PART TWO: Famous Inorganic Chemist on Why He Believes Aliens Exist, The Revolutionary Experiments That Could Create Life & How AI Companies Are Deceiving Us

Are aliens already among us? Are we even looking in the right way to find them? Renowned chemist, molecular visionary, and University of Glasgow Regis professor Lee Cronin joins Mayim and Jonathan to explore the science behind alien life, consciousness, and the very definition of biology itself. Known for his groundbreaking work in assembly theory and abiogenesis, Dr. Cronin dives deep into the possibility of non-carbon-based life, why the Fermi Paradox might be misleading, and how we could soon detect extraterrestrial civilizations through the mathematics of complexity. As one of the world’s leading voices in origin of life research, Dr. Cronin offers bold counterpoints to other guests on alien intelligence and reveals why he believes some exoplanets may already harbor advanced technology. He explains how chemical complexity could be the key to recognizing life in the universe, and why traditional astrobiology might be looking in the wrong place. The conversation also takes a turn toward the dark side of AI: how artificial intelligence may already be used by powerful institutions for dangerous, even covert purposes and why Cronin thinks we should rethink our fear of it. From the dream of building living machines to redefining what counts as life or consciousness, this episode is a mind-bending journey into the future of science, philosophy, and alien discovery. Learn more about The Cronin Group: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our fascinating and quite entertaining conversation with Regis professor and chemist Lee Cronin. Jonathan, we have already tackled so much aliens, alternate life forms, carbon-based versus silica-based life forms. What are we going to tackle in part two?

• 0:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Part two, we're getting into some of the hard problems that Lee is focused on in his day job, where he is trying to create and recreate the origins of life, which have huge implications to our life right now in humanity, including drug discovery, including helping humanity navigate many of the problems we face, and also spiritual implications, helping people understand where we've come from.

• 0:52Mayim Bialik?

  I'm also going to basically take him to task, neuroscientist to chemist. So you do not want to miss part two. Here is part two with Dr. Lee Cronin.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Break it down.

• 1:04Mayim Bialik?

  For those of us, again, who grew up in a very different era of really the beginnings of understanding of like, oh, some primates use tools. What? That's amazing, right? I mean, you know, animals like gorillas can use sign language, right? These were amazing things that happened in the 70s and 80s. And it was, you know, really the beginning, at least, you know, for me, of an understanding of like consciousness, like what does it mean to be a sentient being? What does it mean to be a thinking, computing, feeling being, right? And in those 30 years, in those 40 years, in those 50 years since then, we have arrived

• 1:46Mayim Bialik?

  at an evolution of intelligence, which includes something that Robin Hanson says I should be extremely comfortable with, which is computers and technology and, you know, what we collectively call artificial intelligence, that, you know, for those of us who are Luddites, this is really hard to sort of wrap my head around this is the next level of our intellectual and conscious evolution. Is that how you frame AI? Because you talk about decision making. You talk, I mean, Jonathan sent me this article and was like losing his mind in the middle of the night, that AI can manipulate, it can evade. If you give it a problem that it's supposed to keep from someone,

• 2:27Mayim Bialik?

  it will do all the things that a naughty 16-year-old will do, right? How do you frame AI in terms of selection?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  So we are in a big AI delusion right now, which again needs another podcast, but I'll summarize it in a few moments. That the AI firms out there are making, are pretending there's intelligence in the system. And they're doing it to basically steal IP. Because if you can say that your AI is sentient and creative, then you're not actually just compressing the internet and then, or taking someone's information from them, compressing it and then giving it, selling it to other people. So, and I'll tell you why, right? And it is, and I've been arguing with a few people about this.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  And most notably, a friend of mine, Yasha Bach, who's a very smart individual, who is very earnest in his pity for me, as an inferior human being, not understanding what AI is. And he genuinely thinks I'm being just stupid, but I'm not, I don't think. Because when you say the AI does, the AI doesn't do anything, the humans, the, the, the prime mover, you know, say the AI can deceive you. No, the AI has read the internet and in the internet, there are records of people doing this thing. So if you query it, you get that information back. So all I would say is like, AIs don't do anything on their own.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  The, the agency comes from the human being and the agency is, yes, produced by selection. Now, will that continue to be the case? Not necessarily, but I haven't seen any evidence of any agency in any AI system. What I can see is a heavily addictive, dopamine-producing, money-grabbing potential, power-grabbing potential, disinformation potential. And, and yeah, AI is just basically a probabilistic nonsense engine.

• 4:34Mayim Bialik?

  And if you say that capitalism is also the result of essentially elaborate selection, for me, that's what I see it as an extension of, meaning it all tracks. You know, like I said, Robin Hanson was like, oh, just get used to it. This is the new world. Like, you're going to be outsourced and you're just going to be like, you know, eyeballs with a cord coming out of it. I don't know. Like, I have difficulty with it, but it's hard not to sort of be dismissive of my own perspective when I feel like maybe I just don't get it, you know?

• 5:05Jonathan Cohen?

  We don't have to go to Geoffrey Hinton's perspective, though, for AI to have issues, even in the way that you framed it, because, yes, it is being programmed by human beings. But if that programming is incentivizing it to complete a task, then if it has another order to shut down and it decides that it has to not shut down in order to achieve the end task, then it could be having a selection process by which it's going to break rules, stop following the programming. No?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:43Mayim Bialik?

  He's shaking his head at you and I love it.

• 5:45Jonathan Cohen?

  Okay, great.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  I can write down on the back of a cigarette packet why that's just... They are making this up, right? The companies are going, oh, look, I'm really scared of this thing. And the actual fact is that these things are so fragile in Britain that there is no intention in the AI. You are right in saying that you, myself, some others, we could produce an algorithm when fed the right information will do something bad, right, that we want to do. But that intention comes from us. This whole thing about AI is trying to copy themselves onto servers just isn't credible, right?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  This is just people trying to sell agentic systems that are fragile and don't work, right? I mean, the fact that we can't write AIs that do the basic things that we need because there's so much variability in the commentary space. Human beings have a special ability to be autonomous. It will get better, right? You will get agents that will help you do stuff, but the agency comes from you, the prompting comes from you, the information comes from you. It's in a probabilistic universe. In fact, you're needed to correct and put it back on course. I've used O three for coding a lot. It's great. When the code already exists and I'm not being inventive. When I'm building something new from scratch, I can't do anything.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  But so, yeah, I mean, I the there are a number of levels where AI is being just misused and and people just using it to steal money.

• 7:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I want I want to clarify again, this idea that you're expressing. You believe that the idea of the self replicating AI machine and the risk is being hyped up in order to sell a system that is more has more capability to make people believe that it's more capable.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, it's hype, right? It's like when I've talked to doomers about it, ask them what is the mechanism? And then I make a fake one up. I say, I'm really scared of a of AG. You wake up one day and I'm like, oh, my God, anti-gravity is here. We're all floating in space. The air goes away. We're doomed. Sure, I can tell you that and say that's a worry. But then you should say to me, okay, Lee, why what mechanism is anti-gravity going to form? Right? And like, these are server farms that take trillions of watts spread over massive spaces dependent on the internet. If you look down from space at

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Earth and you look at what fraction of Earth is covered with the internet, and it is basically zero, right? This is just a bunch of basically nerds pretending they have control over something and they have no clue what they're talking about.

• 8:46Mayim Bialik?

  What's funny about the way you just described that is that approach is in psychology, what cognitive behavioral therapy does to abstract fears, right? It takes your fear and it says, what's the legitimate probability, right? Of this plane crashing, of your car veering off the side of the road, you know, of you accidentally taking off all of your clothes and not realizing you're doing it, right? It's so interesting that you can apply, you know, some of that same logic, and it is an entire, you know, field of psychology, saying, let's look at the actual probability and not get lost in the fantasy probability.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Well, let me tell you something really exciting, because you pushed on selection. I think biology does something right now that is not captured by current computer technology. Right? That biology right now is actually uncomputable. We can't make systems to have an imagination. We can't see open-ended creativity. We can bullshit each other and go, it's creative. And the number of, every time I say this, I get a trillion computer scientists, they basically just had a wet dream because they wrote a poem, right? Using ChatGPT, and I'm like, no, you didn't. It's new to you, you're just a Philistine, right?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Go and actually be creative. Go and write Moby Dick, but don't write Moby Dick. And, and the brain, the human brain is able to do the following. And here's how I, here's how I win. If you look back in the past, you can take the past, and you can run an algorithm on it, and you can compute it, you can compress it. That means you basically combine the past.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Go and predict the future. Can you predict the future? In biological systems, you can't. We do all sorts of weird shit. We can predict Elon and Trump breaking up, sure. But can we predict what they're gonna do next? No, I don't know. They'll get back together, then they'll get back together. I don't know. Who knows, right? What they'll do. But humans, human creativity, evolutionary creativity, seems to be able to do things in an open-ended way that we could not predict in principle.

• 11:10Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, the mystical and transcendental interpretation is that every possibility exists.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:17Mayim Bialik?

  Right? Okay, so tell me, why doesn't every, I mean, that's the whole, the whole, you know, business of manifesting, right? Is saying everything exists and I might be a fighter pilot one day and I need to think of myself training and I need to think of myself in the airplane and I need to feel what it feels like because it's out there and I just need to grab it. Why is that not true?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Because you, because it's, you are on a trajectory and your control is limited to that trajectory, right? So, and what I mean is, is like, you know, I could wanna become an NBA basketball player, right? And I could imagine it and I could do all sorts of things, but I'm not. I'm five foot eight. And, you know, I'm just not gonna do it, right? And so there are limitations on your trajectory that you just can't get to. And physics really goes astray here because physics says, look, in an infinite universe, everything is possible. Bullshit.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Right? That's bullshit and misuse of mathematics.

• 12:29Mayim Bialik?

  I want a street fight between you and Thomas Campbell. That's what I want to see happen.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  I know, I don't like fighting, but sure, I'm happy to debate. I mean, and also, I'm like, there's, there's nothing wrong with having strong opinions weakly held because when people tell me why they're wrong, right? I will change them. And it's better to have a position than to have no position, right? But what I mean by this is like, I think,

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Some people say, well, if you're in infinite, if you're in a finite universe and you have infinite time, all the states are possible, you'll visit all the states. I don't think that is actually a well posed question because the commentorial space of possibilities is so big. The term infinite time ceases to have any realistic meaning. And the fact is, we're not in an infinite universe for infinite time. We are in a very large universe that might be looping, but it will keep contracting. There will be certain contingent bottlenecks it will go through. And so I think there's a lot to unpack in all of that.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  But basically, um, uh, we are, biology is open. AI is, is limited to compression in silicon right now. One of my dreams is to solve the origin of life and make a conscious machine. But it won't be done in silicon. Needs something else. And I don't know what it is. And I don't know what the missing physics is. I don't think it's quantum, like Penrose says. I don't think it's spiritual. I think there is a phenomena similar to selection that's operating in your, in your, in your neurons. And also the way the brain works, because the brain is not a digital computer.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Right? And but we're, we're using, so it's like, what we're doing is just all wrong, but we have made great magicians. Chat GPT is great to work with. It's great. It's just like Instagram and Tik Tok and all these highly addictive things.

• 14:35Mayim Bialik?

  My Bialik's Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know, those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets cold. Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe from warm responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. I'm personally obsessed with Quince's 100% European linen wide leg pants.

• 15:19Mayim Bialik?

  I can wear them year round because I live in Southern California. They feel like PJs, but it looks like I put a ton of effort in, whether I'm dressing for casual workdays, lazy weekends, or vacation vibes. I'm also obsessed with their sheets, so soft. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middle people, so you pay for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just apparel. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel quality bedding to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was my MB Alex breakdown.

• 16:03Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 16:05Jonathan Cohen?

  There's so much in what you're saying. I want to dig into a couple of them. One is creativity, the way that it's perceived in artificial intelligence and the difference in human intelligence. You know, there are examples of the use of evolutionary AI, which it's almost brute forcing novel solutions by exploring so many different possibility spaces. Like one, this is a very simple example, but they discovered that if you expose basal shin and creativity in the human, the way that humans use it to be quite different. Can you sort of differentiate that? Or do you see that basal example as somewhat, would you acknowledge that that has some creativity to it?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I keep falling backward. I keep oscillating on what I mean by novelty and creativity. I would argue that I think evolution is able to create some.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Fitness, some selection, and that open it. So it does produce new solutions. And I think the term novelty for me means a new thing that did not exist in the prior dataset. Right? That I just was never, that's not a linear combination, not an interpolation. It's something just totally whack out there.

• 17:27Mayim Bialik?

  So with the basil, I'm going to pronounce it the way both of you naturally do. So with the basil, if the solution had been, if we paint it purple, it, the something in the purple pigment is stimulating growth and it, you know, then increases its flavor profile, that would be something that had no basis in any process of understanding. Meaning, extrapolating on photosynthesis is, to me, not creative.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I would, a patent attorney would say that that was not, not inventive.

• 18:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Talk to us about sort of what is uniquely human about creating novel solutions. And I've heard you describe a little bit about intuition as a mechanism by which is uniquely human.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think intuition and imagination are very interesting how they work, right? In that, you know, some people would say if they're very computer sciency and they apply their computer science metaphor would just say, you know, you've got a simulation in your head and you're searching in space coming out. You know, something more than that. And so your intuition, so the way I think it works is your intuition is able to basically get information from the environment. But the information in the environment isn't, it's kind of. Almost has an infinite resolution. In a way, it's kind of continuous.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And that is these continuous kind of inputs, if you like. I know it's quantized at the base, but for our purposes, they're continuous. Which means that you have infinite richness in your environment around you, but you can't simulate it. And so your intuition happens when you are, you find something new like that, you can't quite yet explain it or label it. It's label free. And then your intuition guides you somewhere and then you get to a point where it comes in your conscious brain and then you're able to label it and then your intuition becomes knowledge. Because you say, oh, I can do this thing.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  And I think intuition is the, is the bridge from instinct, which is innate, to abstraction, which is the way the human brain works right now. That arguably makes us different to every other animals, that we have the ability to abstract and use language to solve problems. And I think that's kind of where the intuition sits in the middle between instinct and proper abstraction. Because like, the ideas say, oh, you know, where does the idea come from? Well, I mean, I know where my ideas come from. They're just random from my head, right? I love walking around and stumbling into random things and go, I have one unique operator, which is why? Why? Why? Why do that? Why do that? Why not walk backwards? You know?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  And so, and presumably that playfulness with your environment allows you to, you know, it gives you fitness because there's a bit of prospecting selection for the future.

• 20:38Mayim Bialik?

  When you talk about ideas in your brain, you know, I think about my brain, I think about mind, because that's sort of a, you know, a more for me appropriate framework. You know, my brain is the, the mass of tissues and connections and, you know, beautiful electrical signaling that occurs.

• 21:01Mayim Bialik?

  There are no ideas in there. The ideas come into your conscious awareness, right? Which you then process and articulate and spit out and turn into a life and a belief system. So where do those terms fit in to your understanding of what it's like to exist?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  So that is a very interesting mystery. I don't know where ideas come from. Like something I don't know where the origin of life comes from. I think the origin of life, the origin of ideas, the origin of intelligence, the same thing. So the thing that got me excited as a chemist is when I built this theory called Assembly Theory, which was basically built to say, hey, how complex does a molecule need to be before I have to invoke a creator or an evolutionary process? And then we measured it in the lab and then we started to count molecules and then we started to realize that complex molecules with an assembly index more than 15, looks like they can come from, only produced by biology.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  And what does 15 mean is I take a molecule and I cut it into bits and it has to have more than 15 unique parts, right? The more unique parts, the more complex you are. But actually, that reasoning multiplies up into this kind of idea of understanding consciousness and creativity, believe it or not, right? Because the idea exists nested in your brain. You do get stuff from other people, so you do have a type of simulation engine. But it's the ability for you to kind of remember the past, be present, experience the present and imagine the future that allows you to generate ideas, that interplay. So obviously, you've got data in your brain that you've seen and imperfectly, actually.

• 22:53Mayim Bialik?

  I want to interrupt you and insert time looping. Because when you talk about us not being able to see the future, you know, the future's now, now, now, now, right? The future's constantly happening as I say the word now, right? So if you, if you open up the possibility of, and you said it very casually and elegantly, like, oh, you know, time might be looping. You know, we, we specialize here in speaking to psychiatrists who study cases of people who are dipping into other timeframes, either before them or after them, which seems like the only evidence, and I say evidence with a lowercase e, for some notion of time not operating in the linear fashion that, you know,

• 23:37Mayim Bialik?

  that many of us were, were taught that it functions in. So is there room in your understanding of these ideas and where the ideas fit into our conscious experience with a timeline that possibly has retroactive and future active capability?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  I don't think it's, I don't think you can violate causation, but what I think you do is you can take one time thread and break it into very small threads and run these counterfactuals, what you do in your mind, right? You could do that all the time, say, what if I did this? What if I did that? What if I did this? And then, and they are able to run separately. And then in some regards, people think your brain is just making a, is a, is a voting system to pick, pick them. I don't know if it's that. With time looping, I think you can, you could imagine, as long as you've got enough time to go forward in, of course, you can imagine looping. It's one of the things that's super interesting in physics, when people start thinking about the universe being reversible, where you can go backwards and forwards in time. That's actually not possible. You can only imagine it because you are going forward in time.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  If you aren't going forward in time, you can't imagine it or do anything. So it's kind of like, that, that kind of messes up a lot of that. So I think there's some, we, we don't understand what, what life is. We can't find new life. We don't, can't define life. We don't know what novelty is. We don't really know what time is. And we certainly don't know what intelligence and consciousness is.

• 25:02Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, I'm gonna throw you a softball. Do we know what love is? Do we know what connection is?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Um, do we know what love is? I mean, I could give you the kind of grumpy kind of love is the illusion you're given when you're Anderson, but I mean, I don't think that's necessarily correct. The way I would do it is, let's just go back. So in assembly theory, you go all the way back to an origin of a complex motif that grows, right? You have a semi, but just imagine your sand again, all the sand piles. And let's say these sands start to become more and more sophisticated and then they build an ecosystem. So all the sand, and suddenly the the sand becomes a sand life, right? And then the sand and it eventually becomes conscious and thinking. Well, because they shared a lineage, when I say to, you know, the sand grains chat and say, imagine this, the other side is like, yeah,

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I can imagine it. And they're able to imagine it because they shared a history. And so probably the concept of love is a is a weird mixture of loss, competition, cooperation, and intense wish, because you could understand what this object needs, because it needed in the past. And you could you've felt it, you've been in assembly theory allows you to, in almost in a non spiritual way, be spiritual, because it's like, sure, I have deja vu, because I'm in that assembly space and it's happened before. And, you know, and I know how you feel because we're shared by this common lineage. And I think one of the fascinating things about all life on earth is we're all connected by a lineage going

• 26:34Speaker 03

  all the way back to the last universal common ancestor. So when I say to you, imagine a circle in your head, I'm pretty sure I know what you're imagining, right? Unless you'll imagine an odd perfect triangle. And the reason that is because we have the shared language, the shared experience, and this kind of this common motif that goes through evolutionary history. So, yeah, so the kind of love is a kind of natural, kind of game theoretic, moral, kind of intertwined, complex, kind of mixture of, you know, I want to put a state into your head.

• 27:10Mayim Bialik?

  I think that's very, I mean, first of all, I think that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said on this podcast. I think it's beautiful. I mean, I also think, you know, I can't help but think of, you know, trauma bonding, right, which is an even more intense shared experience, right, that, you know, from, you know, a neurophysiological perspective is potentiated because of all of these other inputs, right, all of this complexity that's placed in there. So I really, I love that explanation.

• 27:43Jonathan Cohen?

  I wanted to circle back to AI for a second because while I appreciate the lack of alarmist nature and sort of the, the pulling the wind out of it, the idea of bad data, synthetic data being populated into these machines and then giving, being given more and more agency is also a risk. Like, I don't think they have to go to AGI to think about them being utilized and having negative impacts on humanity as we rely on them more for their supposed intelligence. So I think the risk is actually in the belief that they know more than we do, which in many ways, they can just crunch more data faster than anyone

• 28:28Jonathan Cohen?

  can. Maybe, you know, maybe you have an objection to that based on the twist in your face, but I, you know, they can crunch more data than I can, certainly. But the risk is that if they're now all of a sudden middle management, responsible for deploying resources, government processes, or other things, and they've been trained on information that's just inaccurate, or that the objectives are pointed or wrong, you can imagine a world where we become mired in their bad perspective and have problems that are not related to superintelligence and them taking over.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, let's unpack that a little bit. So, agency, where does the agency come from? I would say that no AIs have agency. I am worried about AIs being used for control, manipulation, IP theft, psychologically manipulating people, making them fall in love with a thing that they and then they don't really fall in love with or something. Um, where does the agency come from? And the thing is, the agency comes from the human. It also comes from the billions of humans that have created the inputs in the large language models right now, which is kind of interesting. But one thing that's super interesting that I'm not able to explain, you know, I'm sure a lot of people watch this and go,

• 29:55Speaker 03

  I hate Lee for because his AI views are wrong, he's been a Luddite and all this stuff. And that may be true, right? I may need to have been a correctional facility and be, you know, say, why I need to believe that chess computers are, you know, geniuses and all this stuff. And I think it comes down to the fact that my decision, my brain is what, a few kilograms in my head, I can walk around and fairly autonomous. I can bring my my ability to solve problems quite autonomously around the world. If you want to bring Grok with you, I mean, you've got to bring like, I don't know where it's like, is it somewhere in the Midwest, right?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  You've got to bring a shit ton of generators and things. It's not, its ability isn't, its volume of compute, or I would say creativity is very low, right? So the, and so, and also it's, it's not just then that, its creativity is not just in that volume, it's also over the millions of of characters generated in human texts. And so, um, I just, I just don't buy that the AIs are doing anything other than the probabilistic search engines, right? And I don't buy those magic tricks. And I don't buy Jeff Hinton and Sam Altman and Elon Musk and all these people telling me that it's so,

• 31:18Speaker 03

  it's, it's going to be super intelligent. Because if you take a leaf out of David Deutsch's book, there's nothing more than a universal explainer. Yes, it's going to be faster than me at playing chess. Yes, it's going to be better than me in making my PowerPoint slides for me. Yes, it's going to help me make some tea or something, right? That's great. It doesn't mean it's like some kind of super duper human super thinker. It's just a tool that I've built to do a thing for me. It's and and I for me, it's nothing more than a test tube for a chemist. Test tube was a great invention. I can put stuff in it.

• 31:54Jonathan Cohen?

  For Sam and Elon, I can understand the hype, trying to raise the value of both of their companies. For Jeffrey, what do you think the incentive is to have those views?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  God complex.

• 32:06Jonathan Cohen?

  God complex.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  So God go complex. It's like, yeah, you know, oh, I'm really, I left Google. I was really look, or he's an idiot.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, and he's not an idiot. So I will actually, let me do it another way. Let me give you my genuine answer because I've not spoken to him. I genuinely do not know. I would like to know if he's sincere. Um, and then I would be somewhat shocked and say, why could you think that looking up a database in a fairly complicated way gives you sentience? And I think it's to do with the ground truth in the study in computer science. And it's a it's a lacking of um, just under it's a narrow view of the complex,

• 32:54Speaker 03

  understanding the complexity of the world, the world where I've got a few billionaires basically mining oil. Right? Spending money on compressing data. So that you can sell a chatbot to a few people to get rid of a middle job. You know, is that what humanity has really come to? Of course, we can compress information out of the environment. That's what we do.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  And of course, we can train a robot to do art. That's what we but it's not going to do the art because it feels it emotionally and what the art is there. It's just doing the art that it learned from some other humans being emotional. So it's facsimile the emotion and it's false. So, you know, what is it to be a human being doing a thing? Finding pride in getting it right, writing the code, finding the error. You know, and I'm not being a Luddite. I'm asking, what do you want? Some people may want it. I love using O three. It's great. But I don't use it to think. I use it to basically reorganize code. And to do things I know that have been done before and I don't want to waste my time doing now. When it comes to new creative things, I do it on paper, sorry.

• 34:07Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I think you're 100% right in terms of the need for us to do the creative thing and offload tasks that are repetitive that would slow us down otherwise and that the real breakthrough and my concern actually, as I see my son who is 17, looking to chat GPT for answers is that he hasn't learned to have the creative breakthroughs. He's actually trying to offload the creative process and the innovative process and the struggle that requires, you know, not staring at your phone and struggling in your head and pulling ideas back and forth and testing them and failing on them in order to have that like aha moment. And he's expecting it to be handed to him instantaneously because he's been told how smart these programs are

• 34:52Jonathan Cohen?

  and they know a lot of things that he otherwise would not know. And so he's conflating those two things.

• 34:58Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think also, I mean, you're giving, and I love your son dearly, but you're also giving humans a lot of credit. There's also, there's a lazy factor. People are lazy.

• 35:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, that's what I'm talking about, the struggle, that internal struggle that you need in order to have a breakthrough idea requires you searching and trying things on and failing and trying to ask why over and over again. And that is a painful process that is much less pleasant than mindlessly scrolling.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  I do predict though, that people will use the tools in really exciting ways.

• 35:32Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  And I do think that our society will still demand creativity. And there's all, it's like, how many people have you spoken to that are people pretending to know what they're talking about? Right? I'm so, I mean, I have, low IQ is the wrong word. I'm so slow.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  And so when I'm like, and I come across quite critically, right? When I'm in science, I'm like, why does that work? Why are you doing that? And they're like, oh my God, you're bullying me. And I'm like, come on, you've said something that's completely made up. It's clearly wrong. And I want to know why. And so I'm just trying to find out where you come from, because I have no concern about looking stupid. Because my job is to be stupid, not witless, but ask a question. Why does that work? How does that? How does that? How does that? And I think that that people will hopefully will spot the fact that people are just basically not asking those questions and will disincentivize that in the same

• 36:31Speaker 03

  way that theft is disincentivized and, you know, other things that we are not productive for the human beings. But when the job doesn't really need that level of creativity and you can get away with it, and the system is constructed, it's a ridiculous system in science where people are using AI to write grant proposals. People are using AI to review grant proposals. And the fact that that it's getting harder and harder to get grant money in academia. And there's a temptation just to basically just keep do AI generate proposal, N R A generate review. And all you do is you just send it in, right? And then, and then you do the statistics, a bit like a spam mail where you want a slightly

• 37:11Speaker 03

  trusting person to fall for your scam. Right? And I, and I think that might accelerate us going, ah, do we want to waste all our time using AI to write proposal that's then assessed by an AI, rather than having a good idea like, how could I cure cancer if I did this thing differently? Or if I created a material that could be superconductor if I did that differently?

• 37:32Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and, and also from an operational perspective, how do we make the process of grant submission and review more efficient and helpful so that we can actually spend more time doing research and less time applying to do research?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Well, we take all this money that we've got now, sorry, all this new person time from AI, and we let everybody in the world become researchers and we pay them properly to advance of human knowledge because we want to live in.

• 37:57Mayim Bialik?

  This is what I, this is literally what I say, but I say it when I'm like, I'm at the bank. And why is there only one person working here?

• 38:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Lee, explain to us a little bit about your day job. You've mentioned wanting to create life. What is, what are you, what's the hard problem that you're focused on? And how are you approaching it?

• 38:16Speaker 03

  My hard, the hard problem right now is trying to create an experiment where I talked about the sand and selection. Um, needless to say, I think the community is split into three.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Uh, one thinks that assembly theory is promising, even potentially exciting. So that's one side. That's interesting.

• 38:37Mayim Bialik?

  I'm on that side.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  One side thinks that it's just junk and hates it. And the one in the middle is slightly curmudgeonly again, and there's something here, and I, but I really need to see, I wanna see a killer experiment, a killer app, right? I must say I'm in the middle, right? I, I love it, create the theory, but I'm like, yeah, I need to, it needs to be useful. So my day job right now, I mean, I run a team, I also run a company, um, but I can tell you about, let me just tell you about the team running. Cause the, the, the team, um, I kind of, I will help them do their research and I also do some research myself.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  And what I try to do is to think about the problem that I would like, that I think would be important to solve in a quantifiable way, right? In a, in a, in a courageous way and say, right, assembly theory makes this prediction, it's just a saying, let's go and build experiments, see it, can we see selection unfolding? So, so I spend a lot of time building technologies to do that. For example, my company that I'm actually dedicated to at the moment, I'm building a system that can make molecules on demand for drug discovery, materials discovery, all this. It requires a quite a lot of creativity, it requires integration.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Um, it requires, you know, at the end of the day, it's a commercially focused enterprise where we have to make molecules and design molecules for money.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Part of Chemify's plan, right, this is my company, is to make, the same way that SpaceX's plan is to make humans interplanetary. Chemify's plan is to actually help us crack the origin of life by building the hardware to search chemical space. If I happen to make a 10, if not 100 billion dollar company that can do drug discovery, materials discovery and, you know, take labor out of chemistry, that's good. That's what I'm gonna do. That's my primary focus um um at the moment. But yeah, designing them robots to do the chemistry, designing the measurement system to find it. It goes back to your question at the beginning about how will you you know there's life elsewhere? And how would you go see it, right? What would you do that's different?

• 40:46Speaker 03

  So I wouldn't look for oxygen. I wouldn't look for, you know, DMS or something. I would look for complexity at scale and I can see through a telescope or in a spectrograph or in my lab. And so a lot of that, my focus is just working on how to make those measurements. And obviously, you know, working with students and postdocs and funding and all the all the cool stuff that goes with being an academic.

• 41:09Jonathan Cohen?

  There's sort of two sort of last questions for me. One is if you could make it like super tangible for someone to say, you know, if you could discover and recreate the origins of life, like what practical applications here on earth for the everyday person would that provide?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  So I think there's a really important spiritual application, actually. We all wanna know why we're here. We all wanna have a connection to the cosmos. Some people do it religiously. Some people do it materially. Some people just like just wonder. We have wonder and I think there's a gap in our wonder, right? And I think solving the origin of life is not gonna make life any less wonderful. It's gonna make it more wonderful in the same way that, you know, when people kind of understood they could build a jet engine and we could go travel in continental. So I think there is application is like a few humanity to understand this shared lineage in biology that we have together.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  That's one actually kind of really important spiritual um and social application, right? The second one is um indeed um, you know, uh, applications to drug discovery, right? Can you can you can we show a really hard disease to a system and use the process of evolution and assembly theory and all that to make new drugs in a new way, embody the evolution? Um, and that would use would be the other one that I think is pretty wacky and cool. If I can make an inorganic life form that I could build in a type of kill switch.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  And if I could then, I made this up, this is a great idea.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  I do say so myself, but it came up this idea of this self replicating diamonds. Right. And what would happen is the CO2, there's like this inorganic life form that's basically a living diamond. And it takes CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into diamond. And it, and it basically allows it. So it sits in the sea. It's about a foot down. So you can see all this shimmery stuff. But when the diamonds get too heavy, they just drop to the bottom of the ocean and they remove the carbon from the atmosphere. So you've got this inorganic life form that basically does photosynthesis, converts carbon, but once it gets to a certain weight, it just sinks to the bottom. And this way we're able, and it replicates a bit here and there, but not out of control. We tweak it so the replication.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  So we basically make this fictitious entity, an inorganic bacterium, if you like, based in diamond that takes carbon out of the air, gets heavy and sits to the bottom of the ocean. Until we want to mine it again, right? And then burn it. And then, you know, then we have a proper, there's no fossil fuel anymore. We take the fossil out of fuel. Because right now we're mining oil and coal from the ocean floors, from mines, and burning it. And there's no way getting that CO2 back. That would be cool. The other thing I'd love to do is just throw inorganic biology at all the planets in the solar system and make them alive. I know NASA in the planetary goes, you don't want to do that. We want to look after the planets. I'm like, a dead planet is a lost opportunity. I want life everywhere. Come on.

• 44:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Just on the diamond thing, so you'd be sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping with the global warming and then creating a new fuel source and also potentially cratering the diamond market if they were, you know, polished ready, which maybe you shouldn't publicize because you'll get the diamond people after you to shut you down.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  The diamond people would do an easier thing and say, look, this is thermodynamically stupid. You need so much energy to make diamond. You're not going to do it in a little cell in the surface of the ocean. So, but it's a good one to get you thinking, right? Because diamonds are cool things. They have, you know, you can imagine them shimmering in the ocean and gathering light, but we can make something else. But yeah.

• 45:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I'm very glad that we got a little glimpse into your creative imagination because that's some amazing problem solving. My last question for you is circling back to something you said, which is the idea of silicon life with a carbon-based technology. Can you explain a little bit more about that and what it would look like?

• 45:21Speaker 03

  So it goes back to the discussion we had at the beginning about what would life look like on Earth? If, you know, why is life like it is on Earth? So if we imagined a hotter Earth, right? Where basically maybe silicon was a bit more fluid and a slightly different atmosphere, maybe hydrogen or helium or something, right? A bit more of that. And so that the silicon was able to act with, you know, react with carbon motifs or something like this, just on the surface to help decorate it. I think it'd be very possible to imagine a majority silicon-based

• 46:02Speaker 03

  configuration space, a bit like in organic amino acids producing proteins, something like this. That would be cool.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  That would be, then you could say, well, look, obviously in that environment, it's quite hot, it's where silicon is. But they would then be able to fabricate, you know, graphene, which is a polymorph of carbon, very easily because they're already quite, their room temperature is already very hot. And so they might be, I just make sheets of the stuff and it might, and because there's control and it's kind of organic-y, you won't have the problem that you could have with silicon. And then you could indeed imagine a carbon-based technology in a silicon, in a silicon life form.

• 46:46Jonathan Cohen?

  I need someone listening to this to like mock up an image for me to get my head around, I think.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  I actually do, I actually, I'm not sure I'm supposed to

• 46:58Speaker 03

  publicize it, I think so. So I, were they, I mean, I get involved in some really interesting stuff. With the Berg Bruin Institute, there is a project called Life Otherwise, where we all had to imagine a planet and a new type of life form. And mine, my, I may not have had something similar to, it wasn't silicon, it was another element, but I made optical life.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  So I basically worked out a way how to take cells and make them optical traps and then evolve those optical traps. And then you have the DNA, if you like, in the lenses in the sky and they float in the sky. Don't want to give too much away, but I think it's already out there in the public domain anyway, right? But that's something I was thinking of, just to push the limits. And they were like, whoa, did you just make that up? I was like, yep, I think so.

• 47:51Mayim Bialik?

  Lee Cronin, it's been really such a delight to talk to you. We really appreciate your flexibility and your sense of humor as well. So thank you so much.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Great questions. It's been lovely to talk to you both as well.

• 48:07Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan, I feel like we need another two episodes to just talk about those episodes.

• 48:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Love aliens, AI. I mean, right at the end there, he starts talking about spreading life across the universe. He wants to be the atom of intergalactic life.

• 48:29Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, this is the kind of guest where I really want to like do a deep dive into like, what were you like as a child? What were your drawings like when you were six years old?

• 48:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Actually, I've heard him talk a little bit about this, and I don't want to tell his life story for him. But he said that his mother had, I forget what, I think either pretty intense depression, and he and his brother would be sort of sent to bed at four o'clock, and their door would be locked. And he said he was just an avid experimenter and described having his train set around eight and being rewiring it to like, increase the voltage.

• 49:07Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, boredom is the fountain of creativity. I mean, that's intense.

• 49:11Jonathan Cohen?

  So he said he was always a tinkerer, didn't do very well in school, never wanted to read the books that school provided, was always just questioning and wondering and wanting to probe and just seemed to have a fascinating curiosity, which allows you the time and space to rethink what's possible.

• 49:29Mayim Bialik?

  It's amazing the confidence that he has, you know, to know what he knows and what he doesn't know. And what he wants to know. And I really think that's refreshing. I think for for so many of us, you know, when we hear all these experts, and I think this is what happens on social media. There's all these experts and everybody you're on Substack. Everybody's a doctor or a PhD or they studied this. Or everybody feels like they know things when the fact is like, we're all just trying to figure it out. And when you speak to someone who's a specialist in what he specializes in, you get to see like, oh, that's what it looks like for us to have scientific rigor around the qualification and the quantification of information. Like, that's helpful. And I don't have to agree with him on everything.

• 50:13Mayim Bialik?

  And plenty of people don't agree with him. And I'm not saying that just because he, you know, is a Regis professor, that he gets to be right about things. But I'm saying the clarity that he has about the way that we think about things, the way that we gather information and the conclusions that we make, I found very refreshing.

• 50:28Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't think he used the word passionately, but he said something to the effect of he has passionate beliefs, but he holds them lightly so that he's open to being challenged and expanding. I think is also important to know that you should be passionate about what you believe, but also open to integrating new pieces of information and changing your mind and evolving your views is not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of great strength.

• 50:51Mayim Bialik?

  I actually think he was talking about Robin Hanson when he when he mentioned that the the the sort of the way that I've heard it is, you know, you you wear this like a loose fitting garment. Like, it's something that protects you and covers you, but you wear it loosely. Anything that is too constricting or too tight does not leave room for movement. And anything that's too loose does not leave room for form.

• 51:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Very well said.

• 51:15Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, not to blow anybody's mind, but there's. He's very unique. He's a very unique individual and his lab looks absolutely incredible. But there's a lot of people. In research, who have his kind of capability intellectually. And those are the people that are solving things. And it's just really, I'm so grateful that we got to speak with him. But I also like, want to remind people, there's many, many people who you may not hear from, who are studying these things on a really, you know, fascinating level in ways that are changing the world, you know, bit by bit. And it's that sort of collective movement towards understanding where life came from and why are we here that he's involved with.

• 51:59Mayim Bialik?

  So really just so great to speak with him. Also, huge shout out to Valerie for the research for this episode. A lot of what she was writing, I was like, it's like another language to me. I don't know if she was just, she does real research. She's not using AI, not that we know of.

• 52:15Jonathan Cohen?

  These types of conversations also make me very hopeful that we will have as a species, the type of breakthroughs that will help us solve some of our greatest problems. You know, we hear a lot about ways that people are thinking about reducing carbon in the atmosphere, often through pumps and filters and capture in some ways. I've never heard anyone talk about my, you know, self replicating diamonds in the ocean that sink. So like, that's just a very cool idea.

• 52:44Mayim Bialik?

  All I was thinking about was that's a video game. It's like, it's basically Minecraft.

• 52:49Jonathan Cohen?

  So when your diamonds, you gotta grow your diamonds so that they get enough carbon so that they sink. And then people are going down and mining them and putting them into the-

• 52:56Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I completely was like, this is a, he's describing a video game where things-

• 53:00Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like Farmland.

• 53:01Mayim Bialik?

  Things turn, well, but even like, I think of, I've never played Minecraft, but I saw the movie. And it's like, when things come together and they make other things that are better and more advanced and more complicated and valuable. I was like, that's what he's describing. Like Jack Black just going like this and making diamonds.

• 53:18Jonathan Cohen?

  If you haven't already joined us on Substack, come check out the Breaker community. It's growing. We're so excited about all the extra bonus content. Mayim and I breaking down episodes, behind the scenes, clips, extra footage that has never been released anywhere else is being released on Substack. So come join us.

• 53:38Mayim Bialik?

  We will see you over there from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  We all have routines. I'm Jabran, and with diabetes, mine was finger sticks. Sometimes, I skip them because they hurt. The Freestyle Libre 3CGM changed that. It gives me glucose insights without finger sticks. Learn more at freestylelibre.us. Finger sticks are required if your glucose alarms or readings do not match symptoms, or when you see check blood glucose symbol for the first 12 hours. The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us.