Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene
Uploaded: 2020-02-19T20:06:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene

three two one brian green ladies and gentlemen how are you sir good thank you
how are you doing
this man i've enjoyed your work for many many many years so uh i really
appreciate you coming
in well thank you appreciate that and like i was telling you i just started
your new book
and how's it going it's going well it's uh hasn't confused the shit out of me
yet but i know it's
coming it will be coming no doubt no doubt with all your work so the beginning
of time the beginning
of the universe to the end that's essentially what you're summarizing yeah that's
the uh that's the
backdrop to the entire narrative of the book i i basically want the reader to
get a feel for the
whole thing how it started how things like you and me rise up how consciousness
emerges issues of free
will and whether we have it and then on to the future what's going to happen to
us and the world
and the universe as time elapses to the far far future it's uh i'm just getting
to the part where
you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of co-mingle to to create
life and when you think
of entropy a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos yeah
exactly but that's
the not necessarily the case it's only part of the story i mean entropy kind of
gets a bad rap right
it's the thing that you want to avoid but somehow the laws of physics don't
allow you to avoid it it's
this disintegration it's this decay it's this drive toward disorder and that's
kind of true but the
reality of the situation is more subtle because overall entropy needs to go up
but that doesn't mean
there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way and in fact the
universe is incredibly clever
stars the ubiquitous feature of the heavens they are pockets of order that
naturally form but as they
form they increase the entropy in the surroundings so the net entropy goes up
even though this beautiful
orderly bright object in the sky appears and it's only because of the
appearance of stars that the
universe is an interesting place without stars the particles of the universe
would just disperse
the universe would get bigger and bigger colder and colder and that would be it
there wouldn't be
any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity stars
themselves just the fact
that they exist is very strange that you have this thing and ours is fairly
small right it's a million
times larger than earth yeah and it's going to burn for billions of years and
it's just hovering there
yeah right it creates all the life yeah literally is responsible for all the
life yeah and when they
supernova that creates the actual ingredients for life which is even more
strange like you can't have
biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding yeah i mean we
often in a poetic way
said that we are made of star stuff yeah that's carl sagan but you can also say
that we are
are made of you know nuclear refuse right we are the detritus yeah that that
the death throes of
a star puts out into the universe and it rains down on planets and at least on
one such planet that
stuff comes together and yields life so it is a cycle i mean i don't want to
sound like the lion king
here but you know that's really what it is well what i'm so interested about in
getting into your book
is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that that have to
take place in order for all
this life in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going
to go yeah yeah exactly
and um the remarkable thing and sort of the the main point at some level is
that look we're special
entities we can think we can reflect we have emotions but ultimately you and i
and everybody else were just
bags of particles that are governed by physical law and so there's this
continuity between the stuff
of the world the inanimate stuff of the world the inanimate stuff of the
heavens and us we all come
from the same fundamental ingredients in the same fundamental laws now some
people find that that
gives them i don't know a sense of desperation a sense that we're not special a
sense that somehow
the universe is pointless or meaningless but you know my view on this is it's
spectacular that we're made of the same
bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues you have on this desk.
Because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do
what we do.
And I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity.
We don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity.
You don't need that.
Particles can do miraculous things.
And that is the message that I think you can draw from a more complete
understanding
of where we came from and where we're going.
That the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant,
like what
is the point?
This sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right?
That's something that you touch upon really early on, that this thing that
makes us unique
is that we know that we're going to die.
Yeah.
That to me is the vital distinguishing feature of our species.
We can reflect on the past, we can think about the future and recognize that we're
not going
to be here in the future, at least for some period of time.
And it's an idea and it's powerful, motivating influences, one that has been
explored throughout
the ages.
Otto Ronck, who was one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke
with Freud, developed
this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving
factors in what we do.
When I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named
Ernest Becker called
Denial of Death.
I don't know if you've ever heard of this book.
It was big in the 70s and won actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s.
And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans
do what we do.
And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today,
Until the End of Time,
it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now
seeing it in a cosmological setting.
Because it's not just we that are going to die, it's every structure in the
universe is going to disintegrate in time.
Our best theory suggests to us that even protons, the very heart of matter,
they're quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton
disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles.
And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all.
What timeline are we talking about here?
Well, pretty, pretty big, long timeline.
In fact, I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times
involved.
I like to use the Empire State Building and imagine that every floor of the
Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the previous floor.
So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second
floor, 100 and so forth.
So you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State
Building.
And in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're
about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years.
And as you go forward, you are looking at things very far in the future.
And to answer your question, we think and I underscore think because we're now
at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas.
Protons will decay roughly in, say, by the 38th floor, so 10 to the 38 years
into the future.
So we can relax for a little bit.
You can relax for a little bit.
But here's the thing.
The amazing thing, obviously, is it sounds trite, but time is relative, right?
So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another
duration.
And on, say, the scale of the entire Empire State Building up to, say, 10 to
the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent,
10 to the 38 years is like less than a blink of an eye.
I mean, it's nothing on those scales.
So you sort of have to be careful with your intuition if you're willing to
entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need
to if you're going to think about the very far future.
Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist?
Yeah.
We anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart.
So if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor, most
stars will have used up their nuclear fuel.
There will be dark embers just sort of, you know, smoky out there in the cosmos.
But if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will all just
dissipate into their particulate ingredients.
So it's hard to imagine past, say, floor 38, that there's going to be any life
or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe.
So the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small
when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline.
So impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long, but
yet so small, like in the human mind.
Yeah, it's very hard to hold these durations in mind.
I mean, I don't feel like I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time.
I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking
about.
In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me to sort of
give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen in the universe.
But, you know, we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the
times of, you know, conventional experience.
We have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've
never experienced.
You know, and that's true not only for time, it's also for space, right?
I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomenon.
I mean, if I was to take this bottle of water and I throw it at you, you'd
catch it, you'd know where to put your hand.
You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the
water is going.
But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither
do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that
govern how a particle like an electron behaves.
And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big
creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics.
And because of that, our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to
understand how electrons behave.
In fact, I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savannah
who started to think about electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten,
right?
They're the ones whose genes didn't propagate onward.
And therefore, those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our
ancestors, we're good at understanding Newtonian physics.
But we're not good at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the
world.
Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is next after human
beings will be able to understand these concepts?
Because if you stop and think about what a human is, we've only really been
this for X amount, 100,000 years.
That's right.
And it's a good question, and it's a tough one.
I like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds,
virtual reality or whatever, augmented reality, whatever version of that kind
of technology takes over in the far future,
we might be able to experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way
that our innate intuition may begin to shift, to change so that we grasp the
quantum realm the way we grasp Newtonian physics.
I can at least imagine that as a possibility.
What it would take to actually get there and whether our species will ever last
long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't
know.
But it's all about experience and survival.
We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the
world.
We've been programmed by evolution to survive, and those are two radically
different propositions because you don't need to know the 