's general relativity, that these wormholes could exist. In fact, Einstein himself, in 1935, wrote a paper with a colleague, Nathan Rosen, where they introduced this idea that we now call wormholes. We're no further along in knowing whether wormholes are real than Einstein was back then. We've analyzed them, we've developed the mathematics. You know, science fiction has taken this idea. You know, in Interstellar, I believe Matthew McConaughey goes through a wormhole.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Jodie Foster went through one in Contact. You know, they're a ubiquitous feature of science fiction trying to allow for the kinds of travel across the galaxy that otherwise would be impossible. But whether this is actually real, nobody knows.

• 1:18:55Steven Bartlett?

  What about time travel?

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Steven Bartlett?

  Can we travel backwards in time within the laws of physics?

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is the way of phrasing it. Because if you ask me the reverse question, can we travel to the future? I would say, yeah, that kind of time travel, we're highly confident of. So I don't have a little thing for that. But let's call, you know, this is time travel to the future, right? I put it very, very high confidence for that.

• 1:19:20Steven Bartlett?

  You think we can travel to the future?

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  Yes, in principle. Executing it, a different story. But one of the things that emerges from Einstein's special and general relativity is that the way time elapses, for you and for me, is variable, depending upon how fast we move and the strength of the gravity that we experience. So for instance, if I want to see what your life would be like 60 years from now, Einstein laid out a blueprint for how I could do that. I build a spaceship. I travel out into space near the speed of light. I go for a certain period of time, maybe about six months. I turn around, I come back, six more months. I come back, I'm one year older, six months, six months.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  But you will be 60 years older if I traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light because my clock would be ticking off slow compared to your clock. Your clock went through 60 years while my clock went through one year. There is no physicist who knows what they are talking about who disputes this. Now, it's not controversial, but if you then say to me, well, do it, I'd say, mm, I don't know how to build a spaceship that goes that fast, at least not yet.

• 1:20:35Steven Bartlett?

  You would only have aged one year.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:20:37Steven Bartlett?

  But I would have aged 60 years.

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:20:39Steven Bartlett?

  Could you then go back?

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Ah, I don't know. And if you were to ask me to give my confidence on going back, I would say it's pretty, pretty low. People have written proposals for how you could go back. They do involve things like wormholes. That is one possibility. Because if you have a, have a tunnel from one point in space to another, if you then move the openings at different speeds, their clocks will tick off at different rates. This clock may be before this clock. So if I travel this way, I'm going one way in time. If I'm traveling that way, I'm going the reverse way in time. But again, like we said before, we don't know if wormholes are real. If they are real, you might in principle be able to travel back. But if you ask me, do I think that you can?

• 1:21:23Speaker 00

  Low, low confidence that you can travel back.

• 1:21:26Steven Bartlett?

  You've used the word Einstein a few times.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Steven Bartlett?

  And I think this generation, you know, we exist with AI now and calculators and all this incredible knowledge that has come from sort of standing on the shoulders of so many of these giants. Who do you think is the smartest person to have ever lived in your estimation?

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  It's a tough one. People often make it an easier question by saying, who's smarter, Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein? And first, my answer is, when you're talking about that level, it doesn't matter who's smarter. But if you really press me, I think I'd say Isaac Newton. Because Newton kind of went from nothing to develop the laws of physics. There were people before, but there wasn't really a mindset that the universe should be articulable in a few mathematical equations. And yet here comes along Isaac Newton, and he writes down the equation that we teach high school kids, F equals ma, force equals mass times acceleration, which governs just about everything in the world around us,

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  non-quantum mechanically. He writes down the law of gravity, F equals G m1 m2 over r squared, articulating how the gravitational force works. And he was sort of doing this on, he invents calculus in order to be able to use that as a tool for articulating the laws of physics. I mean, he kind of went from no real architecture of physics to a solid mathematical formulation. Einstein came along, and there was already a lot of physics. I think going from nothing to the first step, that's hard to imagine.

• 1:23:04Steven Bartlett?

  Was Newton... To some degree, like neurodivergent. How could he be so genius?

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  I wish I knew the answer to a question like that. Like, you know, what is it inside their heads that allows them to do the things that just are superhuman or feel superhuman to us? I have no idea. Now, Newton was a kind of weird fellow, right? He was deeply religious, as makes sense for the time. He was ultimately, you know, in the government, tracking down counterfeiters and hanging them. I mean, there seems to be a certain curmudgeonly side of him that was also part of his genius. He once reportedly took a knitting needle and stuck it in his eye between the ball and

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  the socket to see if he could manipulate sight through mechanical pressure. I mean, who does these kinds of things, right? So he was a different thinker, but clearly one who ultimately was able to see deeper. You know, and as you said, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, you know? And there was a certain humility that came through him. There's a beautiful quote where he describes himself as a boy playing on the seashore, having found a smoother shell and prettier pebble than most, while the great ocean of truth, he said, lay before me all undiscovered. He knew that we were just on the shore and we'd taken our first baby step into the cosmic ocean and there is much more to be discovered.

• 1:24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Is it conceivable that the next Newton or Einstein is going to be an artificial intelligence? Could it be Claude?

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  Yes, it could absolutely be. Look, I like to think of scientific creativity or creativity in general in sort of three main buckets. It's a coarse organization, but I think it's helpful. One bucket of creativity is the ability to see the landscape of possibilities more fully than a mortal human being. And there's a lot that emerges from the ability to do that. For instance, you know, if you're a chess player, you can see the spectrum of allowed moves that are available to you more than the ordinary chess player, you know? If you're a scientist, you can sort of see the landscape of ideas and equations that

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  you might bring to bear on a puzzle more than somebody else. And that is what allows you to achieve greatness. Artificial systems, they have the entire landscape, right? They've read the entire internet. They've read every textbook. They know everything that we have ever developed. So in that kind of creativity, obviously they're going to excel. And we've seen that. A human can't beat an AI any longer in chess. A human can't beat an AI system in Go, right? I mean, this famous example with AlphaGo, right? Move 37 has become this sort of iconic move where, you know, Lee Sedol, the world champion, is playing and you can see it on his face.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  The AI makes a move and he smiles momentarily and he's like, oh, it messed up. And then his face changes because he slowly realizes that wasn't a mistake. Even the commentators, if you listen to them, they were like, oh, my God, the AI has made a mistake. What a blunder the AI has made. And then within 20, 30 seconds, they're like, oh, oh, that was genius. Why? The AI could see the spectrum of possibilities more than a human being. So at that level of creativity, AI will win. Second bin of creativity, second bucket, is putting together divergent ideas in a way that no one has thought of before and in that way making progress.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  You know, that's kind of what Einstein did in general relativity. Put together Romanian geometry and Newtonian gravity yielded the general theory of relativity. But again, AIs, since they know everything that we've ever developed, can combine things in a way that we would never have thought of. The final domain is the one where somebody comes up with something that nobody has ever imagined, ever thought of. It's not just putting things together, it is radically new. That's a tough one. We're still able to win in that category. There are examples where people just come up with things that, where did it come from? How do they think of that?

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  If you develop an artificial system and allow it to have a life, allow it to grow up, put it in an environment where it actually has experiences of the sort that an Isaac Newton had. Could it be that that system then develops to a place where it can do the things that we'd like to think are exclusively human? Coming up with something that is not previously represented in the database on which the AI system has trained. And so even this third, more difficult or more pristine bucket of creativity, could an artificial system do that? I don't think there's a barrier.

• 1:28:21Steven Bartlett?

  I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home, as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life, whenever we get a minute, we play the diary of a CEO conversation cards. And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more.

• 1:29:06Steven Bartlett?

  These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say, they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now.

• 1:29:31Steven Bartlett?

  This comes to one of our questions, which is the skull there.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:33Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, do you believe it will be possible to live forever? And again, I think about this in the context of AI where you said it will be able to understand that, take us to the limit.

• 1:29:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard to, it's hard to understand how that isn't a solvable problem. In fact, a lot of the smartest people on earth, including, I think Elon Musk said it recently, that living another 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 years seems to be within the laws of physics.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that is absolutely within the realm of possibility, but 500 years is so different from forever. Like, when I hear forever, I'm taking it kind of literally.

• 1:30:09Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  And, and so if, if forever doesn't mean 500 or 1,000, if it means never ceases, then I have no confidence that that kind of existence will be possible.

• 1:30:25Steven Bartlett?

  What about 500 years?

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  500 years, yeah, I would say, again, not in our lifetime, which is sad. I would, I would put that at reasonably high confidence that, you know, hundreds of years will be within our ability.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  If we are on this sort of exponential of intelligence, then it, you know, and if 2021.

• 1:30:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Steven Bartlett?

  We couldn't solve that math equation you're talking about, but in 2026, we can.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Steven Bartlett?

  And you've got trillions of dollars now pumping into these artificial intelligence systems to make them smarter and more powerful. It is, it is conceivable that if we're on an exponential curve here, it could be within our lifetimes that there is a discovery made about our telomeres and whatever else it might be that the guests on my show have talked about. That means we can theoretically.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  But let me tell you why I'm skeptical of that. Number one, right now, we have a certain kind of artificial intelligence. It's basically large language models. And that's a certain paradigm where the system is trained on an enormous number of tokens, an enormous number of words, you know, basically the entire internet. And based upon the statistics and the statistics of the statistics of the statistics of how the words are arranged, the system is able to provide answers to questions that are coherent and insightful and so forth. There isn't necessarily an unlimited capacity of that kind of artificial intelligence to continue to improve, right?

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  And so it's not obvious to me that it's just a matter of pumping billions and billions of dollars, building ever larger data center, putting them in space, wherever you're going to do. And the more money you put in and the more data you have and the more computer power you have, the better it's going to be. That's not obvious to me that that will continue up that exponential curve. And that's why I'm hesitant to say in our lifetime. It may take a number of lifetimes to develop the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to advance this kinds of scientific problems that you're talking about. But look, I'd be thrilled if it's our lifetime. I'd be thrilled if I'm wrong and these systems are up to the task.

• 1:32:29Steven Bartlett?

  One of the terms that has emerged in the world of AI recently is this term recursive self-improvement.

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Steven Bartlett?

  Recursive self-improvement is the concept where an AI becomes intelligent enough to write its own software, design its own hardware or train its own successors without human intervention. And once this loop begins, the upgraded AI uses its superior intelligence to build an even smarter version of itself, which then builds an even smarter version and so on. Because computer systems operate in seconds rather than human evolutionary time scales, this feedback loop could trigger an exponential, quote, intelligence explosion, rapidly taking AI from human level capability to superintelligence within days or hours.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Steven Bartlett?

  And the big AI leaders, Dario at Anthropic, has recently published an article warning that we're edging closer to that. Sam Altman has said the same. Demis has said the same. Elon has talked about this as well recently. And their timelines for this explosion in intelligence, because of the AIs being able to train themselves, ranges from two years to five years, placing them between 2026 and 2029. And Dario, who's the CEO of the biggest model called Anthropic Claude, has stated that AI systems outperforming most humans across all human tasks, including software engineering, could arrive within two to three years. And Anthropic has been warning that full recursive self-improvement could arrive by 2027 to 2028.

• 1:33:46Steven Bartlett?

  Demis at Google is citing 2029 as a real possibility and Sam Altman says this decade. I mean, Brian Johnson tweeted yesterday, pace yourself as if you'll live to 500 because you may, because you may.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  Look, I'm all for the possibility that these systems will take off in a way that hopefully we are.

• 1:34:11Steven Bartlett?

  Hopefully.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  Hopefully working in a way that allows the kinds of future that you're envisioning, that we are here.

• 1:34:18Steven Bartlett?

  Would it be a good thing?

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it would be seductive. I mean, and if someone was to present you with the opportunity to live to 500 years, I think many people would opt in for that. It's very hard to say, ah, you know, 100 years is enough. And I just, you know, there are people who do that, who will look at the world and say, it's enough, you know, I'm done. But back to the prognostications that are being made. Look, it's absolutely the case that the AIs will self-improve through the very process that got us here, but on a time scale that's tiny compared to the time scale that got us here. I'm skeptical that by 2029, this will really be the case.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  Let's see, right? I mean, this is a very short term, right? So we will know in a few years whether this is the case.

• 1:35:14Steven Bartlett?

  How many years has it taken living organisms to get from a single cell microbe or whatever to understanding string theory?

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, the first life on our planet formed roughly within the first billion years, you know? People debate exactly where that is. And, you know, we're now roughly, call it, you know, five billion years in. So call it roughly four billion years.

• 1:35:35Steven Bartlett?

  And a computer going from zero to being smarter than every human on earth has taken.

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it depends where you, where you start the gun, right? Because again, if you think about these systems as we, they needed us. Without the internet and all the data, what would they have trained on? At least this version of artificial intelligence. If it's the computer, the artificial system that's self-tinkering, then yeah, there's this feedback that will yield an exponential growth. And if there's no barrier, and there may be, right? There may be a barrier to the kind of artificial intelligence systems that we have. We may allow it to iterate and it iterates and it, sure, it improves, but doesn't improve like this. It improves like this. It could asymptote.

• 1:36:22Speaker 00

  It could approach a maximal intelligence compatible with this version of the artificial system. And so it won't skyrocket. It could do this. And we don't know the answer, which curve is the right one.

• 1:36:35Steven Bartlett?

  Give me a rebuttal to that.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  A rebuttal to it being the exponential curve?

• 1:36:40Steven Bartlett?

  Give me a rebuttal.

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  Oh, you're asking the system?

• 1:36:43Steven Bartlett?

  That was Brian saying one of that. Give me a rebuttal to that.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  The rebuttal to the idea of an asymptote is that AI isn't just improving one thing, it's exploring an astronomically vast solution space of algorithms, data and hardware configurations that humans can't even conceive of. Furthermore, each marginal gain in intelligence could instantly be reinvested into solving the very bottlenecks that might cause a slowdown, effectively breaking through the wall rather than hitting it.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  Maybe. But if all of these incremental improvements ultimately are limited by the kind of artificial intelligence that we are working within, then none of that will necessarily be able to break through. And I think this is something that we're just going to have to see over time.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Fight back.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  That points to a crucial distinction about whether the current paradigm has a hard limit. While it's possible there's an invisible ceiling, it's also true that we haven't yet mapped out where that boundary lies, meaning any predictions about a plateau remain speculative for now.

• 1:37:49Speaker 00

  Yes, and all I'm saying is there is a possible limiting ceiling, exactly as you just admitted.

• 1:37:56Steven Bartlett?

  Rebuttal that as well.

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  The counter to that is the idea that an intelligent system could innovate beyond the current framework by recursively redesigning its own architecture. By altering its fundamental rules, it might not just reach the ceiling, but raise it altogether or bypass it into an entirely new domain of capability.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  But you do agree that the system that we're starting with may be self-limiting. I'm simply positing that as a logical possibility and therefore will have that natural inbuilt ceiling.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  Okay, stop, I'm done.

• 1:38:35Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's totally insane.

• 1:38:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because even five years ago, we never would have thought that was possible.

• 1:38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:44Steven Bartlett?

  Would have been this, I doubt it.

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally crazy. And, and again, you know, just the flip side, even though I'm saying that there may be a ceiling, I also would say there may not be a ceiling. And again, it's both exciting and frightening at the same time because it's not obvious that we would be prepared for that, you know?

• 1:39:02Steven Bartlett?

  Why frightening? What would that mean?

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  Well, you know, they're the usual doomsday scenarios that many people have articulated, you know, from these systems just having a single-minded focus on some particular outcome that may not ultimately involve us. Or that these systems may have a self-preservation instinct that prevents us from stopping them if they head in a direction that we're not happy with. I mean, Yann LeCun, who's a, you know, is a.

• 1:39:33Steven Bartlett?

  He's one of the godfathers of AI.

• 1:39:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And his view is much more of the sort, just pull the plug. If something's going in the wrong direction, just pull the plug. I mean, just stop the AI system. And it's not obvious to me, and I guess to many of the other leaders, that if these systems advance sufficiently far, that they won't be able to stop you from pulling the plug. The other thing I would say, and again, this is not original, many people have worried about this, you rattled off the names of the leaders of the current companies that are leading the charge in AI. There only are a handful of companies and a handful of people. Putting that kind of power in such a small number of hands has historically, not with

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  AI, but with other power structures, not always turned out well, you know? And so, yes, I think there is a chance that there's an instability that the power of these kind of artificial systems may generate.

• 1:40:34Steven Bartlett?

  So Demis, and I use Demis because Demis is running the biggest AI company, said that since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines. If the exponential continues, which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything. The combination of intelligence, agency and unpredictability is a recipe for existential danger. Not because AI is evil, but because it's complex in ways we don't fully understand yet. If a system can improve faster than humans can evaluate those improvements, the normal safety feedback loop breaks down. You cannot catch problems before they compound.

• 1:41:14Speaker 00

  He's absolutely right. You know, the, the problem with exponentials is that they grow so quickly that by the time you see them, it's too late to do anything about it. I mean, what happens with the pandemic? With a pandemic, you know, it starts off slow, nobody cares, nobody's paying it. It's a story in the news, a story in the news, starts to be, by the time it becomes a real story, the pandemic is at the part of the exponential curve that makes it very difficult to address the problem itself. And the same thing, you know, could easily happen here, that the increase in intelligence, and I'm glad Demis phrased that way, it may not be that it's intrinsically evil to have this kind of powerful intelligence.

• 1:41:56Speaker 00

  It just may act in ways that are so alien to us, so foreign to us, so unexpected to us, that we don't know how to deal with it. And moreover, it may not necessarily be beneficial to our existence. Now, as I said before, I'm perhaps a minority when I say, I can imagine that we work with the AI and co-develop into something that we can't even predict today. That seems to me a real possibility.

• 1:42:26Steven Bartlett?

  And that's also the temptation.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I have a friend, Michael Douglas, who's a brilliant physicist. And he said to me,

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  We physicists, we should choose the final problems that we work on because within a few years, we'll be out of business because the AI systems will just be doing it all. And that's both exciting and terrifying because as a physicist, you know, your, your lifeblood is looking out at the world and finding puzzles and trying to find the explanations for them. And if you can just put it into an AI system and it generates the answer, yeah, there can be a certain existential angst about what your role is at that point. But it's also exciting because maybe we will get answers to questions that we thought we would never get in our lifetime.

• 1:43:15Steven Bartlett?

  Did you say you're friends with Jan Leukunen?

• 1:43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:18Steven Bartlett?

  And did you say he thinks we should just pull the plug?

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  When you confront Jan and say, dude, aren't you worried about what's going to happen with this? He's like, ah, don't worry, just pull the plug if there's a problem.

• 1:43:31Steven Bartlett?

  Oh.

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. His view is the difference between the AI systems that we have today and the AI systems that we need for tomorrow, if you really want this to continue, is they can't just be probabilities and statistics based on words. The AI systems need to have some inner model of the world as we do, right? I mean, if I take this cup here and I push it, I have an inner model of what it would take to move it without spilling, and I have an inner model of what it would take to spill it. I won't actually do it because it would make a mess. That's not just statistics and probabilities of words. That's a model of how reality functions. And that's what he and many others have been developing.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  A world model, together with the probabilities of large language model, or some weird hybrid or something else we haven't thought of, that may be the next phase of artificial intelligence. But of course, Demis and others might say, the LLMs through self-improvement, maybe they would develop that world. Maybe they would on their own get to the place that you would think that we humans would need to inject something extra. Who knows?

• 1:44:43Steven Bartlett?

  Because if I like, if I get this glass here, I say to the AI, what happens to this if I push it in that direction?

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  If you push that mug, it'll slide across the table. And depending on how hard you push, it could knock into the plate or slide right off the edge.

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  Now, again, it simply is relying upon the fact that it's read everything on the internet. And there are physics textbooks, there are conversations about things falling, and it bases its response by drawing on those collections of words.

• 1:45:17Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't that what I'm doing as well?

• 1:45:18Speaker 00

  I don't know. What is, how does human intelligence work? Certainly, evolutionary psychologists have asked the following question. Are we like a blank slate? And we simply learn about the world people tell us we experience and so forth? Or is there something more innate? And I think there is strong evidence that we have a kind of innate physical intuition about the world that's really been passed down through the generations. Not that you can pass down F equals M A or Newton's laws to your children because you learned, of course, that's silly. But there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to quickly assess the world and figure out how to act, right?

• 1:45:59Speaker 00

  Those are our forebears who could not throw the rock or the spear. They're the ones who didn't get the next meal. Those are our forebears that had a slightly better predilection for ingesting experience and codifying it in some understanding of how the world actually works. They're the ones that survived. And so they can pass down that predilection. And I do think that that's part of how we assess the world. I don't think we're complete blank slates in that sense.

• 1:46:29Steven Bartlett?

  It would make sense. Babies are born with some kind of intelligence. They grip fingers. But, but, but that is in part because the, the parent has passed that on. And so an AI could pass.

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right. When you talk about the AI systems themselves being evolutionary, yeah, they certainly do pass down the achievements of generation N to generation N plus one. That is certainly part of this iterative process without a doubt.

• 1:46:52Steven Bartlett?

  What a weird world we're living in.

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so crazy. Sometimes I think, but I imagine through history, everyone's thought like, God, what a time to be alive.

• 1:46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. We are living through a rapid change that is a little unprecedented.

• 1:47:04Steven Bartlett?

  How do you think one should contend with all of this? Because people are concerned. Change is not something that we love at this rate.

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  You know, again, I think people will cope in many different ways. You know, if you can stay open and excited to the possibilities and have the flexibility of change.

• 1:47:22Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is Elon's out there saying that we're heading to an age of abundance. He's kind of shifted his perspective from this dumerism to age of abundance. And then part of his narrative there is we won't need money. Because when you've got robots and AI and more energy, then we're not going to have to worry about food and these kinds of things or bills, whatever. But still, humans pursue scarcity.

• 1:47:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Steven Bartlett?

  We, we pursue status. We want, you know, humans want the home on the end of Miami Beach with the best plot. And there's, there's, there's finite numbers of these things that a lot of humans pursue, even like academic discovery, Nobel prizes. There's a finite number of them and we pursue them. So there's, one would argue that there's still going to be a, a competition. Humans are still going to strive for things, right?

• 1:48:07Speaker 00

  Why do we do that?

• 1:48:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:09Speaker 00

  Right? And part of the reason is if you know that you're going to die, if you know that your life is finite, there can be an urge to make your mark, to do something special, to be out of the ordinary, so that in some symbolic way, you continue to exist even after you are gone, right? I mean, you know, Elon Musk, yeah, after he's gone, people are going to talk about him for a long, long time, right? Because he had a radical impact and who knows where it will go. He's got many productive years still left. And so, yes, there is this natural tendency to seek something that will allow you to

• 1:48:53Speaker 00

  symbolically persist after you are gone. Now, if we all realize that that is part of human motivation, maybe as a species, we could begin to shift, right? It isn't the case that we have to always be the way we have been. Historically, that's the way we have been. Kings want to be kings in part because they have the power. If they have the power, they have the hegemony. They in a sense exist even when they are gone. Their progeny. Why do we have descent of monarchies? Because the king continues to exist through the king's progeny. And so, yeah, could we perhaps get to a place where we shed that way of being because

• 1:49:37Speaker 00

  we're in a world of abundance where the whole notion of scarcity is artificial? And we're only inventing it, we realize, in order that we can feel good and special? And maybe we can find other ways to feel good and special? I allow for that possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic that that's what will happen. The flip side, I'd say it's easy to say that money won't matter when you have a trillion dollars, right? You're right. I, I mean, you know, you just have to sort of see this stuff in context. But yeah.

• 1:50:04Steven Bartlett?

  We have one more little souvenir thing there. And this is kind of what we're talking about, which is robots. Do you think AI can become conscious is the question?

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Steven Bartlett?

  High confidence or low confidence?

• 1:50:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm pretty high confident on that. You know, again, as I'm saying before, I just see consciousness as a physical process. And it's a matter of, in one way or another, achieving that physical process in an artificial system. And I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that.

• 1:50:33Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about how laws would have to potentially change if, if we considered robots to be conscious and they lived in our homes, would they then get rights?

• 1:50:42Speaker 00

  I think that's something we should think about now, actually.

• 1:50:45Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a very tricky idea. I mean, you know, it's one thing, you know, to pull the plug on a, on a light bulb. It's another thing to pull the plug on a sentient system. And we may well find ourselves in that situation. The, the challenge, the challenge is it's virtually impossible to ever prove sentience, right? I mean, you know, as we look at each other, we each afford the other consciousness. I believe that you are conscious, you believe that I am as well. Why? We're more or less, you know, physically constructed more or less the same way. We're part of the same species.

• 1:51:30Speaker 00

  Our body language, our speech is so similar in the grand scheme of things that we afford the other what we internally experience. But we don't know it, right? You don't know that I'm conscious. I could be faking it. I could be a really good artificial zombie that speaks and talks, but there's nothing going on inside. And the same could be true for you. And what that means is when we are with these artificial systems that don't have our lineage, they're not part of the same species, they don't necessarily look like us, they don't have the upbringing that we had, and so on and so forth. Will we be willing to agree that they're conscious if they tell us that they are? I mean, if the artificial system says, I really am, I'm, I'm feeling exactly the thing

• 1:52:15Speaker 00

  that I read about in your internet. I'm, I'm, I'm feeling love. Or I'm feeling depressed. If they say that to us, will we say, no, no, no, you're just mimicking, you're miming the kinds of things that human beings have said. There's nothing going on inside. There's nothing, there's no world inside there. How do we ever get beyond that? And I don't know the answer to that question, even though I strongly believe that there's no logical fundamental barrier that prevents the system from saying that and from telling the truth.

• 1:52:47Steven Bartlett?

  And electrical circuits within that system causing it to behave in such a way, when it's scared, when it's in love,

• 1:52:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Steven Bartlett?

  where it cuddles you, because that's what the electrical circuits told it to do.

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  Yes. But is there an inner world associated with that? Or is it just going through the motions? Here's how I think it's going to likely turn out. We'll have these artificial systems, they'll start to say these things. At first, we'll be like, oh, come on, come on, come on, it's not, not real. But we'll start to get used to them behaving just like we, in the sense of having these inner worlds. And sooner or later, through a process that's so perhaps slow that we don't even notice it, we will afford them consciousness. We will talk to them as if they're conscious, we will imagine that they're conscious, and ultimately, we will treat them as if they're conscious. And I hope that we do that in a, in a good way.

• 1:53:39Speaker 00

  We have a terrible history of treating conscious beings in a respectful way, even in the same species, right? We've done terrible things to each other, even though we afford consciousness. We do terrible things to animals. I'm vegan. I don't eat any animal products. I think that's not the way to treat a living system that has some level of conscious awareness. I do eat plants. I don't think plants have a sufficiently high level of consciousness, if at all, that I'm concerned about cutting them and eating them.

• 1:54:11Steven Bartlett?

  Have you always been vegan?

• 1:54:12Speaker 00

  I've been vegan since 1993.

• 1:54:16Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  So I've been vegetarian since I was nine years old. And so that's how I treat living or conscious beings, because I don't think it's right to treat them that way.

• 1:54:28Steven Bartlett?

  What was the catalyst for that decision?

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

  Well, when I was nine years old, it was very flat-footed. My mother cooks spare ribs. And for the very first time, I realized what meat was. I'm a city kid. I grew up where meat was in cellophane, you buy it wrapped at the supermarket. But when the meat came on a bone, I was like, wait a second, what is this? I was like, oh my God, this is like the rib of an animal. And I was like, and, and I said, I took it and I said, I'm never going to eat meat again. Later on, I did eat, you know, cheese and milk. I wasn't vegan at that point. But when I was a professor at Cornell in the 1990s, I went to an animal sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, where they showed you what happens to these animals when they

• 1:55:14Speaker 00

  are treated like milk factories. You know, what happens to the cows? And it's, it's awful. And within 72 hours after visiting that animal sanctuary, I said, I'm done. I'm not participating any longer. I'm not going to eat or drink or imbibe any living, any substance that came from an animal. And so that was the end for me.

• 1:55:36Steven Bartlett?

  For some people, it might be somewhat surprising to hear that from a physicist.

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  I agree, it's inconsistent. Because if I believe, as I do, that you and I are just a collection of particles in one configuration, and the cow or the pig is just a collection of particles in a different configuration, what does it matter if you eat particles in one configuration that we call a cow, or another configuration that we call a carrot? But as a human being, I allow the other parts of me to shine through, and I look at that collection of particles that happens to be a cow, and I say, it just doesn't feel right to me to eat that collection of particles. It just doesn't feel right, and I don't want to do it.

• 1:56:21Steven Bartlett?

  Brian, you've written many fascinating books. I've got some of them here. I think there's one other that I'm missing, I believe.

• 1:56:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's more of a kid's book, I think.

• 1:56:29Steven Bartlett?

  That's a kid's book.

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Steven Bartlett?

  For my listeners at home, what is the most interesting thing that we haven't talked about, that we should have talked about, that exists within your works that I guess is relevant, either fascinating or somewhat relevant to their everyday life?

• 1:56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm going to go more on the fascinating than relevant to everyday life. As you know, I'm pretty esoteric in these kind of things. But in the book Until the End of Time, I, I tried to give the reader a sense of how we got here. But I also then turned to the future and tried to give them a sense of what will be if we go arbitrarily far into the future. And yeah, that's it. I used a metaphor of the Empire State Building, which I, I think helps you get a feel for what the universe will be like if you take the current understanding of the laws of physics and extrapolate arbitrarily far into the future. And so to try to give people a sense, I asked them to imagine that every floor of

• 1:57:26Speaker 00

  the Empire State Building represents an era of time that's 10 times longer than the floor below. So like at the, at the ground floor, that's like one year. And then the next floor, 10, next is the 100,000, 10,000, 100,000, and so forth. Exponentially larger time scales as you walk up the stairs of the Empire State Building. Now, in this way of thinking about things, everything from the Big Bang until today takes you to just about here, the 10th floor. We're about 10 to the 10 years from the beginning. And what I do is I take the audience from that point, and I step through the key markers

• 1:58:07Speaker 00

  in the far future of the universe to give you a feel for what will happen. And I can sort of take you through a couple milestones, right? So again, here we are today.

• 1:58:17Steven Bartlett?

  Stop when it gets scary.

• 1:58:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's scary the whole way. You know, so here we are, 10 to the 10 years from the beginning. If you just go up to here, 10 to the 11 years, what happens here is the sun will get bigger and bigger. It swells, it eats up the close planets, Mercury and Venus. It may swallow up the Earth too, we're not sure. But certainly, it will make life on Earth virtually impossible because it would be so hot on this planet. If you go up to the next floor above that, 10 to the 12 years from the beginning, what you find here is that the universe is expanding ever more quickly, driving the distant galaxies away faster than the speed of light, so we won't see them.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  So a future astronomer here, looking out into the deep night sky, will see only darkness in the deep, deep night sky. Everything will have drifted beyond the cosmic horizon.

• 1:59:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why will it be going faster than the speed of light?

• 1:59:15Speaker 00

  Because we have found surprisingly that the expansion is speeding up.

• 1:59:18Steven Bartlett?

  And there's no limit to that.

• 1:59:20Speaker 00

  There doesn't seem to be a limit. Now, again, there's always assumptions in every prognostication, assuming that what we measure and see today will persist. It's like what the AI people are assuming, that the growth that they see today will persist. Is that true? We don't know, but it's our best guess from the laws of physics that it will. If you then go up to about here, the 20th floor, something interesting happens. If the Earth is still here, if it wasn't swallowed up on the 11th floor by the swelling sun, the Earth is going to spiral into the dead sun because we'll lose energy through gravitational radiation. Ripples in the fabric of space will cause the orbit of the Earth to decay. We will crash into the dead sun.

• 2:00:05Speaker 00

  That will be the end of the Earth by about the 20th floor.

• 2:00:09Steven Bartlett?

  But the end of life itself took place.

• 2:00:11Speaker 00

  Could easily have taken much earlier.

• 2:00:13Steven Bartlett?

  On the 11th floor.

• 2:00:13Speaker 00

  On the 11th floor. If we go up to about the 30th floor, what will happen here is that the stars themselves will spiral into the black hole at the center of most galaxies. So most galaxies have a black hole. We have one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And the stars themselves, much like the Earth, will spiral into the sun, the stars will spiral into the black hole, which means there'll be only kind of black holes as the remaining macroscopic structure in the universe.

• 2:00:47Steven Bartlett?

  Has that happened elsewhere?

• 2:00:49Speaker 00

  Oh, certainly. We see things that can spiral into black holes in, and certainly even in the center of our galaxy, there's evidence that there's activity there, and that activity in part is stars being ripped apart as they fall into a black hole. So this is pretty clear that this will happen.

• 2:01:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is this the end of all galaxies as they spiral into the black hole?

• 2:01:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. So after 10 to the 30, 10 to the 35 years, it's hard to imagine that galaxies as we know them will persist. The stars will have burned out. I could have even mentioned another milestone. Around the 14th floor, almost all stars will have used up their nuclear fuel.

• 2:01:28Steven Bartlett?

  All of them?

• 2:01:29Speaker 00

  Just about all of them will fade to black.

• 2:01:31Steven Bartlett?

  All of them in the whole universe?

• 2:01:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32Steven Bartlett?

  So they'll be.

• 2:01:33Speaker 00

  Or at least the observable universe. I can only really speak to the part that we have direct access to. Yeah. And so by the 30th floor, those, those dark stars will spiral into black holes.

• 2:01:44Steven Bartlett?

  So there could be no life anywhere?

• 2:01:45Speaker 00

  It's hard to imagine. But let's be optimistic and imagine that somehow there is some life floating in the darkness, because I want to get to something interesting on a two, two more milestones. By the 38th floor, wherever that is, we believe that protons, which are the heart of matter, will likely themselves disintegrate, fall apart. And so if there is any remaining organized matter of the sort that we're familiar with, somehow persisting somewhere, it itself will disintegrate by the 38th floor. That's our belief based on our laws of physics.

• 2:02:22Steven Bartlett?

  There'll be no matter anywhere.

• 2:02:23Speaker 00

  There will be fine particulate constituents, because when a proton falls apart, it doesn't disappear, it falls apart into other, more refined particles. And so they will continue to persist, but the aggregate called the proton will not.

• 2:02:41Speaker 00

  If we keep on going to roughly, say, the 50th floor, this is an interesting point because imagine that somehow some conscious being still exists in the darkness of space. I don't know how it is, dark clouds of particles somehow are having electrical signals, allowing them some kind of conscious self-awareness. After the 50th floor, that conscious being will likely think its final thought. The reason is, when you think, it generates heat. That heat has to be carried away. It's very easy for that heat to leave us in a room like here because there's a lot of room for that so-called heat or entropy to be absorbed. By the 50th floor, the universe won't be able to absorb the heat generated by the process

• 2:03:26Speaker 00

  of thought itself. So any thinking being, when it thinks, one more thought will burn up. It'll fry in the entropic waste, the heat generated by thought itself. So by the 50th floor, it is hard to imagine any kind of consciousness continuing to exist. And that's why I said earlier, when you said, do you think that we'll live forever? I'm thinking here and I'm like, well, maybe we'll live to here, like 500 years or 1,000 years, but here, no way. It's hard for me to imagine that we will continue to persist. By the 68th floor, black holes themselves will begin to disintegrate. Stephen Hawking showed us that black holes are not fully black. When you take quantum

• 2:04:11Speaker 00

  physics into account, they can emit particles that will waft outward, causing the black hole to shrink. And over time, the black hole itself will disappear. A black hole the size of our sun, with the mass of our sun, about 10 to the 68 years for that to happen. A black hole of the gargantuan sort that we think might exist, billions and billions of times more massive than the sun, it'll take about 10 to the 100 years, very top of the Empire State Building, for that kind of black hole to disintegrate. But by the time we get here, 10 to the 100 years into the future, we suspect it will

• 2:04:50Speaker 00

  just be detritus of particles wafting through an ever larger, ever colder, ever quiet universe. That's the future that we're looking at.

• 2:05:06Steven Bartlett?

  And then when does the big bang kick off and it all start again?

• 2:05:08Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting because you're absolutely right. You can say, what about beyond the top of the Empire State Building? Now things, look, this whole thing is speculative, right? We are extrapolating from laws of physics that we've developed on thinking about physics here. We're assuming that it applies all the way up into the exponentially far future. Is that true? I don't know. It's our best guess, based on what we know today, but definitely it is an assumption. If you extrapolate even further, then yeah, you can imagine that way, an exponential of an exponential of years into the future. Sure, could particles somehow recoalesce just by chance and build a state of matter that might generate another big

• 2:05:51Speaker 00

  bang and it all starts again? Yes, definitely within the realm of possibility.

• 2:05:59Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not the most appealing future?

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  Well, I agree. But here, can I tell you my take on it?

• 2:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 2:06:07Speaker 00

  My take on it is, when you realize that, you know, the far future is a realm of darkness. And when you also realize that until life emerged, say on planet Earth, it was a kind of realm of chaotic conglomeration of particles, you know, before. So it's as if we're living in a special time. We're living at a special region in the cosmological unfolding when living beings like ourselves and consciousness as we experience is compatible with the state of the universe. How wondrous, how spectacular that there is this brief

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  window of time. I mean, Nabokov had this wonderful saying that we live in a brief crack of light between two eternal stretches of darkness. How beautiful to exist in that brief crack of light. And that, to me, is where the gratitude comes from that I was mentioning earlier. You said earlier, like, what gives your life meaning? And how? The fact that we understand that we live in this very special era in cosmological history where for a small period of cosmic time, living beings can stand up, look around, contemplate themselves and the universe, and gain some insight. And then it all goes

• 2:07:29Speaker 00

  away. But how wonderful that there is that brief moment that we are now inhabiting.

• 2:07:36Steven Bartlett?

  It is wonderful when you say it like that. Frank, the thing that I think is most special about you isn't just the extent of your intelligence, it's your ability to communicate in such a way that makes the complex both interesting and understandable. And that's what I've seen throughout all of your work and all the videos that I was told you I was watching your TED Talk with my fiancee a couple of weeks ago. And it's the closest I've ever come to actually understanding this concept called string theory.

• 2:07:59Speaker 00

  Oh, great. Well, I'm glad to hear it. And thank you very much. Really appreciate that.

• 2:08:03Steven Bartlett?

  I have a couple of your books here. I think this is the most recent one from 2020 called Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. And I think, you know, your work makes us feel so many things, but I think maybe the most important feeling it makes us feel is connected.

• 2:08:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Steven Bartlett?

  And I think we're all searching for connection in an increasingly lonely, isolated feeling universe. And so that's why I love to have these conversations on the show. I sometimes joke to the team that diary of a CEO, the C in it stands for like, oh, one of our goals is to make people feel more connected in some capacity. And you most certainly do that. So thank you for having that impact on the world. It's a very important, increasingly important impact to be having on the world. And it makes us look up, not just down, I guess. And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

• 2:08:46Speaker 00

  Well, thank you.

• 2:08:47Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to link all of your books below. So if people do want to continue this conversation, they can continue it through all of your books here. Is there anywhere else people can go to support your work or learn more about your work? Where would you direct them?

• 2:08:57Speaker 00

  It's there in World Science Festival, you know, worldsciencefestival.com. You'll find all sorts of conversations of the sort that we're talking about here. Also, I'm working on a new AI, we're talking a lot about AI, education system where AI will help people understand these ideas better. It should launch sort of in the next year or so. So keep an eye out for that kind of thing as well.

• 2:09:21Steven Bartlett?

  Where do people follow you?

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  Well, you know, on Twitter or Instagram, we post semi-frequently, but more at our YouTube channel, World Science Festival.

• 2:09:33Steven Bartlett?

  And in terms of these books that I have in front of me, I have four of them, different groups of people, which one would you direct them to read?

• 2:09:39Speaker 00

  Well, my favorite, if you sort of frame it in that flat-footed way, is Until the End of Time, because it's the more philosophical and the more, the kind of ideas that we spoke about here today. But if, you know, if you want to hear the hardcore of what string theory is, or the new insights in space and time, some of the other books are more directed in that way.

• 2:09:59Steven Bartlett?

  Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. The question left for you is, what might be worth even more than the thing that matters most to you?

• 2:10:14Speaker 00

  Oh, well, I would say the thing that matters most to the people I care most about, you know, the things that matter to my wife and my kids feels much more important than the things that matter to me most because I'm so involved in that relationship, you know. So that, to me, is the thing that trumps all else.

• 2:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  The things that matter more to them.

• 2:10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, it's a beautiful answer. Wasn't expecting that, but it's very true. Brian Green, thank you so much. It's been an honor.

• 2:10:47Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Thank you.