Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene

Joe Rogan 0:01 Three, two, one. Brian Greene, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, sir?

Brian Greene 0:04 Good, thank you. How are you?

Joe Rogan 0:05 Thanks for doing this, man.

Brian Greene 0:06 Oh, it's my pleasure.

Joe Rogan 0:07 I've-- I've enjoyed your work for many, many, many years, so, uh, I really appreciate you coming in here and talking.

Brian Greene 0:11 Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Joe Rogan 0:13 And I j- Like I was telling you, I just started your new book.

Brian Greene 0:15 And how's it going?

Joe Rogan 0:16 It's going well. It's, uh, hasn't confused the shit out of me yet, but I know it's coming. (laughs)

Brian Greene 0:20 It will be coming, no doubt, no doubt.

Joe Rogan 0:22 With all your work. So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe, to the end. That's essentially what you're summarizing.

Brian Greene 0:31 Yeah, that's the, uh, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book. I, I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing, how it started, how things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future, what's gonna happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future.

Joe Rogan 0:58 It's, uh ... I'm, I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of commingle to, to create life. And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos.

Brian Greene 1:11 Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan 1:12 But that's the- not necessarily the case.

Brian Greene 1:14 It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kinda gets a bad rap, right?

Joe Rogan 1:17 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:17 It's the thing that you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration, it's this decay, it's this drive toward disorder, and that's kind of true. But the reality of the situation is more subtle, because overall, entropy needs to go up. But that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings. So the net entropy goes up even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky appears. And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place. Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse. The universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it. There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.

Joe Rogan 2:18 Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange, that you have this thing, uh, d- and ours is fairly small, right? It's a million times larger than Earth.

Brian Greene 2:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:27 And it's gonna burn for billions of years, and it's just hovering there.

Brian Greene 2:32 Yeah. Right.

Joe Rogan 2:32 And it creates all the life.

Brian Greene 2:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:34 I mean, it r- literally is responsible for all the life.

Brian Greene 2:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:37 And when they supernova, that creates the actual ingredients for life, which is even more strange. Like you can't have biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding.

Brian Greene 2:49 Yeah, I mean, we often, in a poetic way, say that we are made of star stuff.

Joe Rogan 2:53 Yeah.

Brian Greene 2:53 I guess that was Carl Sagan, who ... But you can also say that we are, are made of, you know, nuclear refuse, right? We are the detritus-

Joe Rogan 3:00 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Greene 3:01 ... that, that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe and it rains down on planets, and at least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and yields life. So it is a cycle. I mean, I don't wanna sound like The Lion King here, but-

Joe Rogan 3:14 (laughs)

Brian Greene 3:14 ... you know (laughs) , it- that's really what it is.

Joe Rogan 3:16 Well, what I'm so interested in about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that, that have to take place in order for all this life, in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going to go.

Brian Greene 3:30 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, um, the remarkable thing and sort of the m- the main point at some level is that, look, we're special entities. We can think, we can reflect, we have emotions, but ultimately, you and I and everybody else, we're just bags of particles that are governed by physical law. And so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the heavens, and us. We all come from the same fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws. Now, some people find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense of, uh, desperation, a sense-

Joe Rogan 4:12 Yeah.

Brian Greene 4:12 ... that we're not special, a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless. But, you know, my view on this is, it's spectacular that we're made of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues that you have on this desk, because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do what we do.

Joe Rogan 4:37 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 4:37 And I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity. We don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity. You don't need that. Particles can do miraculous things, and that is the message that I think you can draw from a more complete understanding of where we came from and where we're going.

Joe Rogan 4:59 That- th- the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant, that, like, what is the point?

Brian Greene 5:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:07 This sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right?

Brian Greene 5:10 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 5:11 That's something that y- you touch upon really early on, that this, th- this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're gonna die.

Brian Greene 5:20 Yeah, yeah. That, that, to me, is the vital distinguishing feature of our species. You know, we can reflect on the past, we can think about the future and recognize that we're not gonna be here in the future-

Joe Rogan 5:34 Yeah.

Brian Greene 5:34 ... at least for some period of time. And it's, um ...It's an idea, and its powerful motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages. Uh, Otto Rank, who was one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, uh, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do. And then when I was, uh, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book.

Joe Rogan 6:08 No.

Brian Greene 6:08 It was, it was big in the '70s. It won, actually, the Pulitzer Prize in the '70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do. And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today, Until The End of Time, it's, um, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting. Because it's not just we that are going to die, it's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time. Our, our best theories suggest to us that even protons, the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that, in the far future, will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles. And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all.

Joe Rogan 7:01 What, what, what timeline are we talking about here?

Brian Greene 7:03 Well, pretty, pretty big, long timeline. In fact, I like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved. Um, I like to use the Empire State Building and imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times out of the previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second floor, 100, and so forth. So you're going to exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building. And, uh, in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years. And, uh, as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future. And to answer your question, we think, and I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, protons will decay roughly in, say, by the 38th floor, so 10 to the 38 years into the future.

Joe Rogan 7:56 So we can relax for a little bit?

Brian Greene 7:58 You can relax for a little bit.

Joe Rogan 7:59 (laughs)

Brian Greene 7:59 But here's the, here's the thing. The amazing thing, obviously, is, um, uh, it sounds trite, but time is relative, right?

Joe Rogan 8:05 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 8:05 So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another duration. And on, say, the scale of the entire Empire State Building, up to, say, 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years is like less than the blink of an eye. I mean-

Joe Rogan 8:24 Hmm.

Brian Greene 8:24 ... it's nothing, um, those scales. So you sort of have to be careful with your, your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need to if you're gonna think about the very far future.

Joe Rogan 8:38 Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist?

Brian Greene 8:42 Yeah, um, we anticipate that, uh, all complex structure will fall apart, so if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor most stars will have used up their nuclear fuel. There'll be, there'll be dark embers just sort of, you know, smokey out there in the cosmos, but if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will all just dissipate into their particulate ingredients. So it's hard to imagine past, say, floor 38 that there's gonna be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe. So the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline.

Joe Rogan 9:31 So impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long, but yet so small?

Brian Greene 9:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:37 Like in, in the human mind?

Brian Greene 9:39 Yeah. It's very hard to hold these durations-

Joe Rogan 9:42 Yeah.

Brian Greene 9:43 ... in mind. I mean, I don't, I don't feel like I ... I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about. In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me to sort of give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen in the universe. But, you know, we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the times of, you know, conventional experience. We have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've never experienced. You know, and that's true not only for time. It's also for space, right? I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomenon. I mean, if I was to take this bottle of water and I throw it at you, you'd catch it, you know where to put your hand. You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going. But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle like an electron behaves. And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics, and because of that, our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave. In fact, I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savanna who started to think about electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten, right?

Joe Rogan 11:06 (laughs)

Brian Greene 11:06 They're the ones whose genes didn't propagate onward. And therefore, those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our ancestors, we're good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we're not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world.

Joe Rogan 11:22 Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts 'cause if you-

Brian Greene 11:29 It's a... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:29 ... stop and think about what a human is, we've only really been this for X amount, 100,000 years.

Brian Greene 11:34 That's right, and it's a, it's a good question, and it's a tough one. I like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or whatever, augmented reality, whatever version of that kinda technology takes over in the far future, we might be able to experience these-... distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift, to change, so that we grasp the quantum realm the way we grasp Newtonian physics. I can at least imagine that as a, as a possibility. Um, what it would take to actually get there, and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know. But it's all about experience and survival. We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world. We've been programmed by evolution to survive. And those are two radically different propositions, 'cause you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive. It's a distinct attribute, and one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value, to understand black holes, or the Big Bang, or general relativity, or quantum mechanics, or entropy, or thermodynamics. These qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world, go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us. But it's not something which obviously has any survival value.

Joe Rogan 13:13 Uh, but it may someday.

Brian Greene 13:15 It may.

Joe Rogan 13:15 And what's interesting-

Brian Greene 13:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:16 ... is also how relatively recently people have been pondering these ideas-

Brian Greene 13:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:20 ... in a, in a sort of a quantifiable way, where you can write things down and sort of express it with other scientists and try to figure out w- who's right and who's wrong in terms of these calculations. But human beings, I mean, w- when did we really start pondering the, the, the scope of the universe? When did that-

Brian Greene 13:40 Pretty, pretty recently. I mean, if you, uh, if you think about the beginnings of modern physics, you know, you can start with, uh, Galileo. You can start with Newton. But in any event, we're talking on the order of hundreds of years. And the amazing thing, in hundreds of years, we've gone from a complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world actually works, to the development of Newton's equations, where you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses, or lunar eclipses, or motions of the planets, and so on. And then, you know, a couple hundred years after that, we migrate from that understanding, which is basically an encapsulation of the patterns that we can all discern with the naked eye. We develop a whole new body of physical law called quantum mechanics, which is so completely counterintuitive, which describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't ever see with the naked eye. But nevertheless, we can use the math to make predictions, and the predictions are borne out by experiment. And that progression only took, say, a couple hundred years. And that's where we've gotten. So it's kinda spectacular that, you know, we beings who are just coming of age here in the Milky Way galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper and a calculation, a pencil, and we can figure out magnetic properties of particles like electrons to 10 decimal places. That's shocking. I mean, it's stunning, and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of, that our species has been able to accomplish that.

Joe Rogan 15:18 Somehow or another, I don't think I'm responsible. (laughs)

Brian Greene 15:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:21 I don't feel proud.

Brian Greene 15:22 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:22 I don't feel like any of my people-

Brian Greene 15:24 You, you-

Joe Rogan 15:24 ... were involved.

Brian Greene 15:24 ... you've contributed your part.

Joe Rogan 15:26 (laughs)

Brian Greene 15:26 No, it really is a collective effort.

Joe Rogan 15:28 Yeah.

Brian Greene 15:28 Um, and, uh, that's the beauty of science. In the end of the day, it's not that most scientists are ever going to be remembered. You stop someone in the street and ask them to name a scientist, yeah, they may say Hawking. They may say Einstein. That's kind of it, I think, for most people. And I don't think that's a bad thing per se, because it's not about the personalities or the people that have pushed the frontiers of understanding. It's the fact that we've got this body of insight that continues to grow and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand-

Joe Rogan 16:00 Yeah.

Brian Greene 16:00 ... the natural world. And I think that's really what it's all about.

Joe Rogan 16:03 Don't you think that there are some personalities, like yourself, uh, like, um, Feynman, like, uh, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, that because of their personality, because they're sort of, they're charismatic people, it actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes more people attracted to the ideas?

Brian Greene 16:21 Yeah, no doubt. And, and I think that's a, that's a vital point, because without that impetus from outside the traditional educational system, I don't think we would have the kind of interest in science that I can feel growing, you know, in the world around us. I mean, the unfortunate thing in the educational system is that we teach toward examination. We teach toward assessment. And if you wanna figure out how to flatten a kid's interest in these ideas, just teach them stuff and tell them, "You're gonna be tested on this on Tuesday. You're gonna have to spit back, you know, everything that you've learned." So I find it kinda heartbreaking, the way in which so much intrinsic interest in these ideas ... And you can see it in a five- or six-year-old, right? I mean, I like to say we begin as little scientists. We're exploring the world. We're trying to-

Joe Rogan 17:11 Mm.

Brian Greene 17:11 ... figure things out. And then we go into the educational system, and it's not by, by malice. It's just by the nature of how we teach in the, in the current, you know, uh, approach to educational philosophy, that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas as a burden.

Joe Rogan 17:28 Mm.

Brian Greene 17:29 So, "I don't wanna have to spend time learning about parts of the cell or-"

Joe Rogan 17:32 Yeah.

Brian Greene 17:32 "... how to balance reactions." I see it with my own kids. You know, I've got a 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, and all they are motivated by is next Wednesday's quiz. And I'm like, "Hey, these ideas, they're, they're kind of exciting. They're kind of wonderful." They're like, "No, no, Dad, Dad, Dad. I just wanna know enough so I can..."... you know, do well on, on the quiz. And once the quiz is over, they just sort of leave the ideas behind.

Joe Rogan 17:56 When did these ideas become attractive to you?

Brian Greene 17:59 Well, I was, I don't know, uh, n- not unusual for a scientist, but unusual, I think, in the, in the spectrum of kids in the world because at five or six years old, I was just captivated by mathematics.

Joe Rogan 18:11 Really?

Brian Greene 18:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:12 Five or six?

Brian Greene 18:13 Definitely, yeah. My dad, my dad was not an academic. My dad was a composer. He was a vaudevillian. He was a, he was a comedian. You know, he would, in the early days, would go around the country and, uh, with a harmonica group and a stage show, that, that's what he did. You know, he liked to say that he was an SPHD, a Seward Park High School dropout. You know? So at, at, at tenth grade, he just hit the road. But he loved scientific ideas. So he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I was about five years old, and then I would ask him to set me problems. And he'd give me these 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers, I'd write them out on big construction paper, and I'd spend the weekend just calculating away on these huge, you know, arithmetical problems of no interest to anybody on planet Earth. But to me, the fact that you could learn a little piece of, of math and then do something that nobody had ever done before, that was exciting to me as a kid, and that's really what got me going.

Joe Rogan 19:12 So you chose the right path, clearly.

Brian Greene 19:14 Yeah, you know-

Joe Rogan 19:15 It's your personality, whatever it is that attracted you to the ideas.

Brian Greene 19:17 You know, well, you always wonder about that. I don't know if you wonder. You know, I always wonder, uh, how can you not? What, what would have happened if, uh, X would've transpired instead of Y?

Joe Rogan 19:27 Yeah.

Brian Greene 19:27 Um, in fact, I have to say, when I, when I graduated college, I had sort of a, uh, a period of, uh, I don't know, depression is too strong a word for it, but, uh, a period of, "What have I done? I went to college, I could have studied all the great ideas of the world, and all I did was get a technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equation and solve Einstein's equations." And I felt like, "Wow, have I just, like, squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever had because I was so completely focused on just trying to understand physics and mathematics?"

Joe Rogan 20:04 How'd you get past that?

Brian Greene 20:06 Well, I was lucky. I was given a second chance. I, I, I won, uh, a scholarship to go to, to England, to Oxford. And in- ostensibly, it was to study physics. But when I got there, I realized that I was completely free to do whatever I wanted to do at that point, and so I took a year to study literature. I went to the physics classes, so I was sort of showing up, but I wasn't focused on it at all. And instead I was focused, I got a, you know, in England, they, it's a tutorial system. So I got a, a tutor, which is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and you write papers. You literally go in and you read your paper out loud. It's not something where you just turn it in and it gets graded. So it's a very personal experience. You write something and you're actually delivering it to this individual that is gonna help you in your educational journey. And so that's what I did for a year. And at the end of that year, I kinda said to myself, "Okay, I've got it. I, I understand now what it would mean to study these, these other subjects." And I sort of felt like, "I'll be able to do this on my own if I continue to be excited about it." And I went back to physics with a vengeance, and basically in that second year completed my, my doctorate in, in that year and, and moved on from there.

Joe Rogan 21:23 So this time that you took off, this year, well, you didn't really take it off, but you changed paths.

Brian Greene 21:27 Yeah, changed paths, yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:28 How beneficial was that for you? Do you think that it-

Brian Greene 21:30 Hugely.

Joe Rogan 21:30 ... it helped you to sort of appreciate what your original subject of interest was as well?

Brian Greene 21:36 Yeah, hugely so, because, you know, i- i- it's funny. It's the flip side of something I often encounter with people that are interested in science but don't know the math. And they always say, or some say, "I'm never really gonna understand this body of science because I don't know the mathematics." And I try to convince them, "Look, at some level that's true. If you really wanna do research in the general theory of relativity, you've gotta learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus. But if you are really interested in the ideas, you really can grasp the ideas without the technical background." So I try to demystify something that can seem, um, impenetrable because you haven't entered the field. And I think the same thing happened to me in reverse for the more humanistic explorations. It had this aura of, of grandeur that, um, I was unable to penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas. And by spending a year in those ideas, it didn't diminish them in any way, but I felt like it brought it back down to Earth as another journey toward truth, another pathway toward insight, and one that you don't have to have a degree in. You don't have to know the ins and outs of the academic version of that subject to understand it and grasp it and, and spend some time thinking about it.

Joe Rogan 23:03 So do you think that for people studying anything, particularly those studying science and mathematics, which is very rigid disciplines, do you think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding their education into philosophy or art or-

Brian Greene 23:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:19 ... something that, uh, that uses your mind in a different way?

Brian Greene 23:22 Yeah. Um, some.

Joe Rogan 23:24 Some.

Brian Greene 23:25 There are some people in the, in the physics and mathematics community who are so intensely focused that it would almost be a shame to pull their attention away-

Joe Rogan 23:38 Mm. Right.

Brian Greene 23:38 ... from the deep dive that they're gonna do for the rest of their lives.

Joe Rogan 23:41 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 23:41 And the contributions that they're going to make and have made are, are substantial and, and exciting. But for, I think for many others, and certainly for me, I mean, look, I-... as most people do, but not all. But I learned early on that I'm not gonna be an Albert Einstein. You know, I can make contributions, and I have had contributions to fields like string theory and, uh, and cosmology, but they're never gonna be at the level of shattering our understanding of the world, things that people are gonna talk about 500 years from now. That's unlikely. And I think for somebody like that, who's able to make contributions, but pulling away from the technical work is not gonna extract some vital insight into the nature of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered, I think there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying. Because by broadening your perspective on what the work you're doing is actually revealing, it's part of the human quest for understanding. And seeing it as an isolated discipline, where it's all about the next equation and the better unified theory or the deeper understanding of the Big Bang, uh, to see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding, I think, diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do.

Joe Rogan 24:58 Was that a part of your initial ambition-

Brian Greene 25:00 Yeah, it was.

Joe Rogan 25:00 ... to leave something that-

Brian Greene 25:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:02 ... would just rock the world?

Brian Greene 25:03 Yeah, well, to go back to the, the comment that you made before about we being the only species that knows that we're going to die, um, I think part of that instills in many people, and certainly I see it in my own life, even though at the time that I was making various decisions, I wasn't literally thinking about these kinds of issues of mortality, but how do you deal with that recognition of the impermanence of your own life? Well, I think part of it is a symbolic kind of immortality. You create something that will last. You create something that'll have such impact that it will stick around for a long, long period of time. So I think, yes, I mean, part of my motivation in doing physics was not merely to get the next decimal place in this or that physical quantity described in the natural world, it was to try to have some kind of insight that would rock our understanding of the world and have reverberations that would echo out for many, many years to come.

Joe Rogan 26:08 That's interesting. Did that torture you somewhat? I mean, is that something that, uh, haunted you? Was it, uh, in your head all the time?

Brian Greene 26:14 Not really. Uh-

Joe Rogan 26:16 But an ultimate ambition, perhaps?

Brian Greene 26:17 But an ultimate ambition, yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:19 Yeah.

Brian Greene 26:19 For, for sure. Um, and, you know, look, I, I think when, when you're doing any work whatsoever, the day-to-day, the moment to moment is a grind, you know? I don't know how you find it in, in, in the work that you're doing, but if I'm working on a research project, even if, in principle, the ideas are grand and wonderful and bold, the moment to moment is calculating away. It's trying to figure out that equation. It's putting that equation on a computer. I mean, it is not sexy. It is not-

Joe Rogan 26:50 Hmm.

Brian Greene 26:50 ... something that has that glorious quality that you might ultimately describe when you're finished and you look back and you think about the implications of your work. The moment to moment of almost anything that you do is a grind.

Joe Rogan 27:02 Yeah.

Brian Greene 27:02 So, so I think that's ultimately what is the, the, the driver of, of whatever you're doing in your life, the moment to moment. But yeah, there is certainly a part of me that would have a, a desire, um, uh, a hope that the work would reverberate in a powerful way. I think that's true for most physicists, that, that notion that you can sort of sit at a table and think and change the way we understand reality the way Einstein did, the way Schrodinger did-

Joe Rogan 27:36 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 27:36 ... the way Niels Bohr did.

Joe Rogan 27:38 But, like, what percentage of people-

Brian Greene 27:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:39 ... view, have that revelation?

Brian Greene 27:41 Yeah, I think it's, I think it's pretty few and, and far between, so-

Joe Rogan 27:45 And everybody else is sort of just contributing.

Brian Greene 27:48 Contributing and, and, and-

Joe Rogan 27:48 And then occasionally someone...

Brian Greene 27:50 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 27:51 Some, some light bulb goes off.

Brian Greene 27:52 Just sort of powerful new insight, and you're like, "Okay, everything has suddenly-"

Joe Rogan 27:56 Hmm.

Brian Greene 27:56 "... changed." Uh-

Joe Rogan 27:57 That's so exciting, though.

Brian Greene 27:59 And it's what keeps you going.

Joe Rogan 28:00 So ex- (laughs)

Brian Greene 28:00 It's what keeps you going, you know?

Joe Rogan 28:02 Yeah, to be the person who, who has the light bulb.

Brian Greene 28:04 Yeah, but I tell my students, you know, and especially young students who come and they're still trying to figure out what they want to do, "If you're not satisfied with just contributing, if you're not satisfied with being part of the journey, but not the person at the head of the, the breakthroughs, um, it's probably not the field for you." Because it's so unlikely, because it's not just brain power. It's thinking of the right questions. It's thinking of things in the right orientation. It's being at the right place at the right time with the right DNA that somehow is attuned to the question that's being asked. So it's not even fully under your control. It's not sort of a matter of, you know, exercising your mind and, and building up the muscles of the brain in such a way that you are the strongest person to contribute to this and this idea. It's, uh, it's luck. It's timing. It's being there when the question's being asked and you happen to see the way forward.

Joe Rogan 29:03 That's, it's so interesting to me that there's so many people working on all this stuff and that the average person that doesn't contemplate quantum physics or any, any of these equations, we have no idea it's going on.

Brian Greene 29:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:17 And that this, all this work that's so critical to our understanding of what the universe really is, what the, the, the very fiber of the universe itself-

Brian Greene 29:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:25 ... all this is going on. And most people are just sort of, uh, they're reaping the residual benefits of it-

Brian Greene 29:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:32 ... but they're just wandering around nuh- not knowing.

Brian Greene 29:34 Yeah, hugely so. Uh, in fact, uh, there's a number that's quoted that quantum mechanics is responsible for something like 35% of the gross national product.

Joe Rogan 29:45 (laughs)

Brian Greene 29:45 So, so it's like, it's, uh, in a very concrete way, now the, the problem with that number is I recently looked it up to find the source of it, so I sort of went online and checked it out, and apparently I'm the source-

Joe Rogan 29:56 (laughs)

Brian Greene 29:56 ... of this number. And, and I assure you that I've not done a calculation that-

Joe Rogan 29:59 (laughs)

Brian Greene 29:59 ... really fully justifies this. But roughly speaking, you know, anything that has an integrated circuit is the result, uh, beneficiary of quantum insights. So we use this stuff, uh-... every moment of our technological lives. And yet, as you say, for the most part, most of us don't have a, a deep understanding of the reality that's responsible for the gadgetry that the science has, has given rise to. And it's a strange ... Quantum mechanics is an utterly strange reality.

Joe Rogan 30:33 Too strange.

Brian Greene 30:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:34 I, I've tried many, many times to try to understand-

Brian Greene 30:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:38 ... whether it's Sean Carroll's books-

Brian Greene 30:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:40 ... or, or yours, or any- anyone's.

Brian Greene 30:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:41 It just ... It doesn't get in.

Brian Greene 30:43 Right. And again, it goes back to, you know, our brains just weren't under pressure-

Joe Rogan 30:48 Yeah.

Brian Greene 30:48 ... to think quantum mechanically. Um, but I assure you, you give me, um, uh, a couple hours. I mean, books are one thing, because it's a one-sided conversation. But you give me a couple hours and a back and forth, and I will absolutely get you to a place where you appreciate and have a sense of what these ideas really are telling us about the nature of the world.

Joe Rogan 31:10 Here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you. What do you think was happening before the Big Bang?

Brian Greene 31:16 Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a deep question, and a, and a, and a subtle one, and there's sort of two ways that I like to think about that question. One is, it could be that, uh, the Big Bang was an interesting event, but not the first event in the totality of reality. It could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space, but it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part, and that grander realm may have been there for a far longer period of time. It may have experienced its own Big Bangs, maybe a collection of Big Bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past. So it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is, a lot of other Big Bangs, or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality than we have direct access to. However, another answer is that the very question may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest. We know how to parse that sentence. We know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang, because we know how to talk about the moment before your birth, or the moment before the Civil War, or the moment before any event that happened in the world. We fully understand the meaning of that kind of sentence. But it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang, the sentence actually doesn't mean anything. It could be that the Big Bang was the place where time itself started, and, uh, Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across. He said, "Look." I'll dress it up a little bit. Imagine you're walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone. You say, "Hey, can you point me in the direction of north? I wanna walk in the northward direction." They point you, you continue to walk, you pass by somebody else, say, "Hey, which way is further north?" And they point you in that direction. But when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say, "Hey, how do I go further north?" They look at you and say, "Whoa. That question doesn't mean anything, because this is where north begins." There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole. And it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time. Talk about a billion years ago, or ten billion years ago, but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang, that may be where time started, and you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself.

Joe Rogan 33:35 That freaks me out.

Brian Greene 33:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:37 See, that, that's one th- that, that gets in your head, you know? What do you mean, beginning of time?

Brian Greene 33:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:42 Why would time have a beginning?

Brian Greene 33:44 Good.

Joe Rogan 33:45 R-

Brian Greene 33:45 And it could be, it could be that time is an emergent quality of reality. I'll give you an, an analogy for what I mean by that is, we all know what temperature means intuitively. Something's hot, you feel it. Something's cold, you feel it. Your body understands those concepts. What physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment. So if the molecules are moving really quickly, you've got a hot environment. If the molecules are really moving slowly, it's a cold environment. So temperature emerges from the motion of particles. So if you have like one particle, you can't really talk about it being hot or cold, because you need a conglomerate. You need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion. And in that sense, temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas, the molecules and atoms that make up reality. Maybe that's true of time. Maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns, but fundamentally, maybe there are atoms or molecules of time which, when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with, don't yield time as we know it. Time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment, but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently.

Joe Rogan 35:20 Whoa. That's a heavy one.

Brian Greene 35:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:23 That's a heavy one. What also is a heavy one is, what caused the Big Bang?

Brian Greene 35:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:28 Like, why would something smaller than the head of a pin-

Brian Greene 35:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:32 ... become everything that we see in the cosmos?

Brian Greene 35:34 Yeah. So there are ideas for the answer to that question. Look, all of this is tentative-

Joe Rogan 35:39 Right.

Brian Greene 35:39 ... because it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning. We have astronomical observations that we need to be sure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth, so, so we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas. But the idea that I think most physicists or cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations. The usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version. You drop something toward the Earth and it moves downward because the Earth and the object pull on each other. That's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives. But Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive.... it can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward. And this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the Earth is always the attractive variety. The gravity created by the sun, again, a compact object, is always the attractive variety. But Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a, a rocky object that's isolated in space, but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region of space, that that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity. Why is that important to your question? If the very early universe, that little, tiny head of a pin that you're talking about, if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it the inflaton field, the name doesn't matter, but if was filled with that energy, it would've been subject to repulsive gravity. What does repulsive gravity do? Pushes everything apart, causes everything to rush outward. So the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart.

Joe Rogan 37:33 And this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical? Have we observed any sort of element in the universe that...

Brian Greene 37:40 It, it is theoretical, but it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works. So number one, Einstein's equations have now been tested over and over again in a whole variety of circumstances. The detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago was like the, the crowning triumph of Einstein's math. A hundred years ago, the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space. A hundred years later, we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space. So we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics, and right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing. You've got uniform energy in a region, repulsive gravity. The other thing is, we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. Since the 1920s, everybody thought that, yes, the universe is expanding, but it will slow down over time. Why? Because gravity pulls things back together. You throw an apple upward, it doesn't go up faster and faster. It goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back. Everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole. It's expanding, but expanding ever slower. The observations in 1998, culminated in 1998, which won the 2011 Nobel Prize, showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly. The expansion of space is speeding up over time. It's accelerating. How do we explain that? The best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity. We believe even today the universe is suffused with a bath of energy. We call it dark energy. We believe it's uniformly going through space. I like to think of it almost like a, as a Turkish sauna. It's like the steam filling the sauna, this energy filling space, and that repulsive gravity, we believe is responsible for the observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and faster over time. So it's circumstantial, but the case for repulsive gravity is quite strong.

Joe Rogan 39:49 And what would have caused it to coale- what would have caused it to compress in- in- initially?

Brian Greene 39:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:54 Like, why would all that matter be in this tiny-

Brian Greene 39:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:58 ... less than a pin-sized object?

Brian Greene 40:01 Yeah. So I have no idea, and nobody else on planet Earth has any real idea other, but we do have theories. And one of the theories suggests that in the very early universe, it was a highly chaotic environment, very hot with all the fields fluctuating wildly up and down. And the idea would be that if you wait long enough, where it's hard to know what wait means in this environment, but don't press me on my definition of time back then, just sort of intuitively. If you wait long enough, on rare occasions, the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region, become uniform, and then that region explosively inflates, grows large. So, you know, it's, uh, imagine you're looking at, um, a- a- a bo- a- a- a- a pot of boiling water. The surface is, of course, widely undulating up and down, but if you wait long enough, very long time since you've never seen it and neither have I, there will be a little patch on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out. Why? That only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling. It will happen. It's rare, but if you wait long enough, it will occur. Similarly, the wildly undulating fields in the early universe, if you wait long enough, a patch will flatten out. You get the uniform energy, plug it into Einstein's equations, that region explosively inflates, and I mean explosively. It can go from a size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in far less than a blink of an eye, in 10-30, 10-35 seconds. That's how powerful repulsive gravity can be.

Joe Rogan 41:50 That is so baffling.

Brian Greene 41:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:51 So before that, before this happens, you just have, in this theory, you just have all of this energy sort of r- randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects?

Brian Greene 42:06 Yep. Yep. It's just-

Joe Rogan 42:07 And that could have been forever?

Brian Greene 42:08 That could ... And, and in fact, that's the main point. There's nobody who was hanging around looking at their watch saying, "Good God, when is this Big Bang gonna finally happen?" (laughs) You know, so, so you can have this, uh, cosmological pre-show. You can have it last as long as you like. The only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later, a region flattens out and then...... the cosmological show begins.

Joe Rogan 42:35 And if we're looking at this model of the universe being this, uh, infinite universes-

Brian Greene 42:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:41 ... with d- different characteristics and d- different qualities to them, this could be happening throughout infinity-

Brian Greene 42:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:49 ... all over the place.

Brian Greene 42:50 Yeah. And, in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject, says that. It says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit, it was just one of many such events. And therefore, there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated, but the details can be different. The physical details can differ from what we are familiar with. And the differences can be small, temperature differences in one part of space versus another, or they can be far more significant. Even the, the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm. Their masses can be different. Their charges can be different. Their fundamental physical features can be different. So out there, in that wider cosmological landscape, it can be the Wild, Wild West of realities.

Joe Rogan 43:49 And they don't have to worry about proton deterioration?

Brian Greene 43:51 There may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart. Um, uh, the wild, the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically in analyzing these theories, you realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well. Many can be different, but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiated, occur out there-

Joe Rogan 44:20 Yeah.

Brian Greene 44:20 ... in other realms. So you come to these crazy sounding, sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms-

Joe Rogan 44:30 An infinite number of times.

Brian Greene 44:31 ... perhaps infinite number of times. And moreover-

Joe Rogan 44:33 Yeah.

Brian Greene 44:33 ... small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or, you know, maybe your name is, uh, you know, Joe Greene and I'm Brian Roegeen. Or there's, like, strange realities that can be taking place. And this is not an overworked theorist imagination. This is the careful, dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations. Now, I should say, there are some physicists who see this implication and say, "Whoa. You guys have fallen off the deep end. Your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them, that's the kinda theory that we have been trained to avoid, to excise."

Joe Rogan 45:21 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 45:22 However, the more f- you know, forward thinking, I like to describe us physicists say, "Hey, uh, math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years. And if this is where the math is taking us, it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves."

Joe Rogan 45:44 Jesus. That's the weirdest one, the weirdest one. It's like when people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe, that you're out there-

Brian Greene 45:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:54 ... or a version of you or infinite versions of you.

Brian Greene 45:56 Yeah. And it can, um, be disturbing. Like, what do you mean by you-

Joe Rogan 46:03 Right.

Brian Greene 46:03 ... if there are many of yous out there, each of whom has an equal claim on being you because they've had the same experiences-

Joe Rogan 46:11 And-

Brian Greene 46:11 ... they have the same memories.

Joe Rogan 46:13 ... and maybe have made infinite vari- variations in the decisions that you've made through your life.

Brian Greene 46:17 That's right.

Joe Rogan 46:18 So you could meet a, a B- Brian Greene your age somewhere out there in the universe that's gone left-

Brian Greene 46:23 Made the right choices.

Joe Rogan 46:24 ... when you have (laughs) - Or the wrong ones.

Brian Greene 46:26 Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Joe Rogan 46:27 You become a gambling addict.

Brian Greene 46:28 Yeah. You know, it's like-

Joe Rogan 46:29 Get face tattoos like Post Malone.

Brian Greene 46:29 ... a Star Trek episode where you've got, where you've got, like, Spock and evil Spock.

Joe Rogan 46:33 Yes.

Brian Greene 46:33 You know, the one that had the little beard on.

Joe Rogan 46:34 Right, right. (laughs)

Brian Greene 46:35 You know? So there's gonna be a little bearded version of me, a goatee out there.

Joe Rogan 46:38 Yeah.

Brian Greene 46:38 So yeah. You know?

Joe Rogan 46:39 Yeah.

Brian Greene 46:39 And, and, and, and thing I wanna stress is, this sounds kooky.

Joe Rogan 46:43 Yeah.

Brian Greene 46:44 And the danger of kooky sounding ideas in physics is that they're people who then jump off for it and say, "Well, if that's possible, then, then this is possible. Maybe I can, with my mind, you know, affect what other people are..."

Joe Rogan 46:57 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 46:58 You know? So there's all sorts of crazy ideas that can be inspired by the weird insights of modern physics. And you've really gotta keep straight what's real and what's ridiculous.

Joe Rogan 47:09 Yeah. That's a problem, right? When people start using, especially if they're articulate, they start using scientific lingo-

Brian Greene 47:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:15 ... to describe things that are very unscientific. Sorta like what the bleep.

Brian Greene 47:19 Yeah. Oh, God.

Joe Rogan 47:19 Like what the bl-

Brian Greene 47:20 Yeah. Me too. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:22 (laughs)

Brian Greene 47:23 But that was one of those movies where a lot of people, like, g- there was all this quantum talk and-

Joe Rogan 47:29 Oh, yeah.

Brian Greene 47:29 ... you know, Dr. Quantum was in it with the little-

Joe Rogan 47:31 Yeah, right.

Brian Greene 47:31 ... cartoon, explaining-

Joe Rogan 47:32 You know, yeah.

Brian Greene 47:33 ... particles and waves. And, you know, like, there's science behind this, but then at the end of it, really, it was something that was created by someone who runs a cult-

Joe Rogan 47:41 Yeah.

Brian Greene 47:41 ... who believes they're channeling someone who's, like, a thousand-year-old alien. Like, that, that whole Ramtha thing?

Joe Rogan 47:46 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 47:46 Yeah. Well, let me tell you, if you have a moment.

Joe Rogan 47:48 Please.

Brian Greene 47:49 Uh, so a couple years ago, uh, I was in middle of a big project. In fact, I describe this i- i- in- toward the end of the book, so you'll, you'll get to this little anecdote if you choose to carry on reading. Um, I was r- in the middle of a big project. And a speaking opportunity came in and I didn't properly vet it. You know, the money looked good and looked like a fine thing, and I signed off on it. And then a few days before I'm going, I realize it's to go to talk to Judy Zebra Knight-... who channels-

Joe Rogan 48:18 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 48:18 ... Romphah-

Joe Rogan 48:19 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 48:19 ... the 35,000-year-old Lemurian sage.

Joe Rogan 48:22 (laughs)

Brian Greene 48:23 And I, I said to, you know, the folks who, who should've been checking in on this, like the lecture agent, "I can't go." And they're like, "Hey, Brian, it's tomorrow. It's too late to back out." You know? And I was like-

Joe Rogan 48:34 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 48:34 "... Jesus Christ."

Joe Rogan 48:35 (laughs)

Brian Greene 48:35 You know, so I, I look at some videos online, and I see her on, like, the Merv Griffin Show, where, you know, she, she channels Romphah on live television. I don't know what year this was. You know, she snaps her head forward, it goes back.

Joe Rogan 48:47 (laughs)

Brian Greene 48:47 She changes her voice. It becomes like something-

Joe Rogan 48:50 (gasps)

Brian Greene 48:50 ... between the Queen and Yoda, you know.

Joe Rogan 48:51 Yes. (laughs)

Brian Greene 48:51 It's this weird, weird place. And she goes, you know, "Hello, being," and she's talking to Merv Griffin, you know.

Joe Rogan 48:57 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 48:57 And he's talking about, like, an airplane. She goes, "What is airplane?" You know, it's that, that, that, that kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 49:01 Oh, boy. (laughs)

Brian Greene 49:02 Anyway, so I go.

Joe Rogan 49:03 (laughs)

Brian Greene 49:03 You know? And, uh, I show up, and the first thing I see is there are all these people walking around a grassy field with their arms out like this. And I'm like, I'm like, "Can they see?" You know? And I get closer, they're all blindfolded. And I'm saying that, "What, what is going on here?" And they describe that each person has a card around their neck where they've written down their life's dream. And an exact copy of that card has been put out on this big field, and they have to feel their way toward the matching card. And if they succeed, this shows that this goal or desire is gonna come to pass.

Joe Rogan 49:38 Oh, boy.

Brian Greene 49:38 You know, and I'm saying to one of those guys, like, "So how's it going?"

Joe Rogan 49:41 (laughs)

Brian Greene 49:41 He goes, like, "Really good. You know, one person found their card, you know, in the last few..." I was like, you know, the odds or probability of that happening are kind of not, uh, unreasonable, but that's all that this is. And then they take me to, um, the blindfolded archers.

Joe Rogan 49:56 Oh, Jesus.

Brian Greene 49:57 Yeah. You know, so they're taking bow and arrow, and they're firing at these targets. And, like, man, I'm, like, standing way back on, on this kind of thing, and they ask me, you know-

Joe Rogan 50:06 Wow.

Brian Greene 50:06 ... "Do you wanna try it?" And I was like, you know, and there's a photographer that's come along, I'm like, "No, I'll, I'll, I'll avoid that." And then they introduce me to this woman who is able to predict the next card in a, in a shuffled deck. And, you know, so she'd pull out these cards and she'd say, "Okay, it's gonna be a seven of clubs," and it's like a three of spades. And then the next one is a seven of diamonds. And she goes, "Oh, well, there's the seven that I was talking about, you know, one card before."

Joe Rogan 50:31 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 50:31 You, you know, so it's this crazy circumstance where, um ... And then I go, I go to give my talk, okay? 'Cause that's why I was there, after all. This was just, like, the preamble. They were showing me-

Joe Rogan 50:40 Right. (laughs)

Brian Greene 50:40 ... what they do. I walk into this barn, and I, I cross the threshold of the barn, and they all give me a standing ovation. And I'm like, "Okay. It's appreciated, but, like, why are you giving me a standing ovation?" And I go in, o- and I start to give my talk, and I, and I say to them straight out, "W- what I've seen here is nuts, okay?"

Joe Rogan 51:02 (laughs)

Brian Greene 51:02 You know, I say, you know, "If you're gonna try to predict next cards in the deck, you know, one out of every four times you'll get the suit, one out of every 13 times you'll get the rank. There's nothing in there but the pure probabilistic laws of mathematics," you know? They rise up and give me a standing ovation. And I say, "It's appreciated, but why are you applauding? I'm telling you that you're wasting your time." And they applaud me again. And I'm like, "This is, like, so totally weird." But then I go to the book signing, I finish my talk at the book signing, and these people, they're, they come up to me and they, they talk real soft and they say, "There's a lot of crazy stuff that's happening in this place, but we come here because we feel that there's something else in the world, and we want to be around like-minded individuals that are searching for the deeper truth. So thank you for calling out the silliness that's happening here, but we'll come here anyway and spend our money because we wanna be part of the journey." And I have to tell you, I had a degree of sympathy-

Joe Rogan 52:01 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 52:02 ... for them, um, because I get the motivation. I mean, as a physicist, what we do is we are revealing strange features of the world. So I get the urge, I get the desire. Th- the problem is that the methodology that's being employed is something that will never take you closer to the truth, however much you may feel that you're among like-minded individuals. So I get the motivation, I get the sensation, I get the urge, but it's tragic that these individuals feel that this kind of an undertaking is a pathway that will take them toward the deeper truth. And let me just fi- finish up. So, um, after this, they take me to the dinner. And the dinner's in a mansion at the top of the hill, and that's where, where Judy i- ... I'm probably gonna get sued for, for this conversation, by the way.

Joe Rogan 52:48 Really?

Brian Greene 52:48 Yeah, I don't know. You know, but, but I've, you know, I've never spoken about it and then-

Joe Rogan 52:51 Romphah wouldn't sue you.

Brian Greene 52:52 Yeah, sure, well, no, they're, they're quite litigious.

Joe Rogan 52:54 Are they really?

Brian Greene 52:55 Yeah. No, they definitely are. You know, so, so anyway, this is just one person's opinion. You know, they take me to the mansion at the top of the hill, and that's where she is. She doesn't come down and actually participate in the talk. She's, like, watching it on closed-circuit television up in the mansion.

Joe Rogan 53:11 Oh, boy.

Brian Greene 53:11 And I walk in, and she hugs me, but it was too goddamn long of a hug.

Joe Rogan 53:18 (laughs)

Brian Greene 53:18 You know what I'm saying? It was like ... And she was like, "Thank you." It was like this big emotional thing, and I was like, "I, I don't, I don't get it," but I think that's the way that she brings people into the fold and gets them to spend the big bucks to enter on this so-called journey toward truth where she's, you know, channeling this, you know, made-up, fictitious sage that somehow people buy into.

Joe Rogan 53:44 Is this all still going on?

Brian Greene 53:45 It was just a couple years ago, so I imagine it is.

Joe Rogan 53:48 Im- imagine if she's really channeling it-

Brian Greene 53:51 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:51 ... and we're just, (laughs) we're just missing-

Brian Greene 53:53 That's right.

Joe Rogan 53:54 (laughs)

Brian Greene 53:54 You know, that would certainly rewrite every rule of reality-

Joe Rogan 53:57 Yeah.

Brian Greene 53:57 ... every law of physics that I, that I understand, but-

Joe Rogan 53:59 I mean, wouldn't that be less weird than the Big Bang itself?

Brian Greene 54:02 You know, no. I tell you why.

Joe Rogan 54:03 (laughs)

Brian Greene 54:04 I tell you why. It's b- see, see, when it comes to the Big Bang-I can sit down with the mathematics that I understand well, and I can follow the deductive chain of reasoning that gets us to some of these strange implications that we're talking about, multiple big bangs, other realities-

Joe Rogan 54:17 Right.

Brian Greene 54:17 ... and so forth. When it comes to channeling a 35,000-year-old sage, I don't know what the hell that even means.

Joe Rogan 54:24 Right.

Brian Greene 54:24 I don't understand the physical processes by which that could possibly happen. I don't understand how there could've been a being of the sort that she's channeling alive 35,000 years ago 'cause it doesn't have any agreement with the archeological record.

Joe Rogan 54:37 Mm.

Brian Greene 54:37 You know, so, um, there's, there's a vital distinction between weirdness that emerges from careful mathematical analysis and weirdness that emerges from an overworked imagination that possibly sees a business model whereby a lot of money can be brought in if you can get people to buy into your vision of how the world works.

Joe Rogan 54:58 Well, it's sort of like what they do is they, they curate ideas, and then they run them through their sort of filter of, uh, woo-woo.

Brian Greene 55:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:09 Right?

Brian Greene 55:09 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 55:10 And then they distribute it in a very palatable way that attracts people. That movie-

Brian Greene 55:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:16 I, I tell a story. I've told this before, so, uh, I apologize to people who have heard it. There was a, uh, a friend of mine at The Comedy Store had a friend that I, I don't know her name, but she came to The Comedy Store, and, uh, she was so happy. And I'm like, uh, she was like, "I'm so happy." I go, "Why are you so happy?" She goes, "Because I found The Secret, and now that I know about The Secret-"

Brian Greene 55:37 Right.

Joe Rogan 55:37 "... I, I am going to be married. I am going to be this. I'm going to, I'm going to have this fulfilled life. I'm going to reach my dreams, and I'm really excited about that." And so, y- you know, at the time, I had just seen the movie, and then I was just starting to understand the criticism of the movie. I was reading all these-

Brian Greene 55:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:53 ... you know, accounts-

Brian Greene 55:54 Sure.

Joe Rogan 55:55 ... where scientists were breaking down all the things that were wrong, and... And I know- I didn't just dash her dreams. I just was like, "Wow, okay." And then I saw her a year later, uh, outside of, uh, another one of my shows at a different comedy club, and I said, "Hey, how are you doing?" She's like, (sighs) "Things are just not going the way I thought. I thought because of The Secret that everything would be great, but my dad is still a pain in the ass, and you know, and then-"

Brian Greene 56:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:18 "... now he's moved in with me and doesn't have any money, and I can't-"

Brian Greene 56:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:21 "... you know, I can't establish a good relationship, and I don't have the job that I wanted. And I don't understand because I've been using The Secret. I, I think about it every day."

Brian Greene 56:29 Right.

Joe Rogan 56:29 And I said, "Here's my take on this. If you talk to someone who's very successful, and you say to them, 'Hey, how did you get very successful?' And they say, 'I thought about it all the time. I have a vision board. I took that photo of the house that I wanted, and I put it in the vision board. That became my house. I took a, you know, this, this idea. I want a beautiful wife. I want a family. I want sports cars and this and that. And now I have those things because the mind is a powerful tool, and the mind can create reality.'" The... You're just talking to someone who is successful. How many people thought like that and nothing happened?

Brian Greene 57:07 Right.

Joe Rogan 57:07 I bet millions.

Brian Greene 57:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:08 I bet there's so many p-... You're, you're, you're, you have a th- you have a bias in successful users. You're... Those are the ones you're talking to. And just because of the fact that they've been able to have these extraordinarily success- successful lives while visualizing these things does not mean that visualizing these things creates-

Brian Greene 57:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:28 ... an extraordinarily successful life. You have to think and you have to act and you have to do.

Brian Greene 57:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 57:32 And there's trial and error, and there's a lot of lessons to be learned. But if you wanted to simplify it at the end once you're successful and boil it down to a philosophy that you could sell a course on-

Brian Greene 57:43 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 57:43 ... that's what it would be.

Brian Greene 57:44 Yeah. No, that's exactly right. Um, look, there's nothing wrong with visualizing-

Joe Rogan 57:48 Right.

Brian Greene 57:49 ... success. But that is not the causal ingredient-

Joe Rogan 57:54 Right.

Brian Greene 57:54 ... that will yield the success, and the thing that comes to mind is, you know, I don't know if they do it any longer, but there was certainly a time when Olympic athletes would be taught to visualize, say, jumping over that high bar.

Joe Rogan 58:05 Yes, they would do that.

Brian Greene 58:05 You know, and they'd run through the whole thing-

Joe Rogan 58:08 Yeah.

Brian Greene 58:08 ... uh, but that's not all that they were doing.

Joe Rogan 58:10 Right, of course.

Brian Greene 58:10 They were doing, you know, 10 hours a day of training-

Joe Rogan 58:13 Yeah.

Brian Greene 58:13 ... that integrated this visualization as part of the training program.

Joe Rogan 58:18 Yeah.

Brian Greene 58:18 You know, so, so, so it's kinda tragic when people buy into these, these crazy ideas. And I have to tell you, when they were making that film, they called me to, to be in it. And I think it was the director or one of the producers I was on the phone with, and, you know, they were describing what they were doing. And I probed sufficiently hard, and some of my friends did not probe sufficiently hard and were in the film-

Joe Rogan 58:40 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 58:41 ... and regretted it.

Joe Rogan 58:41 Yeah.

Brian Greene 58:42 But, but I probed sufficiently hard, and I said, "Look, what you're doing, to me, sounds really dangerous. It sounds like a really bad thing to be doing." And they took offense, uh, in that call back then.

Joe Rogan 58:52 (laughs)

Brian Greene 58:53 A year after the film came out, it was either the director or producer, I can't remember the gentleman's name, called me up. And he said, "I want to apologize to you. You were absolutely right. I have finally realized what a bad film this was to be involved in, and I completely regret it." So that, I don't think, is the point of view of, of, you know, the, uh, Romp the School of Enlightenment, which is behind this, or at least part of what was behind this. But at least the director or the producer, whoever it was, saw the light and realized that this is not the kind of information that you wanna put out in the world-

Joe Rogan 59:28 Yeah.

Brian Greene 59:28 ... because it can change people's lives in a very negative way.

Joe Rogan 59:31 You know, I think your, uh, comparison to Olympic athletes is, is very good because the Olympic athletes are visualizing something that they already do, you know? Uh, what... There's a, uh, great benefit in visualizing, uh, for athletics, for martial arts, for a lot of different things. Um, visualizing success, visualizing potential f- uh, problems, failures of your process, how you're going to adjust on the fly. All those things are great because then when things do take place in real life situations, you've already prepared for them.

Brian Greene 1:00:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:03 You know the path.

Brian Greene 1:00:04 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:04 That's what that's all about, and-

Brian Greene 1:00:05 I, I agree with that. A- and in fact, I have to tell you, you know, i- in one of the chapters, uh, later chapters in the book, I describe...... theories about why it is that we, for instance, tell fictional stories. I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:00:18 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:00:18 ... could there be any evolutionary value in two individuals telling each other a story that they both know is false, that they know has no connection to the world around them, but yet we've been doing that since the emer- emergence of language?

Joe Rogan 1:00:32 Right.

Brian Greene 1:00:33 And there are these interesting evolutionary scenarios in which what you're saying is brought to bear in that unfamiliar context. We tell stories because it's the mind's way of rehearsing for the real world, but it's a way of rehearsing for the real world that's completely safe.

Joe Rogan 1:00:49 Hmm.

Brian Greene 1:00:49 So you can go on all sorts of crazy journeys, to the underworld, up into the clouds. You can engage in all sorts of battles. You can fight gods or demigods. Uh, all these things can take place within your imagination, so you're completely safe. And yet when you encounter something that's analogous to the stories that you've been told or retold or embellished or told to others through other accounts, your brain is more attuned to respond in a beneficial way because it's not as novel as it would have been had you not been engaged in this fictional account of telling stories. So there's value in, in visualizing. There's value in telling stories.

Joe Rogan 1:01:28 Hmm.

Brian Greene 1:01:28 But it's not the causal part that some individuals would want us to believe it is.

Joe Rogan 1:01:36 Yeah, the only thing that I would say, uh, contrary to that is some people develop expectations based on fictional accounts.

Brian Greene 1:01:44 N- yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:44 And it's a real problem, like romantic movies, where y- some people will expect behavior that exists in these romantic movies only.

Brian Greene 1:01:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 And it's not indicative of human beings in the real world.

Brian Greene 1:01:57 Yeah, yeah. Uh, uh, point well taken.

Joe Rogan 1:02:00 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:02:00 I mean I think the vital thing is that your brain has had sufficient experience that it can weight these fictional accounts-

Joe Rogan 1:02:09 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:02:09 ... in a way that can enhance your response to the world, but not set undue expectations of things that are just, you know, only gonna be true in a fictional setting and not in the real world.

Joe Rogan 1:02:19 It's just so strange to me that we desire those. I mean hero movies, right?

Brian Greene 1:02:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 Like hero movies in particular.

Brian Greene 1:02:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:25 Especially superhero movies.

Brian Greene 1:02:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:26 Someone who possesses powers beyond anything known to human beings or any life form.

Brian Greene 1:02:33 Yeah. I get that.

Joe Rogan 1:02:35 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:02:35 Do you, I mean of the way-

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 Sure.

Brian Greene 1:02:37 Well, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:02:37 You'd love to just snap your fingers and fix everything.

Brian Greene 1:02:39 Wh- But I actually see it in, in, in, in a slightly different way relevant to what we were talking about before. You know, I think that the whole hero worship that we have as a culture-

Joe Rogan 1:02:49 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:02:49 ... comes again from our recognition of how powerless we are against the forces of nature, against the inevitable death that is facing us all. And therefore there's something deeply seductive about the possibility of a being that can transcend the limitations that we mere mortals are always subject to.

Joe Rogan 1:03:10 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:03:11 So I think it's built into our DNA to respond to the way that we do, the, in the manner that we do when encountering a hero in the world. I mean there's, you know, you know, Joseph Campbell.

Joe Rogan 1:03:24 Yeah, I was just gonna bring him up.

Brian Greene 1:03:25 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:26 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:03:26 You know, so, you know, in The Power of Myth, but his more technical version, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you know, he goes through the, the whole notion of what it is to have a myth. And it's basically an individual that's called to action to rise above the kinds of activities that mere mortals will be able to undertake, resists the call at first, but then rises to the challenge-

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:03:48 ... goes out into the world, conquers, comes back a changed individual, and shakes up the reality from which that individual initially emerged on this journey. And there is ample evidence that across cultures, throughout the ages, we have constantly been telling these kinds of mythological tales because they speak to us. They speak to our urge and our desire to transcend the limitations that our physical form and the laws of physics necessarily constrain us to.

Joe Rogan 1:04:17 Yeah, it's, it is fascinating when you think of how many different languages and how many different cultures share those same archetypal themes.

Brian Greene 1:04:25 Yeah, yeah. And I do think it all comes, uh, if you look way back into the history of the ideas, it comes from this initial recognition that we are mortal. And the fact that our brains are able to not just fix on the moment, but can think about the entire timeline is the one that makes that a poignant realization. And if we couldn't think about the future, who would, what would it matter if we knew that we were going to die? I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:04:55 Right.

Brian Greene 1:04:55 ... it would mean nothing.

Joe Rogan 1:04:56 Right.

Brian Greene 1:04:57 But the fact that we can innovate and the fact that we have ingenuity that allows us to, you know, make the wheel, that allows us to build the pyramids, that allows us to come up with quantum mechanics and Einstein's equations and Beethoven's symphony and, and Picasso's work, the fact that we can undertake all of these expressions of creative will and the desire to transcend the world around us has a downside. And the downside is we recognize that we are not gonna be here for very long. And I think that motivates a certain kind of engagement with the world. And hero worship is part of it.

Joe Rogan 1:05:33 Curzweil is a, a fascinating character.

Brian Greene 1:05:36 Yeah, he thinks he's gonna be around forever.

Joe Rogan 1:05:37 Yes, yeah.

Brian Greene 1:05:38 Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:38 That's why I was bringing him up. I mean-

Brian Greene 1:05:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:40 Have you discussed any of this stuff with him?

Brian Greene 1:05:42 You know, I don't know him personally. I have certainly gone to some of his talks, and I think he and I had one exchange at some point in the past. Um, and I totally get where he's coming from.

Joe Rogan 1:05:53 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:05:54 You know, uh, he feels that we're perhaps the final mortal generation, and how sad it is after, you know, 100,000 generations of humans, if we could only stick around for one more generation science would come to a point where we would be immortal. And that feels like a tragic state of affairs.I don't think he's right, and I think most people who think about this deeply don't think he's right either. However many vitamins you take, and however much science is progressing, the notion that we are just a generation or two from immortality I think is wishful thinking.

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 This is a strange concept of immortality too, because it's not necessarily you, it's a downloaded version of you that will exist in some sort of a computer.

Brian Greene 1:06:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:45 Which is, what does that mean?

Brian Greene 1:06:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:47 Like, that sounds like Hell.

Brian Greene 1:06:48 Yeah. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:06:48 I mean-

Brian Greene 1:06:49 It could be.

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:06:51 You know, I-

Joe Rogan 1:06:51 How is REM sleep in that computer as well?

Brian Greene 1:06:53 (laughs) Well, I allow for the possibility that, that, maybe it would be a way of being in the world that, uh, would have upsides that are hard for us as flesh and blood individuals-

Joe Rogan 1:07:03 Mm-hmm. Sure.

Brian Greene 1:07:03 ... to appreciate at this point. Um, but it raises the deep question, um, would that be a good thing?

Joe Rogan 1:07:11 Right.

Brian Greene 1:07:11 In fact, if you had that opportunity to be downloaded in some form, and that would allow you to hold onto all your memories, build new memories on top of them, have experiences, maybe there's an avatar that you're able to drive b- through, you know, your mental machinations, who's out there in the world, would you do it?

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 I might have said yes before I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences, and then from then I've said, "I'm gonna hedge my bets. I'ma see what's next."

Brian Greene 1:07:40 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:40 "I'ma see what happens when the lights go out."

Brian Greene 1:07:42 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 1:07:42 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:07:42 So you think there may be something that happens when the lights go out?

Joe Rogan 1:07:45 I don't know.

Brian Greene 1:07:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:46 I don't know what, I mean, for sure, your body's going to decay and you are going to become a part of the Earth. You're becoming part ... Unless they cremate you or unless they-

Brian Greene 1:07:56 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:56 ... embalm you with some toxic chemicals, and then nothing can use your, your dead tissue, which is really a shame.

Brian Greene 1:08:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:01 It's really a shame that we do that, right?

Brian Greene 1:08:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:03 I mean, unless someone-

Brian Greene 1:08:04 I agree.

Joe Rogan 1:08:04 ... murders you and you have to exhume you in the past to solve, in the future, rather, to solve a, a murder.

Brian Greene 1:08:09 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:09 But I, I don't know what ... W- what do you think consciousness is?

Brian Greene 1:08:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:14 Do you think consciousness is clearly just a, a factor of brain tissue and, and energy, or do you think it's possible that what our brain is, is something that tunes into consciousness?

Brian Greene 1:08:29 Yeah. Um, well, I spend, I've spent some time thinking about this question. I think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or even humanity at some level. And, um, my own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy, gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head. Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody have any proof for what consciousness is? Not at all at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program, where we've been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients and the laws of physics leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness. Now having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is, and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world, how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles, you can turn on the lights? How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling is, when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate. We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding, maybe it's a hundred years in the making, maybe a thousand years in the making, and we'll say, "Aha! When electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience." And that, to me, is the likely answer that we will find. But there are some very smart, well-respected people who go in a very different direction. There are some who say electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings of a sort. Now, it's not like you're gonna have electrons that are crying or, or quarks that are anguishing. But if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and put them together, the idea is that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with. I don't buy into that, but there are people who do.

Joe Rogan 1:11:09 Why, why do you pick a position?

Brian Greene 1:11:11 Well, I- I take a position on this because ... I guess my view is, you look out at the world, and what you do as a physicist is you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing. And to move from our current understanding of the world to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious, to me, is such a fantastically radical move, that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding.

Joe Rogan 1:11:46 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:11:47 There was a time, back in the 1800s, when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing. How could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being? They said that they can't. You have to induce a life force. You have inject vital ... You have to inject a life force, and that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles. I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I think most serious scientists say, "Yes, life is wonderful. Life is-"... in some sense miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms. And that's all that it takes to have something that's alive. No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about the world has gone away. And I, my own feeling is that that kind of progression is gonna happen for consciousness. Today it's utterly mysterious. How it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head, how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red and I can, and I can experience the color red. I don't just have sensors that can call that red. I mean, an iPhone can do that. I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red. Where does that come from? Hard to answer that question. But I think a hundred or a thousand years from now, we'll look back and smile at how-

Joe Rogan 1:13:19 Mm.

Brian Greene 1:13:20 ... we, in this era, invested consciousness with such mystical quality, when in the end, it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics, and that's all there is to it.

Joe Rogan 1:13:29 Well, what's interesting too, to me, is that as a human being, my, my thoughts on consciousness are, are very deep and profound, and th- this, this idea like, "What is this thing?" But if I really break it down objectively, and animals have some sort of a, a consciousness, I mean, including they have instincts, right? They, they try to get away from danger. They try-

Brian Greene 1:13:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:50 ... to survive and procreate. And we developed something far more complex in our ability to express ourselves in language. And in doing that language, or i- d- during that in, uh, b- creation of that language, we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts. And we've developed all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and, and emotions and, and contemplate the future-

Brian Greene 1:14:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:13 ... as well. And these things are continually getting more and more complex. If you go to single-celled organisms, work your way up to, you know, early hominids, and then get to human beings, you just see this ever-increasing-

Brian Greene 1:14:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:14:25 ... form of complexity in, in every way.

Brian Greene 1:14:27 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:14:28 And i- i- in the way that the things see the world, of course, it makes sense that there would be more complexity.

Brian Greene 1:14:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:14:36 But we don't think about that when we think of a parakeet. We don't think of a parakeet as being conscious, but a parakeet, relatively speaking, is far more primitive than a chimpanzee, which is relatively speaking, far more primitive than a human being.

Brian Greene 1:14:49 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:14:49 And it's just gonna continue to evolve, or if we survive, things will continue to improve due to nat- natural selection and-

Brian Greene 1:14:57 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:14:57 ... random mutation and all, all the other factors, and will be something that makes this today look like-

Brian Greene 1:15:04 Primitive.

Joe Rogan 1:15:05 ... the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever.

Brian Greene 1:15:07 Yeah. I can well imagine that.

Joe Rogan 1:15:09 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:15:09 I mean, because we see, you know, small changes in DNA, you know, tiny fraction of percent yields a radical change in what the being that has that DNA is able to accomplish. But at the same time, you, you made reference to psychedelic experiences.

Joe Rogan 1:15:23 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:15:24 And I trust you agree, but tell me i- if you don't, that those psychedelic experiences were generated by a slight change in the chemical makeup of the particles coursing through your brain and your body.

Joe Rogan 1:15:36 Sometimes not even a change. Sometimes a, a lot of them, the heavier ones are actually produced by the brain.

Brian Greene 1:15:41 Right. So-

Joe Rogan 1:15:42 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:15:42 ... so, so to me, that's a great piece of data that speaks to the fact that all it is, is particles and chemicals coursing through a structure, because if the mind was somehow external to the physical makeup and the laws describing it, then how would the injection, say, of some kind of foreign substance, or as you say, the brain producing some sort of substance that it didn't ordinarily have within its makeup, why would that be able to have such radical impact on conscious experience?

Joe Rogan 1:16:17 The way I would look at it if I was trying to argue against that would be that your eyes and e- the, the, the organs of the human eye are taking in light, and through that light are able to perceive physical objects in the world that they would not be able to do without light.

Brian Greene 1:16:33 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:16:33 There's, it's, uh, it's something that allows you to see and i- uh, allows you to take in depth perception and understand shapes that the human mind, and particularly these glands that produce these psychedelic chemicals, when experiencing these chemicals, it allows the brain to experience things that might be there all the time-

Brian Greene 1:16:54 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:16:55 ... but that you cannot perceive with normal human neurochemistry that needs to be enhanced or the levels need to be changed and shifted. And what's v- really perplexing about th- these chemicals is that these chemicals are produced by your brain. And if you do take these, like particularly dimethyltryptamine-

Brian Greene 1:17:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:12 ... is the most potent of all the psychedelic chemicals, if you take that, th- you have these insanely profound visions-

Brian Greene 1:17:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:17:18 ... which is, you know, leads to a lot of people having these religious spiritual epiphanies. Have you done anything? Have you done any psychedelic experiences-

Brian Greene 1:17:25 Uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:17:25 ... that you're allowed to talk about?

Brian Greene 1:17:26 Yeah. Uh, I, I, I have. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:17:29 What have you done?

Brian Greene 1:17:29 Not, not many. And I'm a complete lightweight in this arena, because I hardly drink, you know, I hardly do anything that i- puts foreign, uh, substances into the body.

Joe Rogan 1:17:39 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:17:40 But, um, yeah, I was in, uh, I was in Amsterdam. Uh, I was, uh, I was there because I was giving a lecture to the Queen of Holland. And I gave the lecture, and my wife and I were both there, and after that was over, we decided to do a little experimenting. Uh, and for somebody like me who doesn't experiment, um, I made a mistake.

Joe Rogan 1:18:00 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18:01 Uh, uh, because, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:18:03 Did you eat it? Is that what you did?

Brian Greene 1:18:04 Well, well, well, well, the first night, we went out, and we went to one of these coffee bars. And, uh, I guess I can speak about this. You know, I, um-

Joe Rogan 1:18:10 It's legal here.

Brian Greene 1:18:11 Yeah, totally legal. Exactly. You know, uh, I, we, uh, we took the, like, the f- the easy way in, like the, the, the, the novice, uh, version, and it did nothing...... to me at all that first night. So the next night when we went, I went right to the bottom of the list, where they -- it was some- it was in Dutch or something, but it had, like, machine guns-

Joe Rogan 1:18:30 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:18:30 ... you know, pointed at a brain kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 1:18:32 Oh, boy. (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18:32 Yeah. So, so, I, I did that version, and it was the most terrifying-

Joe Rogan 1:18:38 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18:38 ... experience of, of my fucking life.

Joe Rogan 1:18:40 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18:40 I don't think I need to say that either, but, um-

Joe Rogan 1:18:42 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18:43 ... we were in a club.

Joe Rogan 1:18:44 (sighs)

Brian Greene 1:18:44 We were in a club, and all of a sudden the world changed, and, uh, what started happening is my brain started manufacturing versions of myself that would converse with me and convince me that the reality that I was experiencing was real. And then that version of me would destroy that reality, and the process would start over and over and over again.

Joe Rogan 1:19:10 Is this something you smoked or you ate?

Brian Greene 1:19:11 Smoked.

Joe Rogan 1:19:12 Yeah. Wow.

Brian Greene 1:19:12 Definitely smoked. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:19:14 Wow.

Brian Greene 1:19:14 And, again, I suspect that the impact was because my body has no experience.

Joe Rogan 1:19:19 Oh, for sure.

Brian Greene 1:19:20 You know?

Joe Rogan 1:19:20 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:19:20 And, and so I think that just enhanced the, the impact, and, um, y- y- y- you know, uh, it was terrifying. It was utterly... I was in the hotel room (sighs) and I was clinging to the bed.

Joe Rogan 1:19:33 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:19:33 And, and I actually said to my wife, "Tie me up."

Joe Rogan 1:19:38 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:19:38 Not, not in a, not in any... No. Th- th- this sounds wrong.

Joe Rogan 1:19:41 (clapping)

Brian Greene 1:19:41 I, I meant, I meant tie me up 'cause I'm, like, terrified of what I'm gonna do.

Joe Rogan 1:19:44 Right. Wow.

Brian Greene 1:19:46 You know? You know? And, and so instead, you know, she, she called the doctor. And I was like... She was, like, afraid this would be, like, in the newspaper 'cause I'd just, like, given lecture to the queen, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:19:55 Yes. Right.

Brian Greene 1:19:55 Uh, but, you know, they're so used to Americans getting in over their head-

Joe Rogan 1:19:59 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:19:59 ... with this kind of experience, so it was, it was something that they were completely used to. So, you know, they-

Joe Rogan 1:20:03 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:20:03 ... they, they sent up a doctor.

Joe Rogan 1:20:05 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:20:05 And the, and the doctor basically just gives you sugar. And my wife knew that this was a, a, a, an extreme circumstance for me because I don't eat any sugar,