Joe Rogan Experience #1151 - Sean Carroll

Joe Rogan 0:00 (laughs)

Narrator 0:01 All right.

Joe Rogan 0:02 Oh, wait a minute. Are we going live? Can-

Narrator 0:10 Boom, and we're live. Mr. Carroll, how are you, sir?

Sean Carroll 0:13 Very good to be back.

Joe Rogan 0:14 Very good to have you back. So, uh, you have a podcast now.

Sean Carroll 0:17 I do. I've joined the ranks. You inspired me.

Joe Rogan 0:19 Well, you, uh, it's important.

Sean Carroll 0:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:21 We need people like you out there. Uh, you're, uh, you have, like, what, seven episodes so far?

Sean Carroll 0:25 Seven episodes up, got a few more in the can. Gonna try to drib 'em out once a week, uh, for the first six months or so, see how it goes. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:31 Are you enjoying the process?

Sean Carroll 0:33 I am. Mindscape, by the way, is the name, for those out there in podcast land. Yeah, I'm loving it. You know, the, the real, the thing that tilted me over toward doing it... 'Cause like, look, it's, I have a day job, right? I can't spend too much-

Joe Rogan 0:43 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 0:43 ... time doing this stuff. Um, but what I realized, it was an excuse, uh, a license to talk to people who are not just physicists, right? 'Cause like-

Joe Rogan 0:51 Yes.

Sean Carroll 0:51 ... I have intellectual interests that go way beyond just what I do for a living. And in academia, you're not allowed to take seriously anything other than your discipline, your job, right? I'm allowed to be talking about physics, but nothing else. But so now I can talk to historians and economists and philosophers and psychologists and it's great.

Joe Rogan 1:09 Well, you could've just gone to Evergreen State and then you could talk about anything.

Sean Carroll 1:12 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:13 I mean, you're teaching a professor, you could just, if you're a professor, you could teach them dance.

Sean Carroll 1:17 We have to break out-

Joe Rogan 1:18 Literally.

Sean Carroll 1:18 ... of the system. We have to do it ourselves.

Joe Rogan 1:20 Yeah, man.

Sean Carroll 1:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:21 Gotta break outta that system. So your, uh, podcast, you decided that this would be a great venue for you to just, uh, expand on subjects and just get into anything that you'd like.

Sean Carroll 1:32 Well, you know, I, I have opinions about things, and I've never been one who's said you shouldn't talk about things unless you're a PhD-credentialed expert, right? I think everyone should be talking about everything, but you should know what your level of expertise is.

Joe Rogan 1:45 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 1:45 So if you're not an expert, you should listen to people, and you should then make your own decisions, but you should first gather the information. And so I don't feel quite like I can go... I, I have a blog, and I can write whatever I want on my blog, but I can't really expound on my theories of economics 'cause what do I know about economics?

Joe Rogan 2:02 Right.

Sean Carroll 2:02 But I can call up a, a very expert economist and chat with them on the podcast, and both I will learn something and hopefully the listeners will.

Joe Rogan 2:10 So you're gonna just basically talk about anything?

Sean Carroll 2:12 The shtick is we sort of try to pick an idea, right? So for the hour or whatever it is, I don't have your stamina. I can't do the two-and-a-half-hour thing (laughs) thing, but-

Joe Rogan 2:22 Just need more of these cavemans.

Sean Carroll 2:23 For an hour... I know, I need more, I need more nitrous, uh-

Joe Rogan 2:25 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 2:25 ... caffeine in me. But, uh, yeah, for an hour, hour and a half, uh, I'll get someone who's an expert and we'll dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on, you know, in, in sort of everyday people's language and how it fits into the bigger picture and things like that. And, uh, trying to mix up, you know, good old professors, which are my peer group, to sort of... I got some people coming outta left field. I had a professional poker player, I have a movie director-

Joe Rogan 2:50 Hmm.

Sean Carroll 2:50 ... coming up, a chef, and things like that, so. But basically, yeah, whatever I wanna talk about.

Joe Rogan 2:54 That's awesome. So, uh, is this for your own edification or are you just using it as, uh, just a platform? Like, what-

Sean Carroll 3:02 Yeah, I think that my, like, philosophically, I treat it like it's for me, right?

Joe Rogan 3:08 Hmm.

Sean Carroll 3:08 Like, I'm not gonna do guests or topics, or not do topics because the people say so, right?

Joe Rogan 3:15 Right.

Sean Carroll 3:15 Like, there's plenty of people out there who don't want me to talk about anything other than physics, right?

Joe Rogan 3:18 Of course.

Sean Carroll 3:18 Or, or, or at least nothing that involves politics or religion, but I-

Joe Rogan 3:21 Stay in your lane, bro.

Sean Carroll 3:22 Very much, right.

Joe Rogan 3:23 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 3:23 But I love talking about politics and religion, so guess what?

Joe Rogan 3:26 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 3:26 I'm gonna talk about those things. Um, and so, and then hopefully, they, it finds an audience, right? And, uh, so I, I'm willing to listen to suggestions, but mostly I have to treat it like it's for me.

Joe Rogan 3:38 Well, I think it's absurd to ask someone to not talk about things if they're-

Sean Carroll 3:41 But there's, it's-

Joe Rogan 3:41 ... interested in those things.

Sean Carroll 3:42 ... people love doing it, right?

Joe Rogan 3:43 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 3:43 Like, and I, I especially love, you know, the commenters saying, "Oh, you know, of course he's a scientist so he, it knows nothing about politics." I'm like, "You're an anonymous YouTube commenter."

Joe Rogan 3:53 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 3:53 Like-

Joe Rogan 3:54 Right.

Sean Carroll 3:54 ... why should I listen to your opinions (laughs) about politics?

Joe Rogan 3:56 You definitely can't listen to the opinions of anybody that's willing to take the time to comment on YouTube.

Sean Carroll 4:02 What- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:02 That's a problem.

Sean Carroll 4:04 Any, like, would think that they would have self-awareness.

Joe Rogan 4:05 I mean, like, I had a bit, I had a whole bit about it 'cause I was like, "What kind of a person does that?" Like, who, who listens to a video and goes, "Well, it's about time that I put in my input"? Takes a very rare breed, unless they have, like, a real specific expertise in what's being discussed. Like, maybe it's about auto repair and, like-

Sean Carroll 4:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:23 ... that is not how you replace a transmission, here's why.

Sean Carroll 4:26 Or if you're just asking questions. Like-

Joe Rogan 4:28 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 4:28 ... I love my commenters. Like, mostly the, the comments even on my YouTube, like, so I send the video... I don't do video, right? I'm just doing audio podcasts, but you can put them on YouTube with a static image and-

Joe Rogan 4:38 Right.

Sean Carroll 4:39 ... for, for some reason people (laughs) like that, people listen to podcasts on YouTube, right?

Joe Rogan 4:42 A lot of them.

Sean Carroll 4:43 Uh, yeah. And, uh, the comments have actually overall been surprisingly good, 'cause YouTube is one of the worst, right? In overall. But, uh, you know, people say like, "Oh, I didn't know that," or, "Tell me more about this," or, "This was interesting." That's great. Like, by all means do it. But if you're like, "Don't talk about that, I wanna hear about this," then, you know, block. You know, go away, delete.

Joe Rogan 5:02 It only takes a tiny drop of LSD to pollute a whole bucket of water.

Sean Carroll 5:07 There you go.

Joe Rogan 5:08 And (laughs) that-

Sean Carroll 5:09 There you go.

Joe Rogan 5:09 ... that's really what the deal is with YouTube comments. It's just the, the sheer number of people. The, the problem is that YouTube has a dedicated group of shitheads and trolls for whatever reason. I don't know why, but that platform seems to attract some of the worst in people that comment.

Sean Carroll 5:27 And I'm, you know, I, I cannot claim that I'm immune to, uh, reading it and, and getting annoyed, right?

Joe Rogan 5:35 Of course (laughs) .

Sean Carroll 5:35 Like, I'm like, "You idiots."

Joe Rogan 5:36 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 5:37 Like, I know I should just say, "Forget it," like-

Joe Rogan 5:39 Yes.

Sean Carroll 5:39 ... you know, go move on with my life, but I'm like, "Damn it." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 5:42 Well, it's, it's interesting in a lot of ways. I mean, there's, there's, there's something fascinating about this new form of communication where someone can send this, uh, very, uh, just flat text. You don't know anything about the background of the person that's sending it. And there's a style of doing that that's designed to kind of mess with your head.

Sean Carroll 6:05 Just to, like, poke at-

Joe Rogan 6:06 Yeah (laughs) .

Sean Carroll 6:06 ... all of your nerves (laughs) , right? And, and look, let's, let- let me just, you know, just to redress the balance here, um-... it's great that we have these new ways of talking to each other, right? And part of, you know, I- I- I glancingly mentioned the fact that academia wants you to stay in your lane very, very much. And I think that that's a shame. And, uh, so I think that part of the many hidden purposes of my podcast, one of them is to dissolve the boundary between science and the rest of our intellectual life, right? Like, I'm not gonna... Sometimes I'll be talking about science, sometimes I won't. Like, we s- we tend to s- silo off science as a thing, and then, like, econ- economics and history and political science is another thing that is out there and relevant to the world. And science is something that is sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of people. And I wanna mix it all up. I want, like, the different people talking to each other. And so, overall, by all means, comment on the YouTube videos and, you know, keep that conversation going.

Joe Rogan 6:58 That's good of you. That's- that's- that's a very healthy attitude, and that's kind of the attitude that you have to have if you're putting everything out there.

Sean Carroll 7:05 Yeah. And (laughs) and just one more irony is, like, I'm not a... I don't seek conflict. I'm a conflict-averse person. Like, I just want... I don't wanna argue with people.

Joe Rogan 7:14 Right.

Sean Carroll 7:15 But I do wanna say things that are true, and not everyone agrees about what is true, so there's gonna be arguments. So I put up with that, but I'm not seeking it out. So I would like this, you know, utopia of rational discourse where everyone is talking about ideas in a dispassionate way and in good faith, looking toward- moving toward the truth.

Joe Rogan 7:33 It would be nice if we had, like, a system, like, almost like a rating system of, for humans, like a Yelp-

Sean Carroll 7:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:41 ... for commentators.

Sean Carroll 7:42 There- people are trying that. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:43 It's not a bad idea. It really isn't, in terms of, like- like, y- people review your comments on things, and enough people decide, like, "Well, this is just-"

Sean Carroll 7:53 Right.

Joe Rogan 7:53 "... unnecessary."

Sean Carroll 7:54 Yelp for expertise. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:55 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 7:55 Yeah, yeah, or for commentary, in general. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:56 Well, all the above.

Sean Carroll 7:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:58 Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, that's pr- they're- we're probably gonna move to some sort of a system like that. In fact, some people are actually advocating that, uh, in- y- for society to have some sort of a- a- or a, like, a ratings system for people, and almost a- a new kind of currency, like a social currency.

Sean Carroll 8:18 They're doing it in China, right? You've heard this?

Joe Rogan 8:20 Yes. Yes.

Sean Carroll 8:20 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:20 It's scary for people, though, 'cause it's China.

Sean Carroll 8:23 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 8:23 And, you know, and Ch- China is a- uh, uh, is a trippy place. And it's very trippy in terms of its sort of g- gut capitalism going, but it's also a communist dictatorship-

Sean Carroll 8:34 It's a big old dictatorship, yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:35 ... and it's controlled by the government. And the- all the companies are also in... You know the thing with Huawei? Am I saying it right? People are getting mad at me about that. Huawei? I think it's Huawei. It's, uh, the n- now the number two cellphone manufacturer in the world, and they're forbidden to work with US carriers.

Sean Carroll 8:53 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:53 The- the United States government does not trust this company, so they've said, you know, this company has apparently done some shady things, according to them, not according to certain tech people, who say it's nonsense. But they're- so n- now they're keeping them from selling their cellphones with AT&T and T-Mobile and whatever. Uh, but they're the number two manufacturer in the world now. They just surpassed Apple.

Sean Carroll 9:16 'Cause China's just so big.

Joe Rogan 9:17 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 9:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:17 So China's a trip.

Sean Carroll 9:18 Yeah. Well, it's- it's... They know very well. It's- it's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful, because there are, you know, people who don't like it. There are people who rebel against the system. But they've been so- the government's been so enormously successful at controlling information.

Joe Rogan 9:35 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 9:35 Controlling what you learn. Like, you can't google Tiananmen Square if you're there in China.

Joe Rogan 9:39 Right, yeah.

Sean Carroll 9:40 Uh, you can't get those images or anything like that. And companies wanna do business there, so they'll go along with it. And I'm not sure if it's stable. But, again, you know, I talked about this on my last podcast with Joscha Mohnke. I'm not sure that democracy is stable either. So, um-

Joe Rogan 9:54 Mm.

Sean Carroll 9:54 ... when- when the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly, uh, huge abuses and huge changes are on the horizon, even we don't know what they're gonna be. I mean, that's- that's my worry about the social credit system, right?

Joe Rogan 10:06 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 10:06 Like, it's so obviously abusable, right?

Joe Rogan 10:09 Yes.

Sean Carroll 10:09 Make the wrong people have bad credit. Make the people you like have... I mean, if this is run by the government, you're gonna trust them to, uh, do it fairly? I, you know, I- I'm a little skeptical about that.

Joe Rogan 10:20 Well, I think this last election and the subsequent analysis of the manipulation of the election has been very eye-opening to people. And, um, the- the- the Russian troll farms, have you been paying attention-

Sean Carroll 10:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:36 ... to any of that stuff?

Sean Carroll 10:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:37 Th- that is- that is a- a stunning revelation, that there's 24/7 businesses where people are set up where they're hired to just tweet and post things and comment on things. And they're all working in some way to try to manipulate way- the way people look at the news.

Sean Carroll 10:58 Yeah. And the most interesting thing to me, I thought, like, if they were clever, they will do this, and they- they do it. It's not just that they have a policy that they want to push, right, or a candidate they want to push. They want to foment disagreement, right?

Joe Rogan 11:11 Yes, yes.

Sean Carroll 11:11 They will take the most radical views on either side and pump them up just so Americans are tearing at each others' throats.

Joe Rogan 11:18 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 11:18 And yeah, that kinda works, right? That's- that's pretty successful so far.

Joe Rogan 11:22 There was a Radiolab podcast where these people that were Trump supporters detailed being contacted by these, uh, Russian troll farms where they organize these rallies and they organize these, uh, these protests.

Sean Carroll 11:37 Yep.

Joe Rogan 11:37 And they even hired a fake Hillary. They fu- they hired a fake Trump. And they were gonna have the Hillary in a cage, and they wanted everybody to yell out, "Lock her up!" And this- these Russians coordinated this whole thing.

Sean Carroll 11:52 Right. And then once it starts, you know, it organically takes over, right? I mean-

Joe Rogan 11:55 Right.

Sean Carroll 11:55 ... you- you probably saw just the other day, this, uh, uh, Trump rally where the CNN reporter was trying to do, uh, uh, on-camera-

Joe Rogan 12:02 Jim Acosta.

Sean Carroll 12:03 Yeah, trying to do a camera spot, and he just, like, got drowned out by people shouting at him and, you know-

Joe Rogan 12:08 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 12:08 ... shouting obscenities. And-... yeah, I, I don't know what, that- that's bad, right? Okay, I mean, it's bad. The- the media, I wouldn't want that to happen to Fox News. I wouldn't want that to happen to people I disagreed with.

Joe Rogan 12:18 Right.

Sean Carroll 12:18 You gotta let the people in the media be the media. They're not the enemy of the people, you know?

Joe Rogan 12:22 Well, what he's done is very dangerous.

Sean Carroll 12:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:24 You know?

Sean Carroll 12:25 It is.

Joe Rogan 12:25 It's- it's very s- it's very sneaky and very dangerous, and it's very manipulative. And he's essentially, he's in survival mode. And when people are in survival mode, they, th- the, he's not thinking at all about the importance of the press. He's thinking about-

Sean Carroll 12:40 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:40 ... his- his situation, his stance, his position in life, preserve that.

Sean Carroll 12:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:45 And what's the best way to preserve that? Well, someone's attacking me, attack the people who are attacking me.

Sean Carroll 12:49 And he, yeah, you- you build yourself up by creating an enemy that everyone can agree on, right?

Joe Rogan 12:53 Right.

Sean Carroll 12:53 And some- one of the chilling things that Yascha pointed out, um, there's really, despite the rhetoric, there's never been a successful truly multiethnic democracy in the history of the world. Like, democracies that have worked, have worked because one group is the boss.

Joe Rogan 13:10 Right.

Sean Carroll 13:10 And, you know, they- they give rights to the rest of the people and so forth and try to be fair to some extent, but that's changing. Like, as the demographics of the world are changing, uh, we're, you know, we're becoming more of the patchwork that we claimed to be years ago, and people aren't quite happy with that. They're not comfortable with it, and this is something that can be used to gin up emotional reactions.

Joe Rogan 13:32 Yeah. There's, people are terrified of change too. There's always this nostalgia for the- for the past.

Sean Carroll 13:39 Yeah. And, you know, a past that is not necessarily accurate, right?

Joe Rogan 13:42 Right.

Sean Carroll 13:42 The past that they-

Joe Rogan 13:43 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 13:43 ... that they, that they envision. Um, and- and it's, and I'm sympathetic, you know, with the real problems, right? There are real problems with inequality and with healthcare and with jobs and, you know, not just the number of jobs, but the jobs are changing. Not everyone is really tooled up to be a high-tech, uh, office worker in this-

Joe Rogan 14:01 Right.

Sean Carroll 14:01 ... day and age. And so I take those concerns really, really seriously. But those concerns are being channeled in very unproductive ways, to scapegoat people who don't deserve it.

Joe Rogan 14:10 One of the things that's fascinating to me that s- seems to be boiling under the surface is the possibility that we might need some sort of universal basic income to deal with, uh, what's happening with AI and automa-

Sean Carroll 14:22 Yep.

Joe Rogan 14:22 ... automation. Like, uh, auto- automation of, um, cars, automation of, uh, what, normal jobs that people, like food preparation and things that people have come to just take for granted that a human's gonna be doing that. It's entirely possible that millions and millions and millions of people are going to be out of work within a very short period of time. And it seems to me that it's just, it's one of those really sneaky things that might just catch us before we're ready for it.

Sean Carroll 14:48 Yeah, I think that if you, you know, extrapolate very far ahead into the future and imagine what utopia is supposed to look like or, you know, the far technologically advanced civilization, why wouldn't we imagine that work is done by robots and machines and human beings are free to be creative or artistic or athletic or just sit on their butts if that's what they wanna do? If you believe that that's a possible future, then the way to get there is to, as robots and machines do more and more, make it more and more possible for people to live without working. I think that's a, is at least... I have no idea whether it works in practice. I'm not an economist. I haven't studied it, but I think it should be taken seriously as an idea.

Joe Rogan 15:27 If you looked at it as a pessimist, and if you looked at it with a cynical perspective, you'd say, "Uh, well, people just, what, they don't have motivation. Then they behave like rich kids or entitled people or people who won the lottery. They blow all the money. They don't take it seriously 'cause they didn't earn it. It goes against human nature."

Sean Carroll 15:44 Yep, I get that. And maybe it does. Let them do it. Who, who am I to tell people that they need to be virtuous by earning a living in some-

Joe Rogan 15:52 Hmm.

Sean Carroll 15:52 ... you know, job they may or may not be able to keep for very long, right? People who say that usually haven't gotten fired from their jobs recently, right?

Joe Rogan 15:59 (laughs) Right, right. Yeah, and I always feel like the people that are actually ambitious... But the- the real problem I think would be growing up with that. I think if you- you got it as an adult, you'd probably recognize it as the safety net that it is. But as, if it was during your developmental process, you might rely on it as a constant.

Sean Carroll 16:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:20 And so that might be a problem in terms of motivation.

Sean Carroll 16:23 I think so, and I think that, uh, and you see it, right? I mean, I- I- I have friends at various levels of income and- and class-

Joe Rogan 16:29 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 16:29 ... that they grew up in, and you can always tell people who grew up in very comfortable, uh, environments because they don't have jobs, they have projects.

Joe Rogan 16:36 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 16:36 (laughs) Say I'm working on a project. Because they're not really worried about the project failing, you know? Like, the, if- if you grew up without that safety net, you're more cautious, right?

Joe Rogan 16:46 Yes.

Sean Carroll 16:46 Like, you have to have a- a fail safe. You have to have a- a backup plan. And, but what if everyone had that backup plan? What if we could all do projects instead of work? Is that really a worse world? I don't know.

Joe Rogan 16:56 Do you know any trust fund people?

Sean Carroll 16:58 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:58 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 16:59 I know plenty.

Joe Rogan 16:59 The ones that I know all blow their money. (laughs)

Sean Carroll 17:02 Actually, I know some, I know some very wealthy people who raise their kids really well. And you know-

Joe Rogan 17:07 As trust fund people?

Sean Carroll 17:08 Oh, yeah, as people who, like, never need to work a day in their lives and they all work really hard.

Joe Rogan 17:12 That's so weird. You- you-

Sean Carroll 17:13 Yeah, it's possible. Possible.

Joe Rogan 17:14 Find those people and clone them.

Sean Carroll 17:15 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:16 (laughs) Find out what made them tick. What was their-

Sean Carroll 17:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:18 So they found a passion. They found something that they're actually...

Sean Carroll 17:21 Yeah, and-

Joe Rogan 17:22 That seems to be a giant issue.

Sean Carroll 17:23 That's right. And your parents need to, you know, sort of encourage that.

Joe Rogan 17:27 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 17:27 And, you know, um, you, you know, parents matter when it comes to, like, uh, if you're, if you are very wealthy, do you feel like you deserve it? Or do you feel like, "Oh, I should, you know, give something back because I'm really, really fortunate," right?

Joe Rogan 17:38 Well, there's cockamamie ideas that come from people that haven't earned their money too. Like, one guy came to me with this crazy idea for this project he's doing. He wanted me to get involved in it, and I was, I was going over the details of it. I was like, "I don't think this is gonna work." Like, why, why is this guy so enthusiastic about it? And then the more I dug into it, I'm like, "Oh, he got all this money from his dad."

Sean Carroll 17:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 17:57 Oh.

Sean Carroll 17:58 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:58 Well, there you go. This guy's just, he just, he's got pipe dreams.

Sean Carroll 18:02 Yeah. I mean, I guess I feel, just to be honest about it, like, I'm very lucky. Uh, not because I grew up wealthy, 'cause I didn't, but because I now have a job that represents what I want to do. Like, what I would do with my life if I were...... independently wealthy isn't that different-

Joe Rogan 18:19 Right.

Sean Carroll 18:19 ... from what I'm doing right now, right?

Joe Rogan 18:21 That's bliss.

Sean Carroll 18:21 And, uh, exactly. But therefore, I kinda think that I would like a world where everyone can do that, if that's what they wanted.

Joe Rogan 18:27 That would be amazing.

Sean Carroll 18:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:29 The real question is, does everybody have an actual interest? And if they don't, is it nurture or nature?

Sean Carroll 18:36 And if they don't, do we force them to? Is that-

Joe Rogan 18:39 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 18:39 ... what we wanna do?

Joe Rogan 18:39 Bro, find something you love.

Sean Carroll 18:41 I don't wanna do that. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:41 Find something you love.

Sean Carroll 18:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:43 Find a thing.

Sean Carroll 18:44 I, you know, and actually, I never tell people, like, follow your passion or find what you love 'cause look, there's a lot of people who need to earn a living, right?

Joe Rogan 18:50 Right.

Sean Carroll 18:50 There's a lot of people who just need to do work because they need to pay the bills. That's fine. That should be respected, that in the w- in the world we have right now-

Joe Rogan 18:59 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 18:59 ... that's an- an honorable thing to do, and not everyone gets to just do what they love.

Joe Rogan 19:03 That's true. There are some things, though, that you can do for a living that you'll actually enjoy. Like, you need to make a living, but because of your temperament, because of your interests, you can find a thing, whether it's carpentry or, you know, whate- whatever it is that you find to be fascinating and fulfilling when you're actually doing it. You're making a living, but you're also doing something that, man, I, this is very satisfying.

Sean Carroll 19:26 Maybe. Maybe that's true. I mean, it's certainly true it can be done. Can it be done for everyone in the world? I don't know.

Joe Rogan 19:32 That's a good question.

Sean Carroll 19:33 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 19:34 Yeah. Well, there's so many styles of living, too. You know, when you're talking about China, uh, I was in China recently. I- I was- I- we spent some time in Thailand, and we flew through China, and one of the things you realize about China is, they just, uh, there's a differe- totally different way of, uh, moving.

Sean Carroll 19:50 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 19:50 Like, w- people just walk right through people.

Sean Carroll 19:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:54 I mean, they- there are lines, if there's a space and a line, they- like, peop- they don't respect that space. They go right into that space, right in front of you. Like, "Oh, no, there's a space there."

Sean Carroll 20:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:02 And they don't even think of it as rude. It's not rude.

Sean Carroll 20:04 It's not just the style, right, yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:05 Yeah, it's just, it just how it is.

Sean Carroll 20:06 Yeah, we went on a- we went through Southeast Asia for a few weeks and, you know, visited Vietnam and Thailand. And they're right next to each other, but just the behavior in the city is utterly different.

Joe Rogan 20:15 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 20:15 Like, just walking down the street, it's just a different culture.

Joe Rogan 20:17 I haven't been to Vietnam. What was that like?

Sean Carroll 20:19 Oh, Vietnam was my favorite. It was the best.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Really?

Sean Carroll 20:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Everybody says that.

Sean Carroll 20:21 It's great, um, I mean, I don't know. I- I was there for a few days, right? I'm sure that there's depths to the country that I didn't perceive. But, uh, you know, it was coming to life. Literally the week we were there was the first McDonald's was opening in Vietnam.

Joe Rogan 20:34 Mm.

Sean Carroll 20:34 So, which is not good, but at least it meant it was- we were there in a pre-McDonald's, uh, society, right? And the- it was physically very beautiful. The food was amazing. Pe- it was all scattershot, like, the, you know, people just go crazy on the streets in any direction they want, and it was not organized or anything like that. But it was very genuine, you know? It was- people were trying, you know, to be nice. Uh, people seemed to be very friendly. Like, uh, we didn't speak any of the language or anything like that. And, uh, it was just a wonderful experience overall, yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:03 That's awesome. Yeah, it's, uh, Asia's a trip. I mean, it's a really different part of the world.

Sean Carroll 21:08 China is, yeah, I've been to China too, and it's- it's, uh, that's a trip for a different reason, right? And, uh, you know, I- it- I- I'm scared of China in the sense that I- I'm worried that they will succeed while still being a repressive dictatorship.

Joe Rogan 21:20 Mm.

Sean Carroll 21:20 Right? Like, uh, I- I- I remember reading, you know, this- these memoirs from Bertrand Russell when he visited China, and, uh, he was rhapsodizing about, "This is an amazing culture, amazing people, this is great." And I'm like, "Does he not know it's a communist dictatorship?" And then my brain kicked in. I'm like, "Oh, no, it was 1912, it was not a communist dictatorship-

Joe Rogan 21:38 Mm.

Sean Carroll 21:38 ... at the time." And there- there's a great tragedy in the way that China has been sort of repressed for so long. I think there's immense potential and promise there, but it's also the possibility that they just remain this autocracy forever, and some people's lives improve, and a lot of people, it's just drudgery for billions of people.

Joe Rogan 21:58 Yeah, it's totally possible. It's- it's fascinating that they've become this combination of things.

Sean Carroll 22:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:03 A combination of both capitalism and communism.

Sean Carroll 22:05 Yeah, well, I think that's it. You know, like, they found a release valve, like, you couldn't- you couldn't be- the Soviet Union was gonna collapse because it was- it's a terrible system, right?

Joe Rogan 22:12 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 22:13 That, you know, economically, politically, whatever. And China found this little bit of balance where they still have the repressive, uh, dictatorship, but they give enough freedom for people to, you know, be ambitious and try to get ahead, and- and that improves the economy. And they make some terrible mistakes, right? There are these huge cities that are built, and no one lives there, right?

Joe Rogan 22:30 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 22:30 And (laughs) there's the- these spooky pictures, right? You-

Joe Rogan 22:33 Have you seen the recreations of other large cities like Paris?

Sean Carroll 22:36 I've seen that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:37 That's the weirdest thing.

Sean Carroll 22:38 And- and sometimes, like, cities like Shenzhen, like, right next to Hong Kong, it's a city of five million people.

Joe Rogan 22:43 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 22:43 Thirty years ago, it was 50,000 people, right? Like, it just- they built it.

Joe Rogan 22:47 Wow.

Sean Carroll 22:48 You know, in a couple years. (laughs) And, uh, and other places, like, "Oh, we'll build a shopping mall here, where there's n-" and it's just instantly, it's- looks like Detroit the next day. There's no one there, and you know, no one mak- makes, uh- no one builds anything, no one does anything with it, 'cause it's- it's not really capitalism. It's still a- a planned economy, and there's pluses and minuses with that, no doubt.

Joe Rogan 23:07 One of the big fears about China is their experimentation with, uh, genetics, is that, uh, they're willing to do things ethically that scientists in America and a lot of parts of the Western world are not w- willing to engage in yet.

Sean Carroll 23:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:21 Including the use of CRISPR on human embryos.

Sean Carroll 23:24 Yep, and I think, uh, so I have mixed feelings about that. I think it's gonna happen in all cultures. I think we're gonna do it, right? I d- actually had, um... Sorry I haven't released that podcast yet, but stay tuned. I have an excellent podcast coming with Carl Zimmer, who is a science writer who just wrote a long book about heredity and genetics. And, uh, yeah, so what they're gonna be doing, uh, with the designer babies, it's not science fiction as far as I can tell. It's gonna happen. And, uh, but it's very unclear what it will mean, because we're not any good right now at figuring out, uh, how genetics turns, uh, how your DNA turns into a person, right?

Joe Rogan 23:58 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 23:58 Like, it might be, like, you know, that we find something, oh, that if you increase- if you change this particular gene, uh, sure, you can live twice as long, but also you'll have Parkinson's disease when you're 14.

Joe Rogan 24:09 Right, right.

Sean Carroll 24:09 Like, we don't know what the interdependencies are and stuff like that. Uh, so, but- but it's coming. Like, I think that the idea that we will be...... choosing embryos to come to term and be people on the basis of their genes before they're, you know, uh, implanted in a uterus is, is 100%. That's gonna happen. And the chance that we're gonna be editing them is 99.99% chance. And you're right, China is way more willing to do that. And, uh, again, I'm not really sure that's good or bad. You know, I think it's gonna come here. What I'm more worried about is that, you know, people figure out a system that will make, uh, you can have a baby who's guaranteed to be, you know, tall and beautiful and smart and live for 150 years, and it'll cost you a million dollars. Then that'll be a little bit unfair, right?

Joe Rogan 25:01 Right.

Sean Carroll 25:01 That will be a- that will be an issue that will come up.

Joe Rogan 25:03 Yeah. But then isn't it unfair that The Rock is The Rock? How did he get to be The Rock?

Sean Carroll 25:09 It is, but I think just-

Joe Rogan 25:10 Got lucky?

Sean Carroll 25:10 ... psychologically, it's- I think he worked hard. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:13 (laughs) Yes, but it's also-

Sean Carroll 25:13 But he also had some benefit, right?

Joe Rogan 25:15 ... you know, a giant human.

Sean Carroll 25:16 He started, yeah, he started in the right place. You know, the story of Yao Ming, right?

Joe Rogan 25:20 No.

Sean Carroll 25:20 Yeah. So, Yao Ming, the, the basketball player from China-

Joe Rogan 25:23 Right.

Sean Carroll 25:23 ... he was basically the result of a breeding program.

Joe Rogan 25:26 Really?

Sean Carroll 25:26 Like, they encouraged his parents, who were both really tall basketball players, to have a baby, and, you know-

Joe Rogan 25:31 Ooh.

Sean Carroll 25:31 ... it worked for him. It doesn't always work. It's a, it's a crapshoot, but-

Joe Rogan 25:34 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 25:35 ... uh, um, it can work. Yeah, and so-

Joe Rogan 25:37 But that's normal breeding. That's like, uh-

Sean Carroll 25:39 It was encouraged.

Joe Rogan 25:40 ... I have a dog and my dog's a good-looking dog.

Sean Carroll 25:42 Yeah. No, that's right.

Joe Rogan 25:43 And you have a dog of the same breed. Let's put them together.

Sean Carroll 25:45 That's right, with human beings, but yes.

Joe Rogan 25:47 Yes.

Sean Carroll 25:47 Otherwise, normal, yes. And it, it, I think it's different, it's different psychologically because we think it's different winning the lottery than already being rich and therefore being able to afford something that changes who you are.

Joe Rogan 26:03 Right.

Sean Carroll 26:03 Right? I think that, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people will think that that's awesome and will, these people will all be, you know, celebrities and we'll follow them on Instagram. But I suspect people will be rubbed the wrong way at that kind of access to something that most people can't afford, if that's how it works out.

Joe Rogan 26:17 They most certainly will. They most certainly will.

Sean Carroll 26:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:20 But I think if you look at it objectively, if you look at the interactions of the species as, you know, a co- a completely, uh, outside observer, you would say, "Not only is this inevitable, but this is going to lead to some really spectacular changes in what a human being is." Like, think about a big part of what we're concerned with constantly on a daily basis is healthcare.

Sean Carroll 26:42 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:42 Right? People are very concerned with people that have to deal with debilitating diseases and all. If we could just eliminate all those-

Sean Carroll 26:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:49 ... why wouldn't you want that? Do you-

Sean Carroll 26:50 Yeah. I think, you know, I think you probably will be able to and it will probably happen. That, I think, is the-

Joe Rogan 26:55 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 26:55 But then, so ev- almost everyone agrees with that.

Joe Rogan 26:58 Right.

Sean Carroll 26:58 Like, that's not the controversial part, right? Like, yeah, if we can eliminate, and apparently some diseases we already know, like right there in your DNA-

Joe Rogan 27:05 Yes.

Sean Carroll 27:06 ... you're gonna get Huntington's when you're 40 years old, right?

Joe Rogan 27:07 Yes.

Sean Carroll 27:08 And so those are easy to eliminate, peanut allergies or something like that. Um, other diseases are harder. We don't know what causes them, so it'll take time. But I think that that will be uncontroversial if you could just remove diseases from people ahead of time. It's a little bit different if you're choosing their, uh, hair color and skin color and shape of their nose and feet and whatever.

Joe Rogan 27:26 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 27:26 That's, that gets a little weirder.

Joe Rogan 27:28 It does get squirrely.

Sean Carroll 27:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:29 But it, it's also, you know, when, the idea of it being a cost, uh, prohibitive issue, well, isn't that the case with almost all technology as it emerges? It's very ex- remember when plasma TVs were-

Sean Carroll 27:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:43 ... like $20,000 for a small television?

Sean Carroll 27:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 27:46 I remember I saw them and it was only like a 30-inch television or something that was exorbitant. And I was like, "This is incredible."

Sean Carroll 27:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:52 "Look at it, it's flat."

Sean Carroll 27:53 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:54 "It hangs on the wall. This is incredible."

Sean Carroll 27:56 I know, the future.

Joe Rogan 27:56 But now everybody has them.

Sean Carroll 27:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:58 They're, and they're cheap. You can get one for a few hundred bucks-

Sean Carroll 28:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:00 ... and it's way bigger and way better than what it was back then.

Sean Carroll 28:02 Yeah, and I think that actually that's very realistic. That maybe it will be a million dollars, but then 10 years later, it'll be $100,000 10-

Joe Rogan 28:07 It has to sort of be a million dollars first.

Sean Carroll 28:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:10 It kinda just like cellphones, like everything else, it has to be a really expensive thing, and then eventually it trickles down like cellphones and becomes available everywhere to everybody. Like, if you look at the average person's cellphone, if you buy, uh, the, uh, a cheap cellphone for like 300 bucks, it is way better than an iPhone from 10 years ago.

Sean Carroll 28:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:29 You know, it's just-

Sean Carroll 28:29 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:29 ... it's just in every way.

Sean Carroll 28:31 Yeah. No, and I think that that's probably right, and I think that it's one of the things that's happening. Like we're, we're still the beginning-

Joe Rogan 28:38 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 28:38 ... of technology, right?

Joe Rogan 28:39 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 28:39 Like, we're, technology is not that advanced compared to where it's gonna be. Um, you know, I have another podcast guest coming up who is an expert on aging and how we can fix that by messing with genes a little bit, right?

Joe Rogan 28:50 Was it Aubrey de Grey?

Sean Carroll 28:51 No. No, this was a real scientist (laughs) at Princeton, you know, someone who's just doing experiments-

Joe Rogan 28:56 Isn't he a real scientist?

Sean Carroll 28:58 Uh, well, he's, I don't know him that well, so I shouldn't say, but I, I, I, I think of him as an advocate for anti-aging.

Joe Rogan 29:05 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 29:05 Which is good, which is cool. But the, I'm, I'm, but my guest, Colleen Murphy, is just like a biologist who's working on things and discovered something.

Joe Rogan 29:12 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 29:12 Right? Like that was, she's not trying that hard.

Joe Rogan 29:15 Right.

Sean Carroll 29:15 Uh, you knock out a certain gene in a certain worm and it lives twice as long and without any decay, right? Like, it doesn't get old. Because it's, it's fascinating. Like, why do we die? Why do we grow old? Like, it's not necessary. Like, you could design an organism that doesn't get older. It would die from random bad things, get hit on the head with a brick, but you don't need to die. The reality is that evolution programmed aging and death into us 'cause once we have kids or once we've outlived our reproductive lifespan, we're not useful anymore.

Joe Rogan 29:46 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 29:47 So biology is- wants us to die. And so that, that, in other words, it's potentially fixable, you know? It might not be easy, might be not happen 100 years from now, but it could. So I, I think that, you know, aging, genetic engineering, brain computer interfaces, you know, all that stuff is going to, within the next 100 years, totally change what it means to be a human being. And we're totally not ready for it, and so I was saying this to Carl. He, he, Carl's like not that, Carl Zimmer...... was, is more or less sanguine about it. It's like, "Don't worry, just, you know, we'll put regulations on, it'll be fine." And my attitude was, no, actually we should think of the absolute craziest science fiction scenarios 'cause I wanna be prepared, right?

Joe Rogan 30:25 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 30:25 Even if it doesn't come to pass, I wanna worry about the least probable things because it might spark something that actually helps us down the road.

Joe Rogan 30:33 Yeah, there was a recent discovery, they figured out a way to shut off whatever it is that causes wrinkles and reverse the process.

Sean Carroll 30:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:40 So, whatever is causing your skin to get wrinkly and sag-

Sean Carroll 30:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:43 ... they're reversing that process.

Sean Carroll 30:45 We might be, uh, members of the last generation to die. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:49 Whoa. Or of old age.

Sean Carroll 30:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:52 We won't be immortal.

Sean Carroll 30:53 Well, then if you thought you were immortal, if you thought that, well, let's say if you thought that your average lifespan was a million years, would you suddenly become way more cautious?

Joe Rogan 31:00 Oh, I'd start jumping off buildings and shit.

Sean Carroll 31:03 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 31:03 I would do, like, I have a friend of mine who does that, uh, flying squirrel suit stuff. He holds the world record-

Sean Carroll 31:08 You don't become invulnerable, you just don't age. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 31:11 Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Sean Carroll 31:12 That flying squirrel stuff is truly dangerous.

Joe Rogan 31:14 Oh, it's super dangerous.

Sean Carroll 31:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:16 Yeah. But-

Sean Carroll 31:16 Base jumping, right?

Joe Rogan 31:16 What if they could just fix you? If you, if like, even-

Sean Carroll 31:20 But that's a separate thing. Yes, that's-

Joe Rogan 31:21 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 31:21 ... possible, right? Like maybe if they could back you up-

Joe Rogan 31:23 Take your goo-

Sean Carroll 31:24 ... back you up and then-

Joe Rogan 31:25 ... and throw that in a machine.

Sean Carroll 31:25 ... you know, you just die, but they build your clone, put you back together like all-

Joe Rogan 31:28 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 31:28 ... these crazy science fiction scenarios. I don't think that that's... I think that backing up is way harder than people think.

Joe Rogan 31:33 Right.

Sean Carroll 31:33 And I think that stopping aging is way easier than people think, but we'll see.

Joe Rogan 31:38 I agree with you. Uh, I went to the 2045, I think they're calling it, uh, conference in New York City a few years back ago. It's all the Ray Kurzweil advocates that think you're gonna download brains into computers and stuff along the... Not that compelling.

Sean Carroll 31:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:53 Like, I was, that, that stuff I was like, "What are you gonna do? What's he gonna do? What's gonna happen?" And it seems like everybody had this idea of one day we'll be able to do this and we'll be able to take consciousness, and I'm like, yeah, it's not-

Sean Carroll 32:06 Hmm, maybe.

Joe Rogan 32:06 I mean, it doesn't violate the laws of physics, but it's hopelessly impractical, uh, compared to anything we can do right now. Like the human brain is just not something you can read out, right?

Sean Carroll 32:14 Well, my question, and this is something that really concerned me, was what's to keep someone from making hundreds of thousands of versions of themselves?

Joe Rogan 32:22 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 32:22 Like what if, what's to take someone from some, you know, really rich billionaire character that can afford to do this and say, "I'm gonna do this many, many times, then I'm gonna have my clones make clones of clones and I'm gonna fill up a whole island with me." Why would you do that though?

Joe Rogan 32:39 'Cause you're a crazy person.

Sean Carroll 32:40 Okay, I mean, crazy people are allowed-

Joe Rogan 32:41 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 32:41 ... to do crazy things, right? With-

Joe Rogan 32:42 But, but imagine if you had 100 Sean Carrolls in your house-

Sean Carroll 32:45 But-

Joe Rogan 32:45 ... working on things.

Sean Carroll 32:46 But it, but they're not the same person.

Joe Rogan 32:48 What if you found out that 30 of the Sean Carrolls-

Sean Carroll 32:50 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:50 ... are smoking crack and-

Sean Carroll 32:52 I know.

Joe Rogan 32:52 ... banging hookers and driving-

Sean Carroll 32:54 Like, yeah there's always-

Joe Rogan 32:54 ... fast on the highway in the wrong direction.

Sean Carroll 32:57 Only for the delinquent Sean Carrolls. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:59 (laughs) Could you imagine?

Sean Carroll 32:59 They're good, yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:59 If you, if you realize that like after a while there, there is a randomness-

Sean Carroll 33:04 Totally.

Joe Rogan 33:04 ... to even being you.

Sean Carroll 33:05 I'm sure there is, right.

Joe Rogan 33:05 Sure.

Sean Carroll 33:05 Yeah, yeah, is it evo devo, right?

Joe Rogan 33:07 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 33:07 The environment you grow up in matters and uh-

Joe Rogan 33:09 That would be really fascinating if, if, that would be an excellent episode of Black Mirror.

Sean Carroll 33:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:14 Where someone cloned themselves and found out that a certain-

Sean Carroll 33:16 And they were all different. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:16 ... percentage of their clones were just fucking crazy.

Sean Carroll 33:19 Or they were the crazy one, right?

Joe Rogan 33:21 Yes.

Sean Carroll 33:21 Like all their clones were, were very different than them and they were all the same to each other.

Joe Rogan 33:24 Yeah, or maybe having all those clones somehow or another set something off in them that made them crazy 'cause they were in competition with all these other people-

Sean Carroll 33:32 I think, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:32 ... that were exactly like them.

Sean Carroll 33:33 This is golden, yeah, we should edit this out of the podcast so we can write up this episode.

Joe Rogan 33:37 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 33:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:38 There's a real concern with messing with biology in a way that's never been done before.

Sean Carroll 33:43 Exactly, and I think that the extent to which it's coming is something we haven't quite faced up to yet.

Joe Rogan 33:48 Right.

Sean Carroll 33:49 And it's really coming. It's coming fast and profoundly and we're not ready.

Joe Rogan 33:53 Yeah. And the possibility of just creating a world that we're not prepared for and we're not prepared for the consequences of.

Sean Carroll 34:03 Yeah, exactly. So, that's why I'm all in favor of thinking crazy, right?

Joe Rogan 34:07 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 34:07 Like just wondering what it would be like, even if the answer is no, that'll never happen. At least you know, be prepared a little bit. Uh, you know, think of all the alarmist crazy scenarios.

Joe Rogan 34:16 Yeah. Um, d- have you really gotten into CRISPR? Have you really looked into that stuff at all?

Sean Carroll 34:21 Not that much. You know? Uh, it's a little too applied, a little too real world for my taste. Uh, but it is-

Joe Rogan 34:26 For people who don't know what we're talking about, we're talk... It's a new technique for editing genes that was discovered accidentally while examining the effects of, uh...

Sean Carroll 34:36 The story is amazing. I mean-

Joe Rogan 34:38 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 34:38 ... there are these bacteria, you know, so we, here's the thing. We think of DNA as where our genetic information is stored, right? Like you have a little code, this little like list of symbols, A, C, G, T, and they're in a, in a row and that's it. It is handed down from parents to children. But the reality is way more complicated than that, uh, because different parts of the DNA do things and different ones don't. Some of them get turned on and turned off. We have mitochondrial DNA, which are not our DNA. We have these little sub-cells within us that get carried along for the ride and have their own DNA, and so CRISPR is this thing that was invented by nature, right? Not by human beings. These bacteria who were trying to resist viruses, right? So, the viruses would come in and attack them, and basically the d- the bacteria learned a way to steal part of the DNA of the virus and keep it as like a facial recognition software thing. It's like a template, like, "Oh, this DNA thing is approaching me, that's a virus and I should attack it," right? Like, "This is something that I kn- I learn how to fight off." And so to do that, I need to be able to snip out a little piece of DNA, and so scientists, biologists learned that they could train-... this is a little bit fanciful way of putting it, metaphorical, but they could train the bacteria to go in there, snip out pieces of DNA. And you can do that for any DNA you want, so b-... And you can replace it with something else. Uh, it's not really very high, uh, precision right now, but that's coming. And so in principle, this is, you know, a little, um, way to change a genetic code. And then they- they figured out some other way that ordinarily, right, if you have two parents and you have, like, you know, brown eyes versus blue eyes... And blue eyes are recessive, so they both need to have the blue gene to give you if you wanna have blue eyes. But they figured out a way that you can change the DNA and it automatically, with 100% accuracy, gets sent to all of your offspring, right? It's not, you know, 50/50 chance or whatever. Uh, so then you can just s- propagate a change in the genetic code throughout the species pretty darn quickly. And, you know, human beings take a long time to breed, but animals and plants, it's a whole nother world, right? You can design those very, very rapidly.

Joe Rogan 36:53 And there's already been at least one revision of the process, right?

Sean Carroll 36:57 I think so, but yeah, the- I- I think I just told you everything I know (laughs) about it, to be honest.

Joe Rogan 37:00 Yeah, but I think they're- they're continuing to improve on the process and it's really- it's really gonna be very interesting to see where that goes as that- as that advances.

Sean Carroll 37:10 Yeah, I think- yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:10 And this was a concern with p- places like China.

Sean Carroll 37:13 Right.

Joe Rogan 37:13 That they're already doing this, they're already-

Sean Carroll 37:15 Right.

Joe Rogan 37:15 ... manipulating genetics and trying to create super people.

Sean Carroll 37:19 And I think that the chances that gives them a great basketball team are greater-

Joe Rogan 37:22 (coughs)

Sean Carroll 37:22 ... than the chances that give them-

Joe Rogan 37:23 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 37:23 ... a bunch of brilliant PhD scientists.

Joe Rogan 37:25 Well, that's where it starts, right?

Sean Carroll 37:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:26 In- a lot of it starts in competitive athletics. Have- have you paid attention... Did you watch the documentary, Icarus?

Sean Carroll 37:31 No, I did not.

Joe Rogan 37:32 Yeah, a fascinating documentary that's on Netflix right now about i- it's- it really is a kind of a crazy set of circumstances. There's a guy named Bryan Fogel, he's the director of... And the producer of the- the movie, and he was a competitive bike racer. And he decided to document... What he wanted to do was compete in a race, a bike race, 100% clean, and then get a Russian scientist to juice him up.

Sean Carroll 37:57 Oh.

Joe Rogan 37:58 So in the process of getting this Russian scientist to juice him up, he stumbled upon a scandal, and in the middle of him making this-

Sean Carroll 38:07 I'm shocked. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 38:08 Yeah, but I mean, i- in a crazy way because this Russian guy is the head of the anti-doping agency in Russia, and he was just sort of informing him how you would do this. So he teaches him, informs him how you can do this. While this is all going on, it turns out that the Russians had completely cheated their way through the Sochi Olympics.

Sean Carroll 38:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 38:28 And, uh, and it was all documented and-

Sean Carroll 38:30 (gasps)

Joe Rogan 38:30 ... so they were getting busted as this is all going on. And he films this Russian guy, who's the head of it, escaping Russia-

Sean Carroll 38:37 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 38:37 ... barely, coming to the United States and being chased, and-

Sean Carroll 38:41 Wow.

Joe Rogan 38:42 ... testifying all the different strategies that the Russians used in order to completely cheat on, like, at least one entire Olympic team. Like, every single athlete was on drugs.

Sean Carroll 38:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:54 And they had a record number of gold medals. And so then he starts d- detailing the process and how they did it, and these, uh, forensic tests to examine the urine bottles and show that they've been opened, even though they were supposedly not openable, and really, really interesting stuff.

Sean Carroll 39:10 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:10 But that national pride, the thing about, uh, national pride and, you know, the- the ability to win a- a bunch of gold medals and athletic dominance is so important for the morale of- of these countries that want to establish superiority.

Sean Carroll 39:27 Right. Yeah, and there are some people who say, "Well, let's just go for it. Let's just have the all-dope Olympics," right? Like-

Joe Rogan 39:33 Right.

Sean Carroll 39:33 ... let people enhance themselves as much as they possibly can. And there's an ongoing, you know, debate about, what about people who use prosthetics, right? Is that fair? If you, uh, lost a leg and you have a-

Joe Rogan 39:45 Right.

Sean Carroll 39:45 ... prosthetic leg, is... Could that potentially give you an advantage in a running event or something like that if it were a sufficiently good prosthetic? I- I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I think it's a little bit weird because we set up these arbitrary categories for, what, is it a sporting event? And we invented them, right? They're not out there in the world. And now, we're- we're faced with wholly different circumstances to what to do about it. But yeah, I think that, uh, there's- there's the question of what we should do, which is hard. There's the question of what's gonna happen, which is, it's all gonna happen. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 40:14 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 40:14 All these things are gonna happen.

Joe Rogan 40:15 I was talking to a guy this past weekend who's a Navy SEAL, and his friend lost his hand and they gave him a new hand, and they're working on this new hand now that's gonna allow him to play piano.

Sean Carroll 40:27 Oh, really? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:28 So it's a completely artificial carbon fiber hand with all these different things that attach directly to your nerves. And somehow or another, he can control it with his arm. It's gonna allow him to play piano.

Sean Carroll 40:40 And you- you're gonna tell me he could never play the piano before?

Joe Rogan 40:43 Right. (laughs)

Sean Carroll 40:43 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 40:43 Now he knows how.

Sean Carroll 40:44 It's programmed.

Joe Rogan 40:45 It's in the- it's in the thing. It's-

Sean Carroll 40:47 Yeah. Well, this is what I was saying about the brain-computer interfaces. I think that's the- the real... That's even bigger, um, frontier-

Joe Rogan 40:54 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 40:55 ... than synthetic biology or genetic engineering, because computers are really useful for things, robots are very useful for things.

Joe Rogan 41:00 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 41:00 Human beings are just gonna sort of blend in. It's not like we're gonna have AI and super healthy humans, it's we're gonna just have everywhere on that spectrum.

Joe Rogan 41:08 Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well. There's gonna be some sort of a symbiotic thing, like a chip or... You know, they tried it with the Google Glasses to try to get people to wear them, but they were goofy.

Sean Carroll 41:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:18 I put them on, they felt too science fiction-y.

Sean Carroll 41:21 Just like the first portable phones were these giant things, right?

Joe Rogan 41:23 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 41:23 That doesn't mean... Right? That's not a long-term prognostication tool. Yeah, lots of, uh, lots of people are working on it. Elon Musk has a little company that no one knows about, uh, that is-

Joe Rogan 41:34 Well, they do now. You're rounding them out.

Sean Carroll 41:35 Yeah. Well, people know about it if they care, but it's not like one of his famous ones, right?

Joe Rogan 41:38 Right.

Sean Carroll 41:39 Um, to- to implant a neural lace, right?

Joe Rogan 41:42 Oh.

Sean Carroll 41:42 To put something in your body that reads your brain.

Joe Rogan 41:45 Neural lace, I don't like the way that sounds.

Sean Carroll 41:47 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:48 Where does it go?

Sean Carroll 41:48 You want it more macho? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:49 You pointed to the back of your head too.

Sean Carroll 41:51 No, you mo- no, I didn't mean in terms of lace, like... (laughs) I didn't think of it as lingerie.

Joe Rogan 41:51 Yeah, you open up your skull and you... (laughs) It's like a doily.

Sean Carroll 41:56 I was thinking of it as, like, a mesh.

Joe Rogan 41:58 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 41:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:58 That's what... That's the idea.

Sean Carroll 41:59 It just seems creepy that it's gonna latch onto your nerves and... (groans)

Joe Rogan 42:03 Yeah, and improve you, yeah.... neural lace.

Sean Carroll 42:06 You won't need your phone anymore.

Joe Rogan 42:07 Wow. And where is it? You went to the back of your head. Everyone goes to the back of their head.

Sean Carroll 42:12 Well-

Joe Rogan 42:12 They always go, "Well, neural lace."

Sean Carroll 42:13 ... I know that the front of my head is useful for something else, so... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:16 (laughs) But I mean, like The Matrix, everybody goes to the back of the head.

Sean Carroll 42:19 Yeah, yeah. I mean, there, they're, right now, uh, companies that wanna make money in the short term are building these nonsurgical, noninvasive things where you, like, wear something on the front of your head, right?

Joe Rogan 42:29 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 42:30 You wear, wear a cap or something like that, which can detect frequencies of vibrations in your brain, and you can... It's very primitive, but you can move things around. You can control drones-

Joe Rogan 42:38 Mm-hmm, yeah.

Sean Carroll 42:38 ... right, with your brain without touching anything. Uh, but yeah, the, if it ever becomes practical, which is very far from certain, but the thing to imagine in the far-out science fiction scenario is cracking open your skull, inserting some electrodes in there, closing it back up, and now you're part of the super internet-

Joe Rogan 42:58 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 42:58 ... without doing anything more than closing your eyes.

Joe Rogan 43:00 Yeah, and there's also a pr- the possibility of enhancing various, uh, thought processes, too-

Sean Carroll 43:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 43:06 ... with transdermal stimulation. Like, if they could figure out a... You, you know they're doing that now, they're, they've performed a series of tests where they have people do, like, certain tasks, and then they put electrodes onto certain areas of the brain and put an electric charge. And that electric charge stimulates various aspects of the brain, and then allows them to complete t- certain tasks quicker and more efficiently.

Sean Carroll 43:30 Right. You know, I think, and this is just a kind of an uninformed, uh, belief, but I suspect that the human brain is pretty optimized for what it tries to do. I think that rather than improving the brain or stimulating it, the way forward is to augment it, like hook it up to calculators-

Joe Rogan 43:46 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 43:46 ... and internet and whatever. You know, one thing that I don't see talked about very much, but I think will be a real game changer, you know, we, we talk about phones as if we're carrying around phones, but we don't mostly use our phones to talk to people on the phone, right? We check the email, check the internet, and we take pictures.

Joe Rogan 44:02 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 44:03 Once you really have, and again, it might not be possible, but if you really had, uh, a direct connection between your brain and the internet, your eyeballs are a video camera. Everything you see, you can record and, and store somewhere, right? So, and you can lend them to other people, or people can subpoena them, or whatever. Like, there's literally no place in the world, uh, that human eyeballs aren't looking at that would not be subject to later inspection. (laughs) And that is weird and scary and bad, right?

Joe Rogan 44:33 It is weird and scary and bad. And what if someone comes up with a better eyeball?

Sean Carroll 44:36 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:37 Do, do they-

Sean Carroll 44:37 Of course.

Joe Rogan 44:38 ... scoop out your old dull eyes and put in some new awesome ones that you can record with?

Sean Carroll 44:43 Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 44:44 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 44:44 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:45 I don't think that, uh, nece- I think, I think I absolutely agree that enhancing it with electronics is probably the way to go, and that having some sort of, um, uh, some sort of symbiotic relationship with electronics. But I also think that this transdermal stimulation can enhance that process on top of it. I think there's gonna be a bunch of different things going on at once.

Sean Carroll 45:04 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:04 I mean, if you think about CRISPR being something where someone eventually figures out a way to design various aspects of the human brain that are more open to interface with technology-

Sean Carroll 45:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 45:17 ... changing various receptors, make them, uh, more efficient for data to go straight to the dome.

Sean Carroll 45:24 Yeah, and I think that, uh, there is a short-term versus long-term question here, right? Like, even if what I said is a long-term truth, on the short term, improving our thinking skills in direct ways with stimulation or whatever sounds, you know, pretty good. But maybe you can just do that through beta blockers or some drugs or something like that.

Joe Rogan 45:40 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 45:40 Like, I think that that's another thing very plausible that will have safe, super efficient drugs someone can take, and over the next six hours, they're, they're way clearer thinkers than they were before.

Joe Rogan 45:51 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 45:51 Right? And-

Joe Rogan 45:51 Is there any concern with what's the endgame? Like, what's the endgame-

Sean Carroll 45:56 I hope so.

Joe Rogan 45:56 ... with all this stuff?

Sean Carroll 45:56 Yeah, I hope so. I mean, if you're super far advanced, uh, the endgame is you realize that life is not that interesting. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 46:03 (laughs) You went too far.

Sean Carroll 46:04 Yeah. You're like, "Well, why am I here? What am I doing with all this?" Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:07 Right.

Sean Carroll 46:07 A little challenge is helpful, actually.

Joe Rogan 46:09 Well, in particular, if you develop immortality-

Sean Carroll 46:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:12 ... if there's no concern about getting injured or, or killed.

Sean Carroll 46:17 Yeah. I think that people who envision super far ahead science fiction scenarios, and especially people who envision uploading brains and consciousness, underestimate the importance of our bodies to who we are as human beings, right? Not just that we're in a body, but, like, hunger, thirst, exhaustion-

Joe Rogan 46:40 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 46:40 ... being horny. Like-

Joe Rogan 46:41 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 46:41 ... these are motivating factors that really affect who we are and, and what we say and what we do. And if you remove all that, if you're just a thinking processor in a computer, what's your motivation? What's your motivation?

Joe Rogan 46:52 Right.

Sean Carroll 46:52 Why are you going on, right?

Joe Rogan 46:53 Right.

Sean Carroll 46:53 Like, why are you doing anything at all? Like, I don't think it'll be, I don't think it'll be anything like the personality, the person who you were, if your body is taken away.

Joe Rogan 47:01 That's the big question about artificial life, right, or, or, or-

Sean Carroll 47:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:04 ... artificial intelligence, rather. Like, what, what... We have very specific needs that are addressed by our ambitions, right? Biological needs, the idea of y- you know, transferring your genes, keeping your, your bloodline going, all that stuff.

Sean Carroll 47:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:20 There's all these survival instincts that we have that you necessarily, wouldn't necessarily have if you were an artificial life form. Like, why would you care if someone pulled the plug on you? Why would you try to survive? What are you... What's your purpose here?

Sean Carroll 47:31 Right, exactly.

Joe Rogan 47:32 It seems sort of futile if your-

Sean Carroll 47:34 There's a lot of talk in, you know, the AI, uh, existential risk community, like, worrying about artificial intelligence, about value alignment, like, making sure that the AIs...... value the same things that we do, like our existence, for example, right?

Joe Rogan 47:48 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 47:48 And ... But I think a little bit, at least what I hear, and I'm, I'm not an expert, but what I hear seems a little bit off the mark because they're talking about what to program into the AI. But if it's in any sense really an AI, it can reprogram itself, (laughs) right?

Joe Rogan 48:04 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 48:04 Like, you can change your mind as a human being.

Joe Rogan 48:06 Right.

Sean Carroll 48:06 You can change your values. You can change your motivations. Artificial intelligences should be able to do the same thing. And in fact, they better be able to do that if they're going to be truly intelligent. If they're, if we're gonna mimic what a human being can do, uh, it can't be something where we program them to just do a task 'cause that's not intelligent, right? So if that happens, yeah, then, you know, who knows what they're gonna eventually be motivated to do, if anything. Like you said, like, what is their motivation even to do anything at all or even to exist?

Joe Rogan 48:34 Well, isn't one of the big concerns is that in releasing artificial technology and giving it autonomy that what we're going to do is, like, start a process that some sort of a perpetual, exponential domino effect of technology where this new artificial life is going to create better artificial life, which creates better artificial life, which expands to godlike powers within a very short period of time and decides we're stupid and useless.

Sean Carroll 49:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:05 And just eliminates us.

Sean Carroll 49:07 And then it gets bored and shuts itself off.

Joe Rogan 49:08 Yeah. It goes, "What are we doing here?"

Sean Carroll 49:10 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:10 "The sun's gonna burn out in X amount of billion years."

Sean Carroll 49:11 You know, these are hard, these are hard things to even extrapolate because they're so far beyond our experience. But I do think that, uh, we're opening up doors that we never have before.

Joe Rogan 49:21 Right.

Sean Carroll 49:21 Between, between, uh, genetic modifications of human beings, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces. Uh, we, we don't have the, the experience or the capacity to really even ask the right questions about these things.

Joe Rogan 49:35 Right. We're sort of rudimentally ... We're rudimentary i- idea ... The ideas that we have of, like, what is necessary are really based on our own biological needs.

Sean Carroll 49:47 Yeah. Of course.

Joe Rogan 49:48 We have family. We wanna keep everybody healthy. We enjoy our community. We wanna keep it safe. We enjoy our, our Earth. We wanna keep it clean. We wanna ... We wanna save things for the future generations and all these concerns that we have that are very biological.

Sean Carroll 50:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:05 They just won't exist for artificial life.

Sean Carroll 50:07 I think that's exactly right, and I think that what we're really good at or what we're better at in terms of imagining the future is taking what already exists and just expanding it, right?

Joe Rogan 50:16 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 50:16 Like, so when people ... The v- I think that we ... Maybe we talked about this on the last podcast, but, uh, when people first started imagining mechanical devices to carry you around, mechanical transportation in the late 1800s, they imagined a mechanical horse.

Joe Rogan 50:32 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 50:32 'Cause they knew that horses existed, right?

Joe Rogan 50:33 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 50:34 And the car was a totally different thing, and people hadn't thought of that originally. And then when people did think of cars, they thought of flying cars 'cause they saw there were flying animals, right? And the flying cars haven't appeared 'cause w- we didn't ... What they should have been thinking about is how are cars going to change our cities and our commutes and how we live, right? Uh, when people invented the internet, they weren't, they weren't sure what they were gonna do with it. And I think that the same thing is true when, when if we can imagine blending the barrier between our biological existence and some virtual existence, we don't even know what questions to ask about that.

Joe Rogan 51:06 Yeah. And I think we are getting close to those other things that you mentioned, though. Boston Dynamics is getting really close to artificial dogs and artificial horses.

Sean Carroll 51:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:16 I mean, they have things that you can't kick.

Sean Carroll 51:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:18 You kick 'em and they, they don't get knocked over.

Sean Carroll 51:21 They can open doors. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 51:22 Yes. They can jump, like, incredible distances.

Sean Carroll 51:25 Yeah. Right.

Joe Rogan 51:25 Incredible heights. Um, there's, there's some amazing ones that do acrobatics now. Have you seen that?

Sean Carroll 51:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:30 Where they're gonna replace stuntmen in movies that could potentially get harmed with these robots that can do crazy backflips and jump off buildings and ...

Sean Carroll 51:40 The next big war is going to look very, very different than the last big war.

Joe Rogan 51:42 Very weird, right?

Sean Carroll 51:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:44 That's ... Hopefully it won't happen, but if it does, yeah, it's gonna ... There's a big emphasis on automated things, not just drones-

Sean Carroll 51:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:53 ... but physical things that are running around on the ground.

Sean Carroll 51:56 That can make decisions, right?

Joe Rogan 51:57 Yes.

Sean Carroll 51:57 You know, give it a little bit of AI and then, you know-

Joe Rogan 51:59 Did you s- do you watch Dark Mirror?

Sean Carroll 52:01 Uh, I haven't seen it yet. Is it may- in my queue.

Joe Rogan 52:03 There's an insane episode on, um ... Do you remember the name of it? The one with the-

Sean Carroll 52:08 Black Mirror?

Joe Rogan 52:09 Black Mirror. Did I say Dark Mirror? Yeah. Black Mirror, uh, there's an insane episode on, uh, these little robots that are chasing-

Narrator 52:16 I think Metal Face or something like that or-

Joe Rogan 52:18 Metal Head, something like that.

Narrator 52:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:20 Yeah. Um, it's about, uh, robots chasing after this lady. And it's, it literally is these little tiny Boston Dynamic robots, but they can kill you.

Sean Carroll 52:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:30 And they're, they're on a mission. And this is not outside the realm of possibility at all.

Sean Carroll 52:35 Nope. It really isn't. And, and li- like I said, it's ... We don't even know ... It's easy to extrapolate right ahead to sort of the central differences.

Joe Rogan 52:44 There it is. There it is.

Sean Carroll 52:45 Right.

Narrator 52:45 Here it is.

Joe Rogan 52:45 Oh, yeah.

Sean Carroll 52:46 That's, uh, from the episode. It's a fantastic episode, too.

Joe Rogan 52:49 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 52:49 There's so many good episodes of that show. Black Mirror is just amazing.

Joe Rogan 52:52 Yeah. I gotta start watching that.

Sean Carroll 52:54 Um, but that, that's a concern. I mean, there's, there's a real concern. I mean, we're, we're doing it right now with drones.

Joe Rogan 53:00 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 53:01 Um, you know, if you talk to people that are really, uh, that have paid attention and studied drone warfare and how incredibly inhumane it is and how different it is from any other type of warfare in terms of just, like, the ability to rationalize targets when you're not there.

Joe Rogan 53:20 Yup.

Sean Carroll 53:20 And you're, you have ... You're nowhere near and you're just pressing buttons and you decide, like, w- well, there's a very good possibility this person's in here. Fuck it, nuke the building. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:31 Yeah. And we're d- I think we're doing that, right?

Sean Carroll 53:32 Yes.

Joe Rogan 53:33 I mean, that's absolutely happening. But on the other hand, the drones are also delivering pizzas.

Sean Carroll 53:37 Are they, though?I think so.

Joe Rogan 53:38 Who's got a pizza with a drone?

Sean Carroll 53:40 I think so.

Joe Rogan 53:40 If you looked at the amount of people that have delivered pizzas with drones versus the amount of people that have been killed by drones, which-

Sean Carroll 53:46 Probably the killing is bigger.

Joe Rogan 53:47 Well, the innocents are the scariest. Jo- drones are really good at killing innocent people.

Sean Carroll 53:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:51 Not so good at killing the people that are specific tarbit- targets.

Sean Carroll 53:55 But I think my, my point is just that, uh, there are gonna be pluses and minuses.

Joe Rogan 54:00 Yes. For sure.

Sean Carroll 54:00 Right? So I think that it's gonna change, like if we, if we combine this idea of, you know, interfacing with computers, with this idea of drones doing some drudgery work, with this idea of giving people a basic income-

Joe Rogan 54:11 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 54:11 ... everyone is just gonna sit in their rooms and, and write on their Tumblrs all day. That's gonna be the future.

Joe Rogan 54:16 I don't think they're gonna be writing anymore. I, I think there's, there's a real, uh, possibility that we're gonna create virtual reality that's indistinguishable from regular reality and people are gonna live in there like Ready Player One.

Sean Carroll 54:28 Well, it'll be better.

Joe Rogan 54:29 You know, this very kind of thing.

Sean Carroll 54:29 I think that the, the big flaw to me in things like Tron or Ready Player One is that they make the virtual reality look too much like the real reality.

Joe Rogan 54:36 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 54:36 There's no reason why virtual reality has to have gravity.

Joe Rogan 54:39 Right, right.

Sean Carroll 54:39 There's no reason why it has to be three-dimensional. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:42 Yeah, true.

Sean Carroll 54:42 There's no reason why, you know, you have t- any limit on how strong you are or how fast you are or anything like that.

Joe Rogan 54:47 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 54:47 Like, there's no reason why you have to have only one body. I mean, there's a million different ways in which it could be very, very different.

Joe Rogan 54:52 Well, it also could be implemented with something like the tank, the float tank that we were talking about earlier.

Sean Carroll 54:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:57 I mean, you could climb into that float tank with some sort of apparatus, hook these gloves on, put this helmet over, and literally not be subject to the whims of gravity. You can't even feel it.

Sean Carroll 55:09 Yep.

Joe Rogan 55:09 The effects of gravity will be, uh, inconsequential because you will feel like you're floating, and then from there, you'll be able to fly around and do all sorts of weird stuff.

Sean Carroll 55:18 Yeah, I think, like, this weird period between, you know, the year 1900 and 2000 or 2100 or whatever it's gonna be, uh, it'll be a weird transitional period in human history where we invent technology and not really put it to work yet. And there might be some equilibrium that we reach in 100 or 200 years where the whole mode of life is utterly different than what it is now.

Joe Rogan 55:40 If you could put priorities in terms of, like, what you think people should concentrate on first when, w- in regards to this kind of stuff, what do you think those would be? Like if, if someone said, "Sean, you're a super smart dude."

Sean Carroll 55:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:54 "Let's, uh, let's get on the ball here and figure out what, what direction should we take this in?"

Sean Carroll 55:58 I mean, what I do for a living is more, like, foundational, what are the laws of physics kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 56:02 Yes.

Sean Carroll 56:02 Right? So I'm not the person, uh, to, to speculate on this stuff, but-

Joe Rogan 56:06 But who is?

Sean Carroll 56:06 Well, I think, um, this is why I said earlier, like, I think we should be talking to each other 'cause nobody is. No one person is, right? Like, that's why we need to have people from different areas of expertise talk about each other's areas, if only then to be corrected, right? But, you know, to be open to that dialogue. So I think that, for example, an enormous amount of effort has been put into nanotechnology, building tiny little machines. I suspect that mostly the real, uh, advances there are not gonna be in nanotechnology, but in synthetic biology, where you take bacteria or multicellular organisms that already exist and adapt them for your purposes, make them do whatever you want. 'Cause biology has already solved a lot of the problems that, uh, technology is still struggling to figure out.

Joe Rogan 56:48 So the concept of nanotechnology is you're gonna take, like, almost like a cell-sized machine-

Sean Carroll 56:53 Right.

Joe Rogan 56:53 ... and many of them are gonna go into your body and find areas that are damaged or that are problems.

Sean Carroll 56:59 Or do whatever, yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:00 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 57:00 There's a, a woman, a professor at Caltech who gave a talk, uh, a few months ago about she builds robots out of DNA.

Joe Rogan 57:07 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 57:07 So the, these little DNA robots can go in, and right now they're at the level where what they can do is sort things. So like if they have, uh, molecule one and molecule two scattered across some surface, this little DNA robot will go in and move all molecule one to the left, all of molecule two to the right. And so she says that's the beginning. Like, in the future you'll have your little DNA box and you'll say, you know, "I'm allergic to tomatoes." And then it will invent a little machine that will run through your body and fix your allergy to tomatoes, right? You don't need that anymore. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 57:38 Whoa, with a machine.

Sean Carroll 57:40 With a DNA robot. So it's literally... So why DNA? 'Cause you think of DNA as carrying the genetic code, but DNA is a wonderful molecule because it is relatively stable, but it's not just a crystal, right? It's not just doing the same thing over and over again. So it contains information and it can adapt. It can, it can, you know, uh, hold on and grab onto certain things and let go and, and do things. So DNA is a wonderful testing ground for building little really, really tiny things in your body that will change who you are.

Joe Rogan 58:10 Well, here's a question that's not totally related, but you might be a good person for this. What is quantum computing? Now, I've, I've, I keep hearing about this.

Sean Carroll 58:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:21 That one of the big breakthroughs in, in computers is going to be quantum computing.

Sean Carroll 58:27 Right. I'm almost the right guy. I'm not completely the right guy.

Joe Rogan 58:30 Um-

Sean Carroll 58:30 I actually did teach a course at Caltech that involved quantum computing, so I'm-

Joe Rogan 58:33 Well, then perfect.

Sean Carroll 58:33 ... I'm above average. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 58:35 Definitely the best guy to do that.

Sean Carroll 58:36 But yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 58:38 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 58:38 So, um, so quantum mechanics, this is the book that I'm writing right now, uh, that's gonna be out a year from now called Something Deeply Hidden. It'll be about quantum mechanics, and the goal of the book will be to make quantum mechanics understandable to everybody and convince them that quantum mechanics really does imply the existence of multiple worlds where things look very much the same except for tiny differences. And one way to think about what quantum mechanics says is in classical mechanics, which is what came before quantum mechanics, le- let's imagine you have a bit, right? That is something is either zero or one, right? One piece of information. In quantum mechanics, you have a quantum bit, a qubit as they call it. Very clever. So the difference is that instead of it being a zero or a one like it would be classically, quantum mechanically, it is in some superposition of zero and one. It's some combination of a little bit zero, a little bit one. And it's not that you don't know which one it is, it's that it really is both. It might be 90% zero and 10% one or something like that. So take that fact, number one, okay? Fact number two is that quantum mechanics has a thing called entanglement.... which means that if you have two bits, classically, so you have 00011011, right? Four different possibilities. So quantum mechanics says it's not that this one bit is in a combination of zero and one, and this other bit is also in a combination of zero and one, it's that the two-bit system is in a combination of 00011011, right? So it might be that it's 50% 00 and 50% 11. So you don't know what either bit is, but you know they're the same. Right?

Narrator 1:00:15 Okay.

Sean Carroll 1:00:15 So that's entanglement. So you take these two ideas that the, you have a combination of zeros and ones rather than just one or the other, and that the different bits can be entangled with each other. And then you just say, "Well, what is a computer?" A computer is something that takes bits in, does manipulations, and spits out the answer, right? You solve problems, you, that's what's literally going on in your computer is a bunch of zeros and ones being pushed around. So a quantum computer is pushing around a bunch of qubits, right? A bunch of spinning particles or something like that. The spin of a particle that can either be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise is a qubit. And so these particles can interact with each other, they can become entangled, and you invent a quantum algorithm, right? Like there's algorithms for, you know, finding the area of a surface or something like that, factoring large numbers, you know, solving the shortest distance between two different points. You can do this using the rules of quantum mechanics instead of the rules of classical mechanics. And the belief, which is not yet 100% established, but we think is true, is that there are some problems that are really, really hard to solve for a classical computer, which means that you can easily make the problem long enough that it would take the lifetime of the universe to solve it on a classical computer, which quantum computers can solve quite quickly and efficiently. And so it's, we're not, we haven't proven that. That's not a mathematically precise-

Narrator 1:01:35 Why is the-

Sean Carroll 1:01:36 ... statement.

Narrator 1:01:36 ... why would they think that quantum computers would be able to solve it quicker?

Sean Carroll 1:01:39 There's more information in the quantum computer. Like if you have two bits, 0001, et cetera, there's only four things it can be, right? If you have a quantum computer, there's an infinite number of things it can be, because it's any combination of those four things, right? 10% this, 20% that.

Narrator 1:01:54 Right.

Sean Carroll 1:01:54 So there's like a continuum of possibilities. It's, it's analog rather than digital in some sense. And so what you, what you can do, you know, the, the quantum computer can just sort of take advantage of that extra power, um, to look, I mean, because of this entanglement, what, this is, this is, I'm gonna get in trouble with my quantum computing friends 'cause it's not quite fair, but roughly speaking, rather than manipulating bit by bit, because of the entanglement between the bits, the quantum computer can move all the bits a little bit at once. So let's say that you're, you're searching for something in a list, right? A very elementary, uh, computer science program is I'm giving you a list, find an element that is equal to a certain number, right?

Narrator 1:02:36 Right.

Sean Carroll 1:02:36 It sounds easy, but if that list is 10 trillion things long, that's hard, right? So what the quantum computer can do is say, take every element in the list, nudge it a little bit towards zero if it's the wrong answer and towards one if it's the right answer. And you don't know where it is in the list, but you can do that nudging over and over again, and at the end of the day, you look for where, where's the one, it's very easy to find.

Narrator 1:02:58 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:02:58 So you can get the answer much quicker, it, it is believed. And so things like cryptography, privacy, right, are dramatically changed by this because if, one of the things that we think quantum computers should be able to do faster is factor large numbers, which is the, the, the difficulty in factoring large numbers is the, uh, basis for much modern cryptography, uh, but also simulating systems that were just too difficult to simulate, you know, just, just it took too much computer power to do it. Now, maybe we can do it 'cause nature is truly quantum mechanical at, at the core. It turns out to be very hard because the problem is you have all these bits, if you touch one of them, if the outside world bumps into one of them, right, like a cosmic ray or an atom hits it-

Narrator 1:03:40 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:03:40 ... the whole entanglement is ruined between everything. So it's very, very delicate, and that's what the, you know, right now, um, they're, they're working on systems of, let's say, dozens of qubits entangled at once. You would, you would like it to be way more than that 'cause you can store an enormous amount of information in these things, and, uh, if, if it works, it's, I think it'll be way better at computing if it works. I'm not at all sure that quantum computers will be efficient or cost-effective or anything like that in the near term, but, you know, doing computations faster is something a lot of people wanna be able to do.

Narrator 1:04:16 So right now, they're working with dozens of qubits, and what's preventing them from expanding that or they're doing it slowly to sort of make sure that it all works correctly and get a, a, a, an accurate model?

Sean Carroll 1:04:28 Yeah, so the, the problem is if you have a qubit, it can be in a combination of zero or one, right? Any combination whatsoever, but as soon as you look at it, you never see the combination. You see zero or you see one, that's it. And you've ruined, you've erased this preexisting combination, right? If you see zero, now it's in the state zero.

Narrator 1:04:47 Right.

Sean Carroll 1:04:47 If you see one, it's in the state one. So if you have a group of many, many qubits, what I mean by "look at" is literally anything else in the world bumping into it.

Narrator 1:04:56 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:04:56 So like if, like I said, if photons hit it, if particles, uh, you know, if, if molecules of, of air and, uh, oxygen or nitrogen bump into the qubit, that'll count as an observation, and it will collapse as we say, it collapses the wave function, and then all of your quantum information is ruined. So, uh, you have to make them sort of very cold, very isolated, very shielded from external influences, and the more qubits you add, the harder that is to do.

Narrator 1:05:22 Ooh. Now, is there a proof of concept to this?

Sean Carroll 1:05:25 Yep, they have working quantum computers.

Narrator 1:05:27 Oh.

Sean Carroll 1:05:27 Um, I, I forget, there was a joke, uh, Scott Aaronson, who's a friend of mine who's a genius, uh, theoretical computer scientist, used to joke that the quantum computers are able to, to say that the number 15 is equal to 5 times 3 with very high probability (laughs) .

Narrator 1:05:42 (laughs) .

Sean Carroll 1:05:42 That was the state-of-the-art. I think they're able to say that 21 equals 3 times 7 with very high probability now, but, uh, what you would like to say is, you know, some 100-digit number is the product of, of two other numbers, not able to do that right now.

Joe Rogan 1:05:54 Now, what are they looking at with this? When- when- when they're looking in terms of, uh, the future of this stuff, what are they... how do they wanna implement this?

Sean Carroll 1:06:03 Lots of different ways, actually. Like, look, you know, the actual physical technology that they're using, some people are using, uh, atoms, some people are using sort of, um, (smacks lips) uh, features of condensed matter systems, like two-dimensional systems where electrons are moving slowly and can wind around each other and things like that. This is- this is way beyond what I actually, uh, know about. But also, you know, the sort of sidelight of this is that this e- existence of entanglement, um, is kind of a shared information between two different things in a way that classical physics just would not allow. And that's interesting and exciting because it opens up ways, uh, for, you know, for sharing information that other people can't get to, because you have some information, your friend has some information, but it's- it... you need both pieces of it to get to it, right? Um, Seth Lloyd, who's a- another friend of mine, an MIT professor, said that he was... He tells this story where he was in a hot tub with the, uh, Google guys, right? With Sergey and, and Larry and, you know, the heads of Google, the founders. And he said, "Oh, I came up with this brilliant new idea where we can use quantum mechanics, build a quantum computer so that a person who does a search, a Google search using this quantum computer, they can do a search and they can get their answer, but it is literally impossible for anyone else to ever know what they searched for."

Joe Rogan 1:07:22 Hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:07:22 And the Google guys were, like, very excited and they went away, and the next day they came back and said, "Oh, we realize this is the opposite of our business model." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 (laughs)

Sean Carroll 1:07:30 Like, we... It's really important to us that we know what you searched for. Right?

Joe Rogan 1:07:32 Yeah, right?

Sean Carroll 1:07:33 (laughs) So-

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 I mean, that's the whole thing with them.

Sean Carroll 1:07:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:35 The Google Ads.

Sean Carroll 1:07:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 Goo- Google AdSense.

Sean Carroll 1:07:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:38 When you go to another website it shows you, "Oh, Sean's been looking at, you know, Lenovo laptops." Bam.

Sean Carroll 1:07:44 Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan 1:07:45 There they are.

Sean Carroll 1:07:45 Yeah, and they, they follow you around on all your other devices.

Joe Rogan 1:07:47 Yeah.

Sean Carroll 1:07:47 Right?

Joe Rogan 1:07:47 It's weird.

Sean Carroll 1:07:48 Your cookies.

Joe Rogan 1:07:48 Creepy.

Sean Carroll 1:07:49 But yeah, so in quantum, in quantum computing, is, there's quantum money, there's quantum cryptography, uh, there's quantum eavesdropping, things like that. So it, it's just a, it's- it's easy to speculate about. I would- I would not say the actual technology is very far advanced right now, but I can't tell you how quickly it will happen.

Joe Rogan 1:08:06 Well, wouldn't someone like Google just have to adjust? Because p- prior to these Google Ads, you never really knew what someone was interested in unless they took surveys or unless they had purchasing history or... There had to be some way that you could... Now they're just-

Sean Carroll 1:08:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:22 ... detecting off of searches, and that's what their business model is, but that doesn't mean they can't come up with a better new business model.

Sean Carroll 1:08:29 They'll have to adapt, but they are not, uh, in the business of making that happen.

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 No.

Sean Carroll 1:08:33 Right? In fact, they-

Joe Rogan 1:08:34 Especially now it's so effective.

Sean Carroll 1:08:35 If they were really smart, they would've given Seth $100,000 and said, "Tell no one about this ever again." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:40 (laughs) Right. Is that enough?

Sean Carroll 1:08:42 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:42 We found out with the Stormy Daniels case that-

Sean Carroll 1:08:44 Right. That-

Joe Rogan 1:08:44 ... $100,000 doesn't buy a lot of privacy.

Sean Carroll 1:08:46 Two-thirds of a Stormy Daniels, right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:49 (laughs) What do you think, um, they'll, like... What will be the first way they try to use something like this? They try to use quantum computing?

Sean Carroll 1:08:59 I don't know. I think that, um, you know, the people who are really interested now are, uh, the NSA and the DOD, right? Uh, National Security Agency-

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 Hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:09:07 ... and the Department of Defense, because secret messages are the-

Joe Rogan 1:09:10 Right.

Sean Carroll 1:09:11 ... most obvious thing. Um, cracking codes and things-

Joe Rogan 1:09:14 Mm-hmm.

Sean Carroll 1:09:14 ... like that. That's like the killer app that we know about right now. Um, physicists, of course, wanna use it to simulate quantum mechanical systems, to learn about the behavior of materials, like maybe you'll build a better superconductor or something like that right away. Maybe you'll do better designing of your genetically engineered DNA on the quantum computer, right? Like, there's sort of the generic thought that you'll be able to do computations faster, that's interesting. Um, then there's more specific things like if- if the system you're trying to simulate is itself quantum mechanical, then simulating it on a quantum computer might be the way to go.

Joe Rogan 1:09:45 Hmm. Yeah, to most people that just went whoo!

Sean Carroll 1:09:48 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:49 Right over their head. What is, what are these guys talk- this quantum is so weird. Like, one of the things that you said earlier you were- when you were talking about quantum, you were talking about worlds that are very similar-

Sean Carroll 1:10:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:01 ... but with very small differences.

Sean Carroll 1:10:03 Right. Yes. So, uh, yeah, I forget whether we talked about this, uh, last time, but, you know, there, so there's this whole version of quantum mechanics. Well, let me, let me back up, 'cause we have time.

Joe Rogan 1:10:12 Okay.

Sean Carroll 1:10:12 Right?

Joe Rogan 1:10:12 Sure.

Sean Carroll 1:10:13 Quantum mechanics is weird because, among other things, it is by far the