Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene

Narrator 0:00 (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music) Mr. Greene, how are you, sir?

Brian Greene 0:16 Good. How about you?

Joe Rogan 0:17 Good to see you, man.

Brian Greene 0:18 Good seeing you.

Joe Rogan 0:18 What's the latest? You got a book out?

Brian Greene 0:20 I do, yeah. The paperback of Until the End of Time is out today.

Joe Rogan 0:24 U- Until the End of Time.

Brian Greene 0:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:26 That's, uh, that's heavy.

Brian Greene 0:28 It is heavy. But it's, uh, it's a big story, but it's one that we have a nice part within, a small cameo. The human species has a cameo, so it's a, it's a human story too.

Joe Rogan 0:38 Yeah, the human species, uh, what have we been around for, what, 300,000 years? 400,000 years?

Brian Greene 0:42 It depends how you define the species. But yeah, that's not a bad number. Some people go back to a million or so, if you go back to early human species. But yeah, and compared to the length of time scales that compose reality from the beginning to the end, that's zero. That's nothing.

Joe Rogan 0:58 When you... Uh, being a physicist, being a person that really does have a, a much greater grasp of the concept of infinity and of time and of the, the, just the length that the universe has existed in its current form, how do you just get through your day and not freak out? (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:18 Well, it's because my wife says, you know, "You gotta cook dinner."

Joe Rogan 1:21 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:21 So, I mean- (laughs) They're, they're things that-

Joe Rogan 1:23 You gotta be in the moment.

Brian Greene 1:24 They're things that you have to actually get done. But it does change your perspective in, in a significant way, because you recognize that the things that we consider to be oh, so vital and important are just this blink of an eye on the cosmological landscape-

Joe Rogan 1:41 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:41 ... on the cosmological timeline, and it does change the way you approach the world when you pay attention to it. It's hard to always pay attention to it, though. Look, I mean, if I'm walking down the street and I'm thinking about quantum mechanics, I'm thinking about, you know, quantum tunneling. I'm thinking about relativity, time slowing down when I'm moving, right? So, if you're in the physics mode, you are living life differently, but who can live that way for more than a moment?

Joe Rogan 2:04 Right.

Brian Greene 2:05 Because life is too powerful in its intrusion on the way you actually behave in the world.

Joe Rogan 2:11 But because of your perspective and because of your education on this, do you feel, like, almost an obligation to try to expand people's perspective?

Brian Greene 2:21 I'd say that it's part of one of my goals of life is to do just that. You know, I don't want people to not live their lives the way they have, but I want them to be able to broaden the experience by recognizing that everyday phenomenon is a small (laughs) slice of the way the world is actually put together. And, and when you can see your life and your experiences just a tiny sliver of a reality that's, like, bizarrely strange and utterly wondrous, when you understand everything, you know, from black holes to time dilation to quantum tunneling, to all that stuff that we have discovered over the last couple hundred years, yeah, it changes things.

Joe Rogan 3:02 Is it, uh, is it a difficult thing to get across to people? Like, do you try to think, like, what is the best way that people are gonna absorb these ideas? Because they are so-

Brian Greene 3:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:12 They're not abstract, but they're, th- they're so outside of the norm in terms of the way people view the world.

Brian Greene 3:19 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:19 You kinda like go, "Hey, I know you're concentrated on this, but look at that."

Brian Greene 3:24 Yeah. I mean, the real difficulty is not so much getting people interested. You might think that that's the big hurdle. People are like, "Ah, don't talk to me about (laughs) that stuff, it doesn't matter to my life." But that's... No, people are very curious and interested in what physics has found. What's hard is getting them to not just take it in, but to take it in correctly.

Joe Rogan 3:46 Hmm.

Brian Greene 3:46 So that they don't take the ideas and twist it into something else that suits whatever weirdness they may have encountered in the world. The number of times that I see people take the concepts of quantum mechanics and turn it into utter nonsense-

Joe Rogan 4:01 Okay, yeah.

Brian Greene 4:01 ... because they're like, "Hey, oh, yeah, probabilities. Okay, you know, that describes this quality of my world," or, you know, "The weirdness is the time. Yeah, that's why I had this, like, mind meld with my best friend on the other side of the..."

Joe Rogan 4:12 (laughs)

Brian Greene 4:13 You know, that sort of thing.

Joe Rogan 4:14 Yeah.

Brian Greene 4:14 And, and, and I, I don't, I don't fault people for that. These ideas are difficult. But if you ask me what the challenge is, the challenge is breaking through that and getting people to really understand what it is that we found. And it's weirder than many of the things that the human imagination would go to, but it's harder because it's very specific and rigorous and mathematical, ultimately, and that's unfamiliar.

Joe Rogan 4:36 Do you think it's the complications of quantum mechanics, like the co- it's that it's so, it's such a bizarre field of study that it sort of lends itself being sort of occupied by people like the What the Bleep Do We Know? type folks-

Brian Greene 4:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:52 ... that kinda co-op, co-opt it and then spread nonsense?

Brian Greene 4:56 It's exactly right. I mean, that, that, that film is a, is an unfortunate- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 5:00 (laughs)

Brian Greene 5:00 ... but very good example of people who took the ideas and, and usurped them-

Joe Rogan 5:06 Yeah.

Brian Greene 5:06 ... for their own purpose, right? Um, I had friends that are in that film who were deeply disheartened by the way their words were twisted.

Joe Rogan 5:15 Well, they were tricked. Right?

Brian Greene 5:15 They were tricked, yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:16 They, they thought-

Brian Greene 5:17 Uh, uh.

Joe Rogan 5:17 ... they were doing a documentary on quantum mechanics-

Brian Greene 5:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:19 ... and it turned out to be essentially a cult documentary.

Brian Greene 5:21 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 5:22 Yeah.

Brian Greene 5:22 And, and, and so there is a, a sensibility of that sort which is volitional. That's like a choice, I think, that was made. In fact, I think I mentioned to you once. The director of that film had called me to be in it, and I was like, "Whoa, what are you doing?"

Joe Rogan 5:36 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 5:36 'Cause I couldn't tell what the... And then he called me like a year after the film came out and kind of apologized and said, "You were right."

Joe Rogan 5:43 Oh, so he didn't know?

Brian Greene 5:44 I kinda... Yeah, he didn't know.

Joe Rogan 5:45 Oh.

Brian Greene 5:45 So, so, so, but, but yeah-

Joe Rogan 5:46 We should, we should stop just so people that don't know what we're talking about understand what's happening. There is a person in that documentary that calls themselves Ramtha that, uh-There's a p- they don't explain it in the documentary, but they claim to be, like, uh, what is it? A thousand-year-old...

Brian Greene 6:04 35,000-year-old sage from the lost land of Lemuria, I believe it is-

Joe Rogan 6:10 (laughs)

Brian Greene 6:10 ... which is, like, another lost land with Atlantis. They were, like, at war with Atlantis-

Joe Rogan 6:14 Ah.

Brian Greene 6:14 ... or something like that. Um, so yeah. It, it's, it's a pretty deep cult.

Joe Rogan 6:19 Yeah.

Brian Greene 6:20 And, um, yeah. I think I mentioned to you once, I actually accidentally found myself at one of their headquarters in, in, I think it was in Washington State, gave a talk-

Joe Rogan 6:28 (laughs)

Brian Greene 6:28 ... at a gathering, and it was, it was so sad at some level, because I saw people searching for truth but being misled by a charismatic speaker-

Joe Rogan 6:40 Yeah.

Brian Greene 6:40 ... who was basically coming up with this nonsense, you know? Um, and, and, and so that's one way in which these ideas are usurped. But others, it's less, it's less by design. It's just more, you hear quantum mechanics is weird, and then you hear something else is weird, and you say, "Oh, that must be quantum mechanics"-

Joe Rogan 7:00 Mmm.

Brian Greene 7:00 ... because there's this general sensibility that the world is weird. But quantum mechanics is weird in a very specific way, right? I mean, Schrodinger, Erwin Schrodinger wrote down an equation, a mathematical equation that actually quantifies the weirdness in a very specific way that makes mathematical predictions that we can test in the laboratory. So, that's not just, like, you know, people and their minds coming up with crazy stuff and saying, "Wouldn't that be curious if that was part of reality?" This is stuff that has emerged from careful study. So, you know, when you learn that the world evolves according to a game of chance, it's as if, you know, there's a throw of the dice that determines how things evolve from one, one moment to the next. That's deeply unfamiliar. We don't go around the world thinking that there is a chance that something bizarre will happen, but there is such a chance in every moment and every experience of your life, but the chance is so small in the big, everyday world that we don't experience these things. But if you were an electron, yeah, you'd be having the weirdness of being two places at once, in some sense. You'd have the weirdness of passing through solid barriers. You know, these kinds of curiosities would be an everyday phenomenon if you were as small as a particle like an electron.

Joe Rogan 8:15 That's sort of what lends itself to the woo-woo people, right?

Brian Greene 8:18 Yeah, totally.

Joe Rogan 8:19 Because, 'cause when you talk about things being in superposition or you talk about spooky action at a distance, you, you talk about these bizarre things that they sound like magic-

Brian Greene 8:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:29 ... when you're talking about something that's both moving and not moving.

Brian Greene 8:32 Yep.

Joe Rogan 8:32 It's in two places at the same time, or there's a probability of it being in these. Like, that's-

Brian Greene 8:37 It i-

Joe Rogan 8:37 ... describing stuff like that, especially to the, the, the average person that doesn't have a background in this, it's, uh, they go, "What, what, what is the world, then?"

Brian Greene 8:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:45 "What are you saying?"

Brian Greene 8:46 A- and I have to say, though, we physicists come to the very same place. We say, "What is the world, then?"

Joe Rogan 8:51 Yeah.

Brian Greene 8:51 "What are we talking about?" And the difference is, we can then look back at the equations and say, if we're talking about quantum entanglement, we can see how two particles far apart in space will have behaviors that are correlated. You do something on this particle, and it will have some instantaneous correlation with what happens at that particle, regardless of how far apart they are in space.

Joe Rogan 9:13 Mmm.

Brian Greene 9:13 Einstein himself called this spooky.

Joe Rogan 9:16 Yeah.

Brian Greene 9:17 Spooky action at a distance. You do something in New York, and it affects, in some quantum mechanical way, a particle in California. How could that be?

Joe Rogan 9:25 How can that be?

Brian Greene 9:26 Good. So, I don't know at some level if I'm trying to answer you human-to-human. But if I'm answering as a mathematician, as a physicist, I can see it in the equations. I see it in the mathematics. I see how this particle has a quantum wave which has a piece that stretches all the way out to California and way beyond, and when I interact with this particle, I affect that probability wave instantaneously. Therefore, I change the wave in California even if my action is in New York. So, I see that in the mathematics.

Joe Rogan 9:57 I understand these words you're saying-

Brian Greene 9:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:59 ... but I don't understand it. Like, in terms of-

Brian Greene 10:00 Neither do I.

Joe Rogan 10:01 (laughs)

Brian Greene 10:01 But that's the point. (claps) You know, so-

Joe Rogan 10:04 Uh-

Brian Greene 10:04 So, it's, it's, it's, uh, what level of understanding are we, are we talking about, right? If you're talking about intuition, like a deep intuition, the way we understand two plus two is four, right? I don't have to explain that to anybody.

Joe Rogan 10:15 Right.

Brian Greene 10:15 They get it. They see two apples and two apples are four. They got it. But when it comes to quantum entanglement, I don't feel it that way. I don't have that intrinsic understanding of what it is. And so, if you push me to say, "Well, what is it?" I ultimately fall back on the math.

Joe Rogan 10:33 Right.

Brian Greene 10:33 And ultimately, I say the reason I believe the math is 'cause the math makes predictions that we can test in the laboratory. And then you say, "Well, then what kind of understanding is that?" And some people would say that's the deepest understanding. All we really want of a physical theory is for it to give a rigorous mathematical articulation of what happens out there in the world, and it's the human brain struggling for some kind of intuition. That's our problem. That's a human problem.

Joe Rogan 11:02 Right.

Brian Greene 11:02 That's not a problem of physics. That's a problem of us being satisfied.

Joe Rogan 11:06 A problem of perception and understanding.

Brian Greene 11:08 Perception and understanding, yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:08 Yeah, so this spooky action at a distance, why was it first wha- what... Was it a hypothesis, or was this something that was, was proven by math first? Like-

Brian Greene 11:20 Yeah. So, so Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a curious fella, uh, a very interesting life, but he realized looking at the equations that there was this quality of the math that if two particles come together and they interact for a little while and then they separate, they can no longer be thought of as independent or autonomous. I mean, the very basic quality of autonomy, you and I are autonomous because we can separate. We can go our separate ways and do whatever we want at our respective locations. So, you would think that if two particles separate...They will also be autonomous. But he saw it in the mathematics that they would not be autonomous, that what you did to one would have an effect in some quantum mechanical way on the other. Now, he saw that in the mathematics. He called it out as the central feature of quantum mechanics, and that's a big statement coming from him because there are a lotta other weird qualities of quantum physics. Einstein then comes along, 1935 with two colleagues, and leverages this idea, writes a paper where he tries to prove that quantum mechanics cannot be the full story of the world because of this weird quality of what you do here affecting something over there. It's not until the 1980s that people really start to test this idea. And by today, this is used all the time in the laboratory. Quantum computing makes use of this quality. So, this is no longer an idea that's abstract. It's something that's applied. Applied quantum entanglement gives us things in the real world in the laboratory, so this is beyond question real, even though Einstein thought it couldn't be and Schrodinger considered it to be the strangest feature of the math of all.

Joe Rogan 13:05 So, beyond question, it's real.

Brian Greene 13:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:07 But what do you think is happening?

Brian Greene 13:09 Well, so, m- if you're going to allow for the most exotic possibilities, some would suggest that you are probing the many worlds of quantum mechanics. So, in quantum mechanics, all you ever do is predict the probability of this happening or that happening. Electrons, you know, 70% chance here, 30% chance here. If you measure the electron and you do find it over here, what happened to the other possibility? Some say it happens, but just in another world. In one world, you find the particle here. In another world, there's a copy of you that finds the particle over there. Each of yous doesn't know about the other and thinks you are the unique version of you, the unique Joe Rogan, but now there are two of you, each thinking that the particle was found in one location or another. If that's the way quantum mechanics actually works, and some people do think this, then quantum entanglement is, in some sense, less weird because what happens is that in one world, you have a certain correlation between the particles. In another world, you'd have a different correlation between the particles, and that's just what happens. So, that's one, but, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're allowing multiple universes-

Joe Rogan 14:20 Yeah.

Brian Greene 14:20 ... in this explanation. That's, that's pretty weird in its own right. Um, the fundamental way that we encapsulate this, we say that quantum mechanics is non-local. Non-local means that the influences are not limited to where they are applied. Our experiences... Look, if I do something to this bottle of water, the influence is in this local neighborhood. What I did just now didn't affect something on the other side of Austin or on the other side of the world. But quantum mechanics is saying that that's an intuition built up from everyday experience, and everyday experience is grossly misleading-

Joe Rogan 14:57 Ooh.

Brian Greene 14:57 ... when it comes to this kind of an idea.

Joe Rogan 14:59 Severely limited.

Brian Greene 15:00 Severely limited.

Joe Rogan 15:02 And this concept of many worlds, so the idea is that there's multiple versions of you and multiple versions of everything that you've experienced, all the things that you see that you consider to be Austin, Texas, or the United States, or the, the world itself.

Brian Greene 15:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:19 There's multiple versions of this happening simultaneously. How many?

Brian Greene 15:23 Well, in some sense, infinite-

Joe Rogan 15:25 Oh, boy.

Brian Greene 15:25 ... because the, the basic idea is that any outcome that is allowed by the laws of quantum physics, any outcome will take place in its own separate world. And so, when you think about every decision you've ever made, every possibility that you've ever encountered, all of the outcomes happen, and that would happen throughout all of time. So, in some sense, there's an unending number of realities that are in the grand landscape of the quantum description. Now, we hear that, and you say, "That's nuts. That sounds nutty," right? We experience one world. But if you look at the mathematics, as a guy named Hugh Everett did in 1957, he was a graduate student at Princeton, unknown, and he looked at the math. And he said, "I wanna look at the math and give it the most straightforward intrinsic interpretation." And the most economical intrinsic interpretation of the math is this one. It sounds grossly uneconomical, all these universes, but that's an output. The input is incredibly economical. You look at the equations, and this is the most straightforward interpretation. Every outcome does happen. It happens in its own world. Now, I'm not saying that I believe this, but it's definitely a worthy contender for the way that we should think about quantum mechanics.

Joe Rogan 16:47 So, do you guys get together and bounce these ideas off each other o- on a regular basis? Like-

Brian Greene 16:53 I- it depends who you mean by you guys.

Joe Rogan 16:54 Y- you physicists tell us-

Brian Greene 16:55 You, you physicists. Well, yeah, it's-

Joe Rogan 16:57 (laughs)

Brian Greene 16:58 So, only some. So, some physicists, when they hear about this kinda talk, they roll their eyes, and they say, "Just use the mathematics. Make predictions for what we'll see at the Large Hadron Collider. Make predictions for what we'll see in this or that laboratory. Don't try to understand it. Just do it." You know, it's the cold, so-called shut up and calculate approach-

Joe Rogan 17:21 Hmm.

Brian Greene 17:21 ... to quantum mechanics. And Niels Bohr, who was one, again, one of the founding pioneers of quantum mechanics, this was his perspective. I mean, Bohr basically said the goal of physics is not to tell us how the universe is in the sense of understanding it, it's just to make (laughs) predictions that we're gonna see in experiments. That's all that you should ever expect to do. There are other physicists who don't feel that way. And there are other physicists who think physics is a matter of telling us what's happening.

Joe Rogan 17:49 Yeah.

Brian Greene 17:50 It's gotta give us the story. It's gotta, like, peel back the curtain and give us a clear glimpse of what's happening behind the scenes. And so those of us who do have that as the goal-... do get together and-

Joe Rogan 18:02 (laughs)

Brian Greene 18:02 ... do talk about these things. (laughs) You know.

Joe Rogan 18:03 Well, I'm glad you guys exist, because those shut up and do the math, and-

Brian Greene 18:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:08 ... those guys, they're not gonna help me. Like, that-

Brian Greene 18:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:11 ... I'm, I'm not gonna be able to understand that. Like, you are a bridge to someone like me e- having the slimmest grasp of an-

Brian Greene 18:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 18:17 ... understanding of what this stuff is all about.

Brian Greene 18:19 Although those guys would say that I am doing you a disservice.

Joe Rogan 18:22 How so?

Brian Greene 18:23 They would say that I should convince you that there is no deeper intuition that you're missing, that the only way to understand what's going on is you learn the math, you do the calculations, and looking for anything else is looking for too much. Now, I don't feel that way. I feel that in the end of the day, when we understand the world deeply, it does give us insights into what's actually happening. The question you asked, "What's happening in quantum entanglement?" is, in my view, the right question to ask. Unfortunately, I can't give you a good enough (laughs) answer today, even though mathematically we understand it perfectly. I think one day we'll go beyond that. A- and there is work happening today. There are people who suspect that quantum entanglement is nothing but another idea of Einstein's in disguise, wormholes.

Joe Rogan 19:15 Mm.

Brian Greene 19:16 Right? You've encountered wormholes, probably if you ever watch any, like, Star Trek-

Joe Rogan 19:19 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 19:19 ... Deep Space, you know. These are tunnels from one point in the universe to the other, kinda shortcuts through the fabric of space. And some suggest that when two particles are entangled, there's actually a secret wormhole connecting them, and that wormhole means that they're secretly close together because of the shortcut. So, they look like they're far apart, but there's actually a shortcut through a wormhole. So, secretly, they're actually right next to each other. And then when you do something on one and it affects the other, perhaps it's not so surprising, because through the wormhole, they're right next to each other.

Joe Rogan 19:55 S- anybody that would discourage you from discussing these kind of very strange ideas and e- expressing them that way, you're gonna discourage curiosity.

Brian Greene 20:05 I think so.

Joe Rogan 20:05 Which is gonna discourage interest in the field, which is gonna discourage people to become physicists, because it is fascinating. And when you're talking about this concept of, uh, spooky action at a distance and you're talking about wormholes connecting things together at far distances and w- and that, things that we don't truly understand, but that you can show mathematically are, are correct, like, that's amazing.

Brian Greene 20:28 I agree. I agree. And you have to look at the, the history though. There was a period of time when people who thought about what's really going on got sidetracked. In the early days of quantum mechanics, what really needed to happen was develop the math, develop the equations, make predictions, go into the laboratory, have this hand-in-glove approach between theory and experiment so that you have a theory that you have confirmed. And the fear at that time was that if too many people start pondering, "What does it all mean?" then the progress toward that goal would have, you know, been diminished. But we're beyond that.

Joe Rogan 21:08 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 21:08 We have quantum mechanics, at least as a, as a working theory that we can use to do wondrous things. And so, more and more people are thinking now about these kinds of questions. So, I think it's kind of a pendulum has swung f- toward the more philosophical, toward the more, what does it all mean, how can we describe what's really going on here. Whereas if we were having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, it would, I would say virtually no one is really thinking about things in the language that we're talking about.

Joe Rogan 21:40 That's really strange, because if you think about how long people have been trying to understand the reality of the, the universe itself and how recent some of these discoveries are, it really makes you think, like, what are we going to be able to show and prove is true 50 years from now-

Brian Greene 21:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:58 ... 60 years from now?

Brian Greene 21:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:58 Because if you go back 100 years ago, you go to 1921, the understanding of the world itself is so grossly different than what we understand today.

Brian Greene 22:09 Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. And the, the other, the other side of that observation, which is exciting and daunting, is think about what science has done more or less to date. It's tried to understand things in the world that naturally form, stars, planets, black holes, living systems. But from more or less now going forward, we're entering a realm where we are going to start to create the new things that we're going to try to understand. As we modify the genome, as we perhaps create artificial life, as we use physics to create new kinds of materials and structures that would never form on their own. But because our understanding is so refined, we can begin to manipulate objects at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic level. We can, going forward, be the driver of the new things in the universe around us, as opposed to simply being the passive consumer of those things that the universe has given us that we then try to understand. So, going forward, it won't only be trying to understand the stuff that has arisen naturally. It's gonna be understanding the stuff that we create, and that's an interesting, exciting, but also frightening prospect.

Joe Rogan 23:30 So, that's the concept of use, using these principles and this understanding of quantum mechanics to manipulate reality itself.

Brian Greene 23:37 Yeah. Yeah. Now, how far-

Joe Rogan 23:38 How do you anticipate that playing out?

Brian Greene 23:41 That's a tough one. I don't know. You know, uh...It's, uh, it'll certainly be something that we approach in an incremental way. I'm not suggesting that, you know, tomorrow (laughs) we're gonna be developing terraforming new worlds or creating parallel universes. But there's a pattern that we certainly see playing out throughout the history of science, which is this. You're presented with some quality of the world, you don't understand it. You then experiment, you observe it. And then little by little you begin to understand it, you develop theories. Mathematical ideas being the most precise ones to describe whatever it is that you're talking about. And once you have those ideas nailed down, you can then use them to manipulate the world. That's what we do with quantum mechanics. At first, we just wanted to understand atoms, right?

Joe Rogan 24:26 Right.

Brian Greene 24:26 Particles and things of that sort. Now, we can manipulate the quantum world to create, you know, all sorts of technological wonders, the integrated circuit, which is at the core of every technological gadget that has transformed life on Planet Earth. This is quantum mechanics in the hands of human beings. And so that pattern of going from lack of understanding, to understanding, to manipulation is the pattern that will continue to play out going forward. So, that manipulation, w- what will it be? Well, I think, uh, we're gonna come to a time when we understand the structure of space far better than we do now. The structure of time far better than we do now. Does that suggest that we'll manipulate space and time if the pattern persists? Yeah. Now, what does that mean? Will we build our own wormholes? I don't know. I don't know. That's starting to go into crazy land, the woo that we were talking about-

Joe Rogan 25:19 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 25:19 ... before. But-

Joe Rogan 25:19 But maybe it won't be woo 100 years from now.

Brian Greene 25:21 Or, or a thousand years from now.

Joe Rogan 25:23 Right.

Brian Greene 25:23 And if we stick around long enough, if the pattern persists, that understanding ultimately gives you the lever to manipulate, right now if you ask me what's happening at the cutting edge of string theory, quantum mechanics, it's understanding black holes. It's understanding how quantum mechanics and black holes talk to each other. And what is black hole? A black hole is a weird region of spacetime. So, we're trying to understand spacetime itself at the deepest possible level. And so, the next step would suggest that we will manipulate it at some point in fairly significant ways.

Joe Rogan 25:56 So, the ways we've used it so far, you, you mentioned integrated circuits, how, how is quantum mechanics used to u- to form integrated circuits?

Brian Greene 26:05 So, an integrated circuit, in essence, is a little device in where you want an electron to follow a very specific trajectory to carry out this or that computation or process. Now, if you wanna control electrons with that level of fidelity, you've got to use the mathematical laws that describe electrons with that level of fidelity. Newton's equations from the late 1600s, they won't work. If you think of the electron as a little baseball or a little billiard ball, totally inaccurate. It will not allow you to manipulate their motion. But with quantum mechanics, you can manipulate the motion of the electrons because you understand their mathematical underpinnings. And so it was only by applying quantum mechanics to materials, to structures that could give rise to this kind of control over little particles that we could build these microscopic circuits. And they work.

Joe Rogan 26:54 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 26:55 I mean, that's, that's the proof in the pudding, right? And so that's a, a key example of quantum mechanics transforming the world as we know it. And right now, there is work in string theory that is suggesting that this notion of quantum entanglement that we were talking about before, that may be the key to understanding the fabric of spacetime itself. I mean, we use this metaphor fabric of spacetime, right?

Joe Rogan 27:24 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 27:25 But any piece of fabric, it's stitched together by threads, right? So, what are the threads of the spatial fabric if we push this metaphor and try to really understand it more fully? And one of the suggestions is, the threads of quantum entanglement that tie distant objects together, those may be the threads that hold together the fabric of spacetime itself.

Joe Rogan 27:48 So, that would mean that everything is somehow connected, even if it's 13.7 billion light years away. These things are somehow or another directly connected.

Brian Greene 28:00 Yes. Now, to avoid that turning into the woo-

Joe Rogan 28:04 Right.

Brian Greene 28:04 ... you have to realize that when you have a lot of material, and when you have a lot of time and a lot of space, these quantum entangled connections become so spread out, that they become diluted. So, it's not as though someone can say, "You know, I thought about my best friend in California, then the phone rang. We must be quantum entangled." That's the sort of stuff-

Joe Rogan 28:26 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Greene 28:26 ... that, that this kinda talk can lead to. But, but fundamentally what you're saying is correct. It may be the structures in space may be fundamentally connected through these quantum entanglements, and it may be that the substrate, space itself... We don't usually think of space as something because it's kind of invisible. But we're within the fabric of spacetime itself, and that arena may be stitched together by these threads of quantum entanglement as well.

Joe Rogan 28:55 So, this quantum entanglement will be diluted at a distance? So, is that... What, what, what is the mechanism behind that?

Brian Greene 29:02 It's more, it's more diluted by the number of particles that are involved.

Joe Rogan 29:06 Okay.

Brian Greene 29:06 So, if you just have two particles in a pristine environment, like a total vacuum, and they're entangled, you can move them arbitrarily far apart and the entanglement will not dilute. That's the craziness. You could have two particles on opposite ends of the universe, and you measure one and the other-

Joe Rogan 29:23 How is that done? Like, how, how, how-

Brian Greene 29:24 Yeah, good. Yeah, how do you do that? And there are a number of experimental protocols, procedures, but one concrete one is you take an atom, like an atom of calcium is one example. You fire some laser on it, and that excites the electron in the calcium atom to a higher energetic state.When that electron falls back down to a lower energetic state, it emits photons back to back. And because those photons were emitted from the same process, the electron falling down to a lower energy state, those photons will be entangled. So, that's a concrete way where you can have back-to-back photons that will travel arbitrarily (laughs) far apart if they don't encounter anything else, that will be quantum entangled.

Joe Rogan 30:08 (smacks lips) Now, you were talking about integrated circuits. Now, I hear a lot of talk about quantum computing-

Brian Greene 30:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:17 ... and I don't understand what that is, but everybody's telling me that it's gonna revolutionize computing.

Brian Greene 30:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:21 How so?

Brian Greene 30:22 Well, with- as with everything, you have to interrogate precisely what one means by revolutionize everything. Maybe in some rough sense that's true. But let me just first say what it is-

Joe Rogan 30:33 Okay.

Brian Greene 30:33 ... and then say what the possibilities are. So, imagine that you have a computer that can access, I'll use one particular lang- access the many worlds of quantum mechanics. Now, when you're carrying out a calculation, you don't have the calculation solely take place in one universe, you have it take place in a whole collection of parallel universes, allowing you in some sense to divide up the calculation, and in parallel have it take place across this spectrum of universes. Clearly that will rapidly speed up the calculation because now it's no longer happening in one universe, you split it across many universes. So, in some sense, quantum computing is trying to leverage that quality of quantum mechanics. Now, that's one language using the language of many worlds. You don't have to use the language. You can also use just the language of probabilities. So, if you have a particle, like an electron, normally in a classical world you'd say it's either here or there. In a quantum world, our world, it can be in a mixture of here and there. If it's in a mixture of here and there, you can do calculations here and there. Whereas in a classical world you could either do the calculation here or there. So, it's basically substantially increasing the places where calculations take place, thereby substantially decreasing the amount of time that it takes these calculations to be accomplished.

Joe Rogan 32:09 And but- by what mechanism? Like, what is- what separates quantum-

Brian Greene 32:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:13 ... computing from regular computing? How is it-

Brian Greene 32:14 Yeah, so- so, in regular computing, you- you have quantum qualities, because like I said, the integrated circuit, you need it to understand quantum mechanics to guide the motion of the particle through the integrated circuit. But in the end of the day, a traditional computer, a classical computer if we will, stores information as bits, zeros and ones. So, you have one bit that's either a zero, another bit that's either a one, and through that you can store information and manipulate information, and that's what computation is all about. The quantum computer changes the bit to the so-called qubit. What is a qubit? A qubit is a specially defined and constructed digit that can be in a mixture of zero and one. And specifically, the way we usually do this is we have what are known as spin systems. So, an electron has a spin, like a little top, and it can either spin counterclockwise that we call spin up, or clockwise that we call spin down. In a classical world, the electron is either this or this. In the quantum world, it can be a mixture. And so literally these quantum computers have these spin systems that are in these mixtures of up and down simultaneously, and that allows them to do multiple computations simultaneously that allows them to decrease the time it takes to carry out the computation. That's- that's the essence of the idea.

Joe Rogan 33:40 Is the structure of the computer different? Like-

Brian Greene 33:42 Totally.

Joe Rogan 33:42 So, regular computer has a motherboard-

Brian Greene 33:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:45 ... it has a processor, it has a hard drive. What is a quantum computer structured like?

Brian Greene 33:49 You know, if you see some of these things, they look... I've heard them described, and it's not a bad description, as sort of like chandeliers. You- you've got spin systems in arms of the chandeliers, and you have cooling systems that are vital to these computers because if there's heat that comes into the system, it can destroy this delicate mixture of up and down simultaneously. So, they're far more delicate, and it is much more difficult to, at this stage, have the number of bits. So, an ordinary c- computer can have as many bits as you want. As you say, just, you know, put more boards, expand, you know, the random access memory. You know, it's all up to you, the user. For quantum computers, you've gotta make sure that all these qubits are working together in order that they can perform these calculations. And it's very hard to have a whole lot of qubits maintain the so-called quantum coherence that allows them to work together. So, the maximum number of qubits in quantum computers that have been built, it's only at 50. Very small relative to the number of bits that we're familiar with, you know, in... We're talking about gigabits, right-

Joe Rogan 35:01 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 35:01 ... when you're talking about your- your billions of bits. So- so that is for the future, but there doesn't seem to be a fundamental obstacle to building a quantum computer that has, you know, a large number of these qubits, and in that way in principle being able to do calculations exponentially more quickly. That's the rough idea.

Joe Rogan 35:19 How far away are we from implementing quantum computing in daily life? Like is it- i- d- is it a cooling issue? Is it a- an issue of just, uh, m- expanding our- our understanding of how to construct these things? Like-

Brian Greene 35:32 Yeah. Um, there are- there are those in the field who are careful to say that they don't think that we'll ever have quantum computing in everyday life. And the reason for that is largely, you know, the- the cooling issue-

Joe Rogan 35:47 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 35:48 ... and it has to do with the...... difficulty in maintaining the stability of these devices. They're so delicate. Whereas, you know, you drop your laptop, you may crack it or something. But, you know, for the most part, you drop your phone and it's fine.

Joe Rogan 36:02 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 36:02 And so, there are those who say that we will never have these things in daily life. They'll always be highly specialized, you know, in laboratories that we somehow make use of, as opposed to carry around in our pocket. But the same was (laughs) said about ordinary computers, you know, 60, 70, 80 years ago, when a computer in those days filled an entire room-

Joe Rogan 36:21 Right.

Brian Greene 36:21 ... with all these vacuum tubes. Who ever thought that we'd be walking around in our pocket with something more powerful than that kind of device? So, I'm-

Joe Rogan 36:28 Just 50 years later.

Brian Greene 36:29 Yeah. So, I'm, I'm skeptical whenever I hear people say, "Never, never, never." But in this case, I'm almost open to the idea, because these systems are so incredibly delicate. And in fact, one of the hurdles right now in quantum computing is they're not reliable. These qubits, they can flip from one state to another, ruining your calculation very easily.

Joe Rogan 36:50 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 36:50 So, what some of the quantum computer specialists are developing are what is known as quantum error correcting codes, redundancies in the information in the quantum system, so that when this kind of spin flip should happen, you can correct it down the line and not have to start the calculation from scratch.

Joe Rogan 37:08 What's causing the inconsistencies?

Brian Greene 37:09 Well, it's just the delicacy, you know? The, the way in which these spins are talking to each other can be disrupted by any kind of environmental influence at all. So, it's just-

Joe Rogan 37:21 Power surge.

Brian Greene 37:22 Power surge, heat, you know, any kind of environmental influence.

Joe Rogan 37:26 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 37:26 And, and, and so it's just, uh, a technological hurdle. It's not really a, a theoretical hurdle. We understand what's going on. It's quantum mechanics after all. But it's a technological hurdle to realize this possibility. But getting to the other question, you said, like, "What will it give us-

Joe Rogan 37:41 Yeah.

Brian Greene 37:41 ... if we have these quantum computers?" Um, there are certain calculations that on a quantum computer you can do in the blink of an eye, that might take years or centuries on a classical computer, such as-

Joe Rogan 37:55 Wow.

Brian Greene 37:55 ... there are certain encryption ideas that have been applied to securing information in, you know, banks and things of that sort. In the old days, it was basically you'd build these huge prime numbers and you'd multiply them together, and it would be the challenge of the person trying to hack your system to have to factor this big number, and virtually impossible to do in any reasonable period of time. There's an algorithm that people have come up with that works on a quantum computer that can factor these numbers instantaneously. So, that doesn't sound so good, right? It, it means that information that was secure might not be secure.

Joe Rogan 38:31 Hmm.

Brian Greene 38:31 But of course, then quantum computer scientists come along and they come up with a new encryption mechanism that's quantum mechanically based-

Joe Rogan 38:38 Hmm.

Brian Greene 38:38 ... and that one would be unbreakable, even with a quantum computer.

Joe Rogan 38:42 Pshew.

Brian Greene 38:42 So, that's the kind of development, which is actually already starting to happen. You know, a student of mine actually works for a company that generates quantum random numbers. You need random numbers in order to be able to have the security that nobody's gonna know what number you actually have. And there are quantum mechanical devices that have already been built to generate those kinds of quantum numbers. But the, the, the overarching, from 30,000 feet view is that we'll be able to take on calculations that we could never even imagine doing before, and that could revolutionize artificial intelligence. I mean, what is general artificial intelligence about looking out at the world and seeing patterns, right? You know, AlphaGo, you know, this, this wonderful system that, that learned the game of Go and could beat, you know, masters in the world. How did it do it? It looked at a huge number of games and saw the patterns in that huge number of games, and with that, gained an expertise that allowed it to become the champion Go player in the world.

Joe Rogan 39:45 Hmm.

Brian Greene 39:45 So, it's all about pattern recognition, it's all about finding patterns, and that's what a quantum computer, in principle, could be incredibly powerful at. So, artificial intelligence, in principle, could take an incredible leap forward, simulating various quantum systems that we wanna understand better. Now, when we simulate them on a computer, we're simulating them on a classical computer, trying to mimic quantum mechanical behavior. Now, if you had a quantum computer, you could actually simulate it with the very physical ideas (laughs) that are happening in the real world. So, now you have a confluence between the methodology of the quantum simulator and the real world, allowing you to do things that you couldn't do before. So, it's just to say that, in principle, there's a whole lot of understanding of the external world that these devices could give us, and that's why people have become so excited about it.

Joe Rogan 40:41 I think it's so interesting that we look to games to find out how intelligent and how powerful computers really are. Like, for the longest time it was could a computer beat a chess master.

Brian Greene 40:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:52 And now that, that, that problem has been solved. Like, not only can a computer beat a chess master, but they always will beat a chess master now-

Brian Greene 40:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:59 ... which is really fascinating to people.

Brian Greene 41:01 Yeah, it totally is. And, and there's a way in which that makes a lot of sense, because what is a game? A game is an artificial universe with very simple rules. And therefore, it's a simplified version of reality.

Joe Rogan 41:15 Hmm.

Brian Greene 41:15 And it's also a well-posed game. I mean, tic-tac-toe versus chess, right? The difference is in tic-tac-toe, it's so simple that there's no creativity involved. You know, if you play it correctly, you'll always have a draw, right?

Joe Rogan 41:29 Right.

Brian Greene 41:29 But in chess, because of the great number of possibilities, there's a lot of creativity that comes into play. So, it's a, it's a universe with a fixed set of rules, it's simplified, and it has the opportunity for human beings to be creative.

Joe Rogan 41:41 Hmm.

Brian Greene 41:42 And so it's a wonderful testing ground for computers, because if a computer can beat a human in that domain, now we can say, "Aha, that computer, in some sense, is creative."

Joe Rogan 41:53 Hmm.

Brian Greene 41:53 And the thing that we usually...... look to, to define ourselves as human beings. How do we differ from other things in the world, the inanimate world? We're creative. Right? We can come up with ideas. We can come up with novel, innovative ideas. That's kind of how we define ourselves. And so, when a computer starts to do that, it starts to challenge our humanity.

Joe Rogan 42:16 Mm.

Brian Greene 42:17 And I think that's a good thing, right? I don't think that we are as different from the external world as we perhaps like to think. We are collections of particles governed by the laws of physics, and I think it's spectacular that a collection of particles under the ironclad rules of physics can be creative, can come up with ideas, can, can figure out quantum mechanics and general relativity. Like, how spectacular is that? But all we are are big collections of particles governed by those laws, and all a computer is, big collection of particles governed by those rules. So, I full well anticipate the possibility for a computer to get to our level of cognitive power and beyond, and I full well anticipate that there will be the artificial systems that say to us, "I have an inner world. I have conscious awareness." Now, how will we test that computer to see whether it was programmed to say that or whether it actually is having that inner world? I don't know. That's a tough one, but it's a question we face all the time. Like, I assume you have an inner world inside your head. I don't know that for a fact. You, I assume, are making the same assumption about me. How did we come to that? We come to it based on the fact that we're having a conversation, and we observe each other's behaviors, and all of that comes together to suggest that we are each roughly the same, and therefore I assume that what's happening inside your head is roughly the same kind of processes that happen inside of mine. We have to infer it, and we're gonna have to infer it for artificial systems too. And, you know, if you walk down the street and there's a artificial system sitting on a park bench, you know, hand on its head, saying, "I'm so worried. What's it all about?"

Joe Rogan 44:05 (laughs)

Brian Greene 44:05 You know, "What's, what's, what's life? What's..." And if it's real-

Joe Rogan 44:09 Yeah.

Brian Greene 44:09 ... you're gonna say, "Wow, that computer's having an existential crisis-"

Joe Rogan 44:12 Mm.

Brian Greene 44:13 ... "and, and there's a real inner world happening there." What other conclusion could you draw, you know?

Joe Rogan 44:18 Yeah, the... I think we have a, an internal bias about our own uniqueness in terms of our abil'... 'Cause we're so unique in comparison to all the other animals in our ability to manipulate the world and our environment and, and our use of creativity.

Brian Greene 44:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:34 But it's really just variables.

Brian Greene 44:36 Yes.

Joe Rogan 44:37 And if you took into, like, a c- a computer, specifically a super powerful computer like what we're assuming a quantum computer could become, could take into account all the things that have ever been said by any human being ever, the motivations for those things, whether it's love, or emotions, or jealousy, or narcissism, or whatever these weird human quirks are, and they could figure out a way to create works of art.

Brian Greene 45:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:07 They could figure out a way to s- to do things that are uniquely moving to us, and that's what's gonna be really weird.

Brian Greene 45:14 To-

Joe Rogan 45:14 If a computer can write a book that blows you away, a computer can write a better version of The Great Gatsby.

Brian Greene 45:21 Right.

Joe Rogan 45:21 You know? If-

Brian Greene 45:22 Yeah. No, I agree. And it's gon-... I think it will happen 'cause look-

Joe Rogan 45:25 Yeah.

Brian Greene 45:25 ... I mean, what is it that distinguishes us as a species? Many people will point to different things, but one certainly is that we are deeply social as a species, and because of that, we've been able to learn from each other and therefore not had to start each generation from scratch. Right? Many other animals in the animal kingdom, they basically, each generation kind of start from scratch. They don't have books that they can read about discoveries of an earlier age. They don't have teachers. I mean, some do, but they don't have teachers that can give them, uh, you know, the corpus of knowledge going back hundreds of years. They probably don't have universities where they can learn about what happened over the last 500 years and therefore not have to start from scratch. And so, when you talk about the capacities of artificial systems, they will be far more social than we. Why? For exactly the reason you're saying. We typically learn from a, a handful of masters that had, you know... Albert Einstein's work, all physicists learn about it, you know. Artists maybe learn about the work of Rembrandt or Picasso, you know, the masters. But an artificial system can learn from every single other artificial system. There's no limit to the connectivity between those systems. So, whatever pattern a given artificial system figures out, they'll all know about that pattern simply by communicating among themselves. In our environment, we only communicate with a small number of other human beings over the course of our lives. And again, some of that knowledge is stored, and therefore it becomes widely accessible. All knowledge gleaned by any artificial being within the network will be immediately shared by every other artificial being within the network, and therefore, the very thing that makes us special, the collective culture that allows us each generation to build on the insights of the previous and not have to go back to the beginning, (laughs) that will be amplified enormously for artificial systems. So, why wouldn't they be able to create the greatest work and the greatest novels? I think that will absolutely be the case.

Joe Rogan 47:32 Yeah. We, we have information that somehow or another passed from parent to child somehow, through genes.

Brian Greene 47:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:39 And we, we see it not just in us, but we see it in the animal world. Like, you can have a dog, and for whatever reason, that dog knows it's supposed to lift its leg to pee on a tree.

Brian Greene 47:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:48 And no one has to teach it. And there's other, you know, weird beha-... Like, I have a, a golden retriever.

Brian Greene 47:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:53 He loves bringing things back.... you throw things, he gets them, and he brings them right back. Some dogs, it's hard to get them to bring things back. Not golden retrievers. He's got it somehow or another in his system-

Brian Greene 48:05 Yes.

Joe Rogan 48:05 ... to bring things back to you.

Brian Greene 48:06 Yeah. For-

Joe Rogan 48:07 It's, it's natural.

Brian Greene 48:08 For sure. You know, there's this whole area of evolutionary psychology which applies the ideas of evolution by natural selection, not just to the physical system, that's where we normally learn about it in school. You know, we see how a given species changes over time, because there's a random mutation, and that mutation allows that individual to better adapt to the environment, and therefore, that particular morphology, that change, spreads widely through subsequent generations. That's normally how we talk about evolution by natural selection. But as you're saying, it also applies to behaviors. There are certain behaviors that allows an individual to better navigate in the ancestral world, and that behavior, if it had some genetic basis, can be passed on to the next generation, and passed on to generations still. So, yeah, lifting up the leg to pee is one example of that, but there are many other behaviors. I mean, a canonical example is we have a predilection. We like sweet things, we like fats, right?

Joe Rogan 49:07 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 49:07 Why? Well, the evolutionary psychologists have noted that in the ancestral world, those of our forebears who had a tendency to eat ripened fruits, or to eat nuts, they stored up on calories, so that when times turned lean, they were the ones that survived. And therefore, they passed on that propensity to enjoy sweets and fats, and we are the recipients of that long chain of behavioral predilections. So, that's certainly the case. But the thing is, we then go beyond that. We are able to store, culturally, information and breakthroughs from an earlier generation that may not have any relevance to our DNA, and yet we can pass that knowledge on. Right? So, Newton's ideas and Einstein's ideas, we will continue to pass these ideas on, and I presume they're not gonna be imprinted in anybody's DNA. Maybe one day they will be, but certainly at the moment, they're not. Your golden retriever, that kind of dog is- you were saying was a golden?

Joe Rogan 50:07 Yeah.

Brian Greene 50:08 I- it can't do that. The, the, the, the mother of your golden retriever, and the mother of that mother, and going all the way back, they pretty much all lifted up their leg and peed. And there wasn't a whole lot else that got passed through from sort of cultural heritage of things that one dog discovered that could then pass on to subsequent generations. So, what makes us special is we certainly have behaviors that are passed through the lineage in this manner of evolutionary psychology, but we also have culture. And culture allows us to store the insights, the breakthroughs of an earlier age, allowing us to get to where we have gotten. I mean, I've often wondered if I got stuck on a desert island, how much of the world would I be able to, like, recreate? Even how much of the world of physics would I be ... Uh, not much. Right? Because I have assumed so much from earlier generations. Like, I don't know that I could, I, I couldn't build an integrated circuit. I couldn't recreate a computer. I could write, I could write down the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and I could work out for them the mathematics of black holes and entanglement. That sort of stuff I could do. But there's so much of the culture (laughs) that I, I have no capacity to reproduce. And that's our collective socialization that we're able to benefit from the fact that we all talk to each other, and we all know about things that happened in an earlier age. And that is what makes us special, and that is what will, we will also pass on to artificial systems, 'cause they're gonna be able to do that too.

Joe Rogan 51:42 It seems like almost a race in time to see if we can get to this quantum computing level on a personal, in, in, in a personal way that you can use before we destroy ourselves.

Brian Greene 51:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:55 Because if you go back to think about culture and the way we interact with information, how much it's changed since, like, you know, the 1700s, the 1500s, when things had to be written down-

Brian Greene 52:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:05 ... then the invention of the printing press, and then all these different steps that have allowed us to access information more readily and easily to, to the point where we're at now, where you have a phone in your pocket you literally ask a question to, and it'll Google it and come up with the answer for you, and it's amazing. Right?

Brian Greene 52:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:18 I mean, when we were kids, that would have been just a mindblower, a device in your pocket that you could ask a question to, and it literally has, uh, like, the knowledge beyond your wildest dreams.

Brian Greene 52:29 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:29 Access to scientific papers, the thousands of years of people-

Brian Greene 52:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:33 ... of pondering the universe, and you can have the answers to almost any subject right there in your hand, but that's, uh, the tip of the iceberg.

Brian Greene 52:41 Yeah. No, it's crazy. In fact, when I was a kid, not to bring up Star Trek again. You got me sounding like-

Joe Rogan 52:46 I love Star Trek.

Brian Greene 52:47 ... a Trekkie. Oh, you do?

Joe Rogan 52:47 Yeah.

Brian Greene 52:47 Well, I'm not actually much of a Trekkie, but just, just one more reference. When I was a kid, I remember thinking about, what aspects of this television program are the least likely to ever happen? Okay. You got the transporter, you got the faster-than-light travel. To me, it was the computer that you could ask any question and it would give you the answer.

Joe Rogan 53:07 Wow.

Brian Greene 53:07 I was like, "That will never, ever happen." And here we are.

Joe Rogan 53:11 Did he, what, did they ask it, like, did they say, "Computer"?

Brian Greene 53:15 Yeah. Th- that's the-

Joe Rogan 53:15 That's right. Yeah.

Brian Greene 53:16 You did it. In fact, Kirk would do it just like that.

Joe Rogan 53:18 "Computer."

Brian Greene 53:19 "Computer." You know?

Joe Rogan 53:20 That's right.

Brian Greene 53:20 And, and they, and the computer would, "Yes, John, you know, you know, Jane Smith from 1920."

Joe Rogan 53:25 Yeah.

Brian Greene 53:25 You know, they, they'd just come up with the answer, and I was like, "That's crazy."

Joe Rogan 53:28 Yeah.

Brian Greene 53:28 "That will never happen."

Joe Rogan 53:29 I love using Siri to make notes. I always feel like I'm in the, in the future when I can use Siri. Siri, make a note.

Brian Greene 53:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:36 What would you like it to say?

Brian Greene 53:38 Geez, I've, I've never used Siri that way.

Joe Rogan 53:40 You've never used that? Oh, how about this? We'll do it right now.

Brian Greene 53:43 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:44 Hey, Siri, make a note.

Brian Greene 53:48 You see, it's a quantum Siri. Oh, wait. Go ahead. Do it again.

Joe Rogan 53:51 Oh, okay. Here, I'll do it again. Hey, Siri, make a note.... oh, why did it do that? Oh, ho, hold on. You know why? Because I didn't do, "Hey, Siri." I pressed the button. Hey, Siri, make a note. Fuck, bitch. (laughs) Hey, Siri, make a note. All right, now it's not working.

Brian Greene 54:15 See, I stepped on your demonstration.

Joe Rogan 54:17 Hey, Siri, make a note. It's not saying it.

Brian Greene 54:23 Wow. We gotta call the genius bar.

Joe Rogan 54:26 I swear. But it did it before, right?

Brian Greene 54:27 Yeah, it did hear it.

Joe Rogan 54:28 Maybe it's... Oh, maybe the phone has to be close. Hey, Siri, make a note. Jesus.

Brian Greene 54:35 Wow.

Joe Rogan 54:35 Useless sack of shit.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 54:37 There's Captain Kirk's.

Joe Rogan 54:38 Oh, wait a minute. Okay.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 54:40 Turn it off.

Joe Rogan 54:40 It's, um, it's on Do Not Disturb mode. Hold on. Let me take it off of that, see if that'll help. Hey, Siri, make a note. Nothing.

Brian Greene 54:50 Oh, man.

Joe Rogan 54:50 What the fuck?

Brian Greene 54:51 Which, which-

Joe Rogan 54:52 What happened?

Brian Greene 54:52 ... which iPhone is that?

Joe Rogan 54:53 Maybe it has to be on-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 54:54 The broken one.

Joe Rogan 54:55 This piece of shit one. This brand new one, goddammit. Hey, Siri, make a note. Hey, Siri. Jesus.

Brian Greene 55:04 Wow.

Joe Rogan 55:04 How does that work, Jamie?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:05 Hey, Siri, make a note. Yeah, mine says what you want it to say.

Joe Rogan 55:11 Hey, Siri, make a note. Mine is not listening. It's because it knows I'm talking to Brian Green. It's like, "Fuck you, bitch."

Brian Greene 55:18 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:20 How do you, uh, turn that on and off? Is that in General?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:22 Yeah, mine did it.

Joe Rogan 55:24 Wh- where do you, uh, where do you find Siri?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:26 I, yeah, it's in Settings. I don't know. We can do this later.

Joe Rogan 55:29 Wow. (laughs)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:29 Mine did it, mine did it, though, right away.

Joe Rogan 55:31 But mine did it, too, and then it stopped doing it. It's like, you're just too weird.

Brian Greene 55:34 Man, if I would've just shut up, we would've gotten through this.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:36 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:37 I know. Well, here-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 55:38 Here's Captain Kirk.

Joe Rogan 55:38 Oh, Siri in Search, here it is. Uh, da-da-da-da. Listen for "Hey, Siri." Let's shut it off and turn it on. Continue. Hey, Siri, make a note. Hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. Oh my god, you bitch. Hey, Siri, make a note. Oh my god, it's useless.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 56:03 Ooh.

Brian Greene 56:03 Wow.

Joe Rogan 56:04 Hey, Siri, make a note.

Narrator 56:07 What do you want it to say?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 56:08 There you go.

Joe Rogan 56:09 Here we go.

Brian Greene 56:10 Oh, wow.

Joe Rogan 56:10 Tell Brian Green that he's gotta start eating eggs, and he should exercise to strengthen his back.

Narrator 56:21 Okay. I created a note.

Brian Greene 56:24 I see it. (laughs)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 56:24 Super helpful.

Joe Rogan 56:25 Okay. Super helpful. Real convenient. So I had to shut it off and turn it back on again. Oh, that was it?

Brian Greene 56:32 Wait, that was quick. Abe, can Kirk do it?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 56:33 Now.

Joe Rogan 56:33 Let's see what-

Narrator 56:34 Library computer. History files. Subject, former Governor Kotis of Tarsus IV also known as Kotis the Executioner. After that, background on actor Anton Karidian.

Joe Rogan 56:49 Working.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 56:50 Tasks.

Joe Rogan 56:51 So slow. Piece of shit.

Narrator 56:53 Kotis the Executioner-

Brian Greene 56:54 It's like Siri.

Joe Rogan 56:55 (laughs)

Narrator 56:56 ... number eight. Governor of Tarsus IV 20 Earth years ago. Invoked martial law, slaughtered 50% of population, Earth colony that planet. Burned body found when Earth forces arrived. No positive identification. Case closed. Detailed information follows.

Joe Rogan 57:15 You should be able to get that for Siri, that voice. You know, 'cause Siri could be like an Australian lady. You could have her be a bunch of different things.

Brian Greene 57:21 That'd be a good app, yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:23 Yeah.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:23 Before we go too far away, did you see, you, you were talking about this. This is the very crude version of what you were saying, but did you see this come out the other day?

Joe Rogan 57:30 What is it?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:30 Uh, they... This team created four new songs.

Joe Rogan 57:33 Oh! Oh, no.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:34 From using AI from Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain/Nirvana, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix.

Joe Rogan 57:40 Oh, my God. Did you listen to them?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:42 Yes.

Joe Rogan 57:43 They sound like shit?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:43 The Nirvana one sounds a little bit like shit, to be honest with you.

Joe Rogan 57:46 (laughs)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:46 But the Amy Winehouse one did sound pretty good.

Joe Rogan 57:48 Can you play us a little bit of it?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:49 I'd pr- I'd sh-

Joe Rogan 57:50 Let's see.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:51 I guess, yeah. We'll, uh-

Joe Rogan 57:52 See if we get sued.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 57:53 I'll play the Amy Winehouse one.

Joe Rogan 57:54 Yeah, give me a little bit of it.

Narrator 58:11 Well, you know I got no idea.

Joe Rogan 58:15 Holy shit.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:15 It's pretty good, right?

Narrator 58:16 I got nothing to say. It's all wrong. And I like to get on going.

Brian Greene 58:27 But that's all computer, uh-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:29 So the way I read that they did this was they took, um, MIDI files, which would just be a computer-based audio.

Brian Greene 58:36 Yeah.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:37 ... to recreate the, the audio, the music you're hearing, and then they did what we've heard done to your voice with fake speech patterns.

Joe Rogan 58:45 Yeah.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:45 It took, like, 30 songs to create the lyrics.

Joe Rogan 58:48 Jesus.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:49 They mixed those together to create a decent-sounding song.

Joe Rogan 58:51 So did, how did they construct the, the, the way the song is put together?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 58:56 That's with MIDI. So they took, like, on a pro- I think it said, like, 30 to 40 different, you know, probably Amy Winehouse songs.

Brian Greene 59:01 Yeah, and find patterns.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:03 And, and just found, like-

Brian Greene 59:04 You find patterns, you manipulate the patterns to create a new version of that kind of pattern. You splice them together.

Joe Rogan 59:09 Play a little bit more of that.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:09 So let's hear the Nirvana one we can play, just, it's... You've heard a lot more Nirvana songs, so it sounds a little bit less-

Joe Rogan 59:14 I'm a big Amy Winehouse fan.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:15 ... that's why I thought if... I haven't heard enough of her to know it's not-

Joe Rogan 59:18 Play a little bit more of her, because that is bizarre to me.

Narrator 59:22 Trouble is showing with this song. I have seen it all, but it doesn't show on me. My mind never rests, except for when he says I'm-

Joe Rogan 59:45 That's amazing.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:45 That could pass.

Brian Greene 59:46 There you go, right?

Joe Rogan 59:47 That could, fuck yeah, it could pass. That's good.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:49 You want to hear the Nirvana one for just a second-

Joe Rogan 59:50 Yeah, lemme hear it.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:50 ... and then you tell me if it doesn't-

Joe Rogan 59:51 Lemme hear some of the Ni- Nirvana.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:52 I just thought this was a little, uh, this could pass.

Joe Rogan 59:53 They gotta, they gotta be able to recreate Heroine and Suicidal Thoughts.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 59:57 Right. The music doesn't sound as solid. It sounds a little more like a computer.

Joe Rogan 1:00:07 That sounds like a shitty-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:08 Right. That sounds like it's-

Joe Rogan 1:00:08 ... Nirvana cover band from Portland. (laughs)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:10 It's not as good, that's why I didn't want it to stay on.

Brian Greene 1:00:11 But you had The Doors there too, right? The-

Joe Rogan 1:00:13 Yeah, let me hear-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:14 Yeah. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:00:14 There's a Hendrix one too?

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:15 There's... I did not listen to that at all.

Joe Rogan 1:00:16 Well, give me some Hendrix-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:17 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:00:17 ... 'cause I'm a giant Hendrix fan. I'll tell you if this is horse shit. (heavy metal music plays)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:31 Not bad.

Joe Rogan 1:00:38 That's not bad. Let it go.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:00:50 Damn. Very good.

Joe Rogan 1:01:14 That's pretty fucking good.

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:01:15 They may have had an audio engineer that's someone that knows how to mix music to add to how good this sounds 'cause it couldn't come up correctly, but-

Joe Rogan 1:01:20 Maybe.

Brian Greene 1:01:21 But even that, that will... is again-

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 Right.

Brian Greene 1:01:23 ... pattern recognition-

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:01:24 Yeah. Yeah. I've got-

Brian Greene 1:01:24 ... putting things together. So, look, that's-

Joe Rogan 1:01:25 That's a great example of-

Brian Greene 1:01:27 Yeah. But that's all the, we do, right?

Joe Rogan 1:01:28 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:01:28 That's what we do. So why can't comp-... All we do is mix match patterns, mono- modify patterns. You know, that's, that's all the we do anyway.

Joe Rogan 1:01:36 That... If I'm, if I'm being cynical, and I often am-

Brian Greene 1:01:38 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:01:39 ... that is what's gonna lead us to become some sort of a symbiotic creature, some sort of a integrated computer/biological entity.

Brian Greene 1:01:48 And is that a bad thing?

Joe Rogan 1:01:49 I don't know if it's a bad thing.

Brian Greene 1:01:50 Yeah, see, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Joe Rogan 1:01:52 Oh, you're one of those... (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:01:56 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:01:56 I don't know. You might be right. Look, man-

Brian Greene 1:01:58 You know-

Joe Rogan 1:01:58 ... you know about, more about this shit than I do.

Brian Greene 1:01:59 All I'm saying is, we've been on a particular evolutionary trajectory. And for a long time, it's been thoroughly biological and thoroughly by random mutations. If that now moves to a new phase in which we've got new kinds of materials and new kinds of ways of modifying the system that's not just random mutation and natural selection, so be it.

Joe Rogan 1:02:22 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:02:23 You know.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 It seems like that's inevitable when you think about how we have this insatiable desire to innovate.

Brian Greene 1:02:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:29 It seems like it's inevitable. And, you know, I'm sure you're aware of Elon Musk's Neuralink and-

Brian Greene 1:02:33 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 1:02:34 ... that it's gonna... They're initially gonna use it for, for people that have injuries and-

Brian Greene 1:02:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:37 ... diseases and neurological conditions, but-

Brian Greene 1:02:40 That's how it always begins. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:02:42 (laughs)

Guest’s assistant/third participant 1:02:43 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:02:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:43 But it seems, it seems inevitable.

Brian Greene 1:02:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:45 It seems like if, if we can manipulate matter and, you know, with CRISPR, we're manipulating genetics-

Brian Greene 1:02:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:51 ... it just seems inevitable that we're gonna one day be something unrecognizable.

Brian Greene 1:02:56 Right. And the, the... That will happen in any event. It'll just happen more quickly, right?

Joe Rogan 1:03:02 Yes.

Brian Greene 1:03:02 Because even evolution by natural selection takes you-

Joe Rogan 1:03:04 Right.

Brian Greene 1:03:04 ... to an unrecognizable place.

Joe Rogan 1:03:06 Right.

Brian Greene 1:03:06 We just have to wait a very long time. Now we're simply speeding up the process by taking the reins of change as opposed to allowing it to be, you know, this or that, you know, cosmic ray particle banging into that particular genome and causing a mutation.

Joe Rogan 1:03:20 And I often wonder about social trends. And this, uh, there's almost a frantic desire to escape from a lot of the biological constraints that human beings are saddled with.

Brian Greene 1:03:33 Yeah, of course.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 Um, one of them being, like-

Brian Greene 1:03:36 Death-

Joe Rogan 1:03:36 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:03:37 ... being one of them.

Joe Rogan 1:03:37 Death is a gr- great example.

Brian Greene 1:03:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:39 Right? The other one being aggression.

Brian Greene 1:03:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:42 Uh, you know, what we call toxic masculinity. I mean, you never heard of toxic masculinity 20 years ago. It was a desirable trait, you know. And now, it's considered toxic. Like, more ag-... When, when my think about aggression and war, it's more abhorrent now than ever before in human history and as we move further and further. Not just that, but even cruelty, bullying. There's all these things that are in the forefront of the conversation that we have about, like, what's desirable and not desirable, what we tolerate and what we won't tolerate, and that these-

Brian Greene 1:04:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:15 ... things, bigotry, racism, uh, homophobia, misogyny, all these different w-... But if you break down what they are, they're singling out individual groups for what th- what some people who are ignorant deem as undesirable characteristics. And we're m-... It... A lot of it's biologically based. And we're moving away from that. We're less tolerant of that than ever before, even within recent memory, right? And this is moving towards s-... And also, people are really concerned with, uh, mindfulness, being in the moment, being, uh, and not externally motivated by negative thoughts and, and feelings. And we're moving towards some weird understanding of what we would deem to be our own ability to achieve, uh, some semblance of enlightenment. And that will be encouraged along by new technology that maybe can eliminate some of the problems that we have.

Brian Greene 1:05:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:12 And then I think, and this is where it gets really weird, I think some of the problems that we have are biological sex based problems. Meaning our desire and ability to procreate and to attract mates. What if they come up with some new method of...... replicating, some new method that doesn't involve biological sex.

Brian Greene 1:05:33 I think it'd be helpful to many physicists, but, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:05:35 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:05:36 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05:36 You'd get more work done? (laughs) Uh, or you'll, you'll be able to find mates easier.

Brian Greene 1:05:40 Yeah. Or you'll... Yeah. I, I, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:05:41 Or you'll... It'll no longer be a problem.

Brian Greene 1:05:42 I think all of the above.

Joe Rogan 1:05:43 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:05:44 But, y- y- but the other question that that brings up, t- at what point do you see decision making? Right? What point do you see decision making to another structure, an artificially intelligent structure?

Joe Rogan 1:05:55 As soon as it's far better than what we're doing, right?

Brian Greene 1:05:57 Yeah. But-

Joe Rogan 1:05:58 Like, when do you, when do you stop walking across a mountain-

Brian Greene 1:06:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:01 ... when you can fly over it in a plane?

Brian Greene 1:06:02 Right. Right. So, you know, w- but the, but the difficulty of course, I mean, now, we actually face this in a concrete way. I mean, do you allow an artificial system to have the right to choose who it kills?

Joe Rogan 1:06:12 Hmm.

Brian Greene 1:06:12 If there's, you know, systems of that sort, I mean. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:14 Well, once the, the thing that it's deciding to kill are the other, like, the, the, the, the old representation of a human being-

Brian Greene 1:06:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:23 ... that is damaging the ocean, polluting the atmosphere-

Brian Greene 1:06:27 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:27 ... all these different things that come along with being a person who has access to these incredible technologies that we've n-... We don't have the discipline to utilize these things fully. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that we, we haven't invented them personally. Like, you can just get a gun, right? And you just go randomly running around shooting people. The... If you... Maybe if you developed the concept of gunpowder and figured out how to put it inside a shell casing, and figured out a bullet's trajectory, and figured out rifling on a gun, and all these different... I mean, maybe you would have a greater understanding of what you've created, and you'd feel more responsibility-

Brian Greene 1:07:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:05 ... to be... just to, to be more cautious with it.

Brian Greene 1:07:09 Yeah, I feel that same way, though, when it comes to t- the stuff we were talking about before, being vegan. You know, I feel like so many people eat meat, but they're not part of the process by which that meat gets-

Joe Rogan 1:07:21 Right.

Brian Greene 1:07:21 ... to their table. And I think if they were, they would probably approach it differently.

Joe Rogan 1:07:26 I think so for sure.

Brian Greene 1:07:27 You know. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 Yeah. Um, that's why I started hunting. I went from-

Brian Greene 1:07:31 Do you... I mean, do you, do you hunt your own meals?

Joe Rogan 1:07:33 Yes, I hunt. Yeah. I do it-

Brian Greene 1:07:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:35 ... every year. I hunt... And I hunt elk, which is a large animal.

Brian Greene 1:07:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:39 So, when I get one of those, I can eat it for most of the year.

Brian Greene 1:07:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:42 And-

Brian Greene 1:07:43 See, I just hunt tofu. That's all I do, and you know, just freeze it up, and you had it for the whole year too, you know.

Joe Rogan 1:07:47 That's so processed.

Brian Greene 1:07:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:49 Do you... You have to have some processed, uh, protein, right? Like, what do you take powders in? Do you do, like, pea protein?

Brian Greene 1:07:55 Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, I do have a lot of, uh, protein powder.

Joe Rogan 1:07:58 Mm-hmm.

Brian Greene 1:07:59 But, uh, tofu, peanut butter. And, you know, I think the amount of protein that people think that you need, and if you don't have it you're somehow gonna fall apart, I don't know. I don't think that much about it, and I've survived to this point. Now, maybe inside I'm corroding, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:08:13 No, I don't think... You can do it correctly. If you do it correctly, it can be done. You really do need to have some algae, like we were talking about before-

Brian Greene 1:08:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:19 ... the podcast started. That's a big one for B12, or supplements somehow or another for B12. The thing is, like, what are your requirements? Like, if you're trying to maintain a lot of muscle mass, it's very difficult to do that.

Brian Greene 1:08:30 But clearly I try to do that a lot, obviously.

Joe Rogan 1:08:32 Obviously. Clearly.

Brian Greene 1:08:33 ... here.

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 Getting jacked.

Brian Greene 1:08:34 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:34 But that... It's depending upon what you're trying to do.

Brian Greene 1:08:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:37 Most people that go vegan slim up. Like, they lose muscle mass and... But some of them, they feel better that way. Like, the more mass that you have, one thing that ha-... It's got more of a cardiovascular requirement, so it's, it's more difficult to do long distance things when you have more mass. And there's, uh, a lot to be said for slimming down depending upon, like, what your activities are that you enjoy.

Brian Greene 1:08:59 Sure. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:00 What you're trying to do.

Brian Greene 1:09:01 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:02 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:09:02 And for me, it's mostly sitting at the desk-

Joe Rogan 1:09:05 Doing physics.

Brian Greene 1:09:05 ... typing away, doing physics.

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 As long as you have energy.

Brian Greene 1:09:08 You know. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:08 You know, you... It g-... Most certainly can be done correctly, but that's why I was encouraging you to get eggs. Because eggs are really... Like, if you have your own chickens and you have... You know, you live in, uh, a place where you can do that-

Brian Greene 1:09:19 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 ... chickens are... It's like, it's a really great deal you have with the chickens. They're like your pets-

Brian Greene 1:09:25 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:09:25 ... but they give you food, and you don't have to hurt them or coerce them.

Brian Greene 1:09:29 Sure. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:29 Yeah, my chickens, I would just come up to 'em and pick 'em up, and then they would be cool. They were... I was picking 'em up since the time when they were chicks-

Brian Greene 1:09:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 ... so they'd be like, "Oh, it's that dude who's gonna pick me up." Like, there was no weird issues. I'd pick 'em up, take an egg, touch 'em on their little head, everybody was good.

Brian Greene 1:09:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:42 Like, and they got food from me, and they gave me food. They made food.

Brian Greene 1:09:45 And how many chicks did you have doing that?

Joe Rogan 1:09:47 At one point in time I had 22.

Brian Greene 1:09:48 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 They were, they were killed by my dog and by coyotes. It's a long, complicated story-

Brian Greene 1:09:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:53 ... but the, the coyotes at one point in time, uh, honey potted my dog, and tricked him into killing chickens, 'cause I have a... I had a huge dog at the time. I had this Mastiff. Uh, his name was Johnny Cash. And, uh, he thought the coyotes was his friend. He thought it was a dog. He's like, "Hey, little friend." And he was so big, the coyote knew, "Well, I can't kill this motherfucker."

Brian Greene 1:10:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:15 "But I think I could trick this dummy into breaking into that cage." 'Cause he's so big, he broke through the chicken coop.

Brian Greene 1:10:22 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:10:22 Tw- two times. One, chickens do a thing called, uh, molting. Do you know what that is? They're supposed to go-

Brian Greene 1:10:28 Uh, I think I do. Isn't that when all the, the feathers are, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:10:30 Yeah, not molting. Um, brooding.

Brian Greene 1:10:32 Oh. Okay, brooding I may not know.

Joe Rogan 1:10:32 And what brooding is, a chicken, a chicken gets this idea that this egg that they're laying, even though there's no rooster, 'cause chickens lay eggs with no rooster and those eggs are in their... They never become, uh, an actual chick. But the chickens get this idea in their head that this egg they're sitting on is going to become a live chick, because that's what they're supposed to be doing.

Brian Greene 1:10:52 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:52 They're supposed to breed with the rooster, and the rooster gives them a chick, and it comes out of the egg. So, the chicken will just decide this. They'll pull their feathers off, and they'll sit on this egg, and they'll do it... They wanna do it for, like, a long time. And if you come anywhere near that, they'll peck at you-

Brian Greene 1:11:05 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:05 ... so you have to take them out of their little cage where they're sitting on this egg... You know, they, they were in a large chicken coop that was bigger than this room, and, uh, and they also free-range. Like, I would open the chicken coop in the morning and they would run around the yard. But I'd have to take them out and put them in a separate, smaller cage where they have to stand on a rail. And you just have to do it for a couple of days so they get it out of their head that they're raising a chick. It's just some weird process that has-

Brian Greene 1:11:30 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:30 And if you don't go through that process, then it takes them, like, a full cycle of, like, 20-something days before they get out of it. But they injure themselves, they pluck all their feathers off. They get real weird. It, it's like some system happens in their head, so I had to put them in a smaller cage.And the coyote tricked the dog into smashing this cage. So, me and the kids and my wife were playing some board game. I forget what it is. We're sitting in the living room, and I see this fucking coyote run through the backyard with a chicken in its mouth.

Brian Greene 1:12:00 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:12:00 Running and then ju- I'm telling you, dude, I had a fence that was like six feet tall. And this coyote jumped over that thing like it didn't exist.

Brian Greene 1:12:09 Huh.

Joe Rogan 1:12:09 It was so elegant, so-

Brian Greene 1:12:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:11 ... graceful. It's cr- I, I, I never saw a coyote do that before, so I thought, "Well, fucking six-foot fence, we're not getting through this." Dude, it was like this, boing!

Brian Greene 1:12:20 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:12:20 To the top, bing! Their feet landed on the top of the, uh, like a, a, like a, um, cast iron fence or a wrought iron fence, whatever.

Brian Greene 1:12:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:27 Landed on the top and bounced right over it-

Brian Greene 1:12:29 Huh.

Joe Rogan 1:12:29 ... like it didn't exist. And then I go, "How the fuck did he get the chicken?" And I open up the door, and I go in the backyard, and there's Johnny Cash, the mastiff, standing in front of this smashed box. And I'm like, "You dumb motherfucker, you smashed that so the chicken could get... the coyote could steal the chicken." So, then, unfortunately, he had it in his head that it's fun to kill chickens because the coyote had did that, so-

Brian Greene 1:12:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:12:52 ... and then he looked at the chicken coop, not that day, but like a couple months later, he's like, "I think I can just run right through that fucking thing," 'cause he was big. And so he just used his paws and smashed a hole through the chicken wire, 'cause chicken wire-

Brian Greene 1:13:05 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 1:13:05 ... is not gonna stop a 140-pound mastiff. And he just tore a hole through and just went on a rampage, and he killed like-

Brian Greene 1:13:11 And he, and he killed them?

Joe Rogan 1:13:12 He killed a bunch of them.

Brian Greene 1:13:13 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:13:13 But then we fixed the cage-

Brian Greene 1:13:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:16 ... and then kept him from that part of the yard. And then a fire came, and then the fire-

Brian Greene 1:13:21 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:13:21 ... burnt the chicken coop down, and there was some ch- chickens remaining. They, they didn't die in the fire. They, they actually escaped once the-

Brian Greene 1:13:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:13:28 ... the... once the fire started burning the chicken coop, it kind of fell apart, and they all, they actually lived, but then we put them in a smaller chicken coop. This is a long fucking story.

Brian Greene 1:13:35 Yeah, a good one though.

Joe Rogan 1:13:35 Then the coyotes figured out how to get into that chicken coop, and they killed them all.

Brian Greene 1:13:39 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:13:39 So, that was it.

Brian Greene 1:13:40 But that fire that you referred to right there, going back to our evolutionary story, that's a critical, that's a critical moment. I mean, fire, you said what made us human?

Joe Rogan 1:13:47 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:13:48 Fire made us human.

Joe Rogan 1:13:49 Yeah.

Brian Greene 1:13:49 Right? With fire, all of a sudden we could outsource digestion, cook the food-

Joe Rogan 1:13:54 Yes.

Brian Greene 1:13:54 ... uh, externally, so that we could have the amount of calories and nutrition that otherwise-

Joe Rogan 1:13:59 Kill off parasites as well.

Brian Greene 1:14:00 Yeah, totally, you know. So-

Joe Rogan 1:14:01 Yeah, there was a lot of, a lot of things became edible.

Brian Greene 1:14:03 So, so just another example of, you know, these moments in our history that are pivotal that you don't focus attention on as necessarily that thing that made us ultimately who we are. So, what things are we doing today that generations in the future or millennia in the future will look back and, "Aha, that's when we went through the transformation." It's very hard to know. But these things can have a ripple effect that is of profound consequences.

Joe Rogan 1:14:29 And computing, for sure, has the biggest ripple effect of our lifetime.

Brian Greene 1:14:34 I think that's, that's for sure. And the other thing is, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there is now a connection between quantum computing and black holes. (pauses) Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:44 What's their connection?

Brian Greene 1:14:45 It's a weird one. So, th-

Joe Rogan 1:14:47 It's all weird. (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:14:48 Well, this is like hyper... this is like weird squared or, or something. But work over the last 20 years has established that when you have a black hole, actually even more general systems, but talk about a black hole, there's an alternate description of a black hole in terms of what's known as the holographic description. It's as if there's a two-dimensional world that surrounds any given three-dimensional world that has exactly the same physics as the three-dimensional world that we're familiar with, and yet it describes it in a completely different language. So, a black hole gravity is obviously essential. That's how a black hole forms. But in this dictionary that physicists have developed, there's a description of a black hole that doesn't involve gravity, only involves quantum mechanics. And the beautiful thing is the quantum processes in that quantum world mimic the kinds of processes that people have been developing for quantum computing, quantum error correction code, and there's a dictionary that people have proposed for that quantum language on the holographic boundary with physics in the interior. And the dictionary shows that the quantum error correcting code may be the reason why space-time itself holds together. So, there's this bizarre way in which everything that we know about in the world around us has a translated dictionary version in a different world that lacks gravity but has quantum mechanics. And so people are u- using some of the insights from quantum computing to understand questions about black holes and space time.

Joe Rogan 1:16:24 So, as-

Brian Greene 1:16:24 Is that strange or what?

Joe Rogan 1:16:25 That's so strange. So, as quantum computing expands, much like as computing expands, if you go back to the early NASA computers that filled up a whole room, we can extrapolate that as we get better at this and you look 50 years down the line from now, quantum computing will be the standard, it would be the norm.

Brian Greene 1:16:42 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:16:42 And it would probably radically alter our understanding of everything.

Brian Greene 1:16:47 Including black holes, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:48 Including black holes.

Brian Greene 1:16:49 That's right. So, there's a real possibility that the language that we use for space-time and black holes may bear a profound imprint of the language that we are developing to understand quantum computing, quantum computers.

Joe Rogan 1:17:04 I was just reading some article about black holes roaming through the universe, and that some of them, some of them, they're detached from galaxies, right?

Brian Greene 1:17:11 They can be. I mean, oftentimes people think about black holes as these gargantuan structures that form from collapsed stars. There's a big one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, weighs four million times that of the sun. The photograph of a black hole in the galaxy M87 that got the world excited a couple of years back, 55 million light years away, billions of times the mass of the sun. But the reality is anything, if you compress it enough, becomes a black hole. If you take an orange and you squash an orange down (laughs) sufficiently small, according to Einstein, it becomes a black hole.

Joe Rogan 1:17:46 (laughs)

Brian Greene 1:17:46 So, these things don't have to be gargantuan. The flip side of it is, we also typically have an intuition that black holes are really dense, right? That's usually the way we think about them. But if you make something sufficiently large, regardless of how low its density is, it will also become a black hole. So, you can make a black hole out of air, by just having enough air. If you have enough air, a sufficiently large sphere of air, it would become a black hole too, with a density of air. So, all the intuitions (laughs) that we typically have about black holes, that they have to be dense and they have to be gargantuan, not right.

Joe Rogan 1:18:24 So, black holes are just a part of the elemental structure of reality itself.

Brian Greene 1:18:30 Yeah. When you look at Einstein's equations, right in his mathematics, there's a little formula (laughs) that you can see where it says, if you have any mass M, whatever mass you want, and you squeeze it into a radius, R, that's less than two times Newton's constant, 2G, times M, divided by C squared, speed of light squared... A formula. Details don't matter. But you take any mass, if the radius within which that mass sits is less than 2GM over C squared, it is a black hole. Period. End of story. According to Einstein. Now, Einstein left out quantum mechanics. Weirdly, right? Because his Nobel Prize was for quantum mechanics. It was for a paper he wrote in 1905 about the photoelectric effect. But he never really believed that quantum mechanics was the true description of the world. And when he was developing the general theory of relativity, he was just thinking about gravity and not quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking came along in 1974 and started to inject quantum mechanics into our understanding of things like black holes. And that's where Hawking proved that black holes are not completely black. He showed that black holes allow a certain amount of radiation to leak out of their surface, leak out of the event horizon, or leak out from just beyond the edge of the event horizon. And so, yes, when you think about black holes, as far as we can tell, they are a fundamental quality of the world. But you have to include quantum physics to truly understand them, and that's the cutting edge of what's happening right now.

Joe Rogan 1:19:59 So, they're a fundamental quality of the world, but they're also in the center of every galaxy?

Brian Greene 1:20:04 It seems to be the case. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey did a wonderful study of a vast number of galaxies, and I've seen these wonderful images where they put, like, a little red circle around all those galaxies that have a black hole in their center, and there are red circles all over that imagery. So, it seems to be a ubiquitous quality, that black holes are at the center of galaxies, and those are typically gargantuan black holes, millions or billions of times the mass of the sun.

Joe Rogan 1:20:35 Do we know why they exist at the center of a galaxy?

Brian Greene 1:20:39 Y- y- y- uh, n- you know, there's still a lot of uncertainty about galactic formation. You know, some have suggested that early stars, which were quite large compared to more modern stars, when they exhausted their nuclear fuel and they collapsed in on each other, they created black holes that were large. And then they continued to suck in more material from the environment, and they grew larger and larger still. So, that's sort of one rough