#257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize

Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Brian’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Brian’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrianKeating Books and resources mentioned: Losing the Nobel Prize: https://amzn.to/3E6GSHI Into the Impossible: https://amzn.to/3Fb6F2E PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:46) – Telescope (12:10) – Beginning of the universe (32:23) – Science and the Soviet Union (37:49) – What it’s like to be a scientist (56:45) – Age of the universe (59:37) – Expansion of the universe (1:07:37) – Gravitational waves (1:10:49) – BICEP (1:36:05) – Nobel prize (1:59:06) – Joe Rogan (2:06:21) – Recognition in science (2:14:30) – Curiosity (2:22:18) – Losing the Nobel Prize (2:35:13) – Galileo Galilei (2:54:00) – Eric Weinstein (3:12:21) – Scientific community (3:30:02) – James Webb telescope (3:35:01) – Panspermia (3:38:32) – Origin of life (3:43:59) – Aliens (3:49:41) – Death and purpose (3:53:53) – God (3:59:49) – Power

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USASD and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible. Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called Into the Impossible.

• 0:17Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. First is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Second is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day. Third is Magic Spoon, low-carb keto-friendly cereal. Fourth is MasterClass, online courses from world-class experts. And fifth is Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. So the choice is health or wisdom. Choose wisdom, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.

• 1:02Lex Fridman?

  I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include blood tests. They give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms. They're using your data. They're using machine learning to come up with the brilliant analysis of that data. This data includes blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data. And the point is to use this data and the machine learning algorithms to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Andrew Huberman, the great Andrew Huberman, host of the Huberman Lab podcast, talks a lot about it.

• 1:47Lex Fridman?

  David Sinclair, who has a new podcast out, talked a lot about it in my conversation with him. It's obvious that we should be making lifestyle decisions based on our personal data, not some generic population data. For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to inside tracker.com/lex. That's inside tracker.com/lex.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and it's newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced a multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It is the first thing I drink every day. I drink it twice a day now. I really enjoy it. It forms a nutritional base. First of all, it's delicious, but it also forms a nutritional base for all the dietary sort of wanderings that I do. So I'm currently eating carnivore, mostly carnivore with very, very few exceptions, sometimes vegetables. Not that I'm allergic to the other stuff. It's just what makes me feel good, but you know, if you're not careful, you're not going to get all the nutrition you need.

• 2:56Lex Fridman?

  Athletic Greens got your back, got my back. Anyway, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil, which is another thing I take when you sign up to athleticgreens.com/lex. That's athleticgreens.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Magic Spoon, the OG sponsor of this podcast, the delicious, the incredible, the low carb keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only 49 grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. You can build your own box, get a variety pack with a bunch of flavors. You can go to the website, check out the flavors. It has cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter,

• 3:40Lex Fridman?

  blueberry cinnamon, I think it goes on and they keep adding new ones. I don't know. For me, still cocoa is the best flavor. It's the flavor of champions. It's the one I go to. In this life, a man must choose, and that is the choice I have made. And it has brought to me much happiness without sacrificing the nutritional sort of fortitude. Anyway, Magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it, they refund it. Go to magic spoon.com/lex and use code Lex at checkout to save $5 off your order. That's magic spoon.com/lex and use code Lex.

• 4:18Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by MasterClass. $180 a year gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Exploration, Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you all know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is, Will Wright, the game designer, the guitarist, Carlos Santana, Garrett Kasparov, Daniel Negrono, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall, it just keeps going. And they keep adding new ones, like I'm doing one on portrait photography currently. I've been interested in understanding how a single photograph can capture like an emotion, a deep, complicated emotion. That's so fascinating to me. The way you should learn, whether you're a beginner or you're an expert, is you should

• 5:03Lex Fridman?

  listen to the masters of those arts. Anyway, get unlimited access to every MasterClass and get 15% off an annual membership if you go to masterclass.com/lex. That's masterclass.com/lex for 15% off the annual membership at masterclass.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, nutrition, supplement, and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, they make a ton of stuff, but AlphaBrain is probably my favorite. It's a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. Long stretches of deep work, so deep focus, where I'm sitting there in the silence of

• 5:45Lex Fridman?

  my mind, focusing on a difficult thinking task, something that requires you think deeply and whatever thoughts that come into your mind and try to distract you, you slowly let them drift past. It's a kind of meditation. I use AlphaBrain to help me when I know that it's going to be especially difficult. So I don't use it every day, I use it when I need that extra super rocket boost for a deep work session. It works, it helps me clear the mind and maintain focus. Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com/onnit. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Keating.

• 6:46Lex Fridman?

  As an experimental physicist, what do you think is the most amazing, or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built? Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm slightly biased towards that particular instrument, but-

• 7:07Lex Fridman?

  Talk about that in a little bit.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but certainly the telescope to me is a lever that has literally moved the Earth throughout history.

• 7:16Lex Fridman?

  So the OG telescope?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  OG telescope, yeah. The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands. And, you know, it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type. And so people, for the first time in history, had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight. So looking at a printed word now, we just take it for granted, 12-point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on, they're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have, you know, perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not, until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type. And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  You know, my priest or my friend over here, he can read it, she can read it. I can't read it, what's going on? And that's when, you know, these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of, you know, glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer. And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, you know, two lenses and go like, hmm, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there, until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10x'd it, which is almost as good as going from zero to one, as going from, you know, one to 10.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species. Because we're using tools not to get food faster or to, you know, preserve, you know, our legacy for the, for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.

• 9:03Lex Fridman?

  Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able to see the star, maybe there was some, some kind of makeup of the atmosphere, which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars, that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there as opposed to, maybe this is an over romanticized notion, but like, looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival and not being eaten by a bear slash lion. If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder, what is my place in the universe? You, you think, you think that's modern humans romanticizing?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  I think it's a little romantic, because they also took the same.

• 9:43Lex Fridman?

  I tried.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at, you know, hairs. And in other words, they made the microscope and we're still doing that. And so, you know, to have a telescope is, it serves a dual purpose. It's, it's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, you can see a microscope, you don't think, oh, I'm, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, one nanosecond ago, light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm seeing it and that, no, you don't think about it like that. But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you're seeing things, you know, back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti plains. And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of, you know, relativity and time travel and so forth.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  It took that before we could really say, oh, we, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain. So I, I think that might be a little too much, but, but nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine? You know, it's like, we can look back in time, we see things as they were, not as they are. And that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with, so I'm a radio astronomer. I don't actually look through telescopes very often, except, you know, on rare occasions when I, when I take one out to show the kids. But, but a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral. I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it, you're like, all right, it looks cool. It's kind of weird shaped thing, looks like it belongs in sci-fi, it's going to blast, you know, the Death Star or whatever.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  But when you, when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, if that object fills up what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope is called its beam. If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at. Which is pretty amazing. It means you're actually remotely measuring, you're taking the temperature of Jupiter, or whatever, in effect. And so it's allowing you to basically teleport. And there's no other science that you can really do that, right? If you're an archaeologist, let me get into my, you know, my time machine and go back and see, what was Lucy really like? You know, it's not possible.

• 11:52Lex Fridman?

  So the same thing happens, this is where I learned about this from March of the Penguins, when the Penguins huddled together, they, you know, the body temperature arrives to the same place. So you're doing this remotely, the March of the Penguins, but remote.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  We do it from Antarctica, too. So there are some Penguins around when we do it.

• 12:09Lex Fridman?

  Okay, excellent. You mentioned time machine. I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about time machines. So let me ask you the question of, take us back in time. What happened at the beginning of our universe?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. Usually people preface this by saying, I have a simple question. So, you know, what happened before the universe began?

• 12:33Lex Fridman?

  Brian Keating teaching me about comedy. I have a simple question for you. Let's take two. I have a simple question. What happened at the beginning of our universe? There you go.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  All right, good. So when we think about what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, it's more practical to go back in time, starting from today. So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate into some day, right? So on that day, something happened earlier than, you know, than the moment exactly now. Let's say we're talking around 1 o'clock. So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor. It started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements. After that period of time, you know, going forward back closer to today, less, you know, 10

• 13:27Speaker 01

  minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later, rather, coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. And in fact, all the hydrogen, you know, to very good approximation, in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period. So I always say, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.

• 13:53Lex Fridman?

  Well done, sir.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  You know, most of those light elements, besides hydrogen, aren't really used in your, you know, in your encounter, right? We don't encounter helium that often unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp. You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know, but, but other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment. The question became, how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later. And I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor and a different type of process explosion as well called a supernova. However, if you go back to the beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable, in other words, going backwards from the first three minutes, as

• 14:38Speaker 01

  famous Steven Weinberg titled his book, we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe. We just don't know enough about that epoch. There are many people, most people, most practicing card carrying cosmologists believe the universe began in what's called the singularity. And we can certainly talk about that. However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence. And really only occurs in two instantiations, the big bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable. And so for that reason, there are now flourishing alternatives that say,

• 15:22Speaker 01

  you can actually, for the first time, ask the question, that day, you know, Tuesday, you know, in the first moments of the our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that, 24 hours time, seven days before that. That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything besides that big bang, that there was a singularity. And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know. But they would say some future in, you know, incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer. But now there are people that are saying, there

• 16:03Speaker 01

  is an alternative to the big bang. And it's not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago, when these models, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten, Ra, and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium B.C. And in that, they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy Akhenaten's court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H-index right about now because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis, and right up until this very moment.

• 16:40Lex Fridman?

  Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to the Big Bang theory?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So there are many alternatives, starting with, so the singularity, quantum cosmologically demanding singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles, called by Sir Roger Penrose, and they all have things in common, these alternatives, as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation. Inflation is sort of, can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot Big Bang that I said we understood. So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not an initial condition. In physics, imagine, imagine I show you a grandfather clock or

• 17:29Speaker 01

  pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second, you know, you come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth. Alex, tell me, where did it start? How many cycles is it going to make before the, you can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions. In a very simple system, like a one dimensional, simple harmonic oscillate, like a pendulum, think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions. It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists, that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology, determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.

• 18:04Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can't, because you can infer things about the pendulum before you show up to the room in our current epoch, correct?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. So if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating? So that depends on how much energy it got initially, and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance, you had infrared camera, you could see it's getting hotter, maybe, and you could do some calculations. But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions. Here on Earth has gravitational field. It's not going to excurs or, you know, make excursions, you know, wildly beyond the length of the pendulum. It's not, um, you know, it has simple properties. Um, so, but in this is like, in other words, you can't tell me, you know, when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now? In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now? Um, now that's a

• 18:55Speaker 01

  pretty pedestrian example, but what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended, but it says nothing about how it itself took place. And that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't really, look, what you care about like big bang nucleosynthesis and the elements got made and these fusion reactors and, and the whole universe was a fusion reactor, but like, don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time? And the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the big bang. We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you asked me about some of the alternatives. So one is Aon theory, the conformal cyclic

• 19:38Speaker 01

  cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose. Another one that's, that's, um, it was, was really popular in the sixties and seventies until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB, the three Kelvin all pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965. That kind of spelled the death knell in some sense to the, what was called the quasi-steady-state universe. Um, and, and then there was another, um, uh, model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state. Steady state means always existed. That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe. Um, and most scientists believed in that for, you know, millennia, basically. The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  They couldn't believe that after Hubble, so they had a append onto it, concatenate this this new feature that it wasn't steady, it was quasi-steady. So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space, and that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant. But because it was producing more and more every century, as centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand. And so that's how they developed.

• 20:49Lex Fridman?

  But slowly.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Very slowly, and it doesn't match observational evidence. So but that is an alternative.

• 20:54Lex Fridman?

  By the way, did I say and think the the steady state universe is infinite or finite? Do you know?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  He I I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if if something had a no beginning in time, then it'll be very unlikely we're in like the center of it, or it's bounded, or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.

• 21:13Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what he thought about infinity, because that's such an uncomfortable.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Hey, it's a silly joke. I'm sure you're familiar with this silly joke, right? The silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe.

• 21:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke. It's very meta. Okay, so I sorry, you were saying about quasi.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  All the alternatives.

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  All the alternatives and the quasi-steady state.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And the and the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that, you know, people say like, what's your favorite, you know, alternative, right?

• 21:46Lex Fridman?

  This is not investment advice.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Inflation is not transitory. It is quasi-permanent. So a very prominent.

• 21:55Lex Fridman?

  Sorry to interrupt. We're talking about cosmic inflation, so calm down, cryptocurrency folks.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  That's right. Although the first Nobel Prize, and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind. So most people don't know that inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.

• 22:09Lex Fridman?

  It's a good topic to work on if you want a Nobel Prize. Doesn't matter the field.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's time translation invariant. So when we look at the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues, according to some. One of the virtues to me, just as a human, I'm just speaking, you know, as a human. One of the founders of the new version of the of the cyclic cosmology called called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt. He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences at Princeton University. You may have heard of it. And he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation. In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation,

• 22:59Speaker 01

  he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society. So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world, the universe of cosmologists, such as it is, and not a huge universe, but they're more podcasters than cosmologists. Some do both, but this man created this theory with collaborators. And now he's like, I joke, I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity. Like, you're like a deadbeat dad. Now you're saying like inflation is bogus. And but he doesn't just attack. See, this is what's very important about approaching things as an experimentalist. You've got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful. And I think that's a huge service.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  An experimentalist has to say no. He or she has to be confident to say like, I don't care if I prove you right, or I prove your enemy wrong, or whatever. We have to be like exterminators. And nobody likes the exterminator until they need one, right? Or the garbage collectors, right? But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea. Like inflation is a beautiful idea, but it also has consequences. And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science. And in that sense, I can see support for what he does. But none of that detracts from my respect for a man.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  You know, imagine like Elon comes up with this like really great idea, you know, space, and then he's like, actually, it's not, it's not going to work. And, you know, but like, here's this better idea. And he's like SpaceX is not going to work, but he's now creating an alternative to it. It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean I'm gonna like have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend, or because I respect the idea, or I respect the man and his colleague, Anna Agius, who works really hard with him. But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it. And what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology. So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  You've talked a lot about quantum gravity. You talk to people, eminent people on the show. Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything. There is a theory of quantum gravity, but there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.

• 25:32Lex Fridman?

  So that that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory. So in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core? So, okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society from believing in cosmic inflation?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  So, you know, one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation, according to its other two patriarchs, you know, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state. It has to exist in this Hilbert space, and the Hilbert space has certain features. And those features are quantum mechanical, endowed with quantum mechanical properties. And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off. So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets. It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  It continues the thrusting and you need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion, which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes. Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish. And this is known as the multiverse paradigm. It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence, not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more, we're seeing it in string theory as well. So that, you know, sometimes two, you know, branches coming to the same conclusion is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.

• 27:11Lex Fridman?

  So one of the negative consequences is it creates... phenomena that we can't, that are outside the reach of experimental science?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Lex Fridman?

  Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity? Like, it makes us, um, maybe makes life seem more meaningless? Is that, is that, is that where he's getting at a little bit? Or is it not reaching that far?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think, I think those are both kind of perceptive. The answer is a little both, because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain this fine tuning problem, that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly facund, that has features consistent with our existence, and how could we be otherwise? You know, this sort of weak anthropic principle. On the other hand, it, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything, can be said to predict nothing. Like, if I say, Lex, you know, you've been working out, you look like, you know, yeah, you have, and yeah, it's great. You look like you're, you know, about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms. Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's horribly imprecise. So what good is that? That's meaningless.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I don't contribute any what's called surprise, or reduction in entropy, or, you know, reduction of your ignorance about the system, or, you know exactly how much you weigh. So me telling you that tells you nothing. In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist, there has to be at least one place that we exist. But the problem is, it's a manifestation of infinity. So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  So if I say to you, like, what's bigger, the number, you know, water molecules in this thing, or the number of real numbers? Or if I say, what's bigger, the number of real numbers or rational numbers? They're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be. Infinity to the infinity power, you know, we have kids someday that'll tell you, I love you infinity, you have to come back, I love you infinity plus one.

• 29:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Right? So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that. They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature. Right? So let me ask you a question. Is there anything that you can contemplate in the Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite, like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature, energy, that's infinite. And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it. But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one, you know, the opposite direction I go with my kids? How does it go from like the half of infinity? Because that's still infinity. How did it cool down? How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied? So now it's only infinity over two in terms of Pascal's.

• 30:02Lex Fridman?

  Less infinite, more infinite. Yeah, I mean, it's, that's one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is you can't truly hold it inside our minds. It's a mathematical construct that doesn't, it feels like intuition fails. And but nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly and then use like physicists, their incredible intuition machines. And then they'll play with this infinity as if they can play with it on the level of intuition as opposed on the level of math. Yeah, maybe it's something cyclical. You can imagine infinity just going around the same, kind of like a Mobius strip situation. But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite? Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer? Right? It's either some placeholder for infinity, or it's one divided by a very, the smallest, you know, possible, you know, real number that you can represent in the memory.

• 30:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's basically my undergraduate study in computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer. I think I took 17 courses on this topic. It was very useful.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I came to the right place. But, but, you know, in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right. I mean, physicists will blithely, nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization and do things to get finite answers. And it's miraculous. But, you know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, you ask, you know, what, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless? They purport, many of the people that support it, like Andre Linde. In fact, Andre Linde says, you have a bias, you, Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias that you believe in a universe. But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse? What evidence do you have that there's not? So he turns it around. Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen,

• 31:52Speaker 01

  then there's no predictive power within the theory. Because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with Bicep or Simons Observatory, whatever. But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen. And that's logically 100% correct. But it's like, it's like kind of chewing, you know, Wonder bread. You know, I apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but you know.

• 32:18Lex Fridman?

  Wonder bread slash lex.com.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Type in code kleb, right? Kleb, it's my favorite Russian word is like, would you like a piece of kleb?

• 32:27Lex Fridman?

  By the way, even that, that word kleb, which means bread in Russian, as you say it, like you're jokingly saying it now, it made me hungry because it made me remember how much I loved bread when I was in the Soviet Union. When you were like hungry, that was the sort, that was the things you dreamed about. I don't know.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today? And they were completely in hiding, like there was no Google. They couldn't look up on Scholar. They had nothing. They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved. And then, and then, and only then, if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport. It said Jew on your passport.

• 33:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borishevich Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnarev. And he had to, only because he was like at a Nobel level and, you know, was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program, could he even get his Jewish student, and he was Jewish too, but, but only by virtue of his standing, of his intellectual accomplishments, would they give him the dispensation to let his student, you know, travel to Georgia or something. And it makes what we complain about, I complain about academia. And it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about? We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation, completely isolated from the West. I mean, some of these people wouldn't didn't meet like people

• 33:49Speaker 01

  like Stephen Hawking until, you know, he was almost dead. And they just learned this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology. There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working on the, they could, they could pass off as well. We're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.

• 34:07Lex Fridman?

  At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment, that because there's a dictatorship authoritarian regime throughout the, the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized. And because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machines, through the news and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist. Like you were highly valued in society. Maybe that's a better way to say it. And I, I would say, you're saying like, we have it easy now. In that sense, it was kind of beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero, as there's, there's.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Yes, Zbigniew was hero of the Soviet Republic.

• 34:53Lex Fridman?

  And that, you know, there's positives to that. I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negatives with the positives, but it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized in, in a capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist, let's just say it, the American system, the celebrities are the, the athletes, the actors and actresses, maybe business leaders, musicians. And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers. So it's interesting to think of a world where science was highly prized, but they had to do that science.

• 35:36Lex Fridman?

  Within the constraints of always having Big Brother watching. It's uh.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, the same in Germany. Germany had, you know, highly prized, I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases is Fritz Haber, who invented the, you know, Haber-Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet? You look, you look, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day and you do that, you know, I said kleb and you got, it's a little drool, but.

• 35:58Lex Fridman?

  He says, I'm lifting and I look slim. This is amazing. I'm gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder. I think that's a website.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  You gotta swipe left or right for that. I don't know. Um, but when you think about like, you know, what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day. He was a German nationalist, first and foremost, even though he was a Jew. And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia chlorine gas applied during trench warfare in, in 1916. In battles in Brussels and whatever. And he was, they had a whole cadre of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. You know, that would go and witness these atrocities, but that was also, they were, they were almost putting science above, I don't want to say human dignity, but, but of like, who, the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his,

• 36:44Speaker 01

  relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zyklon B. And so it's just, it's just unbelievable. So I, I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of, of science, you know, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like scientism. And there is still a danger. You know, I always say, um, just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion. You know, just because you, you, you know, in, in my case, in my books, I, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize. It's kind of like a kosher idol. It's something that you can worship, you know, it doesn't do any harm. And, and we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Cause there is a core of America and the Western world in general that does worship and really look at science, predominantly because it gives us technology. But there's something really cool about that. And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between, um, between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has. They're two different words. Um, but, uh, but also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope comes from science.

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  You open so many doors because you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book. So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize. It's fascinating to explore and we will. And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the of the universe, which we'll return to. But now, since you opened the book, wow, pun unintended of losing the Nobel Prize. Can you tell me the story of Bicep, the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization experiment, Bicep one and Bicep two? And then maybe you can talk about Bicep three.

• 38:32Lex Fridman?

  But the the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  What happened?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that that book is in contradistinction of the second book. That's like a memoir. It's really a description of of what it's like to feel, what it feels like to be a scientist and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which which I cover in the later book in more detail, but to really feel like you're doing something and it's all you think about. It is all consuming and it's something I couldn't have done now because I have too many other, you know, wonderful, delightful demands of my time. But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky, who was a 12 year old, 13 year old, and really mix together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence

• 39:23Speaker 01

  or nonexistence of God. So I call myself a practicing agnostic. In other words, I do things that are that religious people do and I don't do things that atheist people do. And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast guest, actually, I shouldn't say, oh, I was just just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.

• 39:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  And I miss him.

• 39:44Lex Fridman?

  Name drop.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Name drop, yes. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of comments.

• 39:49Lex Fridman?

  In case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible podcast, where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists in the history of science, physicists, especially in the history of science.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So when I talked to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you're you call yourself an agnostic too. Can you tell me something like what what do you do on Saturdays? Do you go to church? Like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien. And he was looking down or she was, it, she, I don't know, it, thing was looking down and I saw Freeman. And on Sundays, like a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church and those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that the, like Richard Dawkins. He doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to, right? So I said, how would you distinguish yourself if not practice? So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality. You can, you can influence your mind, your bodily, physical actions.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church. It's kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not. Uh, but, um, I was just fascinated by these, these.

• 41:00Lex Fridman?

  Can we get into it for a second?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. Let's go.

• 41:04Lex Fridman?

  All right, let's go there.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  All right.

• 41:06Lex Fridman?

  Let's go to, uh, Baby Brian or Young, Young Brian.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  The new sitcom on CBS. Uh, Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents. Uh, my father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician. And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant, um, uh, English major, et cetera. And they raised, they were secular and they, they, you know, we'd go to, I always joke, we'd go to, we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year on, on Christmas and Easter. Now, we would go, uh, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right? That's the typical two day a year Jews. Uh, and you know, we'd have, uh, we'd have matzahs once a year on Passover. Uh, and that was about it. And, um, for years I was like that until my parents got divorced. My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating. My father's name is James Axe.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Um, so when she remarried Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted. I'm actually adopted into the Keating family. And he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious. They, you know, did Christmas and Easter. They, it was one of the most wonderful experiences I had and I do things with great gusto. Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way. So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case Catholicism. So I was baptized, confirmed, and I said, I want to go all the way. I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

• 42:26Lex Fridman?

  And you're gonna be the best altar boy there ever was.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket. I could push people and get them to two extra contributions. But in this case, I was 13. I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like you go graduate student, postdoc professor, the next level up from, you know, confirmation altar boy is priest. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priests are not entitled to have relations with with women. And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future forecasting what life's gonna be like for myself if I continue on my path. I found it, maybe I-

• 43:05Lex Fridman?

  The math did that up.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  That's right. There was a, there was a serious gap in, in that future, in that future. And instead, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be a 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope and, and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it. It wasn't bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through. Is that a hedgehog?

• 43:29Lex Fridman?

  It's a, it's a hedgehog, hedgehog in the fog. I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things. You've given me some incredible gifts. Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope that put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look and using-

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Now, you're officially an experimental astrophysicist, by the way.

• 43:47Lex Fridman?

  Why experimentalist versus an engineer?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Cause you assembled this telescope, you gave it a mount and you connected it to, to a very-

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but there's no experiment going on. It's just engineering for show. It's very shallow. So experiment is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something. Here, I just built a thing for show.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's always a joke. People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist. So I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes. We, actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things, you know, it's not actually doing the stroking of my nonexistent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.

• 44:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever, right? So telescope.

• 44:27Lex Fridman?

  Yes, this telescope. What's the, what's the story of this little telescope?

• 44:30Speaker 01

  This telescope's a, a very precious thing in some ways, a symbol of what got me into, you know, what brought me all the blessings I have in my life, came from a telescope. And I always advise parents or even people for themselves, you right here, wherever we are, biggest city on earth, Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12 year old outside of Manhattan. You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of Venus. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, like two and a half million light years away from Earth. You can do that with that little thing over there. One that's a little more expensive. Get one that has a mount and you could attach now your smartphone. What the hell is that? I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And with that, you can do something that no other science, to my knowledge, can really replicate. Maybe biology in some sense, but you can experience the physical sensation that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it. Or that Saturn had ears, as he called it. Or that the moon was not crystalline polished, smooth, and made of this heavenly substance, the quintessence substance, right? So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery? Try doing that with the Higgs boson. Get yourself an LHC and smash together, you know, high luminosity, you know, call up Harry Clift and say, you know, I want to replicate. How did you feel? He didn't feel anything. None of them felt

• 45:58Speaker 01

  anything. It took years to go, you can't do it. But this, you can feel the exact same emotions.

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. It's almost like, maybe, maybe there's another one like that is fire. Like when you build a bonfire, like can you actually get it? See, if you use a lighter, I think if you actually, by rubbing sticks together, or however you do it, without any of the modern tools, that's probably what that's like. And then you get to experience the magic of it, of what like early humans.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you feel what Og felt when he did it that first time.

• 46:29Lex Fridman?

  By the way, is this a gift?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  This is a gift, of course. You need a little bit of a swag upgrade, so I got you some gifts.

• 46:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a Putin, like, asks if this is a gift, making it very uncomfortable for you. It's like, not really.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  This is actually my childhood telescope here, you know.

• 46:47Lex Fridman?

  But now I'm keeping it.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  That's right. So looking through this telescope.

• 46:51Lex Fridman?

  Was when your love for science was first born.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Changed my life. Because not only was I doing that, I was replicating what Galileo did, but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself to Galileo Galilei, okay, if there's any confusion out there. But I did replicate exactly what he did. And I was like, holy crap, this is weird. Let me write it down. So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do, and all parents should do. Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it. Write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's gonna be, not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel? Better yet, astronomy is a visual science. Sketch what you see. The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades, Seven Sisters, you can see them anywhere on Earth.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  And when you do that, again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain, as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips. You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down. Then, you do research, right? The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new. And that's why we call it research, and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia. And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks. It's unbelievable. And now, we can do even better, because you got, share it on Instagram, or whatever, and you can, by doing so, have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist, and do so viscerally.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  You know, I often say, I was taught this by my, my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade, that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into. Let me pour in some facts, intellects, and, you know, it's not like machine learning, you're just showing like billions of cats, or, you know, you're not like forcing it in, you're bringing it out. It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare. And what more could a teacher want than to have something the kid is just like gushing? No, you're not gonna see like-

• 48:45Lex Fridman?

  To inspire the kid.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:46Lex Fridman?

  Inspire.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:47Lex Fridman?

  Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching, yeah. She's a big fan. Me, she doesn't care for, but you.

• 48:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, excellent. We take those we love for granted. This is in Manhattan.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  This is in Westchester County, New York.

• 49:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay, got it. So, okay, so, but then, that's where the dream is born.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Lex Fridman?

  But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist. So going to university, graduate school, postdoc, and all the way to where you are today. What's, what's, uh, what's that? What are some notable moments in that journey?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  So I call that the academic Hunger Games, you know, because it's like you're, you're competing against like these people, you know, who are just getting smarter all the time as you're getting smarter all the time. They're, they want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots. Like there's fewer slots to get into college than in high school. There's fewer slots in graduate school, there's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc, and many, many, maybe infinitesimal number, you know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego, 400 applicants for one position. It's almost getting impossible. Like, I almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to become a assistant professor at a state university that they're doing. Like, it takes so much courage to do that. Um, so I went from, you know, this kid in New York, uh, thinking I would never be a professional astronomer.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  A, because I didn't know any, I'd never seen any, I didn't even know that they existed. And I thought, who the hell's going to pay me to look at the stars? Like, will they pay me to be like an ice cream taster? Like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did. Um, and then I went to graduate school. And, um, and during graduate school, I had this kind of, um, on again, off again, relationship with my father. And I knew that he was a mathematician. He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country. I didn't see him for 15 years. And in that time, I learned a lot about him. And I learned that he had gotten very interested, not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed seminal work on, on theophantine equations, which, you know, play a role in Turing's work that you may have seen.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics. And by that time, I was at Brown University. And I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist. I never thought I'd be a theorist, and I'm not a theorist, so it was pretty prescient. And but it always appealed to me like, why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old? Like, we often forget about like those, you know, primitive things about us are probably the most sustainable, durable and resilient attributes of our character. So with my own kids, I look like, what are they interested in now when they're young? And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do. I mean, some of them want to play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite play, which there are, but you know, the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.

• 51:35Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you, is your father still with us?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:41Lex Fridman?

  Just in a small tangent.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you miss him? Do you think about him? Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did in very many ways. And he's been gone for a long time now. Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity. I don't think it's the most limited quantity. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But but to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that we have while we're alive. And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics. For me, it was the foundations of the universe and how did it come to be? And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein. Really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics. But this is an exciting time. The COBE satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth. And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm gonna do and what I'm most interested in. But always throughout that, I wanted to understand, I didn't want to be a wrench monkey. No offense to people that just do experiment.

• 52:52Lex Fridman?

  And no offense to monkeys.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  No offense to monkeys. That's right. This little guy, sorry, man. But thinking back to what animates me, it's not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data, but there's a lot of steps. I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw. So I always joke with my theorist friends, you know, call me a closeted theorist, you know, like, I want to be, you know, what they call a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer. So I want to be like, like that for physics, right? Like for theoretical physics. I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.

• 53:28Lex Fridman?

  I love that formulation of a theorist is understanding.

• 53:34Lex Fridman?

  The source of the signal you're getting, like signal is primary, like the, the thing you measure is primary and theory is just the search of explaining how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal. I mean, I, I see the same search for the human mind and like neuroscience in that same kind of way is it's ultimately about the signal, but you kind of hope to understand how that signal originated. That's fascinating. That's, uh, that's such a beautiful way to, to explain experimental physics. Cause it, it ultimately at the end of the day is all about the signal.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And maybe those two things, the, the neuroscience and like cosmos, uh, not getting too romantic, but yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way. I mean, some fundamental conscious cosmic consciousness, but, um,

• 54:30Lex Fridman?

  We're gonna get to that.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, we definitely have to. But getting back to, yeah. So, so my origins. So I always say like, and I want to try this on you. You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm gonna ask you some questions. What's the most important day on the calendar? Don't tell me the date, but what to you, what is your, what's the most important day to you every year?

• 54:47Lex Fridman?

  Do I have to answer or do I have to think about?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  No, no, just answer. Like you don't have to tell me the exact date of the calendar. It could be like your mistress's, you know, uh, birthday or whatever, but

• 54:54Lex Fridman?

  I have so many, I lose track. Even though I'm single, how does that even make sense?

• 54:59Speaker 01

  I know.

• 55:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I'm sorry. Uh, so I, a day like, like, uh, like a month and a day. Yeah. I mean, for me it would be December 31st.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Uh, some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth. They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right? January means the portal between the God was the portal between the beginning and the end. So you're looking back maybe because you're Russian, you know, like the death side, the light side, looking forward into January, the beginning, right? Um, so, um, everybody's most important

• 55:33Speaker 01

  It's usually some beginning or something significant. For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all is like, when did the universe get born? As I said before, and I didn't think there, again, I didn't, I just, there was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get past because I didn't think like anybody does it. Like I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time between 10 and 20 billion years old. Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old. It's incredible, the five digit, you know, per significant.

• 56:03Lex Fridman?

  What is it again? 13 point?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  13.872 billion years. 872 million.

• 56:10Lex Fridman?

  So is there a lot of plus or minus on that? Is it, what are the error bars on that?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  For me, I'm 50. So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.

• 56:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  So half a percent, percent level accuracy.

• 56:21Lex Fridman?

  There's a confidence behind that?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I mean, there's this significance. Yeah, no, it's extremely well measured. I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have. In contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be, as they are, about 12 billion years old or in the universe that were 12 billion. So that would be like you being older than your father. It was embarrassing.

• 56:47Lex Fridman?

  Can we, can we actually take a tangent on a tangent, a tangent on a tangent? How old is the universe? Can you, can you dig in onto this number? How do we know currently with those, I guess you said five, four or five? Significant digits.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  So we can come about it from two different ways. One, basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units. It has the units of kilometers per second, per megaparsec. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what is the speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away. So a galaxy at one megaparsec away, this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects. But if you go out, say one megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you. And every galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half

• 57:43Speaker 01

  a dozen galaxies, out of 50 to, sorry, sorry, out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies. So 12 out of that number are moving towards us, the rest are moving away from us. So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other, all those galaxies, now they're really far apart, we know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve. When were they touching? That's where you get that number from.

• 58:11Lex Fridman?

  So there's the local 12 and then the rest.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Ignore the 12, yeah.

• 58:14Lex Fridman?

  And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others and yeah, then solve the algebra problem. How does the, and the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this calculation of?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Very little, because actually we understand how, there's some other ingredients that go into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, there are, and how much ordinary matter like we're made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.

• 58:44Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so the

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Morons.

• 58:50Lex Fridman?

  It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older. How does that make sense?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah. So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe.

• 59:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Naively, you would say that, you know, so you're right, if the universe were static, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe, so the universe just started off, those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us, away from us, who knows, that you could say, I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light. That would be true. But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe, so imagine there was some very distant past, we were near a galaxy, it's going to produce some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us, the light's going to be getting more and more red shifted, as it's called, and it's going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on, there'll be

• 59:54Speaker 01

  some acceleration as we get into the era of dark energy. The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which, which represents all the events that we could have received information From we can't currently communicate with that galaxy. It it sent us some light and now it's moving away and it sent us some light. And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe. That's why they're red shifting. That we can see things to out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing. And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see this called the age of the universe 15 billion years, just to make the math simple. We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction. And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction, just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. So I'm conjecture. There's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.

• 1:01:10Lex Fridman?

  How are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding? So like,

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.

• 1:01:19Lex Fridman?

  I grew up in the Soviet Union. We watched propaganda.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  I realized that you did. Yes. So there's a famous.

• 1:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Annie Hall is that some kind of?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  It's a comedy or propagandist. Movie with Woody Allen, certainly canceled, but nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet. He made a movie called Annie Hall in which as a self depiction, he's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David. Neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother, he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. His mother says, why? Goes, because the universe is expanding and it keeps on expanding. Everything will rip apart and we'll never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless. I assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to. And and she goes, what are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. And that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Oftentimes I get asked, what is the universe expanding into? That's one of my favorite questions. What is it expanding into? And I say, it's actually an easy question. If you think about it. You've seen your friend Elon, he goes on space. He's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take, if you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket, you know, sip in some tang. Screw on the cover of it. What's in there? Is it empty?

• 1:02:39Lex Fridman?

  Uh, that's just semantics, I guess. Uh, yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  No, it's definitely not empty.

• 1:02:45Lex Fridman?

  So you step outside the rocket?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space, the quote unquote vacuum of space.

• 1:02:49Lex Fridman?

  And there's no more liquid in it?

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  There's no more liquid in it. No, it's just a, just a container, one cubic centimeter. Let's just make it simple. One cubic centimeter of a box and you take it out into space outside of the Falcon, whatever, right?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  What's inside that box? It's not empty. There's actually, I'm gonna say, this is gonna set your friends up. There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second.

• 1:03:15Lex Fridman?

  Okay, all right. Hold on a second. What? Four, 420, that's, uh, I've heard of that number before. All right, let's.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  It used to be 69, but then they changed.

• 1:03:26Lex Fridman?

  Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  In a millimeter box, it's 69.

• 1:03:30Lex Fridman?

  What, what are we talking about here? What, uh, what's in, what's, what's in the box?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get, that's right. Let's think outside the box. No, we're thinking inside the box. So if you have, oh, every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the big bang. Dark matter particles, there's a little ordinary matter in the universe. And every cubic centimeter, there's some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera. There is actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter. Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe. It's enormous. That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe. It's a very rich universe. But now let's zoom in on that box. So now, inside that box, there might be, you know, one, let's, let's say there might be one ordinary matter, like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a, um, a lepton.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  There might be a couple, some, um, a couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420. What's between those guys?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  What's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons? Like, just zoom into a cubic micron now. Like, imagine 420 things inside a box this big. It's actually pretty empty. Like, they're just zipping around in there, right? So between them, there's a lot of empty space.

• 1:04:43Lex Fridman?

  And this is outside the kind of physics-based models of fields and all those kinds of things. Just like, just asking the question of, like, what is this emptiness?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Particle content in the universe, in every cubic centimeter of the universe.

• 1:04:57Lex Fridman?

  Outside of the 420. So you have the 420.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  420.

• 1:05:00Lex Fridman?

  They have some, you know, they have some mass.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Well, they have the energy, they don't have mass. Photons don't have mass.

• 1:05:06Lex Fridman?

  Energy.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  That's why they don't bring suitcases. You know, that's true, right? Photons never bring suitcases with you, with them, because they're traveling light. See, I don't even get a laugh out of you.

• 1:05:16Lex Fridman?

  That's.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Corny dad jokes, okay? You'll appreciate some.

• 1:05:18Lex Fridman?

  No, this is pretty good. It's just, I'm laughing on the insides. What's in the box? What's the 420? What's between the photons?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  That's what space is. That's what the universe is expanding into.

• 1:05:29Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that's, that's, that's the notebook.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Lex Fridman?

  On which the photons are written.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's beautiful.

• 1:05:36Lex Fridman?

  But still, thank you. Still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable that if the universe is expanding, that this thing is expanding. The canvas is expanding. It's very strange. Because like, if we were just sitting there still, I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing's expanding. So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we don't get to experience this kind of expansion.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray. But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so-called four fundamental forces. And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness. Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda Galaxy at some enormous rate of speed because of its massive countergravitational force, the force we exert on it. So gravity is enormously long-range, but incredibly weak. And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right? Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from each other.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And those can change, those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity. So it's weak and what we experience as gravity is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvalinear. That's what we experience as gravity. You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline. That's almost right because it's actually, you have to visualize that now in four dimensions, like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object, including on the sides. It becomes very hard to visualize, so a lot of people use that. It's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity. So it's a little overburdening analogy.

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  But, okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish wrote the foreword to your book. How do gravitational waves fit into all of this? How do they, on the emotional level, how do they make you feel that they're just moving spacetime?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so gravitational waves were, the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time, you know, it was discovered twice indirectly by two men named Hulson-Taylor. And that was given my first year of graduate school. The day I entered graduate school almost, they announced these two guys won it. And the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.

• 1:08:12Lex Fridman?

  Is this in the 40s?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  This was, no, this is 1990.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  That was a joke.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was good, that was good. I got it, I got it. You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing. And to a tennis player.

• 1:08:23Lex Fridman?

  Not on Tinder.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:08:25Lex Fridman?

  All right, sorry.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Gravitational waves do fit in because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything, and that they're directly detectable. We're using them to try to confirm. If or if not inflation occurred. So did inflation the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe? Did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that. Through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  that Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us, a billion years ago. But we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch. However, those, we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang. So if you want to measure, let's say you have the old time firecracker, let's say there's a firecracker and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang, not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues, but instead

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe. We're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.

• 1:10:04Lex Fridman?

  And hope you can, so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy for the exposure?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  So the signal, as I said, is, so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe. However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is. We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is. We're looking for what its polarization is.

• 1:10:29Lex Fridman?

  And we'll go, let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter? 420 is the number?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Centimeter.

• 1:10:35Lex Fridman?

  But cubic centimeter, 420 is the number. I wonder if Elon knows this, and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:10:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, okay. Funding secured. Excellent. So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph.

• 1:10:55Lex Fridman?

  Of that you described in losing the Nobel Prize. So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Lex Fridman?

  Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are? Bicep three, perhaps the instruments that can detect this kind of polarization? What are the challenges? The origin story, the whole thing?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, well, the origin story goes back again to like a father-son rivalry. It really does. It was my father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize. And, you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know? Oh, I was a football player in high school. I'll show you and whatever, wrestling, whatever. And some of us could be healthy too. But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy. Like, we would compete and, you know, he was much more of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist. So we had both different ideas and what was worth prioritizing our time. But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize. And I knew I could kind of outdo him. So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, miniscule kind of character wise saying that.

• 1:11:56Lex Fridman?

  The only reason you could outdo him is because the fields model is given every four years.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And only if you're under 40, which he was.

• 1:12:03Lex Fridman?

  So he's working under much more limited conditions.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  That's right. So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it. But I wanted to do something big and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally be realized as an discovery for the ages. As in fact, it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.

• 1:12:25Lex Fridman?

  So you were from the beginning, reaching for the big questions?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  That's all I care.

• 1:12:30Lex Fridman?

  So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  That's all I wanted to do. I felt like if it's not, you know, if it's, if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me, to carry me through, to give me the, you know, the, you know, I always say, passion is great when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough. Passion is like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.

• 1:12:57Lex Fridman?

  So then? You swung through the fences with bicep one. What is this?

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  So bicep one was born out of a kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc. So an academic hunger games.

• 1:13:11Lex Fridman?

  Stanford.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Stanford University. Yeah, it's this small little school. It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you're affiliated with. But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor. She had gotten there only a year before I got there. And she had her own priorities, the things that she wanted to do. But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different. She was studying galaxies at high redshift, and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this type of technology. And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine, who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Heminkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope. We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope. We needed a tiny refracting telescope,

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  no bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across. And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, sized telescope could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky. They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky. And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively, as close as you get to proof, there could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch. Inflation being the signal originally conceived of by Alan Guth to explain why the universe had the large scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry. So there's no, there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  You can do that with spacecraft. You can do that with stars. You can do that with laser beams. You can do that with three different galaxies. All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry. It's remarkable, but it's also unstable. It's very unlikely. It's very seemingly finely tuned. And that was one of the motivations that Guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979, when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack. And he was trying to get a permanent job. I was trying to like make my name for myself. And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this, this professor at Stanford to do a job for her. And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you. And then one day she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and planning his experiments. And I just, I wasn't, no.

• 1:15:21Lex Fridman?

  You had big ideas in your mind. You were planning big experiments.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Lex Fridman?

  And that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Lex Fridman?

  Where you have to, you know, publish basic papers, deliver on some basic deadlines for a project, all those kinds of things.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  And support your advisors paying, she was paying me.

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  And so one day I came in and, um, and it actually, uh, involved another friend of mine, astronomer named Jill Tarter, one of the pioneers in the SETI, um, science, uh, business of detecting extraterrestrials, which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens. So I'm sure we won't get into aliens. Uh, but Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her. Can you introduce me? And she said, no, in fact, you're fired. My, my boss. So I was like, is this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me. I didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it, but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path. I mean, literally it brings me here today in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech,

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  which is in Pasadena. And, um, and she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, a man by the name Andrew Lang. And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like, um, he's like a Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, idea man, not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything, but understood the, where things are going decades from now. And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat, very close to flat, um, along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton by Limon Page and other collaborators.

• 1:17:02Lex Fridman?

  So the shape of the universe is flat?

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  The geometry of the universe is flat.

• 1:17:06Lex Fridman?

  How, how, how did he do that experiment?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  So he used the cosmic microwave background. And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe. So you can measure triangles on earth. You can actually, it's hard to show that the earth is curved, but you can show the earth is curved using triangles, mountain tops, et cetera. If you have an accurate enough protractor.

• 1:17:24Lex Fridman?

  Allegedly, yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  God, you're like auto canceling. This is great. My ratings are gonna go up, man. This is gonna be great.

• 1:17:33Lex Fridman?

  If you want actual science, go listen to Brian. If you want all of these conspiracy theories or AKA the truth about flat earth, listen to me.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  So what he used was the following triangle. There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB. The cosmic microwave background has these patches. And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe, which is hydrogen. It's very simple material. Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation. Very simple plasma physicist's son. Understand it. The diameter is, you know, one base of the triangle and then the distance to the earth is the other two legs. So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and then University of Rome and that's other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle effectively, very,

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  very accurately and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.

• 1:18:30Lex Fridman?

  Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB? Can you know like where they could like trace them back location wise?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  You can know where they are, but more than that, there's so many of these patches. They're about one square degree on the sky. The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere. So there's literally 44,000 of these sized patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build up very good statistics. That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang, but they did measure very accurately the, what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.

• 1:19:08Lex Fridman?

  That's fast. So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees to cover a sphere. That's a, it's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and you're looking out into the, into the observable universe. So there's a lot of. There's a lot of patches to work with.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning in the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles called heel, heel, heel pics is what it's called.

• 1:19:44Lex Fridman?

  And it's just to stitch all this stuff together and that's, and stitch it together very accurately.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors, very clean signal and a measurement device to reduce the systematic errors. Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement. Those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the number of the, the one over the square root of the number of measurements. But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big. So they were able to get a very accurate measurement. Again, it's not exactly how they did it. They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration, windows. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Image analysis and then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different numbers

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  that go into a model that made a prediction. And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out. And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature and that was called boomerang. So he had just come off of this. Now, let me remind you, who was the first person, you know, to measure the curvature of the earth? It's a guy named Aristophanes in the, you know, whatever, lived around Aristotle's time. His name is in the history books. So this guy Andrew Lang, I was like, he's like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes. Like, I just wanted to work for this guy. You know, he was clearly had this brand. He was about 40 at the time, California scientist of the year. I, I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that. And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk and he said, you know, I love it. You got a job. And before I could even,

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take it, you know, like it was too good to be true. And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely, because Caltech's a rich private university, at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore. He just wrote us a check, Paul Tamar wrote us a check and said, get started in this idea. And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named bicep, background imaging, cosmic extragalactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization. We'll get to that in a minute. But along the way, the idea was very simple. We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope. Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head. Only way forward is making things more complex, right? And

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic errors. And so we wanted to build the cleanest instrument. Turns out the cleanest instrument you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope. We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that were cooled less than 1/20th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe. So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole, Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch. There

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  it is over there. So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.

• 1:22:49Lex Fridman?

  Bright, oh yeah. As long as somebody was born in the Soviet Union, we obviously like to call it red. United States Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar Station. So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it. Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica, you can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole. There's no land at the North Pole, right? So what did he do? He stuck it on the ocean underneath. But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago, the first time in human history. Antarctica means the opposite of the bear. It means like no bears there, like basically opposite of where polar bears are. Arctic is polar bear. That's where in Greek.

• 1:23:43Lex Fridman?

  Didn't I know that?

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  So Antarctica means the opposite place of that. So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of the continent. We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry. It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas, and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on earth. Of course, you'd like to go into space. There's no water in space.

• 1:24:08Lex Fridman?

  So it's not about, it's not about cold, it's about dry.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka and you could put it in this cup, right? And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up. After two minutes, the water's, three minutes, the water's boiling. You can't touch it. Take it from me, don't touch it. But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right? Why? Because the mug is totally bone dry. But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies. So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them, traveling per cubic centimeter from the big bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the earth's atmosphere. So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per, per square centimeter of, of surface area.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  And that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simon's Observatory is located. Or you take it to the South Pole. We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there. And it's like being on Hoth. You know, it's like, it's a completely otherworldly environment. Ice, planar, flat as a pancake. You like, and, and the buildings are built up on stilts. They're built up because the snow will otherwise cover them over. The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away. If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there. If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down there. The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself. Taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.

• 1:25:45Lex Fridman?

  It's a harsh condition. Science in the harshest of conditions.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  On Earth at least. And we go to those great lengths because it's a pristine environment to observe these precious photons. And we built this telescope and it weighs, you know, tens of thousands of pounds. And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot. I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended. It needed, we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends a year of their life down there. They're called winter overs. They arrive in sometimes as early as November and they don't leave until the following December. And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000. You just have to work for one night of your life. That's, that's all. But it's a long night. And what bicep is, and I couldn't bring my, my polarized sunglasses here. So I brought these actual

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  polarizers here. So if you take this and put in front of your telescope there, you have now made a polarimeter. You have made a polarization sensitive telescope. Now, you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing. But one way to think about it, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one up to your eye, and now put the other one in front of it, anywhere, and now rotate them. What happens to the light source?

• 1:27:01Lex Fridman?

  It becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's called a quadrupolar pattern, right? So it's repeating. It goes bright, dim, bright, dim. It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation. And that's because of the property of the photon. The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is it's the axis at which its electric field is oscillating. Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down. And so therefore, vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization. And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation. It's just like a spin, a spin two object. So now if you put that in front of the telescope. You can do one of two things. Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  you have one of the polarizers and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one. You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization. Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here. There's a crystal. It's called calcite. This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Fridman. This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me, what does it look like?

• 1:28:10Lex Fridman?

  There's a...

• 1:28:14Lex Fridman?

  Like I could see everything twice.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  It's a double image.

• 1:28:16Lex Fridman?

  It's a double image.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction. So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into two different directions. And it could split even more if I made the crystal, give you my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.

• 1:28:33Lex Fridman?

  What is the crystal with this kind of property called?

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  It's called calcite. This is crystal. It's called bi-refringent crystal. Bi means two, refringent means refracting. So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.

• 1:28:47Lex Fridman?

  Pretty clean by signal.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Lex Fridman?

  It's cleanly two.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Lex Fridman?

  I'm seeing two very cleanly.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  It's very crisp. Right. So that's, that's yours to keep with every time you host me. Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.

• 1:29:02Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Put it on top of the crystal and kind of move it back and forth.

• 1:29:07Lex Fridman?

  Wow. This is incredible. You can switch as you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other. So it's one of the refractions to the other. Whoa.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  So that is now you are analyzing the polarization. You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization. And effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave. So our detector, that's where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime of the electromagnetic spectrum. And we're coupling that to a refracting telescope. But your eyes are refracting telescopes. So you are a polarimeter right now. The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization. But otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color. That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.

• 1:29:54Lex Fridman?

  So you're devising an instrument that's very precisely measuring that polarization?

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human eyes retina cells, but of superconductors and things called ballometers. And, and this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero, under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.

• 1:30:18Lex Fridman?

  So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize?

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously. There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories. Now, why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers? Bell Laboratories was kind of like, like Apple, or, you know, it was like a think tank, or, you know, it was Google. Let's say it was like Google. Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing, right? So they were working there, but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers, like they were actively recruiting them. Why would they do that? Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launch for communication. And so, so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T and the telephone,

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone, the year I was born. And they would take that, 1946, and they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed, and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal to noise of the satellites that they were seeing. And they found they couldn't. They found that they could not improve the signal to noise ratio of the first telecommunications satellite. It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second Malcolm. And they were bouncing signals from, you know, from the west coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing it in New Jersey, of all places, in northern, northern New Jersey, Holmdel, New Jersey. And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal. So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York. Let's see if the signal's coming from New

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  York. Nope, not coming from New York. Let's see if it changes with the year. Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.

• 1:31:58Lex Fridman?

  So in the, not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was...

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  It was noise. They knew the signal was right. They couldn't get rid of the noise. And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm. He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that he could not get rid of, that had a value of about three Kelvin. So you can translate, remember I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot, the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object. It's a principle of radio thermodynamics. So it's a really interesting thing. It's a thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth. It's amazing. They were, and so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its temperature.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  So he found, this guy Edward Ohm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid of it, it must be I did my era analysis wrong. And I would give him an F if he was one of my, you know, first year students, but he's just attributed to lack of understanding. These other guys, Penzias and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let's build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration. Put, inject a known source of signal every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they're trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible. They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even, by the end, maybe millions of measurements

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  for sure. And they found they couldn't get rid of it either, but they measured it was exactly 2.7265, you know, degrees Kelvin.

• 1:33:39Lex Fridman?

  So how does, having a four Kelvin source, how does the calibration work?

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  It could be, it could be larger. Imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone, like you could do it with like a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress. So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I've ever worked on, and they only have a linear region over a very small region, and you want to keep it as linear as possible. That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of, you're trying to compare like a voice, and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine, it's not as, it's not going to be as, as easy on the, on the amplifiers as getting, you know, a slightly loud, a gong or something, you know.

• 1:34:14Lex Fridman?

  So the idea of the noise is present in both?

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  There's noise present in both and you get you measure what they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well. Four Kelvin is the temperature of liquid helium. That's a temperature that's not going to change and it's certainly not going to change over time scale of one second. And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal, like a scale, like a balance. So another way to think about it is like this, you've seen these Libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan, right? What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight and you don't get any measurement, right? You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight. That's why they use four Kelvin.

• 1:34:53Lex Fridman?

  Got it. But just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're arriving at the same temperature. That's kind of fascinating. And you're measuring stuff in terms of you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at the source.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Lex Fridman?

  So you get to, I mean, there's something about temperature that's intimate.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Lex Fridman?

  It's cool.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way. And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking for the signal. They found it accidentally, these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson. And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science. Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like, the most important reaction as a scientist is not eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it. No, he said, no, he said, like, that's weird. Like, that's a much better reaction. Or that's freaking cool. Like, that's a scientist, not like, oh, I found one. Because

• 1:35:54Lex Fridman?

  Surprise.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because if you find what you're gonna find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias, which is deadly. And so, you know, as close to deadly as possible.

• 1:36:05Lex Fridman?

  So how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  So Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal. They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera. And that was a serendipitous discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978. It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology. My reasoning is, what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science? So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt, had told me and Andrew Lang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize, if you could do it. Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like superfluidity, plasma physics. When you talk about the

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  origin of the universe, it ties into everything. It ties into philosophy, theology. You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that the Bible can't be correct. In other words, if the Bible is correct now, it isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it. I'm not, I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously. But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning. What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular? It was, it would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative. So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher. And again, it's not an offense, because we need plasma physics, we need, we need every type of physics except maybe biophysics. Like, we literally use every branch of physics, thermodynamics,

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  superconductivity, quantum mechanics, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument. And even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we purport to measure. So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Holson Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before LIGO, by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983, these are like five Nobel Prizes, you know, potentially. For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk, to outdo what my father did, to do, you know, really

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  this impossible. And at that time, Lex, you know, again, I'm You know, it sounds weird because people like, oh, you wouldn't, you know, you, you don't really, you know, you still want the Nobel Prize, you're still like greedy and look, you wrote another book about, um, and I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature, you know, and if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.

• 1:38:45Lex Fridman?

  But, um, Oh, wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on. But so there's this ambition, let's say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many of the mysteries about the early universe. And so there's excitement there. So let's take it then further. I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak. Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list of three that would get the Nobel Prize. So why were you excluded? Maybe that's a place to tell the story of bicep two.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So bicep two, like, you know, iPhones, or I know you're an Android fanboy, but, um, you know, every year they get a little bit better. They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever. Okay. Right. We upgraded our detectors as well. The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors. They, they have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale. And we wanted to make them into, uh, into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them. Why superconductors? Well, again, we're measuring heat. So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range. That means you can use that

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer. And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, Jamie Bach, and nowadays Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, um, they are just exquisitely making these, these sensors, tens of thousands of them. The initial bicep one instrument, of course, we just call it a bicep, uh, that only had 98 detectors. Simon's Observatory is going to have a hundred times more, just in one of our four telescopes. We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full time at point one degree above absolute zero in the Atacama Desert. We'll get there, but.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  In the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded, made Bicep 2. In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole, in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day, we installed a new receiver on the same platform as before. It had very similar, identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors. So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade. And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  of five. And then we started observing with that. And we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything. Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of spacetime produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to. So I was playing a role in that. Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for Bicep with, along with Andrew Lang. And in January of 2010, we were, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew Lang's, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards, at UC Berkeley. And he said Andrew is dead. He had taken his life by suicide. And this is a man, and I'd already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  to me, Andrew. He would give me advice on marriage, and like how I should be with my kids, and, and, you know, what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder. Again, he was pretty naturally suited to win the Nobel Prize. Everyone always thought he would win it. He's still, you know, if he were alive, he still could win it. In fact, his wife, or his ex-wife, won it, Frances Arnold, in 2018. And, you know, it was just a power couple. And it destroyed me for a long time, because, you know, he was, he was just this magical person. I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like, you know, these, these aspects of raising kids and being married without him. And to

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  do it in that way, it felt like, again, I'm not, you know, he's got kids, and I feel terrible for, for them, obviously. But it did feel like a betrayal. I mean, I'm just being honest with you. It felt like, why the F did you not reach out? You know, I thought we were close. And I couldn't, you know? I told him everything. And I felt like he had told me everything. And now he was gone. And then inevitably, we had to keep running the instrument. I mean, there's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard. And then here we were. And like, who's going to take over the lead? He was the lead of the project at Caltech. And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, they

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  had, you know, decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the principal investigator. I was no longer one of the co-principal investigators as I was on BICEP1. So I continued on BICEP1 as the co-leader of it, but not on BICEP2. And, you know, obviously, that was pretty painful.

• 1:43:53Lex Fridman?

  This is all happening at the same time as you, as you lose this father figure. Now there's this kind of, this one betrayal in this, in a way, and then there's another betrayal, or something that feels like a betrayal.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he had, you know, kind of been the one, the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment. I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix, all of whom had come there to work with him to get the, you know, the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off, as it did for mine. And, you know, so there was a competition. I mean, science is not free from egos and, and competition and desires, rightfully or wrongfully, for credit and attribution.

• 1:44:36Lex Fridman?

  Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist, as a man? I mean, we're, we're kind of alone in this world. As when you take on difficult things, we often kind of grasp at a few folks that give us strength.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Lex Fridman?

  Was he your, basically, your only source of strength in this whole journey? Like, primarily in terms of like this close knit?

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  As a scientist, there were really two. There was one, this Russian cosmologist, Alexander Polnarev, who thankfully is very much alive. He was at Queen Mary University. Now, he's retired. He was kind of a theoretical, you know, cosmological father to me. And then Andrew was, was this counterpoint that was teaching me. You need to have a brand as a scientist. Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it. Some of them don't burnish it. But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students, involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona? And he was the exemplar for that. In addition to being the avuncular, you know, father figure type character that really, you know, was the person I would talk to.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  I had issues with, when I had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those were. And he would tell me, you know, his misgivings about, about people that he worked with or things in his personal life. And it was, it was, it was devastating. But again, like, who the hell am I? I'm not his kid. You know, he, his kids lost father, you know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in that sense, but it's just a reality, you know?

• 1:46:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, there is something that's not often talked about is people who collaborate on scientific efforts. I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't want to compare, but you know, it's, it's sometimes when the collaborations are truly great, it sounds similar as when veterans talk about their time serving together. There's, there's a bond that's formed. So like comparing family and this kind of thing is, you know, it is not productive, but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real because you're taking on something, you're taking on the impossible.

• 1:46:50Lex Fridman?

  You're, you're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness, this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is. And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science. And you're doing that together with like a confidence you probably should not have.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Lex Fridman?

  But you're boldly pushing through. And then for him to, to take his own life. Can I ask you about this kind of moment that combined? I don't want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that Bicep Two kind of goes on without you, even though you're part of it, you're not part of the leadership group.

• 1:47:34Lex Fridman?

  Can you describe those low points?

• 1:47:38Lex Fridman?

  Was there depression? Or was there a crumbling of confidence?

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it was it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like, there's only a few different ways to have identity and, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically. One of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary identity. Now I've got other, you know, husband and father. But but, you know, at that time, that was my identity. So to have that kind of taken away, it, you know what? It reminded me of being, you know, kind of adopted in a sense like my, like the one who created me or that I had played, you know, played a role in my life, that he abandoned me in the sense it felt like these people are abandoning me. And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy that you use is like in milit, in

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  the war, they're all working, you know, for common good. It's not like I want to be and get the most kills or even I compare it more to like a band, like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did. And then they like, you know, they ripped apart because of egos, credit, they had solo careers, they had, you know, relations with their intimates and so forth. And and there it's not only for the common good. There is more of a zero sum aspect. Like I always say, science is not, science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You never get to the, oh, we won science and even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like, oh, we're done. They feel like a lot of times they're imposters, even to that day. However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of, lot of finite games where there is only one winner for tenure.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  There is only three winner, are only three winners for the Nobel Prize. And because of that, I think it's heterodox and it's very confusing, especially there's no guide. I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group, how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unreal graduate student or two, you know? And so we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it, because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old, dates back to Bologna, northern Italy, 1088 or so, first universities were established. And, you know, very little has changed. There's some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock and, you know, lecturing in front. And there's only one better aspect

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  nowadays is that back then, the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor, and then he or she wouldn't get paid. Probably mostly it was he's back then. Nowadays, that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure. So, okay. But, but no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me because, you know, here's, he was like my consigliere. He was a guy I, you know, sought counsel and counseled me. And he's dead. And I felt like there is no one who's going to honor the agreements that we had. And he was a very soulful person. He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be. And just a loss for the cosmos. It just really hurt. And, you know, I thought, oh, like, you

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  know, it's so sad because he could have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think like that anymore. First, I think about his kids. Felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize. And hence, the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize. It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with. It's a double entendre. Like, we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out. We can talk about that a different time. But in the context of like, now, thinking back on it, that was such a miniscule part of it. Because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize, or I did win the, or, you know, any of us did. Would that have changed anything? Would that have brought anything back? It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity, it's futility. And, and, and I just, you know,

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  for me, the Nobel Prize is like, it's, I don't want to say it's like insignificant, because obviously, it has a lot of power and it has influence. And, you know, I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show, I'm going to name drop, okay? And he prepares. He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show. So you see him going on Colbert Report, you think, oh, they just have a banter, or he's just naturally gifted. No, he said, no, You say that you're undermining what he does. What he does, he goes back. He watches the last month of Colbert Reports, or whatever it's called, Late Show. And he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions? How long in the news cycle does he go back? What topics has he talked about with people similar to me? So I took Neil, and I did that for you.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  And I look back. How many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and Prize? And I put it into Google N-gram, and out came exactly the same number of times as show notes, show episodes as of this moment. So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.

• 1:52:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right? Like, it's so, it's both sad and beautiful that a little prize, like a little award, a medal, a little plaque, they'll be most likely forgotten by history completely. Some silly list. It's somehow a catalyst for greatness. It resulted in you doing your life's work. The dream of it.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize? You know, I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened. So no, it definitely has a place. And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it. But the level of obsession that academics have about it is really, I think it is almost unbalanced, becoming unhealthy. And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize. Obviously, I've, you know, now I've had 11 on the show. And to think about, you know, like, the one rule. So by the way, right after the denouement of the story, which I'll get to in a bit, you know, how our dreams went down to dust and ashes.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. So like, the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually. They asked me to nominate. Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say, Brian. You know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if, if you say, Brian, would you like to come on the Lex Fridman podcast? I say, you know what, Lex? You know that guy Rogan? I think you might, can you introduce him to me? Like, do you imagine how that would feel? Like, you'd be like, you know, so I was asked to nominate the winners. And the one rule that they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they maintained. In other words, he, he said, one person can win it for something they discovered

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better, right? None of that was mentioned in the letter. It said, many people can win it for what worked on long ago. They didn't mention anything in the letter to me, signed by the Secretary General, nothing about benefiting mankind. They said, just one thing, can't nominate yourself. So none of these guys nominated themselves.

• 1:54:41Lex Fridman?

  Actually, a little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you. That, that rule was created just for you.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  That's called the Keating Correlate. Yes, exactly.

• 1:54:52Lex Fridman?

  Just to like.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Good for them.

• 1:54:55Lex Fridman?

  Rub it in. I mean, it's, in this particular case, of course, there's like some weird technicality or whatever. But in this particular case, it's kind of a powerful reminder.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Lex Fridman?

  That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Lex Fridman?

  And that there's stories behind all of that.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, here's a good example. Again, this is my friend Barry Barish. He's become like a mentor and a friend. He wrote the foreword to this, my book, Into the Buzz. He, he won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died. And he admits it. And he said it. And actually, it's funny with him because I've, I've heard you talk, you know, very rhapsodically and lovingly and romantically about with Harry Cliff and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is, and how in that, you know, we were about to build the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas, and it didn't get built and got canceled by Congress and blah, blah. And I'd say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. And he's like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, the, even though

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  it did get canceled, the Europeans went on to build it themselves, saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars, and we We wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new, as proven by the fact that, as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out. And actually, he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit, along with his collaborators, an LHCb experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about. But, but the bottom line is, it was really built to detect the Higgs. So the SSC, for twice as much money, would have sucked up Barry's career. He would have been working on that, maybe not. And then he would never have worked on LIGO. And then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right? So you look at counterfactual history. That's not actually a big stretch, right? If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on, because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Second thing, if, imagine the following thing had happened. They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for the inspiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind, so one solar mass worth of matter, got mass, got converted to pure gravitational energy, no light seen by them. This particular date, September 15th, September 14th, 2015, okay? That explosion, because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in still, and they never will. Okay, that, if that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. Because

• 1:57:42Lex Fridman?

  It's hilarious to think that there is one human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things collided.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  A billion, 200 million years ago. And if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30, because that was the deadline. For the Nobel Prize to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January. So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything and there were just rumors. And so they, he didn't, he, but the reason that he wouldn't have won it because there was another guy who was still alive, considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it, and the third gentleman at Caltech, named Ron Drever, who passed away again. He was alive in 2016. He died in the middle of 2017 and then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

• 1:58:31Lex Fridman?

  And here we are, several billion of hairless apes that strangely wear clothing, celebrated three other clothed, hairless apes with a medal, with one, with one particular element. And then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  And bend down to get those medals in front of another guy, who wears even fancier clothes, who is the king of Sweden and.

• 1:59:02Lex Fridman?

  And then they got some free food afterwards.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  They got some reindeer meat. That's right.

• 1:59:06Lex Fridman?

  Okay, excellent. Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of bicep two? I want to kind of speak at a high level about a particular thing I observed. So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast, just listening to the podcast. I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28Lex Fridman?

  And it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia. So grad school, getting my PhD, I go to MIT and then Google and then just looking at this whole world of research.

• 1:59:45Lex Fridman?

  What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world.

• 1:59:53Lex Fridman?

  Is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them. He gets like genuinely, and I now know this from just being a friend privately. He genuinely gets excited by the success of others. And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing to me. Because the natural, just on a basic human level, there is an excitement. But the nature of that excitement is more like, I'm happy for my friend, but I'm really jealous. And I want to even outdo them. I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better. So even that's even for friends.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:35Lex Fridman?

  So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others. And then couple that with just the you now as a, as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling, which is like, there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others. You, people in academia are often best equipped technically in terms of language to celebrate others. They understand the beauty, like the, the full richness of why the, the cool idea is as cool as it is. And they're in the best position to celebrate it. And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the cover of nature, whatever. And not me.

• 2:01:20Lex Fridman?

  It's, they turn it into zero sum game. What I, the reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Lex Fridman?

  And, and forget money and all those kinds of things that I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money. And so they're fighting for this. I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way. I think, uh, I think you, you can have a limited amount of money, the battle for money. Happens in the space of proposal, there's networking, there's private stuff. Public celebration of others and all and just actually just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money. It has to do with you having a big ego, not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey that we're all on.

• 2:02:15Lex Fridman?

  And there's folks like Joe Rogan, who in a comedian circles is also rare. But he inspired all these other comedians to realize, you know what? It's great to celebrate each other. We're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:29Lex Fridman?

  Cause, cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing and the pie grows. Right now, the scientists by fighting, like by not celebrating each other, are not growing the pie. And now because of that, sort of science becomes less and less popular.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  It's a flywheel and exactly. No, and I want to point out two things. One is that I remember you went on Joe's show, maybe a couple of years ago, and, um, and then he gave you a watch and gave you like a Rolex, right? And I tweeted to you and I think it's-

• 2:02:56Lex Fridman?

  Omega.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Omega, sorry. Okay, fine. Uh, the watch that went to the, to the moon, which we will get to in a bit. Um, I don't think he could give you what I gave you though, by the way. Um, and we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.

• 2:03:09Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, I also wanted to mention, because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan. And I, we had this conversation with him.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  Cause I was like, when I was, uh, uh, so moving to Austin and had a conversation like, don't you think it's weird? Like if we have the same guests, the same time or whatever? He's like, fuck that. I want you to be more successful than me. I want, he, he truly wants everybody, like especially people close to him to be more successful. Like there's not even a thought like-

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  But you know why he does. And this is what I tweeted to you and one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you. I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody. And today I wanted that to be me. No, no.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Joe's Omega. No, but, but the point is, he sees in you that same, um, you know, grandiosity, that same genuine spirit graciousness. And I think that's true. I mean, you do do something very rare. I don't want to turn this into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say, even back to Andrew, you know, who I've almost been ha- ha-geographic about, you know, just treating him like a saint. He said to me the same thing, and a moment of peak, said like, god damn it, like, I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me, so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the effing NSA. You know, that wasn't his, that wasn't who he was. Um, that was just an expression, like, I'm doing something which is fundamentally, but you know

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  what? Um, when you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday. Cause I think, and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something with, when you have a kid, like you can get married, you can marry someone because she's rich, or he's rich, or you can marry someone because they're good looking, or he's good looking. You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish. There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish. Nobody says like, oh, you know what? I really want this thing that's three feet tall, that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor, that wakes me up all hours of the night, that interferes in my love life. Nobody says that, because it doesn't benefit you for months and months. A friend of mine, who actually does the videos for me, and does a lot of my solo videos, he's having his first kid, he's like, what do I do? Because he always gets stupid advice, okay, catch up on sleep now.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank. Like, I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right? You can't do that. That's stupid. What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby, let the mother relax. Like, in other words, do the things, and, and this really relates back to Aristotle once. Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more. And because you love that which you sacrifice for. Here's a proof. Um, I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs. Some, some were severe. Uh, my, one of my uncles, uh, in Keating Side had severe, what they called mental retardation. Now it's probably, has a different name. That out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite because they

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  had to sacrifice so much for him. And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe's kind of mentoring you or whatever, you're going to mentor someone else. You love that which you sacrifice for. Sacrifice is reduction of entropy. It's storing and investing and you want to protect that. And, you know, that, that to me really speaks to this. So, you know, I don't hold it against, but it is true. Like scientists are, you know, when they're described, again, they're often said to be like children, right? You've heard this description. They're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate. They love that. And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others. They're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish, they won't share their ball and they'll go home. We, you, there's no such thing as a single edged sword. I wish there were, you know, because we, we need some more of that because you got to dull it up. But in this case,

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  he, uh, you know, I, I think when, when you have this kind of investment in, in science, it's going to be natural. But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know, feed the flames of competition. You know, I'm like really venerer. If you go to the homepage of the NSF or the Department of Energy, or the recently released National Academy of Sciences Future of Science for the Astronomical Sciences for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel Prizes these different science things could win. Exoplanets, life, uh, the discovery of the CMB, B-mode polarization, the nice study, you know, that's figure two in this thing. And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids? Like to young people? Like that's what you should be doing so that you win this small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape to another wearing

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  a fancier costume, eating reindeer.

• 2:07:31Lex Fridman?

  Especially in the case of Nobel Prize, it's only currently given to three people.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  At most, which was never one of his stipulate. He actually said one, you can only give it to one person. So they change it. Why did they change it? I talk about, I speculate in the book. By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize and it's, it's a fact. But, you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking, actually, this coming up in December is that, is that the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's death. There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum, which is in San Romino, Marino in Italy. It's a lot of like death fascination, you know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize. Because it's like, what outlives a person? Well, science can outlive a person. My father has a theorem named after him.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  It's still engraved in many places around the world. You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our publications. We engrave things, we want to store things, we want to compress things. And I think that's, there's something beautiful about that. But there is a notion of denial of death. Like, there is a notion of what will outlast me? Especially if you're among the many, 90 something percent of members of the National Academy, don't believe in an active faith, you know, in a creator, in a God. And, and science can substitute for that, but it's not, it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I just, I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing, but not believing in a religion, can fulfill a person.

• 2:08:58Lex Fridman?

  So, which is interesting, because you do bring up Ernest Becker and the denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book. And there is a sense in which that's probably in part at the core of this, especially later, dream of the Nobel Prize or a prize or recognition. I've, I've interacted with a few, you know, or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age. And there is the feeling of a real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions. And I probably, at the core of that is a kind of a mortality or

• 2:09:40Lex Fridman?

  a kind of desire for mortality.

• 2:09:44Lex Fridman?

  And that, that was always off putting to me as opposed to, I mean, I know, it sounds weird to say it's off putting, but it just. Rather than celebrating the pure joy of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us, just the actual, the actual exploration of the mysterious.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  For its own sake.

• 2:10:13Lex Fridman?

  For its own sake.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's why I said, you know, it's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic, but you can think of, of scientist and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in my, a plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students. She's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Baron. And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So here I am, 17, you know, levels down. There's a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz. 1596 he was born and I'm in this chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught. I'll say it very slowly, one who was taught, right?

• 2:10:53Lex Fridman?

  Pachonny.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  Pachonny. So it probably means a guy was taught, right?

• 2:10:57Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  A good, just being a person.

• 2:10:59Lex Fridman?

  No, no, it's some, it's, it's literally someone.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Someone who was taught, right?

• 2:11:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  So what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody else. Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist in the truest sense. And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the, you know, 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're, you know, potentially could reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves. Because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition, there is no zero sum fixed, a fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Because it is an infinite game.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre-world war one, Germany or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated. And we're just making like a nation of scientists and like, we're not doing it to become multi billionaires or necessarily, you know, for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we had that, you know, sometimes I'm flying, you know, home at night, like when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare, you can see like the number 10 million. Like, it's very hard to like visualize things. You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there? It might be 1,000, 2,000. 10 million lights, there's 10 million souls. And you can see, and they're discreet, they're not like the Milky Way all blending together.

• 2:12:26Lex Fridman?

  Each lost in their own busy lives.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:29Lex Fridman?

  Excited, fall in love, afraid of losing their job, all that. By the way, people should know that you're a pilot.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:35Lex Fridman?

  So you literally mean fly.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes I get to do it.

• 2:12:38Lex Fridman?

  You get to look at the, the, the eye of God perspective on these 10 million, on these millions of.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  And I, they're like constellations, but upside down, like the cities, it's like a constellation. Hopefully I'll stay, keep the plane the right way up. But when you think about that, like, imagine they're all working together. And imagine, like, you always talk about love and, but like, you don't know, you don't know that they're not worthy of love. Like, so you're looking down on them. And it's just amazing. Cause you think like, what amazing creation is man and humans? And what can we do? It's, it's phenomenal. It's so exciting. And then I get to do it, you know, it's a job I say, don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free, you know? I love what I do. And, but to think about like, oh, if my student succeeds, then I'm not, no, it's, it's, it is unfortunate that you have experienced, I've certainly experienced it. And I think there are ways around it.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  I think it is, it is a vexing problem because people want to, you know, it's very tempting to keep your own kind of, you know, garden fertilized. You know, one thing that's interesting is like, you know, people are like, why are you doing this thing? And, and podcasts, and you're supposed to be a, you know, serious scientist leading this huge project and collaborators. And, and I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before, it's, yeah, for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, you know, what is the deal with the, with the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that allow the concrete truck to, it has nothing to do with the big bang, inflation, the multiverse, gods existence, has nothing to do with that, right? So those are people I say I have to talk to. The people that come on the show, those are people I want to talk to. And that's

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  super fun. I mean, it's, it's, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using, I have some unfair advantages, right? I'm at a top university, we have people, it's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, you know, brilliant scientists coming through. And, but I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't, you know, allow them to teach at scale, because they're better teachers than I am.

• 2:14:31Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you a. Interesting, maybe difficult question. Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm still, I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on to. So I should, we should say like, why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely, that I'm completely divorced from in a, in a secular sense. We're friends, you know, we, we see each other, you know, we send each other emails and stuff like that.

• 2:15:07Lex Fridman?

  I would love to get their sense of like, what the, the natural heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is. I would love to hear an honest, real conversation. I understand you're friends.

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:20Lex Fridman?

  There's some hard truth that even friends don't talk about.

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  They weren't happy I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of them, you know, was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? And, I mean, a lot of people tell me not to write the book. They said it's gonna give, you know, too much attention to the Nobel Prize, gonna look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not, just give me the next prize. No.

• 2:15:39Lex Fridman?

  So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for literature, you would turn it on?

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's funny, because Sabina Hossenfelder, who is, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and.

• 2:15:50Lex Fridman?

  And a shoe in for the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  Right. See, she's so gracious and so good. She has that, that, that German, you know, just, just gentle, genteelness.

• 2:15:59Lex Fridman?

  She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  I wish she could really say what she thinks and not, and be snarky on occasion. So she wrote a review of my book when it came out, three or four years ago. And she, she said, well, you know, Brian Keating, like, she said, well, it's, you know, it's good, it's interesting. He talks about cosmology, but, you know, he, they can do whatever the hell they want. And he, you know, presumably has this, you know, problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically. It's a private. And, and at the end, she said, but, you know, if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer and, you know, who knows, he could win the Nobel Prize in Literature someday. I said, and then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny. But anyway, no. So getting back to the guys that we were, you know, kind of collaboratames or frenemies and we're still, look, I, you know, we don't wish each other active ill. I've visited them, they're welcome

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  to visit me, they have visited me. The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like, for me, literally, I don't.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  I don't care about the Nobel Prize, other than what it can do to, you know, benefit science, but I no longer, I did, but by the way, I did seriously care about how it benefited Brian Keating, early on in my career. I'm just totally honest. Yeah, I don't, I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people would say like, okay, the guy is like, you know, it's not, he's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this. It's about something completely different. And, um, you know, I do feel like people, um, lack introspection a lot of times in science. Like, we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing. And I think it comes down to curiosity. Um, one thing about Joe, and again, I've, I've only listened to like, I have to confess, you know, you're like my father now, I'm confessing my sins to you,

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Father Lex, Father Friedman. Um, I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes, start to finish. Okay. With our friend, a mutual friend, Eric, I've listened to a bunch of recent ones, a bunch of Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, that's what it is.

• 2:17:54Lex Fridman?

  I get them, it's with the brother.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  The brothers, the brothers wives, and a few others. I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode, but from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion. There are a lot of podcasts that have passion, like I've been on their show. He has curiosity, like, he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it, until he understands it, until he gets it viscerally. And I, I respect that because as I say, in this more recent book, passion's like, kind of like the, the dopamine hit that gets you started. Like, oh, I'm going to be great. I'm, maybe I could win a Nobel Prize. Like, that's not going to sustain you. The sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity. And what I want to do is convert, you know, as many things as possible to cure, to things that I can then, because actually I've

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  had on, you know, people that, that discuss addiction. And there is an addictive quality to, you know, doing, doing podcasts, whatever, but there's an addictive quality being a scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized locations with special people, uh, paid for by other people who have no fricking idea what you do. I mean, imagine you worked in some, like some job and, you know, Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things, like when he was, he was once said like, he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it yourself. Then the day you won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's, let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But um, but in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  But um, but you know, what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it? So yeah, I do feel like um, we have to find a way to to nucleate that. I don't know, actually, I don't know if it's if it's like, can you can you turn someone into a I used to ask this question all the time, like, can you make someone creative? Like, can you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know. I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious. Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altucher. He said it once he did a study, kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh. Adults, five or six. Five or six. No, I'm trying to get you to laugh, but you're not going to. But anyway, no, it's true.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  So somewhere we lose 30, you know, to 50%.

• 2:20:08Lex Fridman?

  I'm not entertained, but that's because I'm an adult. No, and then I do remember there's some some distribution on those studies with a happier doll smile a little more, but still the kids blow them out of the water.

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  Just crush it. So can you, is it, or should, in other words, should we invest our energy in getting the half-life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids? Or should we try to reset the the dopamine hit and then, you know? I don't know. It's it's an open question.

• 2:20:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace, the key to life is to be unborable. I think I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation. So like, uh, which I think is at the core, at least this correlated with curiosity is in every situation, try to find the exciting, the fascinating, like in every situation, you sitting at the, I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that. Find something that excites you, like a thought, like, uh, watch people or start to think about, well. I wonder how many people have to go to the DMV every day.

• 2:21:15Lex Fridman?

  And then it's tried to go into the the pothead mode of thinking like, wow, isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval from the government to drive their cars? And then there's millions of cars driving every day.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  How can I do this better? Maybe there's some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, that that is a good.

• 2:21:35Lex Fridman?

  And then every situation, I think if you rigorously like just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that because like sometimes people like ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is, I think you at the core really have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything. Because if you're able to find the awesomeness in everything, like whatever journey you take, whatever, whatever weird.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Meandering.

• 2:22:05Lex Fridman?

  That you take through life is going to be productive. It's gonna end up in a in a in a great place. So like that muscle is at the core of it. I guess curiosity is uh central to that. But you didn't win the Nobel Prize. The team of Bicep that led the Bicep two didn't win the Nobel Prize because of some space dust.

• 2:22:29Speaker 01

  That's right. It's Mick Schmutz.

• 2:22:33Lex Fridman?

  Which one is the moon? Which one is?

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  That one's the dust. The space dust, yeah.

• 2:22:40Lex Fridman?

  What are we looking at? So why, why is space dust the the villain of this whole story?

• 2:22:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, you know, I wrote these books and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books, I'm sure you get books, people send you books. They always come in these dust jackets, right? I was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? Like, how much dust is raining down at any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian tidiness color. But but in a normal household, how much dust is raining down? It's not not really until I wrote a book. And I realized, you know, I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe. Now, the prologue, you know, to the cosmos. And dust is going to cover this story. It was actually, it's actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between. The cosmological and the astrophysical. So what does that mean?

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it's not really concerned with stars, galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino content, et cetera. So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit, you know, they're like, not all astronomers or astrophysicists are equal. They're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have a kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein, we're not using like, you know, Boltzmann, we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures.

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  In so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people, you know, would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal, we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe, luckily only at 3 degrees Kelvin approximately. We're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way, and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format, to detect the characteristic twofold symmetry pattern of underrotation. That's the technical way that we undergo it. I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal.

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if, but if it took place, the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself. So a few nanokalvin, the CMB is a few Kelvin, the signal from these beamons would be a few nanokalvin. It's astonishing to think, Penzias and Wilson, 1965, measured something that's a billion times brighter, and that was what, 60 years ago? Let's call it 60 years ago, since they had discovered it? Moore's law, you're more expert than us. Call it every two years. So you're talking about like two to the 30th power doubling or something like that at that. So let's call it two to the 20th, something like that.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  So that's like only two to the 10th is a, is a, is a, is a thousand. All right. Correct my math. I'm wrong. To the 20th is a million, right? To the 30th is a billion. So you, we're outpacing Moore's law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos. And they didn't have to deal with, you know, in the semiconductor fabric, uh, factory in Santa Clara, California, they didn't have to deal with like, you know, meteorites and asteroid, things like coming into the laboratory. It's a clean room. It's pristine. They can control everything about it, right? We can't control the cosmos and the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids, um, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce to make either

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  the earth, the moon, the planet Jupiter, or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera. The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God, chicks of a size, you know, impact, uh, or, you know, progenitors that will take out all life on earth. Uh, but there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains. And then there's a fair number of intermediate sized particles. It turns out this little guy here is, um, is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called a supernova, type two supernova. So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei, protons into, um, uh, and neutrons into helium, uh, nuclei.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  And then from there it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel. And iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star forms, you know, goes inside out. That's how, um, scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun. I don't know. Did you know? That's why it's called helium. Yeah, they went there at night and.

• 2:27:32Lex Fridman?

  Oh, well done.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  They went there at night. No, helium means Helios is the god of the sun. It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when oxygen and, you know, iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure act.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  So helium came after oxygen?

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no. First, first hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that formed.

• 2:27:54Lex Fridman?

  No, in terms of discoveries.

• 2:27:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. After oxygen. Yeah, I think Priestley and, yeah, and others, Dalton, discovered it in the 1700s. No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and called Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. So, but when it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words, there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the son of a plasma physicist. He fused to a hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy, plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and always will be. No, no, hopefully it'll come much sooner than that. And so doing, trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy, star collapses, explodes, and what does it spray out into the, you know, cosmic interstellar medium? It sprays out the last

• 2:28:40Speaker 01

  thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth, onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed. And some of that made its way to the crust, the iron made its way to the crust. Some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's a quite amazing substance. Without it, we, you know, we wouldn't have our red blood. We wouldn't exist as we are.

• 2:29:06Lex Fridman?

  Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  I've done enough dad jokes. My quota's up. So I'm taking this, this object, you know, seriously, there's not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient. And so there's a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes, looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules, like iron is used in compass needles, right? They're magnetized and magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all aligned, that's like the polarization of, of the dust grain. It's like that filter, polarizing filter. That means light polarized like this will get absorbed. And light polarized like this will go through. So it's absorbing, it's making 100% polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  source. And that's what happened. And what we ended up claiming, we, on, on March 17th, and I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this, at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, there was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience. And the BICEP2 team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mentioned, besides, you know, thank you all for being here, is me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference, uh, because that

• 2:30:25Lex Fridman?

  Harvard.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Complicated. Yes, exactly. Um, it's a little school up there in the Cambridge area. Um, and so, uh, they ended up, uh, making this announcement that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation. We detected the gravitational waves shaking up the CMB. And on that day, past Lex Fridman podcast, back when it was called Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark said, goodbye, universe, hello multiverse, and hello Nobel Prize. See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only gravitational waves, but of the multiverse. Goodbye, universe, hello, multiverse.

• 2:31:00Lex Fridman?

  Uh, multiverse is a natural consequence.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  Consequence of inflation, yes. According to its prominent, you know, supporters, yeah.

• 2:31:08Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, and, and of course, leave the poetry to Max, which, uh, he does masterfully. Okay. So that, the excitement was there. I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too. That's, that's some of the darker moments you're going through, but broadly for the space of science, there's excitement there.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  Huge excitement. And, and, and I often note that this is a problem in what I call, you know, the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past guest Sarah Seager. Venus life, you know, exists and that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And with the work that she's doing or her colleagues are doing, Clara, who was on your show as well. And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune, it'll be above the fold, make headlines around the world. And then six months, 12 months later, as is the case for us, retraction, page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal. So we have a problem in science that the, you

• 2:32:09Speaker 01

  know, if it, if it, if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment. This happened with the earlier discovery of so-called Martian life of discovered in Antarctica, which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement. We had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee who's unethical. We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation bias.

• 2:32:37Lex Fridman?

  There's like levels to this.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were many levels. And there were people, you know, me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but the, the, the public never knows this. I think it's, so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, doling out large amounts of science funding, that when you, you should keep kind of an option. In other words, you should have money for publicity. It's fine. Have money for your press conference, but hold in reserve in a bond to be used, hopefully never, but if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction, if it should occur.

• 2:33:19Lex Fridman?

  So you would like to see, because that's a big part of transparency is the, is the,

• 2:33:25Lex Fridman?

  to me, in the space of science, at least, that's as beautiful, because it reveals the, it's like, it's a, it tells a great story. There's a, there's an excitement. There's a

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  Humanity.

• 2:33:38Lex Fridman?

  There, so there's a climax to the triumph, but there's also climax to the, like, the disappointment at the end, because that also eventually leads. To triumph again, that sets up, that's the drama that sets up the triumph. Like with Andrew Wiles bringing Fermat's last Fermat's theorem, I guess it's not last name, whatever, the is like the ups and downs of that, the roller coaster, the whole thing should be documented.

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  That is science, that is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists, often from minorities or women, that you have to be Einstein, like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly, no, he wasn't. He was, he wasn't bad at math, that was all, that's all nonsense. But he said that he, you know what he said, he attributed his success to Lex? He said, I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in, in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing, by delaying when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with

• 2:34:47Speaker 01

  the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, inevitable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a disservice. And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans. Until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.

• 2:35:13Lex Fridman?

  You've launched the Assayer Project where you hope to assess theories of everything with experiments. You have a YouTube video where you're announcing that, that's, it looks super cool. Can you describe this project? And you also mentioned kind of, you give a shout out to a little known fellow by the name of Galileo Galilei as an inspiration to this project.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my, my avatar, my hero, the kind of all around scientist that I would love to approach the logarithm of, of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist, he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher. And back then, they didn't have distinctions between, you know, scientists and, you know, it was like a physician was like a physicist. And he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy, thinking about phenomena such as the Earth's tides, or the, or, you know, the composition of the Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right.

• 2:36:20Speaker 01

  And Galileo was not alone like this. I always say, like Einstein had at least seven Nobel Prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true. But he also had seven, you know, huge, you know, impossible to believe blunders in some sense. It's too bad because he could have had a good career, as I would say. And Galileo was like that, too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against, their careers, their brands, their reputations against, which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another, or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence in it. And both are equally intoxicating.

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  It's a, you know, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it, it really reinforces this notion, which is partially sunk cost. You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it. You don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would, he would be incredibly perceptive about things such as, you know, the Earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the center. It's called Copernican hypothesis. And he would use as evidence, very, very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically. And in fact, we weren't able to prove that the Earth orbited around the sun. And I ask you, like, can you prove the Earth is not flat? No, well, you're a flat-earther anyway.

• 2:37:49Speaker 01

  But, but, but it's, I asked my

• 2:37:51Lex Fridman?

  Proud Flat Earth Society member. T-shirts coming out soon.

• 2:37:55Speaker 01

  LexFramer.com

• 2:37:57Lex Fridman?

  Merch

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Less merch. But it's actually not trivial to do that, but most of my students, graduate students, can prove that the earth is round or explain how the earth.

• 2:38:05Lex Fridman?

  It is actually not trivial to do though.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 2:38:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08Speaker 01

  And much harder is to prove that the earth goes around the sun. In fact, that's extremely hard to prove and, and almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD and the final exam, I kind of like to just, you know, give them a little bit of humility because I think to be a good scientist, you need to be humble. You need to have a little humility and you need to have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky, like I can do this. I can do this thing that Einstein by definition couldn't do. I'm going to attempt it. I'm going to attempt to do what was impossible just a generation ago.

• 2:38:34Lex Fridman?

  How do you prove that the earth goes around the sun? You have to, is it by the motion of other planets?

• 2:38:41Speaker 01

  So there are many ways to do it. I mean, obviously you could take a spaceship, park it at the north celestial pole of our solar system and, and just watch what happens. But obviously that, that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700s. So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars, as the earth orbits around the sun, the position of the star will shift slightly because of the tilt of the earth and because the earth is in motion around the earth and around the sun. And because the earth has a non trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the sun, the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that we're moving around, if they're at infinite distance, which we assume that they are, they're not really, but for all intents and purposes, on the scale of the solar system, they're infinitely far away.

• 2:39:25Speaker 01

  So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered. And actually we still use that. We have to correct for that effect when we measure the cosmic microwave background. Because imagine you're inside of an oven, it has some temperature, three Kelvin, a thousand Kelvin, whenever, if you're moving towards you, the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter and the ones behind me will be red shifted. I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are. And it's an extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest. Anyway, so you can do it, but Galileo said, no, no, I'm not going to wait for that. I have other proofs for it. One of which is that the earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day,

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  high tide and low tide. And it's, he made the analogy of because the earth is moving around the sun, say this is the sun here, and it's moving around the sun, but it's also rotating on its axis. See how the water is sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle? As that happens, he said, that's what the tides are caused by. Totally wrong.

• 2:40:27Lex Fridman?

  Most people listen to this podcast, just, just, just so you know, if you're listening to this, he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  Half drunk.

• 2:40:34Lex Fridman?

  And, and we're both drunk and whatever else is possible.

• 2:40:39Speaker 01

  So as it's slashed around, he claimed that was what now it has nothing to do with that. The moon over there, the moon pulls differentially on the earth and the earth's ocean. That causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the earth's tide. It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the sun. So he was totally wrong about that. He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars, when we know it's made of gas, dust, nebulae, and things like that. So he had a fair share of blunders. Now, one thing I always kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianotti, Frank Wilczek, and Carlo Rovelli, and my friend Lucio Piccirillo, the first ever audiobook

• 2:41:24Speaker 01

  of one of Galileo's dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the earth around the sun, but it was an error.

• 2:41:31Lex Fridman?

  So you're reading parts of this text.

• 2:41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:34Lex Fridman?

  Which is incredible.

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  Brilliant book. So this book is, was written in 1632. It was written, and it was the one that caused him to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was called the Copernican, or the non- peripatetic Aristotelian, et cetera, notion of the planetary dynamic. And, and eventually he was forced to recant that he believed in it. And allegedly, he said he still believes the earth moves. Anyway, so we're making, it's written in the form of a trilogue. It's actually called the Dialogue, but it's three people. There's one named Salvati, who is espousing Galileo's notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salvati means like the salvation, the savior. Then there's a middleman, Segredo. So Carlo Rovelli is

• 2:42:20Speaker 01

  playing Salvati, brilliant one.

• 2:42:23Speaker 01

  I am playing Sagredo, who's like an intelligent interlocutor. I'm a, you know, I'm kind of just, I can appreciate Aristotle, I can appreciate Copernicus. Then there's this guy, Simplicio, the simpleton, and he espouses the words of the Pope. So you can imagine, like, you know, you're working in Putin's government, or you're working in whatever, and, and all of a sudden, you're, you're kind of putting the words of, of like, the fool, literally calling the fool, but you're using the words of the all supreme powerful being on earth at that time as the Vatican Church, especially for an Italian like Galileo. So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically, as he was astrophysically and otherwise.

• 2:43:03Lex Fridman?

  Who's, who's doing Simplicio?

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  Simplicio is a friend, a friend of mine in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarello. He's an Irish guy, but he has an Italian, no, no, he's, he's a full-blooded Italian. But they all speak English and Italian. I only speak, and that foreword are written by, so one foreword, and this place has three forewords, which is like a 12-word. Okay, the forewords are

• 2:43:27Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain that joke for me?

• 2:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a good one. The foreword, three forewords. One of them is written by Albert Einstein, in which, he says Galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history, this is Einstein telling Galileo, but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That foreword is read by Frank Wilczek, who you've had, Jim Gates, who you've also had, he reads the translation, the translator, Stillman Drake is a renowned scientific translator, and then Fabiola Gianotti, she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany, and, and some of the different introductions that Galileo himself had. It's just, it's, it's such a thrill to be able to do it. I only randomly found out,

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  because I had, I wanted to study it, and it's like 500 pages long, and I was like, let me get the audiobook, because I'm an audio medium kind of guy, didn't exist. So I said, let's do it ourselves. And so we did it, and hopefully it'll be out on Galileo's birthday, which is February 15th, 2022. It'll be a ripe 457, but that's not the only one of his books. Galileo wrote many books.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  One of which is called The Military Compass. And this is an interesting book for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados. In this book, he talks about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but an actual like slide rule. It's basically a slide rule. And he, it's a manual. It's like, imagine if your phone, you know, came with a manual. Nowadays, they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide rule, which is like enormously important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's a brilliant book. One of the examples is how do you convert money? So he does a money conversion, currency conversion between Ducati and Florentine Ducati and Scooty and whatever, you know, lira, whatever. He does all these currency conversions.

• 2:45:15Speaker 01

  One copy of this book, or maybe, maybe two exist, first printings from 1600s still exist. If Galileo had just kept those in his family, they're worth $100 million. Nowadays, you can't get a Scooty. A Scooty is worth nothing. Like a Ducati is worth nothing. I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like, there are value in physical, you know, non-fungible tokens, this original non-fungible token. So, but then a third book is called The Assayer. So what is an assayer? So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, physicists, chemists that would, would, would be around a court. And every so often, for the treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or, you know, paper money.

• 2:46:00Speaker 01

  And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi non-destructive evaluation of the purported object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold, theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone. Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value. It's just a piece of rock. But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth, you know, millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was incredibly important job. And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable. What I want to do in the Assayer Project is take this plethora of physical theories

• 2:46:45Speaker 01

  of everything. And I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn't come up with a theory of everything. Because there's just That's a good There's just like, it's just rotten with them. And, and, and I think it's great. You know, I often say that

• 2:47:01Speaker 01

  Theory is kind of like software, and I'm not denigrating software at all, but like, you can create a lot of software. You can make a coin, and it'll make its own coin, and you can make infinite amounts of software.

• 2:47:10Lex Fridman?

  Look it up, kids.

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  And that's one of my favorite videos. And you can replicate, you can't replicate, you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it. In other words, hardware is kind of like the non-fungible token, that's ultimate minted, you know, limited edition, the book, the compass book, like I talk. And so, it's very expensive. That means you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately, what I've seen is not predictions, but retrodictions. So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will come out with a measurement. And then so and so will say, oh, this is, you know, this is compatible with string theory, or G minus

• 2:47:52Speaker 01

  two of the muon. It has these bizarre properties, fifth force, string theory predicts this. String theory solves this. Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos, Large Hadron Collider bottom or B experiment, blah, blah, blah. They'll say that it's compatible after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because look, what did Einstein do with GR, general relativity? The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury. And he saw it was behaving strangely. And people had said, oh, that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit of the planet Mercury. And it's always, it's called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the dark matter approach, where it's like, there's a clump

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  of matter that we can't see, that's influencing the planet, that we can't see, and we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark, we couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way. And that led to Laverrier discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should be found. So it had a good heritage in physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't see, that worked. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping and bending of spacetime due to the presence of matter. Will later become known as the Einstein equations. So he, he explained why Mercury did that. He didn't predict, and it was known since the time of Newton that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it. He retrodicted it. That's fine.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  But at some point, you should come up with something new that's uniquely predictive of your theory. As I just said, the theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune is actually a valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so if he had kept doing that, maybe, you know, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject. Like he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. You and Barry talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was the one peer reviewed paper that he had. You know, he used to send back in those days, he'd send a letter to Nature, Physical Review, publish this, you know, I don't know how much it costs. And they got it rejected because he said, you can't detect gravitational waves. And actually, or they're not real.

• 2:50:01Speaker 01

  And the guy showed that they're real because he can't, corrected a math error in Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating. What should the assayer do? He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain that already exist and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain. If we can build experiments to check, to test them.

• 2:50:21Lex Fridman?

  So you have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments? So that's like ultimately back going to this, to the signal, to the experimenterist theorist, essentially.

• 2:50:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:50:38Lex Fridman?

  So like very experiment centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything.

• 2:50:45Speaker 01

  That's right. And the best scientists, the best physicists were both experimentalists and theorists. Or at least that they, if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions. They, or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo. Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented. And then, you know, some of his work led to the laser and the laser. So he had practical, it wasn't just pure airy fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe. So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models. They make predictions, they have advantages and disadvantages. And I'm just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals? Why don't we have updates every time an experiment comes out?

• 2:51:31Speaker 01

  We can update our credulity in that experiment, or that theory, rather, based on the results of the experiment. And we shouldn't do it after the fact, or as Michio Kaku has said, "Well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are." And that's not my job. You're supposed to tell me, if string theory is correct, what should it predict if it's true? There's one big problem, which I should say, that to be a good assayer, I think you have to be worldly in the sense of, worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe. And you can't only talk your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, "Well, I only understand string theory,

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  and I don't have time for these other theories." Or as if it's beneath me to even go into Garrett Leesey, or Eric Weinstein, or Stephen Wolfram, or aspects of M-theory, et cetera, et cetera. And there are some that say, "Why do we give string theory so much of an advanced pass? There are actually predictions it's made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics. Like, the dark energy should be negative, and we see it as positive." Like, that's a huge strike. If you told somebody, "Here's my tenure application," and what do you think? If it wasn't done by Maldecena, and Witten, and folks like that, I don't know if it would have had the traction, the endurance, the resiliency that it's had.

• 2:52:58Speaker 01

  And that worries me, because all these men, and some women, are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they're not even looking at what their neighbors doing.

• 2:53:07Lex Fridman?

  There's a thing that I really enjoy seeing, and I don't see often enough, with these theories, which is others, who are also experts, kind of studying them sufficiently well to steel man the theory, to show the beautiful aspects of the theory. You know, I see that with Stephen Wolfram. He has a very different sort of formulation of physics with his physics project. Now, I'm, it's, you know, physics is a foreign land to me, but his formulation, especially in the context of cellular tomahawk or hypergraphs, just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves

• 2:53:49Lex Fridman?

  are familiar. And so I'm able to see the, the real beauty there. And it saddens me that others in the physics community can't also see the beauty. Like, give it a chance. Give it a chance to see the beauty.

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  And that your respect. So there is one person who does take time and is what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks. He obviously has invested interest in his own theory and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving other, and I've witnessed this and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like, I don't know about you, but if you've ever voted like, oh, I saw this debate and, you know, because Trump did so badly and I'm going to vote for Biden. No, never have. You almost never change anybody's mind unless you debate with love, unless you have, almost like, we're going to win together, like the red team approach in the military, they're

• 2:54:48Speaker 01

  trying to win a war. So they may disagree on this, on the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war. I love you and I want to protect you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku. I almost see it, it's embarrassing in some ways because they'll, they'll almost mock, with the exception of Eric, you know, Garrett's interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues, very technical, but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory. And I don't see, I don't see the same graciousness extended from them. I'm sorry.

• 2:55:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes, you're, you're right. You're right. I mean, with Eric, he hasn't, he, he wants to, but he hasn't extended the same for Stephen Wolfram, because I think.

• 2:55:29Speaker 01

  No, he did. No, actually, no, he did. I had a debate with them live on my show.

• 2:55:32Lex Fridman?

  No, I did. I listened to it, but like, I just think it's outside of the toolkit of the Eric is comfortable with. So it's not, it's not that he's not, but you're, the main thing that's often absent and Eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing or mocking the, that he's, he's reaching out. But, okay.

• 2:55:52Speaker 01

  I mean, what if it's not? You know, I made a joke when they were on. I was like, how many theories of everything can there be? You know, Highlander, you know, there can be only one, you know, I don't know.

• 2:56:01Lex Fridman?

  But he, of course, also like the other folks who propose a theory has an ego.

• 2:56:09Lex Fridman?

  He, he rides a dragon, the dragon representing the ego. Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein. So he proposed initial sketches of geometric unity, which is his theory of everything. Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting. But

• 2:56:31Lex Fridman?

  what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community?

• 2:56:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors. Some came from a lay audience and some came from trained scientists or no longer, you know, maybe practicing in universities. I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because I look at what he's trying to do and it was always, the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominem. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders this or whatever. Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails, Professor Keating, I have a new theory, Einstein was wrong, I'm going to prove it. I'm not good at math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with

• 2:57:20Speaker 01

  you. Oh, thanks. Have you read my books? You know, in other words, it's always taking down, taking down the dragon. It's always taking down the Kung Fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D and D, you get their hit points, you take their cards, you get their wrist tokens from Kam Chaka. And thinking about with Eric, it's like, because what he's doing is so aspirational, it is grandiose in a good sense. What he's trying to do is, is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry and stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features in that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions, it uses new mathematical objects that he's invented.

• 2:58:02Speaker 01

  And look, I had, you know, had him on my show. I've talked with him. We've had consultations with other physicists, you know, where he'll come down and I have a visitor's office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists. Eric's been out of the academic world for a long time. And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it. If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door, as the expression goes. That's completely untrue. That almost, that doesn't even happen with mousetraps. I mean, you know how many fricking

• 2:58:45Speaker 01

  mousetrap types there are? It's like, no, they don't beat a path to your door. You have to sell that fricking thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon. You, I have never, I've had one paper out of 200 papers I've published in peer-reviewed journals. I've only had one, half a percent, published with no referees' comments. In other words, published like dream, submitted it, probably, it happened to be in a peer-reviewed journal. I was pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal. And I think he doesn't see, first of all, he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process. He thinks that is anathema to the way science is, it's best interest and public in journals, et cetera, et cetera. I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive

• 2:59:26Speaker 01

  and valuable. I think you have to learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Mather, he talks about loving your critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism, that their criticism goes to your heart, and not being so open to their compliments, that their compliments go to your head. It's a very tough Scylla and Charybdis to walk.

• 2:59:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's something, I mean, I want to be careful here because I'd like to talk to Eric about this directly, but I'll just, from a, from a perspective of a friend,

• 3:00:00Lex Fridman?

  want to ask about the

• 3:00:05Lex Fridman?

  The drug of fame. So there's also the public perception of the battles of physics. And so there's a very narrow community. But then there's the way that's perceived. The exploration of ideas is perceived by the public. And so there is a certain drug to the excitement that the public can show when they sense that you have something big. And that in itself might become the thing that gives you pleasure. And I think that with theories of everything or with any kind of super, super ambitious projects,

• 3:00:50Lex Fridman?

  and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand the origins of the universe. If you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the origins of the universe and you have a platform like you do now, where you start to communicate your intuition. It's hazy, like all the science, you're still unsure. But you have a sense. I mean, perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist because you always kind of start going, okay, how do I build a device to see through the fog? But if you're more like a theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas, in the realm of intuitions,

• 3:01:32Lex Fridman?

  it is also a source of pleasure. You mentioned dopamine, a source of dopamine that you can communicate to others that you're really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe. So there's some aspect to which you want to be a Grigori Grisha Perlman and go into the hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the, I'm speaking about myself, about, you know, talking about the dream and planning and exploring how great it will be if my intuition turns out to be correct. If the sketches I have turn out to actually build the bridge

• 3:02:15Lex Fridman?

  that takes us to a whole new place. As a friend of Eric's or a friend of, or my friend, what kind of advice do you give? What is your role? Is it to be a supporter, given that he has many critics? Or is it to be in private?

• 3:02:37Lex Fridman?

  Um, a critic, like a lot of my friends will say, hey, shut the hell up. Just get it done.

• 3:02:42Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question I've asked him. And then it comes from, uh, Animal Farm by, uh,

• 3:02:48Lex Fridman?

  My, probably my favorite book, yeah.

• 3:02:50Speaker 01

  So you remember Benjamin the donkey?

• 3:02:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:02:52Speaker 01

  And he's talking to the pig. I forget the pig's name, but you probably know. Anyway, the pig says to him, you've got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short curly little squiggly thing that does jack squat. Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But you know what? I'd rather not have the tail if I didn't have the flies. So I ask you, as I've asked Eric, is it worth it? You know, you've got these, you've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative way. I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, you know?

• 3:03:35Speaker 01

  It's kind of the highlight, the spotlight effect. It's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone. And I think, you know, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that. Cause that's something I don't feel I can relate to myself.

• 3:03:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, this has to do with more like

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  Platform.

• 3:03:53Lex Fridman?

  Platform stuff.

• 3:03:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, scale.

• 3:03:56Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I, um,

• 3:03:59Lex Fridman?

  that has no, very little effect on me. I, I enjoy it. I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform. Yeah, no, that has no effect on me. Um, do, I, I'm want somebody that enjoys

• 3:04:15Lex Fridman?

  the act itself. So this conversation, the reason I'm doing this podcast with you today is because that allows me to trick you into talking to me for a long period of time. I don't care about platform. I assume nobody listens. It really doesn't matter.

• 3:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I got it right, my, my whole test of it was a good podcast. Cause how do you know, like podcasts have been around, what 12 years? How do we know as podcasters, we're doing a good job? Like sometimes someone will say, that was the best interview I ever had. But that doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card in that little guy and the Zoom didn't work, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to that, that was a good podcast.

• 3:04:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's exactly it. So in that, in that space, yeah.

• 3:04:58Lex Fridman?

  All of it is worth it.

• 3:04:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:00Lex Fridman?

  But, but the dream, the, the, I'm more referring to the psychological effects. Forget the platform, forget all of that. You know, I maybe shouldn't even brought up the platform because it really has to do even in your own private mind, which is what I'm struggling with.

• 3:05:18Lex Fridman?

  I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages.

• 3:05:26Lex Fridman?

  So much that I often don't take projects to completion. This is a psychological effect that I'm sure basically everybody, every engineer, everybody that does anything goes through. I just, in this case in particular, I think it also applies. And I wonder as a friend, what is the role?

• 3:05:44Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from, you know, planning telescopes to dieting. So there's a, there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're going to feel. You don't need to know this, but you know, you don't deal, but losing five pounds. I said, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds and I'm going to be able to do, run, you know, a minute faster. So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the, and the exercise that I get a little bit of that thrill and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal. So that's a documented effect and that happens in, in, in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project. With Eric, it's interesting because with him, first of all, we, you know, we relate extremely

• 3:06:27Speaker 01

  well, you know, on a friendship level and very close. He does remind me a lot of my father and I've told him that, you know, just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as, you know, in his case, as a father, you know, the father kind of figure that I didn't have in a sense, but that he is, he is a true lover of life. He knows he's got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does. And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing, like, how do you know, Lex, that someone's an expert? Experts say. There's a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in Principles. He says, "An expert is someone who's done something three times successfully." Like, you can do something correctly once, you could do something correctly.

• 3:07:07Speaker 01

  It's very hard to pull off like, three projects, three telescopes, three whatever, right? So, um, so look for, it's arbitrary, it could be four, it could be two, right? But the point is, look at Eric. So, how many things has he contributed to and made, you know, pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different people? I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable? No, of course not. For me, so what I'm saying is, I get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics, gauge theory, um, the kind of very, um, very advanced geometry topology that he's interested in.

• 3:07:51Speaker 01

  But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him that, "I'm gonna turn your son into an experimentalist despite you." You know, like, he is not gonna be a theorist, Zev is not gonna be a theorist. He is working with me, he is learning from me, and he's, we're trying to get him into, he wants to bypass all of the, you know, the kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go straight to graduate school. And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe he can't, but there's no other way than to try. And so, we, I've prepared a whole curriculum for Zev to basically bypass all of undergraduate. And to his credit, he's done, earns all the credit. He's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates.

• 3:08:24Lex Fridman?

  Okay, hold on a second. I have to push back, and this is me saying it, and I'll, I'm sure I'll talk to Eric about this. But to say, you said Eric's done, was right on multiple things. I think Eric has a great, deep insight about human nature and how societies work. And he says a lot of wise words on that world. But, I think if we're talking about experts, you kind of have to prove, you know, it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball. Like, he's proved it many times that he can play basketball, but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball.

• 3:09:03Lex Fridman?

  And I would say, the whole point of, I mean, of radical ideas, is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting on a track record of, I mean, when you're swinging for the fences always, you're, um, there's not a track record to sit on. And like Max Tegmark is an example of somebody who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff, but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world. So he has that track record. With Eric, if you look at just the number of publications, all this stuff, he did really, he chose not to travel the academic route. So there's no proof of expertise, except sort

• 3:09:44Lex Fridman?

  of an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance. But that's not how physics works.

• 3:09:51Speaker 01

  So there's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say, he or she, she, they really know the history of physics very well. Like, physics is always lovely. Like Sean Carroll always jokes about, like, you know, like physicists should never talk about history of physics. But it's more than that. So Eric has certainly contributed in finance, in finance specifically, and gauge theory in economics and inflation dynamics and the non-cosmological.

• 3:10:18Lex Fridman?

  Hold on a second. It's yet to be proven. He has a lot of powerful.

• 3:10:22Speaker 01

  Well, gauge theory is calculus, calculus proven. I mean, he, he, he has a gauge model for currency, for currency exchanges between different nations that is explanatory, not, not, it's not, you know, is, is, is this something, in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes.

• 3:10:39Lex Fridman?

  And it might be, okay.

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  It's unique to him. I mean, to him and Pia.

• 3:10:43Lex Fridman?

  Yes. It might be a powerful model. It might be one that's actually deserves huge amount of applause and celebration, but does not yet receive that. And that's one of the things that Eric talks about. It has not received the attention it deserves. But it has not yet received the attention it deserves. And so like the proven expertise thing, I mean, there's a lot of people that go to their grave without the recognition they deserve. And it's a tragedy. But the fact is, like, You have to fight for that recognition. The tragedy happens for a reason. You can't just say this person is obviously brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit in every single domain. It doesn't, it doesn't like transfer immediately.

• 3:11:28Lex Fridman?

  There's nobody that's, well, at least I wouldn't argue Eric is one of the special minds in our generation, but you still have to fight the fight of physics and prove it within the community. And I think the same applies in economics. You can't, I mean, as somebody that, you know, I've, I've gone through the academic journey, just like you said, the peer review, all of those things, flawed as they are, that's the part of the process. You have to convince your peers, the, the people that are as obsessed, for whatever the hell reason, about that particular thing that you're working on. Yes, there's egos. Yes, there's politics.

• 3:12:08Lex Fridman?

  It's a giant mess, but I think it's a beautiful mess through which you have to go through in order to reveal the power of your idea to yourself and to the world.

• 3:12:21Speaker 01

  Well, let me use an example. So you know of James Clerk Maxwell and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is the first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history. Purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena. In one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the other magnets, bar magnets, currents, et cetera, unify them. You know what he did? I like to do a thought experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864. Maxwell's working away and he goes, I have this wonderful idea with fluxions and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah. And it revolves on this thing called an ether. And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears and the gears have these planetary

• 3:13:03Speaker 01

  things and they suck up vortices and the vortices determine the density of the electromagnetic potent. You'd be like, this guy's a freaking moron. And, and what would you do? Come on, honestly, you would say that everything this guy does is wrong. I mean, he's got this idiotic idea. And it would be proven falsified a couple of decades later by Markelson and Morley. And in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater. Or imagine Twitter, imagine the twitstorm, you know, clerk Maxwell, at clerk Maxwell one would get. It would be brutal, right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing, Chern Simons. A lot of these things are very fantastic, but, but why Lex? Why does Ed Witten? Why does Juan Maldesena? Let me give a good example.

• 3:13:47Speaker 01

  Juan, guest, brilliant guy, I love him. He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss issue. What did he concede conceded based upon Maldesena's calculation in ADS CFT and five dimensional wormholes? Is any of that? First of all, we don't live in ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable, if they exist even. You know, these are devices, you know, Kip Thorne is popularized for movies. Like to say that this is something on which I will concede a bet. Now, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity. Why does Maldesena? What is, and he's got a pretty high H index, pretty well respected guy at IAS. Love talking to him, brilliant guy.

• 3:14:27Speaker 01

  By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work on gauge theory and economics. Originally, and one, I believe the breakthrough, I can't remember exactly what, but partially, you know, credit some of the work that he did, which appears there's a footnote to Pia Malani's thesis and some conversations with Eric, I think, in it. Anyway, getting back to that, why, why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because Maldesena, who's an eminent physicist, obviously, has published, you know, realistic work and done, and what about Witten? You know, Witten gets a pass. I mean, if you

• 3:15:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, Witten gets a pass on which aspect? The string theory?

• 3:15:03Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's, well, let me just say Hawking. Hawking gets the ultimate pass. Hawking would say things like M theory. There's zero evidence for it. I mean, there's the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what does string theory predict it? And it's nothing. And by the way, that's actually wrong. I talked to Comron, I know you talked to Comron. Comron says that string theory does make predictions. It predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus one Planck mass and 10 to the minus 30 Planck. Okay, whatever, electro.

• 3:15:29Lex Fridman?

  It's a big range.

• 3:15:29Speaker 01

  It's a huge range. Is that, imagine Comron comes up, and again, he's just some nobody, but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile, he's not at Harvard, has zero H and X or whatever Eric's is. Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are, that are trying?

• 3:15:45Lex Fridman?

  You know, the answer to that. So I get a million emails, just like you said, you yourself, where they provenize, in my world, this artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that. Is I figured out how to build consciousness, how to engineer intelligence, how to, and

• 3:16:03Speaker 01

  You should send your emails to me, and I'll send my emails to you.

• 3:16:06Lex Fridman?

  And we'll reply to it. I mean, I, and I don't want to sort of mock this.

• 3:16:09Speaker 01

  No, I'm not either.

• 3:16:10Lex Fridman?

  It's very possible that there is either kernels of interesting ideas or in whole, like, there is geniuses out there that are unheard, but the, because of so much noise, you do have to weigh, like, hire the Ed Witten's of the world when they make statements. And that's why you build up a track record, as you said with Ray Dalio. You have to show that you can, like, if you're a pollock and you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos, you have to, and this is a bad example, probably, because he probably never showed this proof.

• 3:16:49Speaker 01

  I don't think he could do it, right?

• 3:16:51Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's much more, it's much more comforting to see that they can paint a good, accurate picture.

• 3:16:59Speaker 01

  Still life.

• 3:16:59Lex Fridman?

  Of still life, of an apple on the table. So there, there's.

• 3:17:03Speaker 01

  Meteorite.

• 3:17:04Lex Fridman?

  Because then, I mean, because then, there's something about the scientific community that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit censor to where they're not going to give the full effort of their attention if you don't have the track record. Now, you could say that's a kind of club that only, you have to like, you have to have 10, you have to, this, yes, that exists, but there's some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit. To get the machine of science going. Otherwise, if you're always saying, well, I have my ball, and I don't want to play your game, your game sucks, then nobody's going to want to play with you.

• 3:17:42Speaker 01

  That's true. And look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity. Look, how could you talk about doing what Kaku said on here and elsewhere? You know, we're looking for the umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one-inch equation that will surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God.

• 3:18:00Lex Fridman?

  That's like a prerequisite, I guess, to tackle these questions.

• 3:18:03Speaker 01

  I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of almost snarkiness, because none of these scientists are believing, you know, Gnostics. They're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand-in. And they always talk about Einstein, and he was like a Spinoza, and he wasn't a, you know, a the-

• 3:18:21Lex Fridman?

  God doesn't play dice.

• 3:18:22Speaker 01

  God doesn't play dice.

• 3:18:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Einstein's mentions of God, yeah.

• 3:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then Stephen Hawking says, if when we come, we get an M-theory understood, we'll know the mind of God. That's the title of Kaku's book, The God Particle, The God Equation. You know, do any of them really believe in God? No, is that a prerequisite? No, I'm not saying that. But the point being, you're talking about something that has to do with God, right? I mean, where else do you go from there? I mean, I think God, for now, enjoys a little bit more, you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So like, it's, you know, God's got a pretty good, you know, H-index himself.

• 3:18:56Lex Fridman?

  He has, by the way, a Twitter account, just so you know, it's pretty good.

• 3:18:59Speaker 01

  The tweets of God.

• 3:19:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:01Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you look at that, you have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger. You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility. So he's doing something, he comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against, I'm talking about Eric now. If he's just railing at, oh, the system, and I'm not going to publish because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing to expose it to criticism, and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps, but in the sense of like, they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital T.

• 3:19:43Speaker 01

  What they're trying to do is take down Eric. Hopefully, those people aren't out there. But on the other hand- Looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy. He will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisi, who's one of his closest friends. I mean, he calls him as, as, not as.

• 3:19:59Lex Fridman?

  Nemesis.

• 3:20:00Speaker 01

  Nemesis, right, right.

• 3:20:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:01Speaker 01

  And I think that's interesting that they're loving friends.

• 3:20:03Lex Fridman?

  I really enjoyed that portal conversation, which in Garrett Lisi, Eric, Eric is torn about that conversation because I guess, because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds playing these ideas of theories of everything.

• 3:20:16Speaker 01

  Some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally, now I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of, but let me say one thing, which is experimental, but, but let me say one thing, I understand probably a third of what Eric's talking about with GU. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics, I understand some group theory, fiber bone, I can get a little of it, the age theory. But I, I also understand what I don't understand. And I understand that there are people like Witt and Maldassena, Nima, other people that that can understand it. And they're not trying to understand Sabina, she can understand, she makes all these, you know, oh, I don't understand it, I don't want to understand it, I don't have time. And then she makes a video, a music video, you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.

• 3:20:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:59Speaker 01

  I'm like, oh, you have a time to do, and I love Sabina, and I've actually promoted my show on her, and, and I, I love her, and she's doing a wonderful job, but you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish, and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours, I, Brian Keating have done it as an experimental cosmologist, and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting, it's part of the Assayer project, and it actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people, they're very serious, Louis Alvarez Gomez at SUNY Stony Brook, Simon Center for Geometrical Physics, so he and I are running this, this seminar, hopefully this summer, we're going to reenact the famous Shelter Island conferences in 1900s, where, you know, Feynman got together and they calculated the Lamb shift and all, but what did that feature?

• 3:21:42Speaker 01

  The harmony, the resonant minds behind the best experimentalist in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about, you know, lower dimensional systems that can be applied, theorists and experimentalists, observers, cosmologists, we all were get together, and we're just going to do it out of a spirit of love. But if it's just like, oh, this guy's like a loud mouth, I don't have time for that. I really don't, I don't, I don't think it's interesting way to spend my time.

• 3:22:09Lex Fridman?

  There is a aspect that I hope to see, and it goes back to our sort of discussion about Joe Rogan. I do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation, like let go of this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit and

• 3:22:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:22:31Lex Fridman?

  Now that everybody is established and known entities, let go of that a little bit so we can explore and celebrate ideas. I would love to see more of that, just because you're saying, especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.

• 3:22:45Speaker 01

  And I've talked, I mean, this isn't talking tales out of school, but I mean, he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like, you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon, you know, why are you spending all this money to get to Mars? You know, we should be spending money on interdimensional travel and we can unlock it if we, and I said to him, like, and he makes the point, you know, that, oh, the atomic theory, you know, that unleashed the nuclear age and, and that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him and I say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn't like look into all these equations of, of the unification, which still doesn't exist, by the way, we spend all this time, Lex, and I don't know why it is, it's a phenomenon purely

• 3:23:26Speaker 01

  in theoretical physics. People are looking for the toe and they're overlooking the gut. In other words, they're spending all this time on the theory of everything, the God equate, and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like Glashow, they've tried and failed at it.

• 3:23:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, for people who don't know, there's four forces, gut, grand unification theories that unifies the three forces stuff and done trying to get a shortcut to the theory of everything, which unifies the four. And then there's this whole thing that maybe quantum gravity is not even a thing. So, so we're, we're, we're trying to solve,

• 3:24:04Lex Fridman?

  we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the physics level. And then already before solving it, already saying, once we solve it, here's going to be all the beautiful.

• 3:24:14Speaker 01

  Or just like level jumping, going to level, you know, two fifty-six.

• 3:24:18Lex Fridman?

  Time action thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I suppose you need that kind of ego, that confidence, that ambition in order to even have a chance at some of these.

• 3:24:29Speaker 01

  The only two people in this book of nine Nobel laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome were two theorists, Frank Wilczek and Sheldon Glashow. And Frank is a pretty interesting, and I know eventually we're going to talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank. Frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another, a third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974, three, when he was at Princeton, all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel Prize, every day of his life, imagine this, Lex, you're going to have this startup, someone tells, actually, someone tells you you're going to win the lottery, you're going to win the lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years?

• 3:25:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, I'm not sure. I mean, would it be winning the lottery? Or if I'm so confident?

• 3:25:16Speaker 01

  You're guaranteed to win a lottery?

• 3:25:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:18Speaker 01

  There's this, here's this wallet, Bitcoin wallet, it's going to guarantee I have this much money, it's a stable coin, whatever. You're going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would cover, go out in a bubble wrap hat. You wouldn't go out with that 20 masks on, right? Your whole life would be consumed with, now imagine, everyone's telling you you're going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the lottery. I mean, many people prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize, and every person who wins a prize that's worth three times the money, like Mal DaSena, he would trade the breakthrough prize for a Nobel Prize in a heartbeat. So, these guys had to wait 40 years. Imagine the excruciating pain. What got him through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like, hell yeah,

• 3:25:59Speaker 01

  I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this assay is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now, because I don't know if I'm going to be here in 40 years, I hope I am, but can we bypass, can we get shortcuts, what's called the low-energy regime? And to me, that's, that's what's interesting. Like, what can we do now? I don't care, like Isaac Newton came up with color theory, and he did something really interesting. Next time I come, I'll bring you some prisms. What did he do? He took a white light, he took a prism from the sun, actually. He put it through a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you've seen. And then he took another prism and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever. And the light went through the first prism, turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out a white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took

• 3:26:42Speaker 01

  a popsicle stick or whatever, it's probably, you know, pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, like blocked out the orange, and it didn't make white light come out. He showed like colors of synthesis. It's a combination. He didn't use like the Large Hadron Collider to do that. You know, he used a very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics, and a different kind of color physics than in quantum chromodynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that? Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider, which even if it gets built will cost $30 billion just to build? By the way, anytime from now on, if I leave you with anything, anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number, always double it, maybe triple it.

• 3:27:21Lex Fridman?

  How much is it gonna cost?

• 3:27:22Speaker 01

  To operate it. So like, do we build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier? Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility? And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10% per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so in 10 years, it'll cost double the cost. So never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual friend Harry or whoever, don't believe the number, double it, and then say, is it worth it? And so, building a solar system sized accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the the number of large extra spatial dimensions? Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating.

• 3:28:02Lex Fridman?

  So focus on building detectors?

• 3:28:05Speaker 01

  Experiments.

• 3:28:07Lex Fridman?

  That, like, where the cosmos is part of the experiment, I suppose, that's doing the hard work. Because when you're saying low energy regime, because for some of these, especially big questions, like theories of everything, you need some high energy events. And so somehow figure out how the high-energy events that are already happening out there, how to leverage them to understand here on Earth.

• 3:28:35Speaker 01

  So one of the alternative theories of cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitation requiring, as the Big Bang and inflation are, is are these bouncing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called a quantum field. And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists that's called the Higgs boson. Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty and it becomes dark energy. So it solves two problems.

• 3:29:20Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying it's correct, we don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today. It's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, et cetera, et cetera. We see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is dark energy a constant or does it vary? That has to vary in order for this theory to be true because that eventually has to decay so that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again classically. So we could use low-energy phenomenon. It's hard to think of supernova as being a low-energy phenomenon, but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or is it a constant? That's an example of a low-energy limit to prove a high-energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.

• 3:30:02Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of things that cost a lot but are super exciting.

• 3:30:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:30:08Speaker 01

  Page two.

• 3:30:10Lex Fridman?

  No, we'll wrap it up. This is, there's more than page two. What do you think this is? This is

• 3:30:18Speaker 01

  My thesis.

• 3:30:20Speaker 01

  Well, Louis de Broglie's thesis was three pages long and he won the Nobel Prize for the wave particle duality.

• 3:30:25Lex Fridman?

  So, you know, size matters in different dimensions in life. I think the lessons I've learned about life is the shorter the paper or the shorter the thesis. Actually, the shorter the paper, some of the greatest papers ever written are short. Like, I feel like

• 3:30:43Lex Fridman?

  some of the best ideas in this world, not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman, a contradiction on top of a contradiction, but it could be written on a napkin, honestly.

• 3:30:53Lex Fridman?

  It was just kind of, but tells you something about ideas.

• 3:30:58Lex Fridman?

  What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope? Is this, as somebody who likes telescopes? And this is one of the, I think it says, it took 20 years to build 9.7 billion dollars. Is that way too much, too little? Are you excited about this thing?

• 3:31:20Speaker 01

  It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field that it's incredibly interesting to me because it's, I have no, you know, horse in that race. And so I'm not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever. So I can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science. It is, in some sense, the successor to Hubble. It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral kind of artistic level that Hubble had. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did? The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, you know, storms and imaging of these twisted deep galaxy, deep sky galaxies. Those resonated with the public.

• 3:32:04Lex Fridman?

  Just visually, they're beautiful.

• 3:32:05Speaker 01

  Visually, yeah. When you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in, you'll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light. There's one star in our galaxy, the rest are galaxies. Now, that image is less than one tenth of your fingernail held out at arm's length. It contains 4,000 galaxies. So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are in the whole sky, just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole sky? So we have another couple of hours. No, so it comes out to be, that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies. It's not exact to the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate, maybe even better. Hubble produced that and it was basically serendipitous. They pointed some dark blank

• 3:32:47Speaker 01

  piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it. Same thing that happened with the CMB. They were looking for something they didn't find. Same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating. So what I sometimes hear is that we don't know what we're going to discover. I never think that's a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something like you should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit and then there should be swinging for the fences. And I think in this case, it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure. If that telescope, which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth

• 3:33:27Speaker 01

  beyond the Earth moon distance by a factor of four and still transmit telecommunications back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from the sun. You know, you don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye. And you do that and you cover, it's going to be phenomenal. I, for science, for sure, if it works. There are a lot of people think, you know, it's so risky. It's such NASA sunk so much of their budget. It ate up, you know, and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's insured, but so what? You're not going to get back those 20 years of people. Well, let's start building it again. Like they didn't build two copies of it.

• 3:34:02Lex Fridman?

  And then if it fails, it kind of has a dampening effect on the prospects and the inspiration of the public for the what science can do, what science engineer can do in space.

• 3:34:15Speaker 01

  It will make a huge impact scientifically. Let's hope for the best. Let's assume it does succeed. It's launched in a couple of weeks and, and when it does, it will transform our understanding of, you know, we just discovered not only like extrasolar planets that have moons on them and asteroid belt. We discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy. This will be able to see crazy stuff like that spectroscopy, imaging, but, but it's, and it'll be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing cosmology. Like Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant. That was its key project when it was designed and launched. But because it is optical telescope, it's sensitive to more, you know, close in redshift. So it's shorter distances. Now, James Webb is much, much higher

• 3:34:58Speaker 01

  redshift. It can probe the darker, deeper distant universe.

• 3:35:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let's talk about not the distant universe, but our neighboring planets. First, I got to ask you about the moon.

• 3:35:11Lex Fridman?

  So there's a, there's a piece of the moon on this table that you've given me.

• 3:35:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:35:15Lex Fridman?

  Uh, that we didn't have to pick up that arrived here.

• 3:35:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:35:19Lex Fridman?

  So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?

• 3:35:22Speaker 01

  So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered by, uh, the Apollo and NASA missions, uh, you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because illegal to own pieces of the moon collected by the Apollo astronauts. So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston. This piece of moon rock was delivered via the old fashioned way by gravity. So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space and it will then orbit the common, uh, moon, earth system and it will then eventually enter our atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the

• 3:36:05Speaker 01

  trajectory is proper, it can land intact. And this one landed with a few, uh, hundred grams worth and they sliced it up and then it was delivered via US Postal Service to, to my house. So you can buy these pieces and actually you can buy a piece of Mars, can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now, what's so interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of earth can get there. If some piece of earth has some life forms on it, it could get there. And if that can happen in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can, can see. I see this look of horror on your face. Um, I view it, I am personally extremely pessimistic, would be extremely surprised.

• 3:36:50Lex Fridman?

  I'm, I'm just, I'm curious by the transition because you just said that life could have arrived from Mars or like from planet to planet by, because of the meteorites striking it and so on.

• 3:37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:02Lex Fridman?

  And then you went to. You don't think there might be life out there in the universe?

• 3:37:08Speaker 01

  Technological life.

• 3:37:09Lex Fridman?

  Technological life. Yeah, advanced intelligent civilizations. Okay. Yeah, okay, so go on.

• 3:37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called, I know this is a PG 13 podcast, it's called panspermia, panspermia.

• 3:37:25Lex Fridman?

  I'll beep that out, please.

• 3:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, please. And that's the exchange of genetic life form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth, but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting. How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that. I'm not gonna add that much, but but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say life started on the Earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough time for the whatever material went from Earth via panspermic direction, you know, spraying the love gun out into the universe? Did that then have enough time to incubate and go onto a planet that could support it? Certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require,

• 3:38:11Speaker 01

  you know, hundreds of millions of years. Then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to bac, from, you know, rocks to Rachmaninoff, I don't know, I can do this all day.

• 3:38:21Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow, that's pretty good.

• 3:38:22Speaker 01

  How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's not enough time for Earth to seed life, technological life throughout the galaxy. I don't think there's any evidence for that.

• 3:38:31Lex Fridman?

  But so you really think that the origin of of life on Earth is a really special event?

• 3:38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it did originate on Earth. My question for those that search for life outside the Earth is what if you had a letter from God? And the letter said, life didn't originate on Earth. Like, would you choose a different profession? Like, it would seem hopeless. Like, in other words, we only have a sample of one. In fact, we only know of one conscious life form, let alone one planet that has life on it, right? What if you knew for sure it didn't start here? That means that like, there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated. It didn't originate the life process. So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself, I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about, you know, the origin of? Remember, you have to go from inanimate object to a living object.

• 3:39:22Speaker 01

  Whatever that definition of life is, and I'm not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, you know, many different definitions. But But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate? It's a huge question.

• 3:39:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but then you don't have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin or to like, yeah, that's one way to understand something is to build it.

• 3:39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:39:45Lex Fridman?

  But another way is to just observe it. You don't have to truly re-engineer from scratch.

• 3:39:50Speaker 01

  Reanimate, yeah.

• 3:39:51Lex Fridman?

  So, you know, but then, yes, if it didn't originate on Earth, then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites of life are off.

• 3:40:03Speaker 01

  What's the governing principle, right?

• 3:40:04Lex Fridman?

  Like, what is, and then you could have just an, almost an arbitrary number of possible, like, if life didn't start on Earth.

• 3:40:15Lex Fridman?

  To me, that's exciting because it's like, we know even less than we thought. The thing is, it can prosper on Earth, though.

• 3:40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40:25Lex Fridman?

  So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life.

• 3:40:30Speaker 01

  Right, and maybe, maybe the existence of the Earth life symbiosis is critical. I think Sarah, and you talked about Sarah Walker, that it's a planetary phenomenon, et cetera. So doesn't that make it less like, in other words, like, not only do you need special life conditions to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon. And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby, you need an Earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like technological life, I haven't said this before really, so I'm just speaking, I usually like to write down before I say this different thing. But one of the things I thought about.

• 3:41:13Lex Fridman?

  Somebody hosts a podcast, you should probably accept the fact that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while.

• 3:41:19Speaker 01

  Not every once in a while, every while. I claim that, you know, to get to sending, you know, people to the moon, you know, our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right? Like, you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel. Like, you made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass, silica, you know, aluminum extruded that using fossil fuels. Where do those fossil fuels come from? Like, so any civilization that's going to be a Dyson, you know, Carteshev's speed, did they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have, like, prebiotic life? Did they have a great oxygenation event? Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic eukary?

• 3:41:56Speaker 01

  All those hurdles, let's say you give each one, let's say there's eight hurdles. And each one of those has a probability of one in a thousand to go from, you know, eukaryotic, prokaryote, whatever. Let's say there's a one in a thousand chance. I think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever, if you really do it. But let's say it's first generous nature, one in 10 to the three. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have, you know, 10 to the, to the, to the 24th power, different possibility. And that's just with eight, like the moon has to be there, Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs had to be there, all the different things that we have to get to technological life. There's only 10 to the, only, there's 10 to the 22nd, we think, Earth, not Earth, planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy.

• 3:42:39Speaker 01

  So that's 100 times fewer than the probability to get, you know, 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in a thousand.

• 3:42:48Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating because now I really need to listen to your conversation with Lee Cronin, who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite.

• 3:42:55Speaker 01

  Yes, I know. Yeah, I want to have a debate with him.

• 3:42:58Lex Fridman?

  He believes, he believes that the, the way biology evolved on Earth could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways. So like if you ran Earth over and over and over, you would keep getting life and it would be very different. So it's, the, the fact that our particular life seems unique is just like, well, because every freaking life is going to seem unique, but it'll be very different. It's not like, we shouldn't be asking the question of what's the likelihood of getting a human-like thing? Because that seems to be super special. It's more like, how easy is it to make

• 3:43:39Speaker 01

  Slime mold.

• 3:43:40Lex Fridman?

  Anything that has the skills of a human. And I don't mean like something with thumbs, but achieving basically a technological civilization. And according to Lee, at least, it's like, it's trivial.

• 3:43:53Speaker 01

  I know, we fought, I fought a little bit. I'd love to debate him and I think it'd be a lot of fun because we debate with love. When I talk with Lee, I love him and he loves me, I think, I hope. But let me ask you a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on our clubhouse ones. So what do you think would happen the next day? Let's say we discovered life. Proxima Centauri B. It's, um, it looks just like slime mold, like you got on your, you know, brie cheese or whatever. We discover it. What would happen the next day? And they were like, oh, this would be transformative. And, and I'm not trying to be like, you know, total Cassandra about this, but I said, I don't think anything would happen. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It would be transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life exists. Go down to like the river, you know, I'm in San Diego, go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up

• 3:44:37Speaker 01

  a glass, you know? You're gonna find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we doing to our earth? We're destroying it callously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have this toxic waste bill a couple of months ago in San Diego. I couldn't go to the beach. What, let me take it a step further. You know how many, you know, how many people, I'm sorry, that you do know, but how many people died in the 20th century? Killed? These are advanced civilizations. This isn't slime mold. We kill, we maim, we harm, we hurt, we hate. I don't think anything would happen the next day. We go back to what we had. And I said, if that weren't proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three times, just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Allanland Hills meteorites in Antarctica, this like microbial respiration

• 3:45:22Speaker 01

  processes. Still, we don't know. It was a press conference held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie Contact, repurposed for that movie. And, um, and then there's, uh, and then there's this, um, this phosphorus life, this, this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake, many, you know, extremophile, we don't give a crap. We continue to treat. So why are we thinking that like our salvation, from whence will our salvation come? As the Bible says, like, it's not gonna change how we are. It's not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And, and we're pretty knowledgeable people, you and I, compared to, you know, laypeople.

• 3:45:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that's interesting. That's a really interesting argument. I, I wonder if you're right, but my intuition is, uh, I can, I can maybe present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about even deeper, which is like, what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe? Like, how would that change your life? I would, I would say there is certain discoveries that even in their very idea will change the fabric of society. I tend to see if there's definitive proof that there's life, and the more complex, the more powerful that idea is elsewhere.

• 3:46:36Lex Fridman?

  That I'm not exactly sure how it will change society.

• 3:46:41Lex Fridman?

  Because it's such a slap in the face. It's like such a humbling force, or maybe not. Or maybe it's a motivator to say, yeah, I don't know which force would take over. Maybe it would be governments with military. Start to think like, well, how do we kill it? If there's a lot of life out there, how do we create the defense system?

• 3:47:02Speaker 01

  How do we extract it?

• 3:47:03Lex Fridman?

  Or, or yeah, or mine it for for benefits.

• 3:47:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I just see like, there's 100 million literal counter examples of that. I mean, right now, there's like, like 700 million kids in poverty. And like, we just, how do we go about our life and just not deal with that? I mean, I, look, I put it aside. I eat hamburgers and, you know, in 100 years, I'll be canceled for being a, you know, a carnivore or whatever. But, you know, so obviously to get through life, you have to make certain compromise. You're not going to think about certain things. But I, I, I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment. Like every time there's water, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter? I'm, we're looking for water, like stipulate that water was there. Like, I believe there was water. I think we should investigate and see what the geology was like.

• 3:47:47Lex Fridman?

  But, but don't you think, so you're saying?

• 3:47:49Speaker 01

  Don't think you're going to get meaning from it. That's all I'm saying. I, I, I'm not saying it's not worth doing. I'm, I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science.

• 3:47:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay, but there's a, there's a complicated line here. What, what if it's this intelligent civilization living, obviously, probably not on Mars, but somewhere like in a neighboring galaxy that we, sorry, in, in a name, in a neighboring

• 3:48:17Speaker 01

  Star system.

• 3:48:18Lex Fridman?

  Star system that we discover. Don't you think that profound change in meaning?

• 3:48:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess, again, I assume that because of this pansharic process or whatever, that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not one 100%, but it's, it's much likelier than not that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system, into the universe, right into our galaxy.

• 3:48:42Lex Fridman?

  Beat that, please.

• 3:48:45Lex Fridman?

  As well.

• 3:48:45Speaker 01

  That's right. So I like the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece, you know, from a planetary body, one that couldn't support life as far as we know. But that could get next time, if you, if you, if you play nice and you come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars. So Mars theoretically could support stuff, right?

• 3:49:02Lex Fridman?

  Moving on up.

• 3:49:02Speaker 01

  So yeah, so I believe that there's, there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means there could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like, you know, people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff in.

• 3:49:13Lex Fridman?

  No, there's so much, some chance though, right?

• 3:49:18Speaker 01

  So again, yes, I think the problem, well, obviously the simple statement to say it's much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists. Right? I don't think we can argue that. It doesn't mean it's forbidden. Again, I'm not saying any of this is forbidden, not worth studying, not interesting.

• 3:49:32Lex Fridman?

  It's a likelihood thing.

• 3:49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to answer your, I think you're wise to push back and like, what does it matter? What I'm doing? And I like to think about that, you know, because it's like, what is the value of what you're doing? Like you have to answer that question or else at the end of your life, you'll have these existential, you know, kind of crises, right? So when I think about like who I am, part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions. For me though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent that does undergird in some sense, this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing, I'm not like wearing, you know, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism. But at the same token, I think as, you know, I, one of the things Einstein did say is that, you know, religion without

• 3:50:14Speaker 01

  science is blind and, or is lame and science without religion is lame, is blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that like, you can't get meaning, you know, from just knowing facts, like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know, right? It has no wisdom. You know, wisdom, it means sapient, the word wisdom in Latin is sapient. We are wise. And by the way, do you know what we're, what our real name is homo sapiens sapiens? So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know what the knowing is? It's that he's going to die. We're the only creatures that know that we are gonna die. We don't know when we're gonna die. But like, you know, I have a cat, a fierce attack cat. It's beautiful. She doesn't know when she's gonna die. Doesn't mean I'm more valuable.

• 3:50:58Lex Fridman?

  The survival instinct is much, it's fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death. And that's where Ernest Becker comes in with the terror of death. And that that's a creative force that seems to be more feature than bug. But the human condition is that.

• 3:51:19Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality.

• 3:51:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, to me, I mean, that's, that's why. You know, I, I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all mysteries. That's why, you know, my love has always been the human mind. So understanding.

• 3:51:42Lex Fridman?

  Who we are, what the hell are we? And I think your love has been an echo of that, which is where did we come from?

• 3:51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:51:51Lex Fridman?

  Or basically, as cheesy as it sounds, you know.

• 3:51:56Lex Fridman?

  Michio Kaku is away with words. If you, if you can just like enjoy the, you know.

• 3:52:02Speaker 01

  Oh, he speaks in complete, he's like Sam Harris of cosmology. I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.

• 3:52:06Lex Fridman?

  But like, also unapologetically, he says, you know, we will know God, or we will know the mind of God, or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things.

• 3:52:17Lex Fridman?

  That's exciting that physics might be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the, at the very core. And like the fabric of it all too, and not just our origins.

• 3:52:31Lex Fridman?

  You know, what's, you know, what's at the beginning? Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand what's at the beginning, but.

• 3:52:38Speaker 01

  I think we, we should be humble in that way. I mean, again, another thing is, you know. You ever hear the saying like, we shared 99% of our DNA with chimps or bonobos or whatever? I share like probably more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%. Like, that would be so much more interesting. Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or banana. Like, we, no, no, no, there's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel like discovering life on another planet, whatever solar system, would cause a diminution of humanity. Like, the one thing I do hold fast to from religion, I don't know where I am with God. Like, do I believe in God? I think that's an unanswerable question.

• 3:53:20Speaker 01

  But, but I have some thoughts about it. But, but by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human has infinite worth. Because we are, in a religious capacity, considered to be equal to God. In other words, we are gods, not to be like, you know, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects of God. We have free will. God had free will, if he exists. Again, I can't prove that God exists, otherwise you wouldn't have any credit for believing in God.

• 3:53:44Lex Fridman?

  This is interesting. I mean, this, this, it's like I'm talking to Einstein here, but let me ask anyway.

• 3:53:50Speaker 01

  Can you clip that for my clips chat?

• 3:53:54Lex Fridman?

  For somebody who's looking at the young universe, at the early universe, and are talking about God and are agnostic, who do you think is God?

• 3:54:10Speaker 01

  So, I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer. And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me, and I've been working it around and trying to work on it my own way. But he said, like, you can never, you can never be happy, you can only become happy. And I'm trying to take it a little bit further than that because I think it's interesting. Like meditation is like, you're not like, oh, I'm happy. And now like, oh, my kid came in. Now I'm not happy. Like, no, like you can be satisfied. Kurt Vonnegut said, like, you ever catch this? Sometimes, Lex, you're like walking around, you're like, life is fricking amazing. Like, I'm happy. And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself every time that happens,

• 3:54:55Speaker 01

  like a little mantra, like, if this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness, nothing is. Just remind yourself how awesome it is, every breath, everything that you do, when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens, good, it's good. So Sam said that, and it made me think, because I was like, well, what does it really mean to be happy? Because like, I can think of, I can think of about, you know, two or three ways that right now, I could double my happiness. Now, like, win the lottery or whatever, like, I could double my happiness. There's only a few ways, though, right? Like, you know, I had this, this kind of thought, like, how many boats can you waterski behind? Like, you had twice as many followers, now you've got 2 million followers, 5 million, whatever.

• 3:55:38Speaker 01

  It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Like, once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more, you know, change and followers, money, impact, women, whatever you want, to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right? On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy. I could make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways. In other words, there's more space to make your life unhappy than happy. And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy. And that what you should be doing in life is doing that which will cause you devastation

• 3:56:18Speaker 01

  if it goes away. Because those are the things that like are where you're reducing entropy, like a kid, like anyone who's a parent. Knows instantly what I'm talking about, like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a billion times better. And so thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence, I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God, to quote, misquote Sam, but there's ways that you can become a believer in God. In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence level that there is some, and let's not call it God because it's a freighted term, let's just call it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right? Simple things can do that.

• 3:57:03Speaker 01

  You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life. And we have this bias as humans towards negativity, negativity bias, well-known fact. So what I want to do is, let's call God good, right? That's where it comes from. God, good. Same words in German. And when we think about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be relationships. And there's a powerful concept from, from network theory, which is that, you know, the number of connections in a network, you know, I'm just saying it for your own, it grows as a square of the elements in the matrix and the number, right? So you think of a matrix with N people, you know, person one, two, three, four, and then

• 3:57:46Speaker 01

  there's four other people, there's 16 different pairs, but two, half of them overlap, the diagonals where you know each other, you know yourself. So there's, but that still grows as N squared. So those connections increase and decrease, right? You ever have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset, even though you're not fighting with either one of them. So like a network grows like that. So you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high-quality interstices between them. And I think in doing so, you, you make yourself fragile, not anti-fragile. And I think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.

• 3:58:25Lex Fridman?

  So that is a source of meaning, maximizing the goodness in life. And the way you know it's good is if it's taken away, it would devastate you.

• 3:58:36Speaker 01

  That's one way.

• 3:58:38Speaker 01

  Think about it, your brand, your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't count though. I've known parents that have a lot. Jim Simons, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors. He is one of the richest people on earth. Gulfstream, mega yacht. This is all documented, books about. He lost two sons as adults. And I hear people say, oh, I'm so jealous of Jim Simons. Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength. And his wife Marilyn and his first wife Barbara. I'm not, I'm not like that. Some people are, there are angels that walk among us.

• 3:59:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's this famous prayer, it's like, you know, God, you know, there's, there's an old saying like, one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money. And you see it like, happens with like lawyer, like people that win the lottery or whatever, or NFL football players after their career is over, they get, they're broke, right? And I always go like, God, please test me with money, you know, that'd be great. But, but in reality, you should never say, I'm gonna, I want what X person has, unless you're willing to take everything. And you'll find, you won't want to take everything.

• 3:59:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects of fame, of money, of power on people. I, it, it blinds people. And, and I wonder about that for myself, because it seems like in themselves, these are definitely not the goals I'm pretty much afraid. I'm not desirous and I'm definitely afraid of each of those things. Money, fame and power. But it seems the dreams I have as consequences can often have these things. And I'm really afraid of becoming something.

• 4:00:37Lex Fridman?

  That would disappoint me when I was younger. That would, uh, that I wouldn't recognize. You know, cause change happens gradually.

• 4:00:46Speaker 01

  But are you using yourself as the, as the touchstone to use the essay or not? Like, what is your rubric to, to apprise if you have lived up to that 12 year old, whatever year old Lex? Like, how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down? Or like, I always think, live to impress yourself. Like, I don't care if I have followers. Like, it's nice, all right, whatever, but it's hedonic and it's just never ending. Cause you'll always see the next level. But I think it's pretty damn cool that like, I've gotten to go to these places, the South Pole, and I've done these things and I've made a family and, and I'm able to teleport my values into the future. Through my children and I've had ideological children that I. So by what metric, you know, have you not already A, impressed yourself?

• 4:01:31Speaker 01

  And B, could you let yourself down? I don't want to turn this into therapy.

• 4:01:33Lex Fridman?

  I think some of it is psychology. For me, I'm very much just never, I'm highly self-critical. That I'm never happy, never happy with what I've done. But I'm always happy in the way that you described, which is that, uh, the Vonnegut thing, where you just often during the day, I will feel, I don't know. I just remember just eating, um, beef jerky and being truly happy. That was just last night and I have that all the time. And that to me is why, I mean, that feels to me like a healthy way to live life. And at least for me, it's the one I really enjoy.

• 4:02:14Lex Fridman?

  A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self-critical, so hard on yourself is not a good way to go. But more and more as I get older, I realize it's just who I am. I, you have to a certain point, accept this is how I'm always going to be the self-critical.

• 4:02:30Speaker 01

  It's like the oracle of Delphi, right? You know thyself. But I want to leave you with one last thing, which is to say, just on this topic. You know, it could be different, right? We could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead of the 7-Eleven. You know, it could be that we have no other, no other taste buds. And, and you know, Eric's talked to the four dimensions of, you know, the, the vibration of your tongue. Right? It could be like this one. And it's just like, not, you know, Memphis barbecue, whatever you like in your, in your, in your Slim Jim. It could be something, it could be very boring. Similarly, what if like, that's a clue? Like, what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. We, there are many animals, most animals have single monoch- monochrome vision.

• 4:03:13Speaker 01

  They only see in, in, you know, black and white intensity. They only have rods and no cones. We could be like that, but we're not. Why is that not a clue? Like, if, like, God's not gonna like hit you over the head and say like, here I am. Cause then everybody would believe in him. And there's very simplistic, I've had debates, even with like famous atheists like Lawrence Krauss. He's like self-declared militant atheist. And I was like, well, I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in. Like some guy in a white beard in a chair, like that's infantile. Like I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if Yang Mills theory, you know, Maxwell's equate, like what, those are beautiful.

• 4:03:54Speaker 01

  If you've ever seen like, you know, expressed in tensor notation Einstein's equations or, or Maxwell's equations. Or, and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's, it's unbelievably beautiful. Doesn't have to be that way. That we can comprehend it? That's a crack? Maybe that's where the light gets in and the light is what reveals what's beautiful. So I, I don't believe in God. I think that's a stupid notion. Like, do I believe in God? Like, sometimes I joke, I wonder if God believes in me, you know, like more than if I believe in like, he needs Brian Keating. Like, you know, what, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rabbi, he's like, um, what would I be doing if I were God? Exactly what God's doing right now. Like, you think I know more than God? Give me a.

• 4:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Leaving clues of beauty for, for these hairless apes.

• 4:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04:43Lex Fridman?

  And to see what they do with this. And then marvel at, um, at, um, both the tragedy of what the, what those apes do to each other. And the, the rare moments of when they have.

• 4:04:58Lex Fridman?

  When they understand, understand deeply about how the world works. Brian, you're an incredible human being. I'm a big fan and I'm really honored that you was, first of all, shower me with rocks from the moon. From space. From space. Space dust. Space dust. And crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals. Yeah. That you can, you can use for good. And tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today. This was amazing. It was a great pleasure for me, Lex. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Keating. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Galileo Galilei.

• 4:05:41Lex Fridman?

  In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.