Joe Rogan Experience #1631 - Brian Greene

(drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

Good. How about you?

Good to see you, man.

Good seeing you.

What's the latest? You got a book out?

I do, yeah. The paperback of Until the End of Time is out today.

U- Until the End of Time.

Yeah.

That's, uh, that's heavy.

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.

Yeah, the human species, uh, what have we been around for, what, 300,000 years? 400,000 years?

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.

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)

Well, it's because my wife says, you know, "You gotta cook dinner."

(laughs)

So, I mean- (laughs) They're, they're things that-

You gotta be in the moment.

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-

Yeah.

... 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?

Right.

Because life is too powerful in its intrusion on the way you actually behave in the world.

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?

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.