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Now, she’s focused on MDMA therapy, which could actually break the chain.

Timestamps

00:20 Chapter 1: Why trauma sticks
03:05 Stress vs. trauma: what’s the difference?
05:55 Why most people don’t develop PTSD
08:37 Chapter 2: How MDMA-assisted therapy can break the loop
09:19 How trauma warps self-perception
12:40 MDMA-assisted therapy explained
16:38 How societal narratives shape recovery (or worsen it)
23:04 The reality of psychedelic therapy (not a quick fix)
28:55 Chapter 3: Healing can echo across generations
30:48 Epigenetics explained
40:00 Can healing be passed on too?
43:43 PTSD beyond fear: guilt, shame, and trauma
47:01 What real healing looks like

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

Hi, I’m Rachel Yehuda, and I study post-traumatic stress disorder and the effects of trauma, including intergenerational trauma.

Chapter 1: Why Trauma Sticks

In graduate school, I studied the neuroscience of stress. Many people were studying that at the time. And post-traumatic stress disorder was a relatively new disorder. It was a very provocative and challenging concept because – what the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder wanted you to understand was that the effects of stress were enduring.

Stress theory at that time basically suggested that stress effects were temporary. They could be quite severe and serious at the time that you were undergoing a stressor. But that the natural way that the body had of dealing with stress was to recalibrate and achieve a kind of a homeostasis. Kind of come back to itself.

Whereas there was a lot to look at in terms of neuroscience in an organism that was under threat or that was undergoing stress, the idea that there was still something to see weeks, months, years, and even decades later was really interesting from the perspective of the neuroscience of stress.

My current research is really about understanding long-term effects of stress and really entertaining the question of why we are so transformed when we undergo traumatic experiences and why the effects can linger for so long. We are looking at a variety of hormonal and molecular mechanisms to try to help us understand that.

I’m also interested in treatment of PTSD. And really what to do about the fact that so many people have effects of traumatic experiences that trouble them. They feel haunted by their traumatic experiences or they feel really stuck because of things that have happened to them in the past. So what’s the best way to get unstuck and what’s the best way to move forward following trauma exposure?

So those are the things that my colleagues and I are studying. Why I’ve dedicated my career to studying the effects of trauma is because trauma exposure seems to be everywhere. And increasingly, the more we seem to be learning about the effects of trauma, in some ways, the more stuck we’re getting as a society. We see it as sort of an insurmountable burden or barrier when, in fact, there’s always been stress and there’s always been trauma. And truly, there must also be a way to go forward in the face of trauma and use the lessons of trauma to really achieve resilience and post-traumatic growth.

Stress vs. trauma: what’s the difference?

I think what’s really helpful is to make the distinction between the experience of stress and the experience of trauma. So maybe what’s useful is to talk about the difference between stress and trauma.

We experience both on pretty much a regular basis, according to statistics. Many people see it as a kind of continuum, with stress being maybe a less serious version of trauma, and trauma’s sort of at the other end of the spectrum. And that’s not entirely wrong.

A stressful event is something that is challenging to you in the moment. It could be trouble at work, trouble in interpersonal relationships. It could be an illness or coping with really any of a number of things.

When most people talk about a traumatic experience, they’re talking more in the order of life threat, interpersonal violence, childhood abuse, combat, being in a natural disaster. So clearly there is a range of challenging events with trauma being at the other end of the spectrum.

But the differences go even deeper than that because when we talk about a stressful situation, once you remove the stressor or the thing that is giving you the symptoms and the angst or the challenge, usually you don’t feel under the influence of the stressor anymore. You can relax and say things like, well, that was stressful. I’m glad that’s over now.

I mean, in fact, when you used to go to a physician who used to tell you you were under too much stress, the solution to that problem was removing the stressor.

But I think with trauma, it’s different because the effects of trauma can remain with you. Even after the event is in the rearview mirror, even if there’s no active threat, the person who perpetrated the violence is in prison. The war is over. You’ve fully recovered and rebuilt your house from the natural disaster. You can still feel the effects of that experience because it comes back to you.

So the way that I like to think about a traumatic experience is an event that really divides your life. It’s a watershed. And it’s an event that will continue to be experienced by you in some way or continue to have some major presence in your life, even though it is in the past.

And that is just not true of stress when the solution to being under stress is to remove the threat.

With trauma, it’s not quite as simple because some events really have a bigger power to transform us.

Why most people don’t develop PTSD

I think what’s also very important to understand when we’re talking about traumatic events — I like to refer to them as potentially traumatic events, the kind of events that are capable of eliciting a post-traumatic stress disorder, is that these events are way more common than we think.

About 70% of people really around the world, but certainly in the United States, have experienced at least one of these potentially traumatic experiences in their lives, and about 25% have experienced multiple life-threatening or potentially life-threatening events.

When you look at the prevalence of PTSD compared to the prevalence of trauma exposure, what you begin to understand is that most people don’t develop post-traumatic stress disorder when they’re exposed to trauma. What’s important about that is that trauma itself doesn’t have the power to transform people. It’s our responses to the trauma.

But when you look at the statistics, you see that compared to the prevalence of trauma, which is quite high, the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder is quite a bit lower. The important thing about a traumatic event is really how you process it, what you think about it, why you think it happened.

And, you know, what’s really interesting about the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it varies from nation to nation. They’ve done studies on this. And so sometimes that’s linked to the fact that there are more trauma exposures in one country and war-torn countries versus other countries.

But it’s not simply that. Culture has a very important role in teaching us how we respond to traumatic events. We’ve done such a good job of validating the experience of trauma exposure and of letting people know that traumatic experiences can result in mental health symptoms, that it’s not stigmatizing to develop symptoms of anxiety or depression or just to feel very incapacitated.

Perhaps we’ve done too good a job on this concept because I think people automatically assume that if they’re exposed to trauma, they’re going to develop a mental health problem. And so what we need to do is really underscore the idea that trauma is something that is survivable and that we have tools to help people who have been exposed to trauma recalibrate and really work with what has happened so that they don’t remain permanently stuck.

Chapter 2: How MDMA-assisted therapy can break the loop

Once you start thinking about trauma as a prison, we’re all kind of doomed because traumatic experiences are here to stay and we shouldn’t view them as a prison. We should view them as simply an occurrence because that’s what they are.

And of course, traumatic experiences are going to be very challenging and they have the power to be extremely disruptive and they have the power to produce a lot of mental health symptoms.

But there are ways to also be resilient. There are ways to cope with trauma, and there are ways to do amazing things, not only despite the trauma, but because of the trauma.

How trauma warps self-perception

When we talk about using psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to heal from trauma and to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder, what we’re really trying to do is use the power of psychedelics to induce kind of an altered state to help people do the work of trauma-focused therapy that is often very hard to do when you’re in an ordinary state of consciousness.

The reason that it’s so hard for people in the aftermath of a trauma is not only because something terrible has just happened, but because they construct a narrative about why it happened and what they did wrong as a result of it happening.

But a woman who’s been exposed to interpersonal violence can get the impression that maybe if she would have fought harder or worked harder or didn’t send certain signals into the stratosphere, that she could have prevented this. Or that she was maybe too passive and didn’t fight as hard as she could have. And this is really what’s sustaining the post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not just that she was violated, but that she disappointed herself in her own actions.

Even something like 9/11, which was 20 years ago, had a lot of people who wondered whether trying to run and save themselves was the best course of action. Maybe they should have gone back, and maybe they should have helped other people struggling to get out of the burning building.

So there’s a lot of room after a traumatic exposure to kind of second-guess yourself. And what happens is that this narrative can be perpetuated every time you think about the traumatic event, which can be very often. And you start to believe that the problem isn’t only what happened, but it’s you.

When you use conventional therapies to try to get at these, we call them altered cognitive schemas, altered cognitions. When you try to use cognitive behavioral therapies to get people to look at some of these ideas, what happens is that they can get very, very distressed. And so many times they give up on the therapy.

And right now we have cognitive behavioral therapies for PTSD that can work quite well for people. But also, equally, many people find that these therapies are just too emotionally draining or too distressing for them.

A lot of trauma survivors with PTSD feel really alienated. They feel different. They try to avoid people. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want to hurt the ones that they love, because they feel inside that they’re very aggressive. Or they don’t want to get really too close to someone that they were once close to because that person might start asking questions.

And the trauma survivor doesn’t want to give them horrific details about what happened to them, mostly out of protecting the person or out of this feeling that once a person understands what happened to them, they may not want to see them the same way. It’s distancing.

And all the partner experiences is that they’ve lost their loved one in some fundamental way that sometimes they can’t even name.

MDMA-assisted therapy explained

MDMA is now undergoing kind of the last stage before FDA approval.

And in phase two and phase three studies, MDMA has shown remarkable efficacy for reducing symptoms of PTSD. And about two-thirds of people that are treated report no longer having PTSD and also report feeling changed in a very positive direction.

That’s a very, very high rate of recovery for any kind of a treatment, and that’s why it’s exciting.

MDMA is not a classic psychedelic. It works very differently than, say, psilocybin, which is commonly referred to as magic mushrooms or LSD or ayahuasca. Those experiences produce a much more dramatic out-of-body experience or a mystical experience or even a sense that you might even have an ego dissolution, your sense of self and maybe blending into a larger cosmos.

And those experiences can be very, very powerful. I think those kinds of psychedelics can and should be tried in PTSD. They might be very interesting. But they’re different because while you’re having those kind of experiences, it’s hard to do psychotherapy. It’s hard to be coherent in a sentence.

A lot of the healing work with those kind of classic psychedelics are occurring really after an integration process, which is usually very short in clinical trials, but ideally the material that is brought up in that kind of a session can be talked about for a long time in therapy.

With MDMA, assisted psychotherapy, a lot of the therapeutic work is being done in the session while you’re in the altered state because you can be coherent because you are not having an ego dissolution experience.

Most people, but not all, experience a sense of pleasure. It’s called ecstasy. It gives your body a good feeling sometimes. Some people during the session can also report feeling not so good. Sometimes people say, I don’t know why they call this ecstasy, but that’s because they’re also experiencing very difficult memories.

But being in a situation where you feel calm and serene can have different effects in different people. But being in a state where you’re not so worried about getting agitated can be very helpful for processing traumatic memories.

So, for example, a woman who’s been exposed to interpersonal violence as an adult or even a child may be able to look past the self-blame and the disappointment that she feels in herself to really seeing that really she was helpless. Really, the responses that she made at the time were the ones that were most conducive to keeping her alive.

But instead of just understanding this intellectually, which is what happens in cognitive behavioral therapy, she feels it as a truth. She sees it in a different and more powerful way, and she sees it in a way that is also infused with compassion.

For herself, and similarly a combat veteran, might also be able to understand that the monster that he feels that is now inside of him is actually a monster he can let go of because that part of him that was aggressive saved him in a situation where it was life or death and also was brought about by the need to provide service to keep others alive, which is an extraordinary thing that combat veterans, certainly in the United States and also around the world, often do voluntarily.

How societal narratives shape recovery (or worsen it)

Being in a state that is induced by a psychedelic such as MDMA may enhance your empathy for yourself, your introspection, your ability to see things differently, and also make you feel part of the world.

The idea of the cognitive behavioral therapies has always been really correct. The idea is to kind of go back there and correct some of the faulty assumptions that you have about yourself in the world as a result of the traumatic experiences.

Why they didn’t work as well as we had hoped they would work for as many people as we had hoped they would work for is because some of the things that happen to people are really horrible. And so going back and trying to discuss this in an ordinary state of consciousness is just too much for people.

So a lot of times, I’m certainly aware of this, people engage in cognitive behavioral therapy and they talk about a trauma, but it isn’t the trauma because they just can’t bear to go into something so deeply distressing. And so many people have had aspects of a traumatic experience that they can talk about, but that they hold something back.

In our society, unfortunately, we have given some people the message, perhaps unintentionally or unwittingly, that if they would have only done something different during a traumatic experience, it wouldn’t have happened. They might have been able to prevent it.

I remember my mother telling me, that when the Holocaust survivors came from Europe to Israel after the war, a lot of people asked them why they went like lambs to the slaughter. There were so many of you, there were so few of the Nazis, like, how did you let this happen?

Obviously, that’s really not the right thing to say to a trauma survivor. What it does, though, is it makes you wonder, well, Why did I go like a lamb to slaughter?

Under the influence of a psychedelic, you may really understand that you had absolutely no choice with all those machine guns firing at you and aimed at your loved one, and if you didn’t march, they would die.

So we create a lot of narratives in our society sometimes that suggest to people that they have choices during a trauma that they may not have, plus which we don’t often understand that the biologic reality of the fight-or-flight response is really to try to preserve one’s life.

You’re not really stepping through this cognitive process at the time of a trauma. You’re just trying to survive.

I think part of the reason that we sometimes do second-guess trauma survivors is because of our own difficulty hearing traumatic material.

And in fact, the reason it’s important for people with severe PTSD is to go and seek therapy is because you do have to be trained to kind of not have these reactions to somebody’s trauma and to listen non-judgmentally and with extraordinary empathy and compassion for someone as they’re telling their tale.

What most people find when they really go into a deep state where they have empathy and when they are in the presence of therapists that can help them process the traumatic experience is that they actually were heroes, that they survived something that was designed to kill them or hurt them and that they did so as best as could be expected in the time and that the reason they did so is because life is worth living. And that now they can kind of take some of that and try to regain that will to live without worrying that they may be horribly defective not only because of what the trauma did but because of the because of who they were, that they weren’t able to overcome the experience of adversity.

So in part, there’s a cultural message and a societal message here that we need to really let trauma survivors know that we understand how difficult it was and really embrace their survival and adaptation.

But sometimes we live in a society that’s pretty judgmental, and so that can add fuel to the fire.

When combat veterans returned home from the Vietnam War, I think one of the biggest contributors to their ongoing symptoms and their subsequent readjustment was being called “baby killers.” That is a great example of how to not help somebody get over combat trauma.

So thanking people for their service and understanding the absolutely impossible situation that somebody is in is more appropriate to helping combat survivors heal because it reminds them that they were doing a mission perhaps at an extraordinary cost.

One of the ways that I like to think about how a psychedelic assists the psychotherapy process is really based on a quote from Stan Grof, which says that a psychedelic is to the brain what the telescope is to astronomy or the microscope is to biology. It just allows you to go deeper and see things that perhaps you couldn’t ordinarily see.

And I think that’s exactly why these compounds have so much potential, and particularly MDMA for PTSD, because it allows you to get past this initial layer that you can’t see, which is, how did I let this happen? Or how could this have happened to me?

And go to that next layer that perhaps is more microscopic, which is, because I couldn’t do anything else, because I had no other options. And also develop that sense of self-compassion that allows you to understand that you don’t need to be punished or punish yourself because you didn’t live up to your own expectations for how you should have behaved.

I think the most important thing to let people know about psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, if you’re using it for the purpose of healing from mental health symptoms, is that intention is very important.

The reality of psychedelic therapy (not a quick fix)

It’s not only intention, it’s the desire to go deeper than you’ve been able to go. On some level, you have to have this sense that I know I need to be going deeper. I just can’t. It’s too upsetting. It’s too traumatic. It’s too difficult. And really using the medicine for what it is there to do, which is help you see that thing that you can’t see with your naked eye and really wanting to see it.

The MDMA or any psychedelic really won’t have healing properties if you’re afraid to have the experience or if you’re reluctant about it. It’s like saying, well, I’m going to look through the telescope, but I’m also going to put my hand on the back of the telescope because I’m really kind of afraid of what I might see. There are ways to be avoidant even using a psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.

It’s very important to not give people the impression that there’s a passive cure. You lie down there on the bed, you take MDMA, you swallow it with some water, and magical things start to happen in terms of processing trauma. That isn’t what the therapy’s about. Ideally, therapists who really know how to work with trauma in an ordinary state can use those tools and techniques to help you do the work of pushing forward while you are in the state induced by MDMA and can really kind of help you supercharge the psychotherapy.

The way that this is being rolled out for PTSD is more medicalized. That’s not to say that people won’t have good experiences with psychedelics that are taken outside of that context. People really show a range of different experiences ranging from this saved my life to I’m not doing that again. That was pretty bad. Psychedelics are really interesting that way.

So much of how they’re going to work has to do with where you are, who you’re with, what your intention is, and also probably your internal biochemistry. So there’s no way to really predict it. Even though this treatment has been found to work in two-thirds of people with PTSD, there’s this other third. So everyone that tries this treatment has to understand that people respond very differently to different kind of medications and to make sure that you’re working with somebody really ethical and can respect your boundaries, anyone that is in an altered state of consciousness is more vulnerable. And so you really want to make sure you’re working with people of the highest, not only therapeutic skill, but ethical standards.

What’s fascinating about psychedelics is that the same person can have remarkably different responses in different settings.

When we talk about MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, we’re talking about a process where there’s readiness. where we prepare people to work with the medicine. We talk a lot about what the experience will be like and what they want to get out of it and what some of the stuck points have been, what their hopes are for getting past those stuck points.

There are three 90-minute sessions to do that, not to mention that these are patients you might have known and have tried to work with for a long time before the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

And then you work during the session and you work after the session. And the way that the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is structured right now, there are going to be three medicine sessions. So you have three very long days to kind of get where you need to go and hopefully you can make great strides with it.

But for anyone that thinks this is a quick fix, that’s a perception that needs to be corrected because the way that it’s being rolled out right now with clinical trials with the FDA is a three-month experience with 12 psychotherapy sessions in addition to the medication sessions.

It’s a commitment that somebody is making towards their own healing and working in a very non-passive way to try to really understand what it is they saw so that they can make something out of it and tackle their lives in a different way.

When people hear this kind of stuff about how great MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is or psychedelic experiences in general, and they have a natural curiosity to want to try it, or they want to see if they can learn more about themselves, I mean, that’s a very natural reaction.

It’s important to understand that not everybody responds the same way. It’s important to adjust one’s expectations of this and really be in the hands of somebody that is very trusted.

Different states in the United States are experimenting with different levels of decriminalization and legalization. So I suspect that we will have a lot more information about the effects of psychedelics in the general population.

When you think about psychotherapy, that was initially meant for people that had serious mental health issues. And a lot of people go for psychotherapy even if they don’t have a mental health disorder.

We may see after we have enough experience with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in clinical populations, that might be a very natural transition, that it might be particularly helpful and maybe easier in some ways for people that don’t have as intransigent mental health symptoms, but simply want to understand themselves better.

So it’s an exciting time to see what the future brings.

Chapter 3: Healing can echo across generations

One of the dilemmas that people had when they first heard about the diagnosis of PTSD or thought about the enduring effects of trauma is how can an event in the past continue to exert symptoms, continue to exert biologic effects? Why can we measure the blood or the brain in people that have post-traumatic stress disorder and see differences even though the event is past?

When we look at some of the hormonal changes that we see in people that have post-traumatic stress disorder, you don’t really see the kind of things you would see in someone that is undergoing stress. And one of the biggest examples of that is that people with post-traumatic stress disorder have lower cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that is released by the adrenals during stress. It is designed to help you cope with the fight or flight challenge. We think that lower levels of cortisol are part of why the stress response doesn’t fully shut off and continues to live on in some ways.

But it wasn’t until we began looking at epigenetic mechanisms or molecular mechanisms for the stress hormone receptors that we began to understand that perhaps one of the things that are allowing kind of the enduring effects of trauma are changes that are actually made into how those receptors work in the long run.

So that in response to a very big traumatic event earlier on, there can actually be molecular changes and epigenetic changes that can change the way that the stress receptor genes function and really in some way keep alive a stress response.

Epigenetics explained

Many people have misconceptions about epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to the study of how genes are regulated. A lot of epigenetic mechanisms occur during development and help really with the complex choreography of which genes are firing at any given time. It explains something very real about why things just don’t go back to normal.

An epigenetic mark, once it’s on the DNA, it survives cell division so that the daughter cells that are formed when the cell replicates itself through the process of mitosis and also meiosis, which is the process of making sperm and egg, the epigenetic mark is robust and it can survive cell division.

A lot of excitement occurred a few decades ago when people began to understand that experience can also influence epigenetics. Now people talk a lot about how trauma influences epigenetics, but trauma is just another example of an environmental influence that can have a profound effect.

The experience of treatment is also an environmental experience that can have profound effects. And some of the work that we have done in the last decade has really demonstrated an improved response to treatment, even to psychotherapy.

So when it comes to understanding issues like, well, how do psychedelics work? Why do they produce, if they do, a long-lasting, enduring, and transformative response?

Many people who are treated with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD actually say, you know, I feel really different now about my PTSD symptoms. First of all, they have far fewer PTSD symptoms. They also feel more self-compassionate and they also feel ready to kind of take the next step in life. They feel transformed.

The word transformed could have also been used to describe how they felt when they had their traumatic experience to begin with. I’m not the same person that I used to be.

And probably epigenetic mechanisms will be very important in helping us understand both the kind of transformative and enduring changes that occurred following trauma exposure and the ones that are associated with deep healing, it’s not about a good event or a bad event. It’s just about experience and the impact that experience can potentially have in regulating stress-responsive genes.

Well, one of the really interesting things about epigenetics of PTSD and the epigenetics of recovery from trauma is that we found changes in the same region of the same stress-related gene in both situations. that there are epigenetic changes on stress-related genes that might explain enduring effects and might also explain why we’re more sensitized to our environments.

And that somehow, when people are successfully treated with PTSD, that you see some of those epigenetic changes again on those same genes, but in a reverse direction.

So it’s important to understand about epigenetics, and this is that you’re not stuck just because there’s an epigenetic change. If a certain region of a certain gene is responsive to the environment, then make healing environments so that we can transform in positive directions.

And I think to me that’s really the message. I think it’s really important to not take the epigenetics too literally and try to tie little regions on little marks on genes to specific behaviors.

And certainly when people start talking about intergenerational epigenetic effects, we’re not carrying trauma with us. These changes are not necessarily responsible for all the behaviors, but they’re present. And their presence is probably a way to really allow the experience to stick with us for some reason.

I’d like to think that epigenetics provides a mechanism for adaptation. Traumatic experiences really, in essence, provide a way of learning. Sometimes we don’t like the lesson, but a traumatic event may teach us that certain situations are dangerous.

And we want to have a way of really recollecting that and really acting on that so that we don’t find ourselves in harm’s way as often. Or if we do, we can mount a response.

When people talk about intergenerational transmission of trauma — which I’d really like to correct. It’s not intergenerational transmission of trauma — it’s the idea that people in a subsequent generation may feel the effects of a trauma in a first generation. Maybe that is a way of kind of transmitting a lesson to the next generation about how to cope or about a potential dangerous situation or scenario.

So the idea is that really, it’s a type of wisdom. I just want to correct this idea that trauma is inherited or trauma sticks with us for generations. That’s not what the science says.

What the science says is that there are epigenetic marks in the adult children of trauma survivors in the same location as in the trauma survivors. And so there are a lot of questions that we could ask about why that might be so and how did those marks get there.

But what’s inescapable is that many people feel that it’s not just the genes that they inherited, it’s the experiences that the parents have also had, whether they be personal or cultural experiences, that are very shaping and determine much of who they are.

We have to start thinking about epigenetics also in terms of what it tells us about adaptation and resilience. What lessons do we take forward that can help us cope with adversity should we have to experience something the way our prior generation did?

Our work was done primarily in the adult children of Holocaust survivors, and many of them feel very hypervigilant, as if somebody is trying to hurt them or chasing after them. for no reason other than who they are.

That’s a trauma their parent experienced. And so this hypervigilance may not serve them in a world where nobody is chasing after them.

But once there’s antisemitism again, and they notice it, they might be more attuned to it. And being more attuned to antisemitism might end up being something that is adaptive if that is indeed what is happening in society.

There are biologic mechanisms to keep the effects of experience alive from one generation to the next. We don’t know if they’re memories. We don’t really know what form they take, but we know that it is kind of a biologic possibility, and this has opened up a lot of questions and a lot of potential excitement.

For many people, it just means that what I feel is real. And that’s good, too.

We really are very affected by cultural and societal and personal experiences of previous generation or generations. It really does form a tremendous amount of our identity, and it forms the basis of how we do respond to adversity when it occurs from a cultural and societal perspective.

But what it might also mean is that responding to mass casualty and mass trauma or big traumas in our society may not be only a mental health problem, but it might be a problem of creating resilient and healing societies so that we have a mechanism for positive transformation and change.

And we can use the power of culture and society to help each other cope from adversity rather than kind of use it to make us feel more isolated and stigmatized, like we let people down by the fact that trauma occurred or how we responded to it.

The legacy that we have most often from our parents in prior generations is that whatever they went through, they survived, and that’s why we exist. We’re here because someone survived trauma.

And then the question is, what’s the next step beyond survival? It’s restoring, repairing, achieving resilience, achieving growth, and really understanding how to go forward despite being exposed to trauma.

It’s beyond just surviving to living.

Can healing be passed on too?

How do we then do that?

One of the of having a complete healing, which I think is possible with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy because it’s not about just dampening symptoms. It’s not about just giving a medication so that you can sleep better or that you no longer feel depressed or anxious or hypervigilant.

It’s really about going deep and correcting and changing. This narrative that you got stuck in, that is some version of how bad you are and how deserving you are of this trauma, but that now you’re having a different narrative about how you actually survived, did the best you could, and you have not only more compassion for yourself, but you feel that you can take your rightful place in society, that you are part of the world, you are part of the earth.

And having that legacy can be profound. From animal research is that, and this is not our work, this is work that was done at Emory University, if you subject a male mouth to a cherry blossom and then shock the mouth, that mouse can develop a fear of that cherry blossom. That fear of the cherry blossom is associated with epigenetic changes in brain and sperm. And if that mouse is mated, that mouse’s male offspring will also have the same changes in the epigenetics in brain and sperm, but will also inexplicably be afraid of cherry blossoms, even though you didn’t have to shock that offspring in order to be afraid.

And that is a really powerful demonstration of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about behavioral epigenetics and the kind of things that can be passed.

But if you use fear extinction on that male mouse, that you continue to expose the cherry blossom to that mouse that is now afraid of the cherry blossom, such that he now becomes sensitized and says, okay, I guess a cherry blossom doesn’t mean I’m going to be shocked, and then mate the mouse, that offspring doesn’t have the epigenetic changes in the brain and the sperm.

So this is a very profound example of what we’re trying to achieve here by trying to understand the epigenetics of what occurs in healing generally and also in response to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

We’re just wondering whether that can kind of restore a certain biological equilibrium.

The real beneficiaries of successful PTSD treatment are the next generation in some very real way, not necessarily only because of epigenetic changes, but because a change in their parent is going to make a gigantic difference in their lives.

So many people think that one of the mechanisms of how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can help us process trauma is that it reduces the fear involved in approaching traumatic memories.

And that can allow, once you don’t have the fear of talking about the trauma, that can allow for new mechanisms.

In a way, this can facilitate a fear extinction, if you think the problem is the fear.

And there are studies that have also shown that MDMA specifically can dampen down some of the activity in the amygdala that occurs when a trauma survivor is exposed to a traumatic reminder or a script of their trauma.

That is definitely one of the mechanisms that might be at play here.

PTSD beyond fear: guilt, shame, and trauma

But it’s really important to understand that fear is only one component of why people have enduring post-traumatic stress symptoms.

And overemphasizing the link between fear and PTSD is, I think — leads us to focus really on things like extinguishing a fear response without delving into why there is such an over-consolidated fear response to begin with and why there might be such an over-consolidated fear response might have to do with guilt and might have to do with shame and self-blame, and all of the other kinds of narratives.

One of the things I really like about the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy approach is that it’s not directed. That the therapists are trained to follow the patient’s process, to go where the patient goes.

The patient might not go to, “I’m scared.” The patient might go to, I’m bad and always have been, and then go leapfrog straight over the event that was discussed in preparation to something that happened in childhood.

We don’t fully understand why we respond to events the way we do. When a person is exposed to a traumatic event in adulthood, they’ve already lived a life. And there might be a lot of events from their past that are contributing to why they think that something that happened was their fault.

And they may identify one of those early events and that has to be corrected in some profound way or a person needs to develop a large sense of empathy for that five-year-old, for example, or that six-year-old that maybe didn’t get something that they should have gotten or maybe has been harboring some sort of a secret inside.

Again, we don’t all respond to trauma with PTSD. That’s very important. It means that it’s not just the exposure alone that put us here.

Kind of the beauty of the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy experience is that it keeps it open. And I think some of the limitations of the current cognitive behavioral approaches have been this narrowing on — we’re going to talk about this trauma. We’re going to focus on what happened to you that you believe is the focus of your symptoms without understanding that, you know what, it could be something before. It could also be something that happened after the trauma.

I once spoke to a veteran who told me anything that happened to him in war paled by comparison to the systemic racism that he experienced when he came back from war. It pales in comparison to the sense that even after I served my country, I’m dispensable, I’m not worthy and I am lesser.

And so I think that what we have to understand is that there are factors before that contributed to how you’re going to respond to a trauma in the moment. There are factors after the traumatic event that are equally as important, and they have to do with how we’re treated by our loved ones, by society at large, and how we treat ourselves.

So it’s just this whole long chain.

What real healing looks like

And when you have an experience with psychedelics, the whole thing is open.

And if you’re with trained people, they’re not going to shift your focus and call it avoidance if you don’t stick. with the traumatic experience that we’ve agreed is the source of your problem, you may be open to identifying the kind of things that are really impeding your recovery or the kind of things that you really can’t get past.

And so a lot of the time, if we’re in abusive or traumatic environments after we sustain a trauma, that just makes it a lot harder.

And so sometimes with a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, you’re more able to broadly understand what in the here and now, needs to be changed, even though it doesn’t have to do with a then and there.

And so what kind of change can I make to improve my here and now so that I can recover from the trauma?

And the other aspect is really that we’re not just looking to neutralize something negative. We’re trying to learn from a traumatic experience.

And for many people that heal successfully, what that looks like is them taking everything that they learned about what it is to be exposed to trauma and helping the next person who is exposed to trauma.

“This is what I should have gotten. This is what I want to give you. This is what I wish somebody would have taught me and to teach them to be self-compassionate so that we create a more healing society.”

What I hope viewers take away from this is that there’s hope.

I’ve talked to so many trauma survivors with PTSD or maybe even other mental health conditions who really feel that because the trauma happened and because we can’t erase the fact that the trauma happened, they’re just going to be stuck.

And unless somehow we can go back in the past and change the course of history, they’re going to be in the state that they’re in forever.

And I think what this kind of public education message is all about is letting people know that there are so many ways to begin to deal with even the most severe PTSD cases.

And that if you’re watching this and you or someone that you know or love is struggling because a traumatic experience occurred to them, trauma and PTSD are things that the mental health community has made great advances in.

And psychedelic medicine in particular really offers a lot of hope for people who have not benefited from more traditional forms of psychotherapy or medicine.

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Timestamps

00:22 Chapter 1: The connection between mind and body
06:45 Chapter 2: Hacking the hunger system with GLP1
12:42 GLP-1 and the new era of appetite control
20:03 Modern food engineering vs. ancient biology
21:43 Chapter 3: Voodoo death, broken heart syndrome, and placebos
22:14 When belief becomes biology: Voodoo death & misdiagnosis
27:00 Broken hearts, placebos, and the power of expectation
31:08 The placebo effect
37:09 From mind-body science to medicine: Devices, drugs, and the future
40:32 Chapter 4: How our brains fight cancer
42:00 Cancer, the nervous system, and ‘the way of the nerd’
58:35 Chapter 5: How a neuroscientist prepares for death

Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

I’m David Linden. I’m a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For many years my laboratory has studied neuroplasticity that is how the brain and the nervous system are changed as the result of experience in the world.

Chapter 1: The connection between mind and body

So like a lot of biologists I’ve been resistant to the idea that our mental life affects our body profoundly because for so long it seemed like something that was untestable and ethereal and operated in a different realm from biological science. But my father was a psychiatrist and he told me when talking here psychiatry works it doesn’t work in some magical psychological realm that is divorced from biology it works because it changes your brain and the same is true of any behavioral process whether it is meditative practice or psychotherapy or controlled breathing or what have you. These things aren’t working in the ether. They are working through biology and in just the last ten years our understanding of that biology has gotten a whole lot better.

So it’s not as if that all claims that have been made through history about mind body medicine will turn out to be true and will turn out to be understandable but a subset of them that seemed supernatural at one point will turn out ultimately to have real biological explanations.

So much of our understanding of both daily functioning and things going wrong in disease right now is focused on the body by itself. There is now a revolution where we’re realizing that many disease processes and many things that we do every day from sleeping and waking to eating food and being hungry – things like cancer autoimmune disease – these are things that we are now learning are strongly under the control of the brain and when things are under the control of the brain it’s not just something that happens subconsciously it means we have the option to control them with our behavioral practices whether these are breathing practices meditative practices psychotherapy exercise – it opens up an entire new way to think about disease.

Maybe this would be a point to talk about interception and extraception. So when we think of the senses we tend to think of smell, taste, vision, touch, hearing things that are pointed outward towards the world that give you information about the world around you but we also have inward pointing so-called intraceptive senses or senses of self that tell us things like is my bladder full, is my bowel full how is my head in relation to the force of gravity. These intraceptive senses are crucial to the ongoing conversation between mind and body.

If these signals need to be seen really fast then they are conveyed electrically from neurons that run from the body up through the spinal cord and get to the brain. If they are signals that can work more slowly then the body can secrete a hormone the hormone passes through the blood system this is a slower process ultimately it makes its way to the brain and binds receptors on neurons or other cells in the brain to produce a slower effect.

Yet another interesting way is that the brain is continuously responding to our breathing rhythm and our heartbeat so every pulse of the heart has a very slight effect on dilating arteries in our brain which our brain can then sense and act upon and that’s a very rapid signal these are the ways that the body talks to the mind and of course the mind as instantiated in the brain will speak back through many other mechanisms some of them being neural signals and there are a couple of different kinds of these some are the volitional or somatic motor system so when you have a thought and you say “I want to raise my arm” and you raise your arm that’s something that we all know about and that’s something that is conveyed from the mind to the body in a conscious way but they’re also subconscious ways and signals flowing and this involves something called the autonomic nervous system and this is mostly a phenomenon in which the mind controls the body at a level that’s below your level of consciousness, the autonomic nervous system is in turn divided into two general branches the sympathetic nervous system which people say prepares you to fight or flee or the parasympathetic nervous system which prepares you to rest and digest and so as you can imagine the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems are somewhat in opposition they’re yin and yang so to speak of the way the mind controls the body subconsciously.

There are other ways too so the mind control the can control the body through the release of hormones that are released by the brain. They effect places like the pituitary gland and the adrenal gland which secrete still more hormones and these are conveyed through the circulatory system broadly to all sites in the body so they tend to have broadcast at general effects. So hormones, neural signals, and then the third way is through control of the immune system and through these are through a class of specialized hormones for the immune system molecules called cytokines

Chapter 2: Hacking the hunger system with GLP-1

So we think of eating and hunger as being a very straightforward thing. “Oh yeah, if you’re a little hungry, I eat something, now I don’t want to eat anymore” but it’s really complicated and it involves a lot of continual dialogue between the body and the mind using both the senses that are pointed out at the world and the senses that are pointed inward at the body. So, if you can imagine walking down the street in New York City near little hungry and you smell some pizza, “That smells good” and the first thing you’re doing is you’re making a decision – am I hungry? Do I want to go seek out where this odor is coming from? “Oh yes, I do,” so you’re using interceptive information to say yes my stomach is not distended and full of nutrients and I feel hunger, it’s been a while since I last ate so I’m interested in this idea. You’re using your memory to say “Oh yes, I remember that I like pizza. That’s a food that I enjoy” and so these smells are bringing up positive associations and that is influencing your decision to go seek it out. And then let’s say you order a slice and you have it in your hand and you’re looking at it and you’re seeing it so you’re taking in information with your eyes you’re smelling it and then you’re making a decision, “Do I want to put this in my mouth or not?” and if it smells a little off if you sniff it and you think it might have spoiled or the oil is rancid or something bad, you’re gonna say “Well no, maybe I won’t put that in my mouth after all.” But really, eating this a series of decisions. So now let’s say you’ve taken a bite and you go “Oh, that’s delicious, yes I’m tasting the salt, I’m tasting the fat, I get that nice yeasty thing from the crust, there’s also mouth feel in my mouth, I’m I gonna swallow this bite” and you’re saying “Oh yes this is palatable food, there’s nothing wrong with it and so I won’t spit it out, I’ll swallow it” – that’s yet another decision.

And then you’re going on eating your slice perhaps you’re walking down the street and you have to make a decision “Am I getting full? This slice is enormous. Am I gonna finish it or am I gonna chuck some of it in the trash and leave it be?” And that decision uses several different streams of information coming from your body. It’s using fast neural signals from your stomach that are saying how distended is my stomach? How much has it swollen as a result of food filling it up? And it is also using fast information from the stomach there cells in the lining of the stomach that evaluate the nutrient content of the food. This is why you can’t just drink a lot of water, for example, distended your stomach and then suppress your appetite that doesn’t work as a diet strategy. Your stomach knows what’s inside. It can tell the difference between water and food and it can even tell what kind of food is there – is it fatty? Is it proteinaceous? Is it carbs? That sort of information saying “Oh yes there are proteins there, there are fats there, there’s a fairly high level of them” and these are signals that go rapidly to your brain and inform the decision “Should I terminate this meal and stop eating? Or should I should I keep going a little while longer?”

And then say 20 minutes later, when you are making a decision do I want to eat again, there are yet other sensors in not your stomach but in the first part of your small intestine that are evaluating the nutrient content of the food as it passes there and saying you know “I just ate, I have plenty of nutrients. I have a feeling of fullness. I’m not going to eat again for a while.” How does that happen? Well that is a slow hormonal signal and when food is sensed by particular neurons in the lining of the small intestine, they secrete a hormone and the hormone is called glucagon-like peptide-1 (or glp-1) and this hormone has several effects. It acts on receptors in the stomach to slow gastric motility, so your stomach empties less quickly, but more importantly it goes to centers in your brain that control your appetite and they suppress your appetite for tens of minutes or an hour or two afterwards.

So we all know that if you put sweet food in your mouth it tastes sweet and that the reason for that is that on your tongue and in your oral cavity there are special sensors for sugars, but what most people don’t know is that there are similar sensors for sugars actually in your stomach and in your small intestines and those sensors send information to your brain to guide decisions like should I stop eating food right now.

Curiously though while artificial sweeteners that are widely used and sodas and other foods, they do a very good job of mimicking real sugar for the sweet sensors that are in your oral cavity, they don’t fool the sensors that are in your stomach and your intestines because those in sensors are molecularly different. So what that means is when you eat artificial sweeteners there’s a mismatch. Your mouth is telling you “Oh this is sugar!” But your gut is saying “No, I don’t think so, this isn’t real sugar” and as a consequence your brain is getting conflicting signals and this is probably some of the reason why artificial sweeteners are really not a very effective strategy for losing weight.

GLP-1 and the new era of appetite control

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve heard that there are very popular diet drugs that are based upon the hormone GLP-1. Now, GLP-1 is a class of molecule called a peptide – it’s a short bit of a protein – and these peptides are broken down very quickly in your bloodstream so when your small intestine secretes GLP-1, that signal is only acting on your brain very briefly and so you would need to inject many times a day and it it’s not wouldn’t be an effective drug. But some clever chemists at the drug company Novo Nordisk realized that you could take the natural GLP-1 molecule and hang chemical groups off the side, in particular you could hang fatty acids off the side, and these fatty acids cause this GLP-1 like molecule then to bind to a protein in the blood called albumin. And when it’s bound to albumin, it’s much more resistant to being degraded by enzymes, and it’s much more resistant to being immediately excreted by the kidney.

As a result, while natural GLP-1 acts for only minutes, this modified GLP-1 that makes a GLP-1 based drug can suppress appetite for a very very long time. It can live for a long time in the bloodstream and as a consequence, you can use it to make a drug that you inject once a week and suppresses appetite strongly. I’m talking about things like semaglutide, which is known as Wegovy or Ozempic, or Tirzepatide, which is known as Zepbound or Mounjaro, and these drugs by mimicking this natural signal are very effective at suppressing appetite and people are losing typically between 12 and 17 percent of their body weight after taking a once a week injection of these drugs over many weeks.

But, they seem to be even better than that. In other words, if you compare the health benefits that you can measure from people who are taking GLP-1 drugs, it seems that there are beneficial effects above and beyond what you would predict from just the amount of weight they’re losing. And we don’t entirely know why this happens, but it makes sense biologically because the receptor for the hormone GLP-1 which is also going to be activated by these drugs, it’s not just in your stomach and it’s not just in your brain, it’s in all kinds of organs. It’s in your heart, it’s in your kidneys, it’s in your liver, it’s in all kinds of places, and it’s doing something good there. We don’t entirely know what that is, but it’s probably some sort of anti-inflammatory effect that provides benefit beyond just what the weight loss is doing.

GLP-1 based weight loss drugs aren’t perfect. They have a lot of benefits, but they have some side effects. Some people feel nauseated, some people feel gastrointestinal distress, sometimes people feel brain fog or a loss of energy on them. And the newer generations of weight loss drugs that are being developed right now may help to make those side effects better.

The other thing is that when you eat less, you don’t just lose fat mass, you also lose muscle mass, so you got to be really careful if you’re losing weight on a GLP-1 drug. You want to go to the gym and do load bearing exercise to keep your muscle mass up, you want to make sure that you’re consuming enough protein to allow your muscles to be able to continue to stay at a reasonable size, so some of these problems may only emerge when we see people using them for years and years and years. And you have to use them for years and years and years because they only work as long as you consume them. You go on a GLP-1 drug, you use it for a year, you go off the drug – you’re gonna gain all the weight back. It doesn’t seem to have a permanent reversal effect.

When these drugs were first developed if you would ask to me as a neuroscientist would these drugs that suppress appetite also suppress the other kinds of rewards that people tend to overdo, like alcohol or drugs of abuse, or even compulsive shopping or gambling – all of which activate the brain’s reward circuitry – I would have guessed no.

I would have said there’s gonna be a separate circuit for appetite and there are reasons to keep that apart from the general reward circuitry. But the indications are that this is not entirely the case. So, it’s early days, but there are promising indications that the GLP-1 based weight loss drugs have some effectiveness for helping people to control their alcohol consumption and to help them get off of psychoactive drugs, and maybe even to deal with compulsive behaviors that are making problems in their life, like compulsive shopping or compulsive gambling. It’s gonna be really interesting to see how this plays out in research in the next few years.

So there are some really interesting things that have come out in the last few years in body-to-brain signaling that have implications for weight loss. One of them has to do with exercise. we know that when you exercise intensively it stimulates appetite and so some people think “Well, you know I might go to the gym and work out real hard, but then I’m gonna be a real hungry and then I’m gonna eat a lot of food, and maybe there won’t be a net benefit.”

It seems to be though, that intensive exercise does have a net benefit. The amount that it stimulates your appetite doesn’t entirely compensate for the amount of weight that you burn through the intensive exercise.

Why is that? Well part of it seems to be that when you have very intensive exercise you produce a metabolite called lactate. It becomes conjugated in your body with an amino acid called phenylalanine and this conjugated compound seems to act through a rather complicated biochemical cascade in the body to get to the brain to suppress appetite itself. So, intensive exercise really does seem to be a good thing to do.

Very few people can lose all the weight they want to lose from intensive exercise itself, but it is very, definitely, a benefit, and of course it has myriad benefits well beyond weight loss and looking good. It has benefits for your mood, it has benefits for maintaining your cognitive function as you age, there’s all kinds of great reasons to want to exercise intensively, but weight loss is one of them.

Modern food engineering vs. ancient biology

Since 1960, the average person in the United States is 27 pounds heavier. That’s a lot. Why is that? It’s not that the genetics of people in the United States has changed. It’s not like there’s a toxin or there’s a change in our metabolism. The reason for this is the people who are making our highly processed foods, as we find both in restaurants and also in the supermarket, have laboratories where they figure out how to manipulate our appetite systems in our bodies and brains in order to get us to overeat.

And we have an evolutionary history, right? Through most of our time as humans, there have been intermittent famines. Food has often been scarce, so it has made sense in those situations, if you come across of very highly caloric fatty food or something really sweet, it made sense to snarf it all down and to put on a little weight so that the next time there was a famine, you might survive and make your way through it.

There is a mismatch though, most people in the world, and certainly people in the United States, don’t live in that famine-laden environment anymore. And as a consequence, when food service corporations, through clever engineering, override our natural inclinations to eat and stop eating with specially engineered foods, they are exploiting this ancient circuit in our brains that says “Pack on the fat pack, on the sweet so that you can survive to live another day.”

Chapter 3: Voodoo death, broken heart syndrome, and placebos

Every scientist I know has their own favorite papers that they like to keep in a file folder and and look at because they’re interesting or revolutionary or odd, and for me one of these is the 1942 report by the eminent American physiologist Walter Kennan about the phenomenon he called “voodoo death.”

When Belief Becomes Biology: Voodoo Death & Misdiagnosis

Voodoo death, in his telling, means when people believe that they have been cursed and their belief system leads them to believe that they are going to die as a result of this curse or hex being placed upon them and then they actually do. And you might think to yourself “Well, does this really happen? I mean, aren’t these just anecdotal reports? I’m skeptical, I don’t really believe” but Walter Kennan was not some flake. He was a very, very eminent and careful physiologist and he documented many cases around the world where people died as a result of being cursed and he developed a physiological theory to underlie this.

He said that the fight or flight part of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, became hyper aroused during hex death and this hyper arousal set in motion a series of physiological changes that ultimately killed people when they had this set of beliefs.

Now, Kennan was acting before we knew a lot of physiology that we know in the modern era. He didn’t know about the so-called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the production of the stress hormone cortisol. That hadn’t been invented or discovered yet. And he didn’t know about the key role of the parasympathetic nervous system. So Kennan’s theory of voodoo death was half right.

The sympathetic nervous system is involved, but it actually seems like what you need to have voodoo death is a one-two punch. The first punch is the sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive. The second punch is that the parasympathetic nervous system comes on and stays high in its activation the rest and digestive system for many, many hours or days afterwards. And these two things together shut down the body and result in voodoo death ultimately.

If you don’t have the belief that you can be killed by a hex or curse, then it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in the spirit world, it only works if you have that belief. And a corollary of that is if a witch doctor tells someone who believes in it that they have cursed them but then before they die says “No, I’ve lifted the curse. It’s not really happened, I’ve moved the bones, I’ve changed the feathers, and this curse is no longer operated” then they can recover. So it entirely is in the mind and the body of the recipient of the curse where this is happening. It’s not happening in the supernatural world. It’s happening biologically in the mind and the body of the recipient.

We might be tempted to think “Oh, voodoo death, hex curses – this only happens in societies that have a certain set of supernatural beliefs that aren’t the ones that dominate here in the USA or in Western Europe or in East Asia and places that are more technologically advanced,” but that’s really not the case at all.

There are papers in the medical literature about the effects of fatal misdiagnosed. So, for example, there is a famous case of a man who was diagnosed with liver cancer – and this was a number of years ago in the 1970s when the kind of scans and diagnostics that were available weren’t as sophisticated as they are now – and they said there’s not that much we can do with you, we can keep you comfortable, and he says “I just want to live through Christmas with my family.” And so he got palliative care, he made it through Christmas. Right after New Year’s, he dropped dead. So we think, “Oh well, the cancer got him he, was able to hang on, that’s wonderful.”

They went into do the autopsy, they were wrong, he didn’t have liver cancer at all. As a matter of fact, he didn’t have much wrong with him that was very serious at all. It was his belief that he had a fatal illness that killed him. And it probably killed him in exactly the same way that voodoo death kills people who believe in it. So voodoo death is not just a phenomenon of a certain group of societies around the world, it essentially also happens in modern medicine with people in white coats – just in a slightly different setting.

Broken hearts, placebos, and the power of expectation

Everyone’s family seems to have a story about a couple where one member died and then the other died of a broken heart soon thereafter. And you think “Well, this is anecdotal.” You know, “People like to tell these stories, it seems romantic.” It’s something that, you know makes us feel warm and fuzzy about the power of love.

But is this really true? If you do epidemiology, if you get a large population you look at statistics, is it really true that people are more likely to die soon after their long-term partner dies? And the answer is yes. And what people die of are the whole range of things: cardiovascular incidents, cancer, autoimmune diseases – all of the incident of these things can go up after the loss of a loved one.

And it’s not just a partner – it can be a close friend, it can be a sibling, in some cases can even be a pet. But this kind of emotional state of grieving definitely leads to a worse prognosis for the person who is grieving. That is now well established.

There is a fascinating phenomenon that was first discovered by doctors in Japan in elderly grieving people and it’s called “takotsubo cardiomyopathy.” “Tako” is Japanese for octopus and “subo” means trap, and the reason it has this name is because the heart adopts a shape like a Japanese octopus trap. It produces an impairments in cardiac function. Most people recover from this cardiomyopathy but some people die as a result and we now believe that takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a consequence of over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system. We have a biological explanation for it that allows us to bridge the behavioral experience of grief to this bodily experience of cardiac impairment.

So, the belief that one has been hex cursed and then dies or from an inaccurate diagnosis leading to death or mourning, its effect on one’s health, these are all negative things that can occur as a result of your mental state but fortunately it works the other way too.

Positive beliefs and positive mental states can work in the opposite direction and can do things like relieve pain or give you better health outcomes.

When people think about mind-body medicine there tends to be a focus on behavioral things: what can meditation do? What can regulated breathing do? What can prayer do? What can psychotherapy or psychosocial support do? And that is an important part of mind-body medicine. But mind-body medicine can also inform the development of drugs or devices – That is to say more conventional therapies – that are based on this understanding. So, GLP-1 based drugs come from understanding information that is flowing from the body to the mind.

Now we have implanted devices to stimulate the vagus nerve and activate the parasympathetic nervous system that are useful in depression and epilepsy and possibly some other diseases. This is a device that is informed by our understanding of information flowing in the other direction from mind out to body.

The placebo effect

I think most people have heard of the placebo effect which is when someone is given a sugar pill or a sham treatment instead of the conventional medical treatment, and they see benefits from it nonetheless. And it can happen in a lot of situations – their placebo effects for pain, for clearing infections, for improvement in cardiovascular function.

To me what’s interesting about placebo effects is that we now have a very good understanding about how many of them work in biological terms. I think pain is probably the best example, when people are given sugar pills or sham treatments and are told this will relieve their pain and it really does, we now know that this effect can be blocked by the drug naloxone and naloxone works by blocking receptors for opiates in the brain. And these are not just the receptors for drugs like heroin and fentanyl, they are the receptors for your brains natural morphine like molecules – the endorphins and the enkephalin. So the fact that naloxone can block the placebo effect for pain tells us that the placebo effect for pain is being mediated in the body by endorphins and enkephalins, by the brain’s natural morphine like molecules.

Placebo effects are best known in the case of pain relief, but they can actually occur for a whole bunch of beneficial medical situations. So you can have a sugar pill or a sham treatment that improves your recovery from surgery and your healing rates that can modify your immune system or in some cases, if you are say receiving a graph, can help you suppress your immune system.

We don’t understand all the biology of all the cases where this works but there are some really interesting experiments that illuminate it. So, for example if I give you a drug that will reduce your blood pressure and then I pair that drug with say lemon lime flavoring that you drink in a little solution that you’ve taken your mouth, and you pair that a number of times, and then just like Pavlov’s dog, now, if you drink the lemon lime flavoring, it will be like you have the partial effect of your drug and your blood pressure will go down, even though the blood pressure medicine isn’t being given, only the lemon lime drink is given.

It seems as if a portion of the placebo effect is a kind of associative learning, although all the details of that are not yet understood.

If you’re a drug company and you have a drug that you think relieves pain well, the way that you are required to test it is by comparing it with a placebo. So half the people in the study might get the drug, and they have other half the people might get a sugar pill that they’re being told is the drug. For the drug to be approved it has to work significantly better than the effect that you would see just from the placebo.

It’s really fascinating to me that it seems like the placebo effect for pain over the last several decades has gotten stronger and stronger. As a result of this, it’s harder to show a statistically significant difference for a real drug compared to the placebo because this placebo is relieving pain to a better and better degree, and showing that something is better than that then becomes much more of a challenge. And you might think, “Well, why is that happening? That’s so weird, why would the placebo effect be getting stronger?” It gets weirder.

It’s not getting stronger everywhere in the world, it’s only getting stronger in the United States. Why is that the case? Well, we don’t really know, but the best guess is that the United States is one of only two countries in the world – the other being a New Zealand – where direct to consumer advertising of drugs is allowed. And so, it may be that somehow this belief in the efficacy of drugs is stronger among people in the USA – and maybe New Zealand, although we don’t know – then it is in other places, and that this is the basis for the enhancement of the placebo effect for pain.

So the placebo effect is really counterintuitive. You might imagine that nowadays people know that placebos are used in clinical trials, and when someone is going into one of these trials they could be thinking “Am I getting the real drug? Am I getting a placebo?” and you might expect that that would make the placebo effect weaker, but curiously, it doesn’t. And it even gets weirder than that.

There’s a phenomenon called open-label placebo and open-label placebo – it seems like it would never work. Open-label placebo is, you say “I’m giving you a sugar pill and it’s just a sugar pill and that’s what we’re doing here” and even with that knowledge, which you then think “Well, there’s gonna be no effect whatsoever,” you still get a placebo effect.

To me that’s deeply counterintuitive and yet it’s been shown over and over again in the literature. And there are trials and whole branches of medicine using so-called open-label placebos, and to me, it’s remarkable, and understanding of the biology of that is something that is is gonna be really fascinating.

From mind-body science to medicine: Devices, drugs, and the future

When you look at the power of placebo effects, it certainly motivates you to try to understand mind-to-body signaling to a greater degree, biologically. You think “Well, where might this lead us to a future medicine?” Well, one way is to say, “All right, well, you know, maybe there are things we can do behaviorally to benefit in search and situations.” If you’re recovering from a heart attack, or you know, you’ve just had this or that therapy, or recovering from cancer treatment, you want to engage in these particular behavioral interventions, but it’s not just the behavioral interventions in other words understanding the signaling will also open us up for new drugs that manipulate those pathways or devices that manipulate those pathways.

So, for example, we know that psychosocial support gives you benefit in terms of your recovery after a heart attack, or, after – in terms of your prognosis for cancer. And so one way is to say “All right, well, what are the behaviors you can do?” But another way might be to say “Well, maybe we could stimulate your brain artificially with a device in a way that would help you heal right now.”

Our ability to stimulate the nervous system non-invasively – that is to say from outside the skull – is really, really crude.

So there are techniques – there’s one called “transcranial magnetic stimulation” and there’s another one called “transcranial direct current stimulation” – these stimulate large volumes of brain tissue, like the volume of a golf ball, and within they stimulate every kind of neuron in that volume. So they’re really crude ways to activate or inhibit very large parts of the brain, but with time, we’ll have much more subtle ways of activating small bits of the brain. And not just a small volume of the brain, but even there are parts of the brain where there are different flavors of neurons that do different tasks, that are physically intermingled, and it’s been impossible – either with an electrode or with one of these outside the skull methods – to activate them or inhibit them. But there are going to be genetic optical tricks that we can now do in experimental animals to just activate one particular type of neuron in the brain that ultimately will able to be able to do as therapies for people. And this kind of manipulation that’s coming down the pipe will eventually be used to exploit mind-to-body signaling in ways that are medically beneficial.

And so mind-body medicine just doesn’t help us in the realm of behavioral interventions, it also helps us in the more conventional realm of drugs and devices.

Chapter 4: How our brains fight cancer

So, nearly five years ago, I was given six to 18 months to live as a consequence of my diagnosis of synovial sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer. I underwent surgery because they found a huge mass that was growing in my heart wall and the mass was enormous it was about the volume of a coca-cola can. I had a very long and elaborate surgery. Before the surgery, they thought this mass was likely to be a teratoma, which is a group of cells that have been present in your body since fetal life that grow in a weird way. So not a tumor, not cancer, a developmental abnormality. But unfortunately, they did the big surgery, they couldn’t remove all of the mass, they had to leave some of it that had grown into my heart wall and remains there to this day. A bit about the size of a walnut. And when they did the pathology they said, “Well no, actually, you have cancer, and you have a rare form of cancer called synovial sarcoma and you’re probably gonna die within six to 18 months.”

Cancer, the nervous system, and ‘the way of the nerd’

It’s a weird thing to be a biomedical researcher and to also be battling a terminal illness. The way I have approached my terminal illness is what I call “the way of the nerd.” The way of the nerd is to understand as much as you possibly can about your illness and to feel a sense of agency and control, and for me that has not been so much about learning all the molecular details about about cancer – I’m not a cancer biologist, I never have been and I never will be – but because my background is in neuroscience, it has brought me to understand the interactions between mental function, brain function, and my particular cancer situation.

For some people it’s the last thing they want to do. The last thing they want to do is to dive into all the biological details and understand the ins and outs of the disease, and I completely respect that and feel like that is a valid choice. But for a subset of us, like me, the way of the nerd is empowering and is a way to to deal with a terminal illness and make it possible to thrive in this liminal time while I’m still around.

So cancer is an opportunistic bastard, right? Cancer is just cell growth that gets out of control. There are many situations where we need our cells to divide and create more cells, and for that process to stop. We need it when we grow as babies, we need it when we grow up, we need it to regenerate certain tissues like in our skin that continually grow, or the lining of our respiratory or digestive system, these are things that are continually renewed. So we need cells to divide, that’s a fundamental thing. But when it gets out of control, that’s cancer. But that’s not just how cancer works. In other words, cancer isn’t just a bunch of cells that start dividing and then that’s all that happens.

When I say the cancer is a bastard, what I mean is that cancer co-ops other systems in the body to prevent the tumor cells from being degraded by your own immune system. It sends out signals that interfere with the immune system and the cells of the immune system to make it think like “Oh, there isn’t really any problem. No, that was just a hoax, you don’t actually need to attack me.” And it also co-ops signals that caused the cancer to grow and spread, so we know that many tumors, for example, send out chemical signals that attract blood vessels to grow in, and nourish, and feed the tumor, and promote its growth. That’s been known for quite a number of decades.

What is really becoming more understood just in the last 10 or 15 years is that the same thing happens with nerves. So, there’s a dialogue between tumor cells and nerves – actually several forms of dialogue. Many tumors secrete signals that cause nerves to grow into the tumor. They secrete molecules called neurotrophins that cause the nerve cells to grow in the direction of the tumor and ultimately actually penetrate the tumor, and these neurotrophins include molecules called nerve growth factor (or NGF) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or BDNF).

But it’s not just that the tumor talks to the nerves, the nerves talk to the tumors in many different ways. And one particular class of neuron which are pain-conveying sensory neurons secrete a signaling molecule called calcitonin gene-related peptide (or CGRP).

CGRP affects immune cells that patrol around the edge of the tumor and sort of nibble at its edges and kill the cells on the edge of the tumor and as a result prevent it from growing and spreading. So, when CGRP affects these immune cells, which are called CD8+ T lymphocytes, it suppresses their activity so they don’t nibble the edges of the tumors as much so then the tumor can grow more. And so tumors, when they are innervated, your prognosis becomes worse, and if we can prevent tumors from becoming innervated – this is a whole new promising realm in cancer therapy to slow the growth and spread of tumors.

If you buy a doctor a drink or two and you get them to talk to you, they’re very likely to say it’s not just the conventional medical therapy that determines the likelihood of someone’s successful outcome when they’re in the hospital or they’re being treated in the office. It has to also do with their own mental state and their own psychosocial support.

It’s well known in cardiology that people recover better from heart attacks, and from the treatment following heart attack, if they have social support, if they have their family around them, if they have psychotherapy, and this is an observation that has been borne out in a number of studies, but the underlying biology has not been clear.

Now, we have some very interesting experiments in mice, which are in early days, but are starting to draw out the biological pathways that might underlie that beneficial effect. And this comes from the laboratory of Asya Rolls, in Israel, and she has shown that if you artificially block the arteries of laboratory mice to give them heart attacks, that they can recover better if you artificially activate the brain’s natural reward and expectation circuitry. This is the dopamine using circuitry that involves a brain region called the ventral tegmental area. And if you use optical and genetic tricks to activate that circuitry that the mice recover from their artificial experimental induced heart attack much, much faster.

Their ability of their heart to forcefully contract and pump blood through the body comes back faster than it would otherwise, mimicking what we know about social connection on social and report support in humans recovering from heart attack. We can do things in laboratory mice that wouldn’t be ethical to do in humans, like go in and and make manipulations and measurements, and so we can now understand a cascade that goes through immune signaling involves a bypass through the liver that ultimately gets us to the heart and its recovery of function.

So it would be obviously comforting to think that social support, psychotherapy, the love of one’s family and friends, and social connectedness can help you have a better cancer outcome and increase your lifespan, reduce the spread – the metastasis of cancer, the growth of tumors – but is this just something we like to think? Or is it real?

And at this point, there is enough epidemiological evidence suggesting that psychosocial support, either in the case of psychotherapy or more informally through one social connections – it’s not a miracle. It can’t replace chemotherapy, or surgery, or radiation, but it does seem to have some beneficial effect on cancer progression.

What does this mean in terms about how we should think about making cancer therapy better? Well, obviously, there are behavioral things that you can do to make your cancer better – meditative practice, things that reduce stress seem to be good, and we seem to understand the biology of that because we know that stress hormone signaling promotes the growth and spread of tumors. We know that psychotherapy reduces stress hormone signaling as well, but it’s not just behavioral manipulations. Understanding that information is flowing from the brain to the cancer microenvironment – whether it’s having effect on cancer cells directly around the immune cells that are patrolling around and keeping the cancer in check – this allows us to develop new drug therapies as well.

So for example there are certain types of cancer that have a neurotransmitter receptor on them called the beta adrenergic receptor – this is the receptor for a neurotransmitter / hormone called noradrenaline, which confusingly also has the name norepinephrine, it’s the same molecule. And people may have heard of drugs called beta blockers, which are drugs that people take to calm their heart rate and feel more calm if they’re feeling anxiety. These same beta blocking drugs, for a subset of cancers, seem to slow cancer progression because the beta receptors on the tumor cells contribute to cancer progression. So this understanding of brain to body signaling in cancer, allows us not just to have better behavioral measures to combat cancer, but to have better drug use as well.

There are a lot of correlational studies that have shown that when people exercise, their cancer outcomes are better. They live longer, they progress less quickly, they’re more likely to go into remission, but you got to be suspicious of these studies because the devil’s in the details. Well you could say, “Well, maybe the people who are more inclined to exercise, maybe their cancer wasn’t as bad to start with. Maybe they didn’t feel as ill and that’s why they’re more likely to exercise. And so it’s not really that exercise makes it better, it’s a complication of that.” Or you might say, “Well maybe the kind of people who are motivated to exercise a lot are also the kind of people who are more likely not to have bad habits like smoking or drug use. They’re more likely to eat a healthy diet, and it’s the reducing drug use on the healthy diet that’s beneficial for cancer, and the exercise isn’t even it.”

But recently, there have been a few randomized control studies where we take a group of people – of cancer patients – and we say, “All right, you guys exercise and you guys just like, do whatever you want to do. We’re giving you this pamphlet, but we’re not going to enroll you in exercise class. We’re not going to monitor you. We’re not going to give you social support.” And there was just a study published this year in 2025 out of Australia for colon cancer, and the result was remarkably strong.

The people who were randomly placed in the exercise group had a 30% improvement in mortality over eight years. If this were a drug effect, it would be – everybody would want this drug. This would be a massive, anti-cancer effect. This kind of study doesn’t suffer from the same problems of these post-hoc association studies of “is it really the exercise that gave the benefit? Or the things that go along with the exercise, something merely correlated with it?” So the evidence is really looking like the benefits of exercise for cancer are clear, and they’re not small effects. They’re big effects.

If you’re battling cancer and you can bring yourself to do it, exercises one of the very, very best things that you can do.

We’re recording this in 2025, I was given six to eighteen months to live in 2021. And so you can do the math in your head and realize that I didn’t, fortunately, really die in six to 18 months. And yet here I am, still alive, and people ask me “Why do you think you’re still alive?” and I said, “Well, I don’t entirely know but I think a portion of it comes from the deep love that I feel from my wife Dina.”

And when I say this, people get a look on their face like “Oh, isn’t that sweet, he’s complimenting his wife. He’s taking off his scientist hat and he is putting on his good spouse hat.” And that’s not the case. That’s not what I mean.

When I say that the deep and unconditional love that I feel my wife is helping to keep my cancer at bay, I am saying that as a biomedical researcher. And I am saying that with the idea that this isn’t occurring in the realm of ether and spirituality, that it is occurring in the realm of biology.

So how might this happen? How do we get from my wife’s deep and unconditional love to my cancer being suppressed? Well, the answer is we don’t entirely know, but there’s a couple of likely ways. One of them is that it’s extremely likely that, like many tumors, my tumor receives nerve fibers from both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system, as well as sensory nerve fibers, and as a consequence, patterns of activity in my brain evoked by my wife’s love, like activation of the ventral tegmental reward and anticipation circuitry through their action in the hypothalamus and some other brain areas, are conveying signals – electrical signals – to my tumor that ultimately suppress its growth and spread. However, it is also very likely that this very same pathway – the activation of the reward and anticipation circuitry in the brain – is producing modification of the brain’s control of the immune system and is boosting my immune system through the secretion of immune signaling molecules called cytokines in a way that allows circulating T-cells and naturally natural killer cells in my immune system to more effectively attack the surface of the tumor that’s large in my heart wall.

What’s exciting about this, even though it’s early days, and even though we don’t absolutely know that either of those two biological pathways are indeed the way that my cancer is being kept at bay, what’s exciting is that we are now at a point where we have biological hypotheses for what before would have been solely behavioral or spiritual explanations.

Chapter 5: How a neuroscientist prepares for death

When I got the diagnosis, I was supremely angry. At age 59, I did not feel ready to die. I felt like I have a lot to do, I have people who depend upon me, I have a wonderful wife, terrific children. I don’t want to leave and I was white hot angry with the universe. But, at the very same time, I felt a very deep sense of gratitude. I’ve been fortunate in life, I’ve had a wonderful life, I have terrific people around me, I’ve been able to have a job that has allowed me to not have a boss, and to follow my own curiosity, and to use my mind in ways that most people don’t get. And so what was remarkable, as a neuroscientist, is that we tend to think of mental states as being unitary: are you preparing to fight or are you going to rest? But it’s possible to occupy two very divergent mental states at the same time. So I could simultaneously be exceedingly angry and exceedingly grateful. And that was something that I didn’t realize before my cancer taught me that.

Another thing is that it really reinforced to me that our brains and our minds are not built to give us the truth, to give us the low down about anything. We’re not we’re not built to know the absolute values of things. Everything is subjective – everything that we perceive is subject to our emotional state and to our expectations. When I was diagnosed, I thought, “Well, if I could get five more years of life, that would be so wonderful? I could spend time with my family, I could travel, I could do some work in my laboratory, I could have my trainees finish their experiments naturally and not have their careers messed with, so many good things would happen.” Getting five more years would be great when I was looking at a diagnosis of six to eighteen months.

But if someone had just come up to me before cancer and said, “Well, you’re gonna die in five years” I would have said “What do you mean? I’m only 59. I should get more than five years. What the hell are you talking about?” So something as fundamental as five more years of life that we think of having a very basic value, doesn’t. In one context, seems like an impossible gift. In another context, it seems like being cosmically cheated. But I think the realization that I had that was the most profound for me, as a neuroscientist grappling with a terminal diagnosis, was the fact that as much as I tried I really could not, and still to this day, cannot engage with the idea of my own death – of a world where I’m no longer in it.

Now, I can do practical things. I can make sure my will is in order, I can dot the I’s and cross the T’s, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about truly cognitively and emotionally engaging and thinking about a world with me no longer in it.

I realized that my mind was really kind of skittering across the surface of this idea that I was not able to engage with it deeply in the matter that I think it really deserved. This probably wasn’t just my own personal failing, it was revealing something fundamental about what it’s like to have a human mind.

I’ve been in neuroscience for a long time, over 40 years now, and there has been a fundamental change in how we think about the brain. We used to think that the brain was fundamentally reactive, that we waited for something, information to come in for our senses, and then we would do some processing on it, and then react to it, and what we now know is that when we are spacing out, when our brain is idling, when we are not engaging with the outside world, that the brain is not just spacing out, that we are actively trying to predict the future. The brain’s a prediction machine and, specifically, it’s not just trying to predict the future, it’s trying to predict the near future. It’s trying to predict the next few minutes, the next few hours, maybe the next few days. Is that rock flying through the air gonna hit me in the head, is this person walking towards me a friend or a foe, am I likely to become hungry in the next few hours and how I should plan my day – these are all predictions that are happening in my brain while it idols, while it’s in its so-called default mode.

Now, the fact that the brain is constantly trying to predict the future presupposes that there will be a future. It presupposes that you’re not dead and gone and so I think this fundamental computation, this fundamental future predicting computation is not just what keeps me, and perhaps others isn’t my situation from truly engaging with our own mortality and imagining a world without us in it, but I would speculate that this is what has allowed for afterlife stories being so important in almost, not all, but almost all of the world’s religions.

Almost all of the world’s religions have the story of an afterlife or reincarnation or melding of the divine or some kind of construct in which one’s consciousness endures after we die. I think that this is in some ways a bug. It is a bug – it’s a side effect of the near future predicting circuitry in our brain that allows us to imagine that consciousness goes on after death.

Now, I’m personally, I’m not a person of faith – I think that when you die, you die, and your consciousness doesn’t go on – but I am very sympathetic to these cross-cultural religious and spiritual ideas that consciousness endures. And I think ultimately there is a neurological and a biological explanation for why those stories are present all around the world.

Some people say, “Well, do you appreciate the little things more” like, do you appreciate you know the color in the sunset and the taste of your tea in the morning, and, you know, to a certain extent, I guess I do. But really I am appreciative in the time I have left of the very largest things that life has afforded me, you know. My terrific wife, who I love deeply, my wonderful children and the good friends and colleagues that I have that have been so supportive. This is what I’m thankful for. This is what I try to remember every day in the time I have left. The wonder and the privilege of being a sentient being on this planet and be able to have a mind and to and to be curious and to move through the world in this way, it’s it’s a miracle, and I find myself ever grateful.

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This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang.

Timestamps

0:00:05 How astronomers seek to answer the biggest questions in the universe
0:02:20 The reality of being an astronomer
0:04:58 How scientists actually come up with new ideas
0:07:39 What astronomers actually study vs. big cosmic questions
0:13:28 Rethinking reality: Einstein, space & time
0:18:30 Quantum mechanics & the nature of spacetime
0:25:50 Neutron stars are the most extreme objects in the universe
0:33:04 The strange physics of empty space
0:37:41 The hidden danger of the Sun (solar wind explained)
0:43:55 Could a solar storm wipe out civilization?
0:52:16 Mining asteroids, magnetic fields & navigating the universe
0:58:05 When astronomy realized the Sun isn’t what we thought
1:00:20 Big Bang, universe origins & limits of human understanding

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

My name is Michelle Thaller, and I am an astronomer. I work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

How astronomers seek to answer the biggest questions in the universe.

There’s sort of two words that float about, there’s astronomer and astrophysicist, and it kind of depends on whether you’re trying to put on a more friendly or formal vibe, I think. They really, these days, mean the same thing. I think there was a time when there was sort of a separation of duties.

There were people that say a hundred years ago would map the stars and create all these wonderful catalogs of stars. And you might call those astronomers the name is from astro-nomy, to name the stars. And then there were people that tried to figure out what the stars were and how they worked and what the science of it was. Behind all that, those would be the astrophysicists. And these days, the two studies are really the same. If you’re an astronomer or an astrophysicist, you pretty much do the same thing these days. The word that was probably the best word, astrology, to study the stars. That one was already taken.

A lot of the questions that I get from members of the public are these vast conjectural questions like, “Is there a multiverse?” Or, “What happened before the Big Bang?” So for my doctorate, for my research, I studied binary stars. I studied two stars that orbit each other, and most stars in the universe are like that, by the way. And in the case of my stars, they had these wonderful colliding winds of high-energy particles that produced these giant shocks in the sky.

The fun thing is that, for a while at least, and maybe today, there are some stars in the sky that I’ve probably spent more time with than anybody else in the world. I observed them for hours and hours trying to figure out how these colliding atmospheres worked.

In the case of myself, I’m an observational astronomer. I went to observatories all over the world. About 25 years ago when I was most active in research I did a lot of research in Australia, in Arizona, the Kitt Peak telescopes, Mount Stromlo in Arizona. I also used a lot of satellite data. I had data from X-ray satellites and the Hubble Space Telescope, I actually got some time.

You see, as an astronomer, you are allowed to write into these observatories. It usually happens once a year. And there is a panel that basically assesses, what would all these people around the world like to do with the Hubble Space Telescope? And this panel of astronomers actually decides who should get priority.

The reality of being an astronomer

One of the things about being an astronomer is you end up doing a lot of writing. You end up doing a lot of writing, asking for time on these telescopes, and then hoping that your proposal gets selected. Another thing is you end up asking for a lot of time to write grants for money to support your work. If you get some time on the Hubble Space Telescope, often it comes with an amount of money to support the time you’re going to do that research.

So, it turns out that being an astronomer, all of the training is about the math and the physics and the computer science. And then what you actually do day to day is often a lot of writing and a lot of trying to organize proposals and grants and how you’re going to support yourself doing your science. And then if you work for a large organization like NASA, some of your time as well is usually assigned to some specific mission.

Some specific space telescope where you’re going to be helping clean up the data, figure out how we’re going to issue a call for proposals, organize the panels that are going to vet and look at all these different things. So, in a way, you become kind of an administrator. A lot of meetings. I think that the normal life cycle of an astronomer is probably 80% like businessperson. A lot of meetings, a lot of grants, a lot of budgets.

But then, at least for me, there really was this time, it doesn’t happen so much when you’re a more mature astronomer, but when you’re really young and out in the field and making your own discoveries, it really does feel like you’re sort of alone with the night sky all by yourself, up on top of that mountain. And you’re seeing things coming down through your telescope that it’s a minor advance, but no human being has ever seen before.

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And it’s a wonderful feeling of empowerment and sort of collaborating with the sky and seeing what we can figure out. One of the things is when you get a doctorate, you have to produce some kind of original research, something that’s never really been done before, and that’s not as hard as it sounds. That sounds very intimidating.

I mean, how am I going to think of an idea that nobody’s ever thought of before? But nothing in astronomy happens alone. What happens when you’re a graduate student after college is you will join a professor doing his or her research with them sort of as an apprentice. And then over time, as you get more familiar with the work, they will give you a little piece of that research like, “Hey, you go ahead and take this part over yourself.”

You don’t really need to think of things entirely, just off the top of your head and come up with brilliant ideas out of nowhere. You start little by little working with a group of astronomers, and then slowly you start to ask your own questions. Maybe they’ve never had time on a telescope to look up this little bit of it, or this little bit of it over here is a new question nobody thought of. And eventually you realize that what you’re doing is something that hasn’t been done before.

How scientists actually come up with new ideas

I guess there were probably about a dozen stars in the sky, but there were three that I really, really focused on. And in in every case, these were binary stars and these were stars that were very massive, stars that were say anywhere between like 15 and 50 times the mass of the Sun. Big stars. They actually only orbit around each other every couple of days or at most about a week.

So, these are very big stars in very close orbits. And so, it should make sense these stars are pouring off not only light, but high-energy particles, this wind of particles that we call stellar winds. And then they collide in between these two stars.

Sometimes ,one of their winds will not be as strong as the other. So the wind from one sort of overtakes the other one and kind of blasts away the wind from the other one. And as they turn around each other, you actually sort of have this wonderful kind of three-dimensional view of how that shockwave goes all the way around.

I use a technique called tomography, which is the same sort of thing you use in a CAT scan, or something like an MRI where you’re trying to produce a three-dimensional scan of inside the human body. In this case the instrument goes around you. But in the case of the stars, the stars would go around each other and then I could use this sort of software mainly developed for medicine to actually try to figure out the structure of these shockwaves.

This is just sort of work-a-day astronomy, nothing all that incredible or sexy about it, but it helps you understand stars better. It turns out that these shockwaves are responsible for producing a lot of the molecules that we find in space. Stars create atoms, they fuse hydrogen into helium and then eventually helium into larger atoms over time. But these shockwaves, at least in the cooler parts of them, can produce things like water, the water molecule.

And there are some binary stars, like there are some in the Orion Nebula that are producing enough water in a single day along these shockwaves to fill the oceans of the Earth like 60 times over in a single day. Now, obviously this isn’t liquid water, this is water in a molecular form, a pretty hot gas actually. But that’s where a lot of the molecules responsible for life can come from is from these shockwaves. So it’s a way of trying to figure out just little by little how the universe really does work, how stars work. So my research is much more observational, much more about stars. I certainly took classes in cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole. I took classes in quantum mechanics, graduate-level quantum mechanics, graduate-level electromagnetism, all of that. People often start right off with the “Are there parallel universes?” and I’d rather they sort of ask me “What are the importance of binary stars?”

What astronomers actually study vs. big cosmic questions

There’s honestly not all that many astronomers by number that do theoretical cosmology. Most of us are trying to figure out things like how stars are born and how they like live their lives and die. We’re trying to figure out what’s left over after a star explodes, a black hole, a neutron star, or we’re trying to figure out how galaxies work, how many galaxies there are, how do we observe them, how do they change over time? There’s only a few of us that are trying to answer questions like, “What happened before the Big Bang?” Or “Are there multiverses?” We all study that to an extent, and we all go to lectures at the conferences. I love going to the ones on quantum theory and quantum gravity.

Most astronomers study things that are a bit more concrete than that if very far away. So, it’s often the case that I’m giving some lecture on these wonderful new images of Saturn from one of our spacecrafts like Cassini, and they’re so beautiful and we’re learning things about the atmosphere. And look at these pictures of these little moons we took in the ring system and we’re studying the ring system, and we have a wonderful lecture.

I turn to the audience and say, “Hey, any questions?” And somebody raises their hand. And the first one is “Are there multiple universes?” It’s like Saturn. There are some words that are really easy to throw around. And in science they become interestingly complicated. People often say “Do you believe such and such is true? Do you believe the Big Bang is true? Do you believe that the idea of multiple universes is true?” A lot of these things. And when you’re a scientist, you’re aware that what you’re doing is you’re constantly trying to approach reality. You’re trying to get closer and closer to describing something very well. But you’re not all the way there yet. It’s quite possible that we never will be. It’s quite possible that human beings with our limited senses and our limited brains even won’t really know what the true nature of reality is.

It’s one of these kind of wonderful things that truth can change a hundred years ago people were certain that the universe was not expanding and of course we found out that it was, and you have to be able sometimes to take your very precious images, models of what the universe is like, about what reality is like, even about what the definition of truth is.

You need to make sure that you’re ready to change when better information comes on board. In physics, at least for the last hundred years, that has really challenged us to leave behind our human ideas of common sense, the very definition and perhaps existence of space and time. The whole idea about, “What is reality? What is existence, what am I?” is a very, very complex question now to answer.

I mean, to give you some ideas about this, there are some things that are very simple. Like what is the interior of the Sun like? It’s obviously something we’ve never directly observed, but we see energy pouring out of the Sun. There are actually waves, almost like earthquake waves that go around the Sun that help us to study the interior, the way those waves travel. But do we know exactly how the core of the Sun works? No. No, we don’t. There are things that we get pretty close to, but we just don’t really have the observational ability to do so. But then there are questions like, “What are space and time really?”

For so long we’ve just sort of taken it for granted that space and time exist around us. Time flows in one direction, space extends perhaps to infinity. But then there was also a time when we didn’t think that air was anything. People didn’t realize that we actually live at the bottom of this wonderful ocean of air that is our atmosphere. People took it for granted that that air existed. That was actually proven in the 18th century that this was actually something.

Einstein showed us that space and time absolutely cannot be the simple way we perceive them. It all is related around the speed of light. The speed of light is always constant to any observer. One of the myths about Einstein was that he pulled all of these amazing ideas just kind of out of his head from nowhere, that he wasn’t part of the scientific establishment. Well, in fact, he was. He was a professor, he was actually a graduate student trying to get a job when he was working at that patent office that he had that miracle year where he came up with the theories of special and general relativity among other things.

So here’s an example about allowing yourself to define whether something is true in kind of a bit more of an active way. Isaac Newton was able to describe very, very well how gravity worked. He was really one of the first people that said, “There’s this force of gravity.” And he just said that it’s a force. “This force permeates the universe. And this is why the planets orbit the Sun. This is why apples fall from trees is they’re reacting to this force.” And by using his equation of gravity, you could calculate that force very, very well.

So, you had this great thing, the force of gravity. The force exists; it binds the universe together. But then you have to ask the question, “Okay, what do we mean by that? What is the force of gravity? What is it really? What causes it?” And it took Albert Einstein to say that what we think of as gravity, is actually a curvature of space and time, things have to follow space and time. We are all embedded in the space and time of the universe.

So, if that space and time has a shape to it, a curve to it, we have to follow that, light has to follow that light itself that has no mass can actually bend and go into a black hole. And that’s because the light has to travel through space and time and the space and time itself is bent. So, all of a sudden there was this answer, what is the force of gravity? It’s a bending of space and time. So, is that it? Is that the end of those questions that we can ask there? Well, how about the rather obvious next one: what is space and time?

Rethinking reality: Einstein, space & time

Okay, there’s this thing that Einstein called spacetime, that your space and time are sort of mixed together. They’re two sides of the same coin. When you change one, the other has to change. If you are in a gravitational field and space is bent, time actually slows down. It actually affects time as well. We know that these two things are bound together, but what are they?

Time can be different for different observers depending on your velocity. If you’re going very close to the speed of light, as people observe you going by, they say your time is very slowed down. If you’re actually a photon going at the speed of light, time stops entirely. So what do we mean by this thing called time? And this is now what some of the major physicists of the world are grappling with and they’re trying to come up with some very interesting answers. And I think the answers that will be very challenging for us.

Imagine being a physicist back in the early 1900s and having this young Albert Einstein tell you space and time are bendable. You can change them, you can manipulate them. You might have thought they were crazy. How about looking at space and time instead as a consequence of quantum mechanics. A lot of people have been saying that relativity and quantum mechanics don’t match, they don’t work together. And this is true.

This has been true since the beginning of relativity and quantum mechanics about the same time. Relativity says that if you have a certain amount of mass, you can actually say space bends this much. And quantum mechanics says that everything is down to probabilities. The universe never has set answers, but maybe the probabilities of a particle being here versus there. Even the curvature of gravity must somehow be probabilistic. And Einstein didn’t like that. There was no way to work that into his equations that actually made them both work at the same time.

What if we were asking the wrong question? What if we’re not looking at two different things? What if we could actually say that spacetime itself is a consequence of quantum mechanics, not something separate from it, not two things that are clashing together. And this is the idea now that perhaps quantum entanglement, if you look at it correctly, is spacetime. Now, quantum entanglement isn’t just a term you can throw off very, very easily, but this is something that we have now observed and been able to replicate in laboratories all across the world, even in space actually.

If two objects interact together, they can actually sort of become, in a sense, the same system under the laws of quantum mechanics. So let me just give you a very simple example of this. A lot of people know the model of an atom where you have this nucleus of protons and neutrons and the electrons can be in different orbits around there. In fact, in a single orbit around the nucleus, there can be two electrons, but those electrons can’t be exactly the same. You can’t have two that are identical. They have to have opposing spins, angular momentum.

It turns out you can have two electrons in each one of these orbits, but the electrons can’t be identical. They have to be spinning in opposite directions. It’s a strange idea that electrons spin, but at least you can say that there’s some kind of intrinsic angular momentum. What we think of as something spinning, that’s actually a property that a particle can have. Whether or not there’s actually like a physical little ball, electrons are not little balls, but they do have a property of spin, of angular momentum. You could have two of them in the same orbit as long as they have opposing spins: one spinning one way, the other one spinning the other way.

So say that one is spinning up and one is spinning down. The way my thumbs are pointing. That these two electrons have to have different spins. So what happens if you actually take them out of that system, you take them away from the atom entirely? And now you’ve got these two little electrons somewhere in space and that they have to have opposing spins because they once were in that same orbit. Well, okay, so now separate them, separate them by a couple of feet, maybe a couple of miles. How about a couple hundreds of miles? Maybe there’s no limit.

We found out that if you use some sort of energy to change the spin of one of these electrons, the other one basically instantly knows that that’s happened. And it’s not that there is a signal passing between one of these to another because it doesn’t travel even at the speed of light. It’s an instantaneous flip. It’s not a signal traveling because these two things are basically the same quantum system. In the rules of quantum mechanics, they are the same object. So, there’s no signal really to travel.

To a quantum system, there really isn’t any such thing as space or time. It will adjust instantaneously because it’s the same system, whether it’s microscopic or whether it’s many thousands of miles apart, they’re the same thing. Could it be that everything is entangled to everything else in some way? Well, I mean there once was a time when the universe was very small, the time right after the Big Bang where in a way we were all kind of the same particle. That particle has changed and expanded. But is it possible to think that in some way we’re actually the same quantum system to everything in the universe? And what we perceive of as space and time is the degree to which we’re entangled.

Quantum mechanics & the nature of spacetime

We’re entangled more to things that are closer to us that have a chance to interact with us. The air in this room, that the space that’s only outside in my yard, I’m less entangled to things that I’ve not been able to interact with much for a long time. Things like distant galaxies, I haven’t been close to them since the beginning of the universe. Einstein asked, “What is gravity really?” And now we have to ask, “What is spacetime really?” And we know it can’t be as simple as the way we perceive it.

Maybe the underlying quantum reality of the universe is that everything, in a way, really is still the same quantum system. I’ve always thought when people think about alien civilizations and they say they flying saucers and UFOs and spaceships, I kind of wonder if the next step in really understanding reality is that there’s no such thing as distance and maybe a very advanced civilization that can somehow manipulate that, you don’t have to travel anywhere in a spaceship. You simply figure out how you access this entanglement of the rest of the universe.

Could it be that you are really the same quantum system as everything in the universe at once? And that degree of entanglement is what we think of as space, as time, as gravity. That’s an amazing idea and it’s one that more and more people are starting to look at. Do we know this is true yet? No, this is still conjectural. But the physics is working very well. And one of the promising things is that the equations of gravity emerge now from quantum mechanics.

They’re no longer, “General relativity quantum mechanics, they don’t mix.” You start with quantum mechanics and gravity emerges from it from the degree of entanglement. So stay put for a couple more decades. And like I said, maybe someday we’re actually going to figure out what the underlying structure of this entanglement is, and then we can actually move outside of space and time. When you are pure energy, you have to travel at the speed of light.

A photon has to travel at the speed of light. It can’t go any other speed. A photon can’t exist in a state where it’s only moving at say, 20 miles an hour. It has to travel at the speed of light. And when you’re traveling at the speed of light, you don’t experience space or time. You’re probably familiar with Einstein’s idea that as you go faster and faster, closer to the speed of light, time slows down for you compared to an observer watching you. If I’m sitting here still on the Earth and I watch somebody in a spaceship whizzing by at half the speed of light, I see them very, very slowed down compared to me.

And when you’re actually going at the speed of light itself, time stops. That means that light does not experience space or time in any kind of extended way. All points in space are one, and all time, all points in time, are one. Time and space don’t exist to a photon the way it does to us. And yet I am made of I experience those as extended properties.

There’s a duality to the universe, and I think this is going to become one of the most important things for modern physics, that the next revolutions in physics. Light around us. I mean, it’s coming from the Sun through my windows. It’s coming at me through the lights that we have in the studio doesn’t experience the same universe I do. To it, in a real way, the universe never expanded. All points of time and space are still one from the perspective of a photon, and I’m made of photons kind of. But why do I experience space and time?

Space and time as we perceive them cannot be the end story. There has to be a different perspective that shows us a reality that our human brains don’t perceive yet. But the physics all around us of something as simple as light demands it. The things that kind of give me chills is just how little we understand the nature of reality itself. If something bouncing off me right now doesn’t experience the universe as having even expanded, what does that mean?

So that equation E=mc2, I mean it’s useful. You can use it to power nuclear reactions, you can use it for particle accelerators, but it actually sorts of claws away the fabric of reality itself and challenges us to ask what’s underneath. To me, I think one of the most amazing things about the universe is the question: what is energy? And this can go very, very deep. A lot of us are familiar with how it takes energy to accelerate something, like to actually like throw a softball that takes energy, chemical energy from your arms.

Or you could say something has potential energy, like it’s sitting at the top of a hill and it’s prone to roll down the hill in the gravity field of the Earth. That’s actually called potential energy. But then there’s also the energy that’s just intrinsic in matter.

One of the things that always gets me about this is that energy, light — light is sort of a form of pure energy and us — matter, we’re made of particles like protons and neutrons and electrons, they seem so different. They seem to have completely different views of the universe as well, which I think is one of the more interesting and disturbing things I know about in modern physics. Let’s just think about the idea that energy and mass really are somehow the same thing. That mass is some like coagulated stored form of energy.

That means the two of them you can actually go from energy to mass and back and forth. And that’s the famous equation that Einstein came up with E=mc2, that in any amount of mass there is an equivalent amount of energy. And the two are basically the same things. The universe actually doesn’t seem to see much difference between mass and energy. As long as the amount is the same it can exist in either form. And let me give you some examples of that.

The way a nuclear reaction works, like a nuclear fusion reaction, is you convert some amount of mass into pure energy. Nuclear fusion actually brings particles together, slams them into larger atoms, and in the process, energy is released. So a little bit of mass is lost, but energy is produced. It also goes the other way. In a particle accelerator, you get more and more energy because of collisions of particles colliding together. They produce so much energy that as long as a given particle has that amount of energy, any particle can pop out of that reactor.

And that’s how we find new particles. As we get to higher and higher energies in a particle accelerator, just having that amount of energy around, the universe can manifest it now as mass. It takes a lot of energy, E=mc2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That’s a lot. But energy and mass pretty much are the same thing. One of the ways the universe seems to do this is something called virtual particles that if you have just the energy around you, the energy of space and time itself, there’s sort of an inherent energy just in the universe.

That energy can actually become mass. It’ll actually form what we call virtual particle pairs like an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Those two particles will just literally pop out of the universe because there’s that amount of energy around. And then pretty much always, they just annihilate each other. They just go back. Matter and anti-matter, annihilate back into pure energy. And this is happening all around you, everywhere around you in space, these little virtual particles are forming and collapsing together all the time.

Neutron stars are the most extreme objects in the universe

Some of the more interesting things happen in the universe when those particles get separated. One example is around a neutron star. It can actually make a beam of energy coming off the magnetic poles of the neutron stars by having virtual particles be created and then accelerated by the magnetic field. So all of a sudden you have this energy that wasn’t there before produced by the virtual particles themselves. As you get to higher energies, say you have a very, very strong magnetic field, very high energy, again, we find these around neutron stars, that can start creating lots and lots of these virtual particle pairs. And the more energy you have, the more of these little virtual particles you get until space itself takes on an aspect of having mass. The density of these virtual particles right around a neutron star, even an empty space itself, would be about three times the density of iron. It’s just unbelievable.

So, energy and mass really are the same thing. They’re two sides of the same coin. They can be converted back and forth to each other, and the universe doesn’t really care. It sees them both the same way. When people think about the most dramatic things in space, they tend to go immediately to black holes, which are absolutely incredible, out-of-control gravity that can actually suck light back in. It’s just amazing. But I think neutron stars deserve a little more love because a neutron star is also created when a massive star dies, but it doesn’t have quite enough mass to actually collapse into a black hole.

It actually leaves behind a physical thing that you can study. So, while black holes are just, are this bottomless pit with neutron stars, you have this very strange thing that you can look at them, you can observe them, you can take real measurements of, and you’re looking at something that is mind blowing. And in some ways, our physics really isn’t ready to describe yet.

The thing about a neutron star, why do we call it a neutron star for one thing? And I’m going to really oversimplify here, but basically when you think about an atom, you have protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom, and then electrons are in orbitals around farther away from around the nucleus. Amazingly, the gravity of a neutron star is so strong that it actually collapses the electrons into the nucleus. The gravity crushes electrons into the nucleus. And if you crush an electron and a proton together, one is negatively charged, one is positively charged, you will get a neutron.

A neutron actually will naturally decay sometimes into an electron and a proton. You have an object that’s mainly made of neutrons. There are some protons as well, and it basically has the density of an atomic nucleus, but it’s about 10 miles across. I mean, that’s like one big nucleus, 10 miles across. It’s incredible. And because there was so much collapse involved in their forming, when you think about what they call the conservation of angular momentum, if something is spinning, and stars actually do spin, if you collapse that down, you actually spin up much faster.

It’s the classic ice skater analogy. You have an ice skater with her arms out, spinning around, and then as she draws them in, you can watch that ice skater spin faster and faster. Same thing happens. But in this case, you actually have a ball that is about 10 miles across, spinning 500 times a second. I mean that in itself is just mind blowing to think of, right? Something that big spinning that fast.

Now, recently, neutron stars have played this important role in explaining something that we had no explanation for. They were very, very mysterious. In fact, there were some people that were wondering if we were actually looking, it might be a signal from an advanced alien civilization. Those are called fast radio bursts.

Now, fast radio bursts had been in the news for a couple of years because there was so much energy in these mysterious bursts of radio emission that we couldn’t explain what was going on. So, for example, we would have our radio telescopes would register a burst of emission.

And that burst would last, say a millisecond, 1/1,000th of a second. That’s about how long these things would last. But in that 1/1,000th of a second enough energy was radiated similar to what the Sun puts out in a week in a millisecond. And so we were getting these signals from all over the sky, and we were trying to figure out what that could possibly be.

How could you make that much of a tight burst of radiation in that small amount of time at those incredibly high energies? So the race was on to try to figure out what these fast radio bursts really were. Luckily we have many, many things that are at our disposal to try to study these things. Right now we have many high-energy telescopes that actually are orbiting the Earth, that measure things like X-rays and gamma rays, the most energetic types of light, light you only get if something is in the millions or billions of degrees, it’ll actually emit X-rays and gamma rays. A wonderful thing is that we actually started to be able to kind of pinpoint to where these things were coming from in the sky. And as we did that, they actually seemed to line up with neutron stars. So, neutron stars are most likely responsible for these fast radio bursts.

Now, exactly what’s happening is something that we don’t really know yet, but it probably has something to do with almost like an earthquake. An earthquake, you have something in our crust shifts and there are all these waves that go through the Earth. It’s actually the way that we know the interior of the Earth is by studying those waves.

We’ve never been able to actually take a sample of the fact that the Earth has magma all the way down until you get to a, at first, a liquid metal core, then a solid metal core. No one’s ever seen that physically, but we actually watch how these waves of compression go through the Earth and we can put together what the interior of the Earth must be like. The same thing may be possible for neutron stars, but on a much more energetic scale. You have this ball of neutrons, incredible densities, incredible temperatures, and we think that there must be a crust of neutrons actually, that actually forms on the outside of these stars. And inside is probably a fluid, a fluid of pure neutrons.

We know this because neutron stars, as they spin, sometimes seem to sort of slosh around almost like a water balloon. So we’ve modeled that to be sort of a crystalline thin crust. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I mean, for one thing, the gravity would be so intense near that crust that it would just crush you into just particles basically on the surface of that neutron star.

But if that crust were to have a flaw in it, and there was some sort of a quake, it shifted somehow, it would send compression waves through the neutron star and release tremendous amounts of energy in a quick little moment of the crust actually sort of refiguring itself. So right now our best explanation is that these amazingly mysterious fast radio bursts are probably neutron star quakes. And just like earthquakes have taught us so much about the interior of earth, now we’re looking at the signal, even in a thousandth of a second, take that signal and pull it apart and try to find the structure that’s going on inside that burst of radiation and see if we can reconstruct what the inside of a neutron star is like.

Neutron stars really are these real monsters. Unlike black holes, you can see them, you can see their surfaces, you can actually map how the radiation is coming off them.

The strange physics of empty space

When it comes to really mysterious parts of the universe but things that you actually can measure, I’d say go for some neutron stars. The closest neutron stars to us are very far away. They’re on the order of many hundreds or thousands of light years. So luckily, they don’t really cause any trouble for us.

But the question I’ve always wondered is how close you could actually get to one of these things and make a measurement before you would just be fried by radiation or in the case of a neutron star, something stranger still.

A lot of people are familiar with Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, which says that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. And what that really means is that in any amount of mass, so if I think about like the mass in my little finger, there’s a tremendous amount of energy.

If I could convert my little finger into pure energy, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan, converted on the order of like a dime’s worth of mass. There would be many, many nuclear warheads, right in my little fingers worth of energy. But E=mc2 also goes the other way. If you have a lot of energy, that basically starts acting the same way as mass, and it does so in something called virtual particles. If you have a lot of energy in a small space, the universe will start to actually create particles that have the same energy in their mass. So a lot of energy can actually become mass. And this is how our particle accelerators work.

This is why you can discover new particles, because if you just have a very energetic collision, like you take two gold nuclei and you slam ‘em together, there’s so much energy produced in that collision that it starts to pop off particles just from the amount of energy. And as long as you have enough energy, you can make any particle the universe has. Their particles come off in all different flavors as long as they have the same amount of energy that that collision is putting out.

So neutron stars are doing something kind of like that. They’re actually becoming sort of natural particle accelerators in a way just because of their mass. There is so much gravitational contraction that the magnetic field, the electric field and magnetic field of that star is actually compressed around this tiny little object now. So, neutron stars have magnetic fields that are trillions of times more strong than a typical magnet you might have in your home, like your refrigerator magnet. It would actually pull regular matter apart, just the magnetic field. But there’s so much energy in those magnetic fields.

So think about E=mc2, there’s so much magnetic energy right around a neutron star that the vacuum of space itself starts to make these virtual particles. And I was at a lecture one time, and this just blew my mind this is what happens when you work at NASA and you go into a lecture your colleagues are having just any day of the week. And they were saying that right around a neutron star the density of space itself, the vacuum of space, right, a place where it’s a vacuum, there aren’t any particles otherwise, has about three times the density of pure iron just from that amount of virtual particles being produced by the energy of that magnetic field.

So what’s it like to fly around something where space itself has the density of three times of iron? What’s that like? What does that look like? I would love to see what a neutron star looks like from a safe distance. And I’m not exactly sure what that is. When you’re dealing with so much energy that even empty space becomes much more dense than iron. And once again, these are real, they’re up in the night sky tonight. I mean, you can’t see them because they’re dim and they’re small and they’re far away so it’s not something we actually see in the night sky, but all around us we’re getting the radiation, the high-energy radiation from these things that are real monsters. Our sun has this wind of high-energy particles that this is something that was only relatively recently discovered.

I mean, when you think about the fact that the very first satellites we put into space starting in the very late 1950s, and in 1960s they realized that there was this source of radiation up there. There was a lot of particles around up in space. I actually had the honor of being next to this man named Eugene Parker. We have a wonderful mission named after him called the Parker Solar Probe. This mission is actually orbiting around the Sun right now, closer than any human-made thing has ever orbited the Sun before. It’s really, really exciting. He was, I believe 94 years old at the time of the launch. Usually we only name spacecraft after people posthumously, after they’ve died. He was the one that basically predicted the solar wind and was the one that figured out how it worked.

And, of course, we’re still figuring out a lot of the details, but they just couldn’t think of anybody better to name it after than him. And so that was lovely.

The hidden danger of the Sun (solar wind explained)

The source of these high-energy particles and exactly how they get accelerated away from the Sun is what we’re studying right now. We know that this wind of particles, when I say high-energy particles, I’m talking electrons and protons and sometimes, as large as like the nucleus of a helium atom, something like that. And they get blasted through our solar system at a million miles an hour in some cases.

And so, we have this very high-energy wind. It changes planets, it’s responsible for Mars losing its atmosphere over time and becoming this kind of cold, dead desert. It’s responsible for Venus becoming sort of this hellish thing that we know it. It actually blasted away all of the lighter molecules like water and left Venus with an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid and.

Even Pluto, all the way out at the edge of our planetary system, Pluto is still losing tons of atmosphere a day blasted away by this wind of high-energy particles. The only reason the Earth is not really affected by it much is because we have a very strong magnetic field. And so, our molten metal core, all that molten metal moving around inside the Earth generates kind of a magnetic bottle around the Earth. And that protects us from the solar wind.

But someday the Sun will actually pretty much blast away our atmosphere anyway. So, planets change and one of the important things about knowing about this wind is we have to understand our environment in space. The solar wind normally is at levels that humans can take quite, quite easily. I know that some people that are into conspiracy theories say, “How could we have gone to the Moon because there’s so much radiation in space?” Well, the answer is, we kind of got lucky with Apollo because a normal day, the solar wind is a radiation level humans can handle quite easily up in space or on the Moon.

Problem is that if you have a solar storm, a very, very violent event that unleashes lots of this solar wind, a lot of times we call these coronal mass ejections. The corona is the outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere and coronal mass ejection, all this stuff comes out at once. It’s true that if a big one of those happens in the direction where astronauts are unprotected from the Earth’s magnetic field, they could die. I mean, it could actually give them a fatal dose of radiation. That is something that we need to consider.

And it turns out that we got kind of lucky that in between some of the Apollo missions when no astronauts were up on the Moon, luckily, we actually had events, solar events that would’ve endangered the astronauts. That’s why it’s hard to go to the Moon and also to Mars is to protect people from that radiation.

It’s not that hard to protect you from it. I mean, a good amount of water could do it. Like if you had a water tank in your spacecraft and you could shelter behind that, it’s just that you’d have to bring up a decent amount of water. And that’s a lot of mass. Or in the case of the Moon, I think if you could dig down just about 10 feet below the lunar surface, that amount of rock above you would shelter you. But then we need to bring construction equipment to the Moon that can dig a tunnel, right?

So, I mean there’s all kinds of things we’re considering as to how you would handle that. So, what happens with shockwaves is that you have, say, two binary stars close to each other, and they both have a wind of particles. In this case we don’t say a solar wind, we say a stellar wind ‘cause we’re talking about stars, but it’s really the same thing.

The main difference is that the stars that I was studying are very massive stars, stars that have anywhere from let’s say 20 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. And they actually have really strong winds much stronger even than the Sun does. So, when you have these two stars close to each other, these winds come off and they collide. And when that happens, I mean, literally, the electric and magnetic fields sort of entangle with each other. The particles collide together and that creates a very, very hot area that we call a shockwave. As all of this stuff comes together, basically slows itself down as it collides, you get all of this heat and radiation emitted along that shock front. Those are wonderful shockwaves that are created by colliding winds.

So one of the big challenges right now, especially as we consider putting astronauts back on the Moon, is there a way to predict when one of these violent events is coming? The answer is yes. In several ways. So, in the very simplest way, we actually have spacecraft, as I mentioned, there’s a spacecraft orbiting the Sun right now.

There’s actually two, the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter from the Europeans. And we also have other spacecraft between the Earth and the Sun. As one of these big belches of material, charged high-energy particles, comes out of the Sun it will hit different satellites that will measure how fast it’s going, how much energy is being delivered. And usually in the case of, say the Moon, the Earth has about a day or maybe two day’s notice.

So, you could say to the astronauts, “Hey, something’s coming, everybody go shelter,” as long as you had a good shelter there. But then there’s the question of can you predict it before it actually happens? And this of course is one of the huge goals all over the world of people called heliophysicists, helio for Sun, and then physicists. So people who are physicists that specifically study the Sun. The Sun is this incredible magnetic marvel. A magnetic field is generated by moving charges, right?

So you think about like the charges in moving metal that generates a magnetic field in an engine. In the case of the Sun, the Sun is made almost entirely of hydrogen, but it is so hot on the surface that that gas has become ionized. Now what that means is there’s so much energy that electrons that normally orbit around a nucleus, the electron gets so much energy it just takes off. And that leaves two particles that are charged, electron and a proton.

Anything that has an electric charge, a magnetic field can bend. And so, when you see these wonderful like loops on the Sun and all of these beautiful shapes, that’s the very hot electrically charged gas just following the magnetic field of the Sun. The name for it, and it’s kind of a confusing name, is plasma. You could actually see the shape of the Sun’s magnetic field, but it’s chaotic, it’s incredibly complicated. So, you have these wonderful loops of magnetic energy, all this stuff following it.

Could a solar storm wipe out civilization?

So how do you predict when one of those loops is going to break open and actually like spew stuff out and create one of these big ejections? We’re getting better at it, but it’s still something that we don’t understand. I mean something that simple of our own star. When is there going to be a really big storm?

We can’t predict it down to the hour. We can say there’s a very active region here that looks like it might produce something, but there’s no way to guarantee that. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the year 2012, because I was having sort of a difficult year that year because people had this idea of the Mayan apocalypse, it was 2012, apparently that was the end of some calendar cycle in the Mayan calendar. The idea was that something catastrophic was going to happen and I would get calls, seriously, people would call us at NASA and say, “I don’t want my pets to suffer, should I euthanize?” I actually got a call, somebody wondering if they should euthanize their pets. Other people would say things like, “Is the world going to end next month?” And I’d say, “Look, okay, if I knew the world was going to end next month, do you think I’d be here in my office answering phone calls?” I don’t think so.

And we kept telling people that there was really no reason to worry about anything. There was nothing unusual astronomically happening. The Sun was in a naturally active period that year. Every 11 years or so, the Sun becomes very active and then it kind of gets quieter again. One of the reasons I know this is ‘cause I love to see the northern lights, the auroras. Those are caused when you get these charged particles in our atmosphere and they create these beautiful glows around the poles.

For us, that’s really the only thing we really notice for the most part. What happened actually is that there was a colossal coronal mass ejection, one that would’ve actually been dangerous to our power grids here on earth. It wouldn’t have caused any damage to like people or animals or plants, but it would’ve actually dumped electric current into our magnetic field. And it probably would’ve taken down a lot of power grids. It would’ve caused a lot of damage. The thing though is, it went off on the other side of the Sun from the Earth, and we had satellites out there in that other direction out in the solar system and they got knocked silly by this big burst of charged particles from the Sun.

And so we looked at that and we were able to observe it and see what had happened and track it and all of that. And we all kind of went, “Phew.” The Sun spins, it actually doesn’t all spin at the same rate. The equator spins faster than the poles. It’s not a solid thing. It kind of twists itself up. The Sun, on average spins about once every 29 days. And so we don’t really know.

There could be an active region that’s about to blast, but then it could spin out of our view and so we’re safe from it. Or something could come from the other side of the Sun that we didn’t see. There’re all sorts of wonderful complexities when it comes to observing this phenomenon we call space weather, the winds and the storms, but in this case, winds of particles and magnetic storms, storms of magnetic chaos on the Sun. It’s a wonderful thing to think about that our lovely gentle star up there is actually very dramatic and very volatile.

Sitting here at the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere we’re not really aware that we’re in a larger environment in space. And the dominant thing is the Sun. The Sun obviously is the biggest thing in our solar system, the most important thing. The Sun not only puts out a lot of light and heat, but also puts out a wind of high-energy particles, high-energy protons, electrons, charged particles. We actually are bathed in this all the time. It interacts with our atmosphere. It creates the northern and southern lights. In some cases, it can even be a risk, especially to our technology.

We’re quite well-protected from these high-energy particles by our atmosphere and also by the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth has a very strong magnetic field that surrounds our planet and protects us from the worst of this stuff. Even the astronauts up in the Space Station, they’re actually close enough to the Earth that they’re largely protected by this magnetic field.

When you go out to the Moon and farther away, that’s when you’re not protected by the Earth’s magnetic field and you find yourself just basically exposed to this wind of high-energy particles. A lot of people don’t realize how significant that is and how much, not only NASA, but NOAA, and other organizations all over the planet are monitoring this. There is a fleet of satellites right now, and I don’t know exactly the number because it usually changes, but we have some satellites that are orbiting the Sun itself. We have some that are actually placed between the Earth and the Sun. There is a place that, actually, the Sun’s gravity and the Earth’s gravity balances out. If you’re between the Earth and the Sun, you’re actually attracted equally to either one gravitationally and you stick a satellite right there. And it doesn’t take a lot of energy to actually keep it in that spot.

So we have this kind of early warning system to see if there’s something dangerous coming from the Sun. And then we have all kinds of observatories both here on the Earth on the ground, and also space-based observatories that orbit the Earth, that just look at the Sun continuously. We even have satellites around the solar systems to look at different angles of the Sun.

So we’ve got the Sun covered, I know. Why is it so important? Well, the solar wind normally doesn’t really have much danger to us or the environment in space. But when you’re dealing with space weather, sometimes there’s a really big line of thunderstorms coming through, right? So in the case of the Sun, the Sun sometimes has very, very violent storms, and these are storms caused by the chaotic twisting magnetic field of the Sun, some of the hot gas on the surface of the Sun, actually gets accelerated so quickly by these magnetic fields that it just breaks off and takes off into space. And in one moment, you could have trillions of tons of fast, high-moving charged material coming out towards the Earth.

Now, that’s not actually very dangerous to us biologically, but what that can do is carry a huge amount of electrical and magnetic energy. All of a sudden, all these charged particles hit the magnetic field of the Earth, and they can actually dump electric current right into our magnetic field. There was a famous event in the mid 1800s called the Carrington Event. With the Carrington Event, we really were just starting to have things like telegraph lines.

Now, in order to get a telegraph to work, there has to be electric current on the wires. And normally you would hook up your telegraph to a power generator, and that would create electric current, and you could send your signals. So when this Carrington Event occurred, there was so much electric current dumped into the Earth’s field that you could actually start sending signals with no connection to power. And then eventually, as the storm went on, some of the telegraph wires actually caught on fire just from a storm of magnetic and electrical energy, these particles coming from the Sun. So, these days, of course, we know that this could happen again.

Events like this are rare, but they certainly will happen from time to time. So there are all kinds of organizations like FEMA, all these disaster relief organizations that work with NASA and NOAA to actually figure out what happens if we think that a dangerous solar storm is imminent. In the case of all of our satellites up above the atmosphere, they’re very at risk.

So we can basically shut them down, put them to sleep for a little while. Of course, that energy burst will hit them and it may damage their detectors, but at least most of the electronics are shut down at the time, and we can recover them, hopefully. And then there may even be plans that are necessary to shut down parts of power grids. Because I think the biggest danger of these things to us is that when they actually hit the Earth’s field, you can have so much, again, energy in that magnetic field of the Earth that it could fry our power grids.

I mean, think about how bad it would be if all the power on Earth just went out because of one of these solar storms. I mean, that could conceivably cause billions or maybe even trillions of dollars of damage. So there are people rehearsing these scenarios. There are people trying to figure out how we would shut things down, how we would protect ourselves. And then we have our fleet of satellites trying to observe the Sun all the time. And we would have probably about a day’s notice as one of these big storms made its way through the Sun.

The Sun we think of as putting off lots of light, and light travels at the speed of light, which takes about eight minutes to get from the Sun to us. But this isn’t light. These are charged particles, protons, and electrons. And although they may be moving millions of miles an hour, it still will take them about a day or more to get to the Earth. So, we will have some warning.

But yes, I mean all around you, there are people monitoring space weather and getting ready for a big storm.

Mining asteroids, magnetic fields & navigating the universe

The thing that’s really fascinating to me about asteroids is that they are kind of a preservation of the way the solar system was billions of years ago. This is really true. The solar system was once this kind of cloud of gas and dust, and then under the forces of gravity, things started to clump together into smaller bits and then larger bits that eventually became planets. And planets like the Earth change so much, right?

I mean, the interior of our planet is molten. There’s stuff that’s melting down there on the surface, you’ve got erosion and rain and wind. So, nothing is really the same as it was billions of years ago. But there were these little, small building blocks that got left behind that actually never got made into larger things, and they’re pretty much unchanged for billions of years.

So scientifically, the reason these are such treasures is that they are kind of a time capsule of what the chemistry, the physical conditions, everything was like as the solar system formed. The question of mining them. So the thing that happened with the Earth is that the Earth has this hot molten core. And most of anything that’s heavy sinks to the bottom, right?

So, when you have a liquid, heavier stuff sinks to the bottom. So, the core of our planet is made of iron and nickel, but also metals like gold and silver and platinum. Anything that was heavy when the Earth was molten would’ve mainly sunk to the core. So that means that if that didn’t happen to an asteroid, an asteroid is still kind of all mixed up. The heavier stuff hasn’t actually sunk out of it. Given a volume, there is in fact more rare elements, more gold, more platinum, more titanium, whatever.

But asteroids are also fairly small. And of course they’re in space, so they’re hard to get to. To me, it becomes kind of a cost question. Yes, asteroid material, by and large, has more rare, valuable elements than parts of our Earth’s crust. It also has a lot more iron. You can get very expensive iron. I don’t know when it will actually become economically feasible to go all the way to an asteroid, mine it, bring stuff back, or however you want to do that, to get the tiny little bit of gold that you’ll get out of it. My guess is not soon.

I don’t think we’ll actually be mining asteroids in any real commercial way very soon at all. It’s a fascinating question whether you could use a compass in space.

So, let’s talk first about compasses and then maybe talk a bit more about the idea of how we locate ourselves in space in general. A compass is something that responds to a magnetic field. So the reason a compass always points north is that it’s responding to the magnetic field of the Earth. Our planet has this wonderful core of molten metal, that metal moves around inside the Earth and it generates a magnetic field that has two poles, a north pole and a south pole.

When you make a compass, you make it out of something metal that can respond to that magnetic field, and it points to the magnetic pole of the Earth, which is very close to our north pole. A magnetic field directs compasses. Obviously, if you go away from the Earth, far away from our planet, it’s no longer going to be able to feel our magnetic field. So a compass will not point to the north pole of the Earth if, say, you’re out by Saturn. Saturn and Jupiter are separate planets, and they have magnetic fields of their own.

So certainly if you were actually close to Jupiter, Jupiter has a magnetic field much stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. Your compass would definitely point to the north pole of Jupiter if you were actually around Jupiter now. But what if you get farther out? What if you actually go farther from there? Is there any magnetic field out in space itself? Well, actually, it turns out that there are, that our galaxy does have a magnetic field as a whole too.

This magnetic field might be hard to detect. You might need a very, very sensitive compass. But say you had it, you would actually see that our galaxy does have sort of a magnetic north and south pole, and that magnetic field permeates our whole galaxy. With compasses, you could actually at least find out where the north and south pole of another planet is, the north and south pole of a star, a star has a magnetic field too, even the north and south pole of a galaxy.

That’s responding to a local magnetic field. But then it kind of begs the question, how do you find your direction in space that doesn’t involve a magnetic field, out between the galaxies, where really there’s no detectable magnetic field at all. Everything is moving. There’s nothing to say, “This point is still, and this is the reference point we’re going to use, and everything moves according to that point.”

We are moving around the Sun at about 66,000 miles an hour right now. the Sun is moving around the galaxy, around the core of the galaxy, at about half a million miles an hour. We are actually falling gravitationally into the center of a cluster of galaxies at about a million and a half miles an hour. That’s just, when we say relative to what? Relative to the Sun, relative to this group of galaxies, there is no absolute standard of reference in the universe.

There is one thing that is perhaps the best way of navigating your way around the universe, and that’s something called the microwave background radiation. That’s the farthest radiation we can possibly see. That’s radiation that’s coming everywhere in the universe from a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. And it fills all of space with this gentle microwave radiation. And it’s pretty much the same in every direction. In fact, if you had an old-style television that used to have an antenna decades ago, a lot of static that you would see on the screen was actually microwaves from this background radiation.

And one of the things we can measure is our motion relative to this bath of radiation, the microwave background. So if you were trying to navigate with a compass in space, just remember that compass is going to respond to the strongest and closest magnetic field. It will point north, north to the pole of a planet, north to the pole of a star, even to the north and south magnetic poles of our galaxy. But what you’re reading is a magnetic field.

That’s what a compass does. And that’s pretty much all it can tell you.

When astronomy realized the Sun isn’t what we thought

Well, this is the thing about the power of astronomy that kind of really does blow my mind is how much we actually do know. There’s all kinds of things that we don’t know. And astronomers, scientists in general tend to really focus on what we don’t know because that’s what we’re working on, that’s our jobs, that’s how we get the grant money to sustain ourselves is trying to answer the questions that we don’t know yet. But the things that we do know, in some ways, just how recently we know them really kind of blow my mind.

You think about what are stars made of, right? I mean, you’ve probably heard that stars are mainly made of hydrogen and helium. They’re these big sorts of balls of gas, very, very hot, dense, burning balls of gas. But how long ago did we know that?

It was actually really not until times like the ‘20s or ‘30s that a young woman named Cecilia Payne working at Harvard wrote a PhD dissertation pretty much proving they had to be made out of hydrogen. It was a graduate student, a woman graduate student. At the time, the idea was that the Sun was probably something very much like the Earth. It was like a big rock.

And if you have a rock that big, and this is true, there would be so much gravity pushing it together that the temperature of the rock would be very hot. So, the temperature of the surface of the Sun is around about 10,000 degrees. And if you had a rock that big with that much gravity pushing it together, it would be that hot. But it would only be that hot for probably a couple million years. And the neat thing was, around about the late 1800s it was Charles Darwin, who had been looking at things like evolution, the strata of rock, like the Grand Canyon. And he sort of had this feeling that millions of years certainly was a long amount of time, but he didn’t think it was long enough for the changes that he saw in the Earth itself.

The prevailing idea, and this was a problem, is that the Sun was basically a big Earth, just the contraction of gravity was making it hot. It would take millions of years to cool off. It turns out that wasn’t it at all. It was actually made of hydrogen, the lightest substance in the universe. But now you have so much gravity crushing together the hydrogen making the interior very hot, millions of degrees hot, hot enough actually to start a nuclear fusion reaction. And that can last billions of years.

Big Bang, universe origins & limits of human understanding

And certainly one of the biggest misconceptions is that people think that scientists feel that the Big Bang came out of nothing, right? I mean, how did all of this energy and all of this matter that made up the universe, you’re saying it just came out of nothing? No, I don’t think any scientist actually believes that.

The problem is, when you think about the condition the universe was in at that point where, I mean, we take our observable universe, right? I mean, you can look from one side of the universe to the other back 13.5 billion light years or more. All of the stuff that we see was actually compressed into a space smaller than an atom, volume smaller than an atom.

We don’t have the physics that describes how that would work. That is so much mass, so much energy in so little volume. I mean, at this point there wasn’t even mass just basically pure energy that right now our physics doesn’t go there. As we get a better idea about how gravity works under very extreme circumstances, huge energy densities, we may have some idea what set off the Big Bang and possibly what came before the Big Bang. And even that word is a little bit difficult when you start talking about the Big Bang. Because the Big Bang, we believe was the creation, not just of space, but of time.

Whatever state the universe was in before the Big Bang probably didn’t have time as we perceive it either. Space and time appear to be some kind of a consequence of the later expansion. So how do you describe something that doesn’t have space and time, that has huge amounts of energy and tiny little volumes? We don’t have the physics. It’s not that we will never know this, but right now we don’t have any way to describe it.

Now, another major misconception about the Big Bang is that the universe before the Big Bang was small. Okay, now didn’t I just say that everything we see in the universe was probably contained less than the volume of an atom? Didn’t I just say that? Well, the thing is, I know every scientist understands that we cannot see the entire universe right now, and that’s because there’s such a thing that we quantify as the observable universe.

The universe has existed, we think, since the Big Bang about, say 13.8 billion years. So as you look farther and farther out into space, you necessarily have to look back in time. If something is a million light years away from you, like the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2 million light years away. The light that you see through binoculars tonight as you look up at the Andromeda Galaxy left 2 million years ago. You’re seeing the Andromeda Galaxy as it was.

So today we actually have telescopes that are so powerful they can see back to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. That’s amazing. We can see so far away in space that the light has taken that long to get to us, nearly 13.8 billion years.

And when we look back to that time, the universe looks very different. For one thing, it’s very hot. It’s actually about as hot as the surface of the Sun. And it’s so dense and hot that we actually can’t see any farther. Literally in any direction you look around the sky, anywhere you look, if you look to that distance, you see the universe as it was at that time, 400,000 years after the Big Bang, and everything becomes just hot hydrogen gas.

So I know this is kind of a strange way to put it, because we’re talking about before the Big Bang, there may not have been space and time the way we think they are today, but whatever it was before the Big Bang, whatever was there, there was a tiny little part of it, a tiny little volume that expanded to become the universe we see today.

But that little bit wasn’t the whole universe. We don’t know yet how big the original universe was, all of it before the Big Bang happened, before something changed to make it expand and completely change its form. So, the universe before the Big Bang didn’t have to be necessarily tiny. It actually could be infinitely large.

Because of that, we have no idea how big the universe is, what shape it has. All we can see is a tiny little bit of it. Think about my arm being the universe before the Big Bang in some kind of state that we can’t even describe through modern physics, the entire observable universe that we can see now used to be a tiny volume of it, maybe an atom in my arm. One atom expanded and became the entire observable universe that we see. But that’s not the whole universe.

There are trillions of atoms in my arm. Each one of those could have expand to actually be its own entirely observable universe. So we can’t tell yet how big the universe was before the Big Bang, or even what shape the universe is, because all we’re seeing is a tiny little bit of it that expanded to become everything that we see. But that’s not the whole universe, that’s our observable universe.

There’s far more out there than what we can see.

One of the most common questions that I’m getting from the public these days is, “Is our universe a simulation?” I think that one of the things people are thinking about is they’ve heard the term “the holographic universe.” And this is indeed a very powerful and increasingly popular idea in modern physics. But it’s a little bit unfortunately named and let me sort of take you through this.

This all started a couple decades ago when people like Stephen Hawking and others were trying to figure out how a black hole really works. We know black holes exist. We actually observe them from a distance very routinely. But the physics of how they work never quite worked. They appeared to violate some pretty important laws of physics.

The universe doesn’t like to lose information. A particle has a charge, it has a spin. There are all kinds of things you can say about an elementary particle, but when it falls into a black hole, the only thing that seems to exist anymore is mass, the gravity that that particle had. What happened to the information about its charge? Can you ever get that back? As people began to do the mathematics of it, they noticed something very intriguing that everything seemed to work much better if you assume the black hole was two dimensional.

Now, black holes are actually three-dimensional objects. A lot of times they’re portrayed kind of as things going down a drain. But basically you have a sphere, which is the point-of-no-return. Gravity is so intense around a black hole that if you get anywhere this close, you never come back out. That’s the event horizon of a black hole. So instead of assuming that it is a sphere around the black hole, it all started to act like it was a two-dimensional surface. Something that was three dimensional became much more understandable if it was two dimensional.

And as scientists do, they thought, “Well, okay, if this works for a black hole, is it telling us something about the rest of the universe?” And this may be one of the most important new revolutions in modern physics, that the laws of physics might work a lot better, might actually work out together if you assume that our reality is really two dimensional. You look around, there seems to be more than two dimensions in space and there’s time, how would that work?

The example of a hologram came up. I still remember being at a hologram museum back in the 1980s, and holograms were really new and really exciting. The idea that a hologram is made out of just a two-dimensional block of film or a block of glass, but it seems to be three dimensional when you look into it. And even more than that, I remember this one hologram that was put on a pedestal, and as you walked around the hologram, somebody appeared to move inside and wave at you. If you were looking at the hologram, there appeared to be motion and even time all embedded in just this two-dimensional surface.

That’s what they mean when they say holographic principle. It doesn’t imply that anybody made a hologram or that we are part of a projection that somebody, some evil genius, is projecting reality on us. What the holographic principle really is, is the universe may store energy in a way and information in a way similar to a hologram. If that’s true, and we really are embedded in this two-dimensional universe, that has some pretty amazing repercussions. It probably means that every point in time exists at once. That our idea that things are changing and that I’m moving right now, and time is flowing in one direction. That’s probably the same as somebody just walking by a hologram and having the perception that the image is moving. It’s probably not real.

The amazing idea is that the extension of space itself and time actually flowing may not be real intrinsic parts of the universe. They may be some way that we perceive it with the human brain, but in fact, there’s an underlying reality where that is not true. We say that these are emergent properties, it’s not the real story, a hologram doesn’t really move, a hologram is not really three dimensional, but it seems so through our perception.

That’s an amazing idea that the entire universe exists all at once as some kind of surface of information. That’s the holographic principle. It’s working quite well right now. I can’t tell you whether it’s true or not, whether there really is some real two-dimensional thing that we think of as the universe. So stay tuned. At the time that Darwin was doing this, I think there was sort of this argument between like biblical people that said the Earth was a couple thousand years old, and then the scientists said, “Oh, no, no, it must be millions of years old.” One of the things about being an astronomer is you throw around very, very large numbers all the time. I mean, some of them are just kind of stupidly large.

But even things like how many is a million, right? How many is a billion? The human brain, I don’t perceive that really any better than anybody else. The human brain just doesn’t go there. Instead, you kind of find yourself getting used to swimming in an environment where your mind can’t really grasp all the way around a concept. It just can’t. I can’t tell you how far away a light year is. I mean, one light year, the distance light travels in one year at 186,000 miles per second. That’s up close to about 6 trillion miles. I don’t have the ability to actually visualize that or feel it. And yet, to me, a light year seems very familiar and actually quite close. So maybe that’s one of the reasons astronomers are almost kind of predisposed to being able to let go of sort of your common sense.

When people say things like the inside of a neutron star is so dense that a single teaspoonful, of that material would have as much mass as Mount Everest. It’s like, “Okay.” The laws of physics pretty much require that. Or when, when people say, “What was the temperature of the universe, just three seconds after the Big Bang?” That our physics really does work to predict that. So I think that when you start swimming just in these big numbers and you begin to kind of let go of the idea that the human mind is the be all and end all. We have these tools to start attacking larger problems, to start asking bigger questions, all of a sudden, it comes very naturally to say things like, “Oh yeah, gravity is actually a bending of space and time.” The amazing thing about that is that that started out to completely theoretical. People thought that Einstein’s theories were very useful.

I mean, they made extremely accurate predictions about how the planets move, about how the universe works. But was there any really reality to the fact that space and time could bend? I mean, literally the space in front of me, the space and time around me can change and bend, even have a direction to it. It turns out that our theories for the most part do lead us to something really physically true. And right now, people ask me questions like, “Are there multiple universes? What’s the shape of the universe?” The larger universe.

All of these things are wonderful questions, and we don’t know the answer to them yet. But I have a feeling that it’s not just wasting time. I think some of these stranger theories will bear themselves out over time. We just need to wait. Right now I think it’s a little bit too soon to follow them all the way into the rabbit hole. Let’s say that there were many, many multiple realities. Well, how would physics work? How would this work? It’s still too much conjecture for me to invest a huge amount in it. I still remember it’s only 2,000 years ago, and less that you had people like Aristotle who were brilliant, and they came up with this idea that all the planets had to follow perfect spherical orbits around the Earth in the middle, and they were on these crystal spheres that somehow moved.

And people all the way up into the Renaissance were trying to figure out how those crystal spheres could have worked and how they were supported. Well, it turns out there weren’t any crystal spheres. There’s always a bit of me as an observational scientist that says, “Take everything with a grain of salt for now.” Oh, I mean, Aristotle had this elegant, wonderful system. I mean, people loved it until the Renaissance, right? It’s just that our observations didn’t bear up with it. And it was so beautiful. People hated to let it go.

But unfortunately, that’s not how the solar system works. Definitely pursue these questions, but I’m not sure I’m ready to dive all the way in to any of those rabbit holes quite yet. I love to think about them, but I think it’s probably a little too soon to follow them ultimately to where they might go. So people today have all these wonderful questions that modern physics is leading us to.

Questions like, “Are the way we perceive space and time real?” That’s even a hundred years old. Albert Einstein said that space and time could be bent, time itself could stop. Then there are things like the holographic principle. Is it possible that our whole universe is some sort of embedded information structure on a two-dimensional surface? These are amazing ideas, and they may turn out to actually have some physical truth to them. We’re not really sure yet. But sometimes people say, “Well, are you scientists just absolutely crazy? How is it that you so blithely get rid of the idea that time has a direction or that space is real?”

One of the things you have to very deeply accept to be a scientist is that your senses, the human brain, is just not the best instrument to perceive the entirety of the universe. I mean, let’s take a simple example. There are many, many colors of light, energies of light that our eyes are not sensitive to. There are things like gamma rays and X-rays, ultraviolet light, radio waves. Those are all just different colors that our eyes don’t see. The universe has colors that just weren’t built for the human body to perceive. And when it comes to a mind, a brain, think about some of the incredible creatures all around us. I mean, think about a grasshopper, a marvel of evolution. It has a brain; it has a central nervous system.

But could you teach a grasshopper quantum mechanics or general relativity? Could it compose a symphony or write a novel? It just can’t. I mean, a grasshopper’s brain just doesn’t have the complexity to do that. A grasshopper doesn’t perceive those things. What about a bacterium? A bacterium doesn’t even have a brain, but of course, the majority of life on earth by mass is still bacteria.

You have to have this humility and remind yourself that it’s possible that the human brain is just as far away from perceiving the way the universe really is as a grasshopper is to perceiving quantum mechanics. We are not some be all and end all of perception. The universe was not designed, not built to be comprehensible to the human mind. We only see a little bit of it through the filter of what our minds can ingest and how they do it.

And so, we think that there really is such a thing as space and time. We actually think that there is a past, present, and a future when in fact there may not be. And this goes all the way back to Galileo. When Galileo was around, the idea that the Earth had to be the center, God made it so. God must have put the Earth in the center. But then it became proven that the Earth went around a larger object, the Sun. And I think almost more beautifully, one of my favorite observations of Galileo is that when he invented his little telescope, he looked at the sky, and he realized that there were stars in the sky you couldn’t see with just the unaided human eye.

There were stars up there that we were unable to see unless you looked through a telescope, a piece of technology. And the question was, “Why would the universe do that if the universe was designed for us to see and us to perceive?” Why would there be things too far away and too dim for us to see?

Why are parts of the universe so strange and so uncomprehensible and make so little common sense? Honestly, why should it be any other way?

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Mini Philosophy | Starts With A Bang | Big Think Books | Big Think Business

Historian Eric Cline argues this collapse wasn’t the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.

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Timestamps

Part 1: Before the Fall: The conditions that led to civilization collapse
0:01:00 Chapter 1: The interconnected world
0:04:27 Scope of the study
0:05:44 Economic interdependence of civilizations
0:11:04 What “collapse” means
0:15:38 Chapter 2: Who were the Sea Peoples?
0:20:58 Chapter 3: The perfect storm
0:24:37 Drought, famine and migration
0:28:22 Evidence for invaders beyond Egypt
0:31:30 Destructions and possible internal rebellions
0:42:48 Multiplier Effects, Domino Effects, and Network Collapse
0:47:35 Systems collapse and the Dark Age debate
0:54:44 Uneven survival and the problem of labels

Part 2: After the Fall: Resilience, Recovery, and the Road Back
1:00:00 Chapter 1: The rise of the new world order
1:03:42 The new world order after collapse
1:11:04 Chapter 2: The winners and losers
1:17:03 The Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, and Canaanites
1:22:29 Chapter 3: How to avoid civilizational collapse
1:28:18 Leadership and resilience
1:30:23 Seven lessons for today
1:38:14 Tipping points and warning signs
1:41:57 Final reflection

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

I’m Eric Cline. I’m an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I’m also the author of 1177 BC, and its sequel, After 1177 BC. In part one, we’re going to take a look at the civilizations as they existed, and what occurred, to make them all collapse one after another in one set of decades. In the second part, we’ll take a look at whether or not that could have been avoided, what led up to it, what do you do after you’ve collapsed, how resilient are you, and whether it has any implications, for us today?

Part 1: Before the fall: The conditions that led to civilization collapse

Chapter 1: The interconnected world

Most of the people that I talk to about this period, and I will go on and on and on about it at dinner parties and such, they say, I’ve never heard of this period, and I say, actually, you have. This is the New Kingdom period of Egypt.

So I will ask them, have you heard of Hatshepsut, the famous female pharaoh? And they’ll frequently say, yes. I’ll say, have you heard of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, who might have started monotheism? And they might say, yes. And then I’ll go out in the limb and say, well, I bet you haven’t heard of King Tut. And they’re like, “Of course, I’ve heard of King Tut.” I’m like, fine, that’s the exact period that we’re talking about here.

So you see, you already do know this period. It’s the second half of the second millennium BC. It’s the New Kingdom period of Egypt. It’s the time of King Tut and Akhenaten and all those other pharaohs. So this is a period that is actually more familiar to people. They just don’t realize that they know it.

The late Bronze Age covers about 500 years, 1700 to 1200 BC. And for most of that, life was pretty good, especially in the 14th and 13th centuries BC, that is in the time before the collapse. Now, in those centuries, it was very globalized. It was internationalized across the Mediterranean and into the ancient Near East. So everyone was in contact with everybody else. This is the period when I say the ancient G8 was in place.

And by the G8, in that case, I mean over in Greece, you had the Mycenaeans and the Minoans, right? Think Trojan War. In what is now Türkiye, ancient Anatolia, you had the Hittites. Over in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, modern day Iraq, basically, you had Assyria and Babylonia. Then elsewhere, you had Cypriotsensai-Prus Egyptians and Egypt Canaanites in Canaan. So overall, these people are in direct or indirect contact with each other on almost daily basis.

The thing is, if they’re not in direct contact with somebody, like Mycenaeans and Assyrians, who are quite far apart, they will be in contact with a common person. So indirect is not even that indirect. In fact, in what they had, which we call the small world network, if you are only three hops from anybody else at the most, or maybe less than three hops, like two hops for the Mycenaeans to the Hittites to the Assyrians, that’s a small world network.

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And in the time period that we’re talking about, that’s what we’ve got. A colleague of mine, Susan Sherratt at University of Sheffield, has talked about this being a globalized Mediterranean. Now, why do we care about that? Because there aren’t that many periods in human history where we’ve had such a small world network in place anywhere. Us today, obviously, yes, we’ve got a small world network all around the globe. Then back then, they had a small world network across the Mediterranean and into the Near East as well.

And that’s why I would argue that what happened to them might be a little bit more relevant to us today than one might think, because they are actually closer to us than one might think. In terms of commercial contacts, diplomatic contacts, and so on, they’re more like us than one might expect, just walking around outside.

Scope of the study

In my book, what I was focusing on is the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. In part, because that’s my specialty. That’s what I know the best. It’s also because they were not necessarily in contact with areas of the world that were further away. So for example, there may have been some contacts with India, with the Indus Valley, but they weren’t that frequent. And as far as we can tell, they’re not in contact with places like China.

There are some indications, and I would give a caveat here, the wonderful thing about archeology is that what people find tomorrow could completely change our understanding. So now, for instance, we think that there were maybe more contacts with Southeast Asia in the Iron Age after the collapse than we had thought before. So this is always changing. However, I limited myself to this area, basically from Italy on the West to Iran and Iraq on the East, if you want to put it that way, and from modern day Türkiye down to Egypt. Again, that’s my focus of specialty, but that is also the area in which this little globalized small world network functioned.

Economic interdependence of civilizations

None of the great civilizations, none of the G8, were self-sufficient at that time, and it’s important to realize that. They each needed each other. So for instance, Egypt was the only place really that could supply gold to everybody else, because it was in control of the mines, Dana Nubia and Sudan. Greece, on the other hand, was one of the areas that could provide the silver. Copper came from Cyprus.

The tin - the tin’s a bit of a problem - it comes from a variety of places, including maybe Cornwall, up in England, but the vast majority came over from Afghanistan, the Badakshan region in particular. It’s the same area where Lapis Lazuli comes from. And so these raw metals would travel hundreds of miles along the trade networks, and each of the different civilizations needed them. So they are trading with each other.

Yes, it’s commercial, but it’s also the lifeblood, because we’re in the Bronze Age here to make bronze. You need 90% copper and 10% tin. I mean, you can use arsenic if you want to, but you’re not gonna live very long. Much better to use tin.

What happens if the trade routes are cut and you can’t get the tin anymore, which means you can’t make your bronze, which means you’re in real trouble. They are trading for the raw materials. They’re also trading for, I would say, commercial goods, but ones that you can eat and drink. So they’re trading olive oil. They’re trading wine. They’re trading grain. And they’re sending it around to each other. It might be a bit like Coles Tourneux Castle, but it’s more like different wines from around the world, each have their own flavor. Same thing back then.

Now, they’re also trading and buying and selling and all of that actual objects. We have a couple of the written texts, for example, that talk about leather shoes being sent from Crete all the way to Babylon, to King Hammurabi, the famous King Hammurabi who wrote his law code, which has an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth in it. And those leather shoes made it all the way to him, but we’re told he returned them. We’re not told why he returned them, and I often wonder if they were too small or too last millennium or something like that, but we know that the actual objects are coming, along with the raw materials and the raw supplies.

We know they’re trading things like solid gold daggers inlaid with Lapis lazuli. These are obviously things that the kings are giving each other. So we have what we call gift giving at the highest elite levels. And then we’ve got commercial mercantile stuff at slightly lower levels. So we’ve got all kinds of things going on, but the end result is that they needed each other. They really did, they could not survive without each other. And so this globalized network is what rose them up to the highest levels, but it is then also what brought them crashing down at the end when all of that was cut.

Now, along with all the commercial activities, and there is diplomatic, but diplomatic also involves marital connections because when the great kings, the G8, when they sign treaties with each other, when they made diplomatic advances, frequently they would marry each other’s daughters to cement the treaties. So we know that Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, the two pharaohs of Egypt in the 14th century BC, they each had multiple wives in their harems who were the daughters of the other kings. We know that there are three Mitannian princesses that are in Egypt in the harems. We know that there are Babylonian princesses in the Egyptian harem.

The one thing that’s interesting is it was not reciprocal. The Egyptians did not send their princesses to the others. No, no, no. Those were sent to them, but it was not the other way around. But even so, exchanging one princess one way was enough to cement a new diplomatic treaty. And we know because of the tablets, especially including one set at the site of Amarna, which in Egypt was Akhenaten’s capital city. We’ve got the archive there of his records and his father, Amenhotep III, writing to these kings.

We can see whenever there’s a new king over in Mitanni, which is in Syria or a new king in Babylonia, they had to renegotiate the treaties with the Egyptian pharaohs and with those renegotiations came the new marriages. So we’re talking diplomatic, commercial, marital, you know, it’s not so different from today.

What “collapse” means

We also need to give a definition basically of what we mean when we say everything collapsed. And I would argue that the world as they knew it back then did collapse after just after the year 1200, like 1177 BC. What collapsed was the network that was linking them all, this globalized small world network where they had commercial contacts and diplomatic contacts and all of that. That breaks apart, that collapses. It’s gonna take up to 400 years to get it back again. Now each of the individual societies that were part of that network, they were each influenced and some collapsed completely, others dealt with it. That’s where we get into a gray area because some of my colleagues say, “Look, you’re over exaggerating, this is clickbait. It’s not collapse, it’s transformation.”

A define transformation for me. So we go round and round and round about this, but basically the way I look at it is the world that they had had in place in the 14th century and the 13th century BC, that world goes away. And it goes away within just a couple of decades in the early 12th century BC. Life as they knew it basically changed. Now that doesn’t mean the farmer out in the Hinterland of Anatolia knew that on Monday he was part of this and on Tuesday he wasn’t, it’s nothing like that, but it does mean that the international contacts, the dynastic marriages, they come basically to a screeching halt.

I frequently say that the comparison is to something like the fall of the Roman Empire. It was catastrophic for its day. Now there was about 1500 years between the collapse of the late Bronze Age and the fall of the Roman Empire. And it’s been about another 1500 years since the Roman Empire fell, at least the Western half. And so I’m not saying that we’re necessarily due for another collapse, but history does rhyme even if it doesn’t repeat.

I’m a little wary that it might be, we might be due for it anyway. So it’s all a matter of academic jargon to a certain degree. What do you mean by collapse? What do you mean by transformation? And I concluded after writing both books that it is, yes, it’s both a collapse and a transformation. It depends where you are and when you are and at whom you are looking.

The thing that’s changed over the last couple of decades is that the old explanation that people put forward for the collapse was too simple. It was what we would now call monocausal. They were looking at one thing. Was it invaders? Was it this? Was it that? But they focused on one thing and one thing only depending on which scholar you talk to.

Nowadays, we think it’s a combination. It would be what I would call polycausal that it takes more than one thing to bring down this whole system. You need two of the explanations, three, four, something like that happening either all at once or in rapid succession. So you don’t have time to recover from one catastrophe before the next one hits. I think that makes a lot more sense than just saying, oh, the Sea Peoples did it or oh, there was a drought. How about if there were migrations? Because of a drought and so on.

That’s what has changed over the last couple of decades. In part, it’s because we have a lot more information now. We have a lot more data from a lot more sources and they’re all pointing in various different directions which if you look at it at a whole, you go, okay, that’s what’s happening. It’s a multitude of causes and that caused a domino effect for one thing and it also caused an exaggeration, where one thing was made much worse because of the next. Our thinking has changed in part because of the new data that we’re getting.

Chapter 2: Who were the Sea Peoples?

When I was first learning about all this, when I was in college and then in graduate school, I was basically taught that the collapse was caused by the Sea Peoples, this group that the Egyptians had mentioned that came not once but twice in the years 1207 and 1177 BC. The Egyptians, Merneptha and Ramesses III were the two pharaohs 30 years apart. They both said that Egypt had been attacked by a coalition of invaders and they give us their names. It’s us that calls them the Sea Peoples.

It comes from a French Egyptologist that was studying these originally. But the Egyptians actually give us the names and we know that there are nine different separate groups that come sweeping across the Mediterranean and wind up attacking Egypt. So I was always told that these groups which are the Shardana, the Shekelesh, the Weshesh, the Ekwesh, the Peleset, you know, these names that most people have never heard of, that they were the ones that were responsible for attacking all the G8 and bringing them down one by one, if you will.

Out of all those Sea Peoples, there’s really only one group that we could identify. We’ve played around with the other ones. I mean, Shardan or Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia. So it may be that that’s where they came from. The Shekelesh, that sounds a lot like Sicily. Maybe they came from there.

But the earliest Egyptologists actually thought that that’s where they went after they were defeated by the Egyptians and that they then gave their names to those islands. So we’ve flip flopped over the years. Personally, I think the Sea Peoples come from the Western Mediterranean and sweep across the Aegean and wind up attacking Egypt. But we still have the problem of, you know, who are they?

Out of all the groups, the only one that we think we’ve really identified is the group called the Peleset. And the Peleset are the Philistines. Now the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible. We already know them archeologically. It really looks like they are Mycenaeans from Greece who have fled Greece and come over to the Eastern Mediterranean because Philistine pottery looks like degenerate Mycenaean. Meaning not that it’s terrible, but it’s Mycenaean pottery as if it were made in Greece, but it’s made with clay that’s local to Cyprus, Rhodes, the Levant. It looks like the Mycenaeans come across.

Now Ramesses and Mernaptha both say that they defeated the Sea Peoples. And in fact, Ramesses III says, “I settled them in strongholds bound in my name.” Meaning he settled the defeated Sea Peoples in Egypt and in the region of southern Canaan, which the Egyptians controlled at that time. So I think we know where they went, even if we don’t quite know where they came from.

If I had a million dollars, I would go looking for the origins of the Sea Peoples and try and settle that once and for all. But the one thing that we’re quite sure, or at least I’m quite sure of now, is they were not single-handedly responsible for the collapse.

In fact, I agree with my colleagues who have suggested that they were as much victims as they were oppressors, and that they’re more like a symptom of what’s happening than they were the cause of it. I think there were a lot of other things involved, and I think the picture was a lot more complicated than I was first taught when I was an undergraduate in college.

In some ways, the Sea Peoples are one of history’s great scapegoats. I mean, I think they’re blamed for something they didn’t really do. Indeed, I used to use the Sea Peoples to scare my kids at night to make them go to bed. Time for bed, and if you don’t go to bed, the Sea Peoples are gonna get you. I think they’re the bogeyman of antiquity and unfairly blamed.

I think some of the other explanations that people have now put forward, like drought and famine and all that, might have contributed to why the Sea Peoples were migrating in the first place. And I actually think a good parallel would be something like the dust ball in the 1930s in the United States, where the people were leaving Oklahoma and going to Texas and California to get a better life.

Same thing, you could look at some of the migrants and the refugees today, the people fleeing from the Syrian civil war, for example, the people leaving and trying to get up into Europe for a new and better life. I mean, we’re seeing some of the same things today. So I think that’s really what the Sea Peoples were. They were migrants in search of a better life.

Chapter 3: The perfect storm

If the Sea Peoples are not to blame for the collapse, then what is or what was? There have been a number of other suggestions that scholars have made over the years. And in my first book in 1177 BC, I went through the various suggestions, looking at the pros and cons for each. And in the end, I thought the answer was “yes, it’s all of the above.” It’s a perfect storm. It is everything, you name it — everything, everywhere, all at once, and it would have been hard to avoid.

I looked at what my predecessors had suggested and thought that there was merit to almost every one of them, but not on their own. You had to bring them all together into this series of unfortunate events, as Lemony Snicket once said. One of the possibilities is that there was a drought back then.

This is not a new suggestion. It was actually made back in the 1960s by Rhys Carpenter, who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. He suggested that the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, that their civilization had come to an end because of a drought. But he didn’t have any hard data to back his suggestion up. It remained a hypothesis. We now have the data that he didn’t have. And we have it not just for mainland Greece, but we have it for an entire area stretching from Italy over to Iran today.

The evidence that we’ve got for drought - and by the way, it’s not just a drought, it’s a mega drought, it’s 150 years at the minimum and 300 years at the maximum. So say from 1200 BC or 1250 BC down to 900 or 850 BC, I mean, it’s a long, long, long time. Now, we find evidence for it all over the place. We find it in caves where the stalagmites stopped growing because they ran out of water. We find it in dried up lakes, dried up lagoons, dried up riverbeds, where when you take samples and you look at the pollen under a microscope, you can see that we get more arid plants, that it becomes a much harsher environment.

If you look at the sediments at the bottom of lakes that still exist in Türkiye, for example, you can see this as well. So it’s not like we have data from one place and one type of source. We have it from a multitude of places. If you look at a map where we have scientific evidence of this mega drought at the end of the late Bronze Age, you’ve just got, it’s peppered with red dots where we’ve got all of this information.

I would say it’s beyond a doubt now, you cannot call it into question. There was a drought back then. It lasted for at least 150 and maybe 300 years. And that would have impacted pretty much anybody back then because, well, frankly, society, you can’t survive. A drought that lasts that long. I mean, we have trouble surviving a drought today that lasts 10 years. So imagine one that’s 10 times that or so. Anyway, so I think drought makes sense that that was one of the big factors at that time. And it may have actually driven some of the other factors as well.

Drought, famine, and migration

If you’ve got drought, you’ve probably also got famine coming right on its heels because if you have a lack of rain, if you have a lack of all your major resources and all that, people are gonna start starving. And it looks like that’s what happened during the late Bronze Age collapse as well.

It can be actually pretty hard to find evidence of famine, unless like you find a mass grave, which we haven’t found by the way. But if they write about it, if they write about it in their text, then you can be pretty sure that there was famine. And we have that now, especially in recent years. There have been some texts that were found at the site of Ugarit, which is up on the north coast of what is now Syria. And the site of Ugarit were very important, entrepôt, very important international port at that time.

There have been tablets that have been published fairly recently, like in 2016 in French (and then a couple of years later in English) in which they say there is famine in our city, please send us help. I mean, they come right out and say it. Now, we had others before that as well. We know up in Anatolia, for example, where the Hittites were. There are also tablets that talk about famine, starting as early as about 1250 BC. So a little bit earlier than we might have suspected.

They are writing and saying things like “Famine is here in my lands. It’s a matter of life and death. Please send grain.” And they’re asking people like the Egyptians to send relief. And in fact, we know from other texts that the Egyptians did send grain and dried fish and other things like that to help out the people in Ugarit and Anatolia and so on. So we definitely know that there is famine at that time. And it obviously comes hard on the heels of the drought.

Now, if we pull the Sea Peoples back in again, I think this then explains why they might have started migrating in the first place. If they do come from the Western Mediterranean, like I think Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, there is now evidence that there is a drought in Northern Italy as well, where the Terramare culture was. And there’s evidence for people leaving at that time in mass numbers.

It may be that that’s where we should be looking for the Sea Peoples coming from and that they started their migrations because they were starving and there was a drought in their lands. In which case though, I mean, as the old saying goes out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the Eastern Mediterranean had a drought as well. I mean, it stretched all across the Mediterranean, but they couldn’t have known that, at least not easily at that time.

They start migrating and they get to a place where it’s just as bad, but there are also people already living there. They are attacking at the same time as assimilating, they’re just trying to get a new life for themselves. And I think that’s what we see when they attack Egypt. But we also know from other tablets that they attack elsewhere. So we have to add other things in here as well. But for right now, I would say we’ve got drought equals famine, and then maybe that’s gonna lead into migration and other things as well.

Evidence for Invaders Beyond Egypt

Now it used to be that the only evidence we had for migrations or invasions, if you will, which is probably a better way to put it, is the evidence from the Egyptians, the inscriptions that Merneptah and Ramesses, the third left us from 1207 and 1177. But now we’ve got other evidence as well, the same archives at Ugarit on the north coast of Syria that gave us the tablets talking about famine. They also mentioned invaders.

Some of them have been known for quite a while. There’s a fairly famous tablet that talks about enemies and ships having been sighted. And are they gonna come here or not? And their messages between the king or the governor on Cyprus over to the king of Ugarit. And you can see Cyprus on a good day from Ugarit, basically. So we knew about these enemy ships, but we didn’t know whose they were. Like it doesn’t say the Sea Peoples or anything like that. It just says ships of the enemy. Well, the new tablets that have just been published from Ugarit also mention ships of the enemy, but they also mention that they’ve made landfall.

In fact, one particular text, which is written by the king of Ugarit, basically asking for reinforcements to be sent. He says, “The enemy has landed. “They have overrun one of my port cities and they are now advancing on Ugarit itself. Please send help.” Well, we know that even if the help was sent, it wasn’t enough or it was too late because the French archeologist, when they excavated Ugarit, starting back in the 1920s and even continuing until fairly recently, they found that Ugarit at that time period had been destroyed and had been destroyed by humans.

There are bodies in the streets, there are arrowheads embedded in the walls. There is a meter of destruction, like three feet deep of destruction in that city. And it was then abandoned. It was abandoned for between 400 and 600 years. People buried hordes of precious metals and never came back for them. So that enemy, whoever they might have been, not only advanced on Ugarit, but destroyed Ugarit.

The problem, once again, the scribe just says, the enemy, it doesn’t say the Shardan, or the Shardana, or the Palest, or the Weshesh, and I, oh, I would love to take that scribe and take him out back and say, “Come on, why didn’t you tell us who they were? Why did you just say the enemy?” But that scribe might not have known who they were. Give them a break. But we can now say that there were invaders. There were invaders from outside. Whether they were Sea Peoples or something else, we can’t know for sure, but we definitely have invaders at that time.

Destructions and possible internal rebellions

There are a lot of destructions around the ancient Near East and the Aegean at this time of cities, both major and minor. There are discussions as to whether there are actually city-wide destructions and whether maybe just a cow kicked over a lantern like Mrs. O’Leary in Chicago. We’re still debating exactly how many destructions and how destructive they were, if I could use the same word again. But the basic feeling is yes, there were invaders, there were destructions, but some of the destructions might not have been by outsiders.

They might have been internal. It might have been an internal rebellion by the locals rising up, precisely because they’re starving, because there’s no water, there’s no food, anything like that. And there are a couple of instances where we can see that. The site of Mycenae on Mainland Greece where the famous Lion Gate is, it has been suggested that its ultimate demise at this time was because of internal rebellion. We can’t be sure of that, but it is a definite hypothesis.

Another example might be the site of Hathor in ancient Canaan, which is today in modern Israel. And at Hathor, where we had two co-directors that were excavating and couldn’t agree on what caused the destruction of the site. One said it was Joshua and pointed to the book in the Hebrew Bible that talks about Joshua conquering Hathor. The other co-director said, now wait a minute, at the site, the palaces burnt and the temples were burnt, but not the houses of the local people.

That looks like an internal rebellion. Palaces burnt, temples burnt, but not the people’s houses. You have an invader from outside, they’re gonna burn absolutely everything. But if you have the people’s houses still there, doesn’t that look like an internal rebellion? Well, it might. Now again, hard to decide, my point would be if the two co-directors can’t decide who might have destroyed their site, pretty hard for the rest of us to decide that as well. But I would put this up as an example of maybe internal rebellion. So yes, we have destructions, not everywhere, but a lot of them. But we can’t be sure if it’s external or internal. We just know the city is destroyed.

If we see a destruction at a site though, it might not be by humans. It could be by Mother Nature. I’m talking about earthquakes. Some of the sites that we see destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age really seem to be destroyed by earthquakes. Now it can be difficult to determine if a destruction’s by humans or by Mother Nature. Sometimes it’s obvious. I mean, if you find bodies in the streets with arrowheads sticking out of them, it’s probably humans and not an earthquake.

But when you find bodies simply buried like under walls of collapsed houses, it could actually be either one. But if there are some symptoms, and we can usually tell when the city is hit by an earthquake because we’ll have walls that are off-kilter, that shouldn’t be, we’ll have keystones slipped in an arch, things like that. And in some of the cases, we could say, yeah, this is most likely an earthquake rather than by humans.

If we take a look at those type of sites at the end of the late Bronze Age, it really looks like we have what’s known as an earthquake storm. Now that’s the name for it in antiquity. If it happens today, it’s known as an earthquake sequence by seismologists. And the general idea is frequently that if you have a fault line, like the North Anatolian fault line that runs across Türkiye, that if you have an earthquake and it doesn’t release all of the pressure, you will have another earthquake sometime later nearby. It could be a week later, it could be a month later, it could be a year later, that will release more of the pressure. And if that still doesn’t release all of the built-up pressure, you will have another earthquake and another and another.

Basically, the fault line will unzip until all the pressure is gone. That can take up to 60 years, 6-0, 60 years. We see that today. It’s been happening across Türkiye since like the 1930s. But it also happened in antiquity. And it looks like it took place in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean from about 1225 to 1175 BC, in other words, spanning the late Bronze Age collapse. And so we can see bodies in a number of cities.

There’s a young teenage girl at Mycenae, for example, who tried to shelter in the doorway of her house. Normally, that’s one of the safest places to try and shelter from an earthquake. But in this case, the whole house collapsed, and one of the stones fell and hit her in the head, probably killed her instantly. She was found with that stone still embedded in her skull. At other places, there are other bodies as well.

To give you one more example, at the site of Troy, where the Trojan War took place, according to Homer, and we have nine cities, one on top of another, city number six is destroyed by an earthquake, not by humans. There’s no bodies there, there’s no arrowheads, anything like that. But the city is destroyed with giant rocks thrown around, and everything fallen with walls undulating. Pretty obvious, Troy six was destroyed by an earthquake. And so we can put that into the category as well. Now, if we’re trying to make a logical succession where we have drought, famine, migration, that works for all those, but we’re do earthquakes fit into that.

Well, you don’t really fit earthquakes into that, they just happen, but it turns out that this is a very active seismic zone in this entire region. There are fault lines off the coast of Greece. There’s a fault line coming straight up the Rift Valley, where you’ve got the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias. There are fault lines across ancient Anatolia.

In fact, if you lay a map that shows all the earthquakes that have happened in modern Türkiye since say the year 1900, and you’ve got all the earthquakes plotted, and you lay that on top of a map showing the cities that were either partially or totally destroyed at the end of the late Bronze Age, there’s almost a one-to-one correlation. And so I think we have to add in earthquakes as one of the other possible stressors, drivers, factors that led to the late Bronze Age collapse.

The other factor we should bring into the equation is that of disease. We haven’t mentioned this up until now, but in terms of like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, where you’ve got drought and famine and earthquakes and all that, even today, you frequently have disease following on the footsteps. And I think we might have had that same situation back at the end of the late Bronze Age.

Certainly we know this from some of the stories that have been handed down. For example, Homer in “The Iliad” in the first book talks about a plague sweeping through the Mycenaean troops that are besieging Troy. In the story of the Exodus from the Hebrew Bible, we’ve got the 10 plagues. These might be memories, vague memories of what actually happened back then, but we do know, for example, that there was a plague that hit the Hittites earlier, about 150 years before the collapse, back in the time of my favorite Hittite king, Šuppiluliuma I, who ruled about 1350 BC, and we are told by one of his successors that he and most of his immediate family died as the result of a plague that was brought to Anatolia, courtesy of Egyptian prisoners of war, and it absolutely decimated the Hittites.

Now, that’s a century and a half before the collapse. So we really can’t say that that’s part and parcel of it, but there is an Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses V, if I remember correctly, who ruled about 1140 BC, and we’ve got his mummy. And if you look at the mummy along the jawline and on the cheek, there are pustules. He had smallpox and he probably died from it, and we’re able to say this because we actually have a papyrus, the Turin papyrus - it’s in a museum in Italy today in Turin - and it talks about the fact that Ramesses and other members of his family died of the plague, which we would say is smallpox, and that they were buried in the Valley of the Kings.

But most unusually, it took something like 16 months to bury them, they dug brand new tombs for them, and after they put the king and his dead relatives in, they dismissed the workmen who had dug the tombs, they gave him a month off at full pay, and then they closed the Valley of the Kings to everyone. It was like maybe the world’s first quarantine at that time. So we do have evidence for plague a little bit after the collapse, but the collapse is gonna take most of the 12th century BC to fully form, and so somebody that dies of smallpox in 1140 is in fact part and parcel of the whole collapse. So I think we do have to add in disease in addition to everything else, earthquakes, migration, famine, drought, you name it. I think we’ve got enough there to justify the fact that we’ve got a polycrisis going on.

Multiplier effects, domino effects, and network collapse

One of the things that we’ve got in looking at all these multiple causes that might have led to the collapse is the fact that we’ve got, first of all, a multiplier effect going on, that is each one has got a bigger effect than it might have because of the others, but we’ve also got a domino effect going on, that is when one of these goes down or is dreadfully impacted, it would have affected the others much as today we can set up dominoes to all fall in a row.

If you’ve got a supply chain shortage to put it in today’s terms, if the tin is cut off and you can’t make copper anymore, that’s gonna affect pretty much all the civilizations, but if you’ve got something that affects Cyprus and the Cypriots, which is giving everybody the copper, then that is gonna have a domino effect on everybody else. So even just the news of one of them being affected might have had a domino effect on one or more of the others.

Now, one of the questions that we wanted to ask is what would it have taken to have brought down this network? And so actually after I published 1177 BC, I was approached and got together with colleagues from the US Army Corps of Engineers and we ran scenarios through a computer trying to figure out which of the G8, or others, in which order would it have taken for them to fall to collapse the whole network?

For instance, if the Mycenaeans had gone down, would that have collapsed the whole globalized network? If the Minoans had gone down, would that have shattered the small world network? What did it take? And we know by looking back at it that it did collapse, it was shattered, but in what order and how important was the collapse itself? Can we actually figure out who went down first and who went down last? Well, it turns out we can try and approximate that.

We ran a couple of thousand scenarios through a computer and came up with two basic scenarios that would have resulted in the collapse. One is if the Hittites and the Egyptians both essentially collapsed at the same time, that would have brought down the rest of the network or if that city of Ugarit, the international port on the coast of North Syria, if that had collapsed at the same time as the Hittites, that would have been enough to disrupt the entire network and bring it down also.

Those were the only two scenarios that actually resulted in what we could see. But over the two, one was preferable because the scenario with the Egyptians and the Hittites going down, we know that’s not what happened. We know the Egyptians survived. The Hittites do not. Their society basically ends for all intents and purposes. The Egyptians, while they don’t do well, they do muddle through, they coped and they adapted, but they do survive the collapse. So we knew that scenario in which both went down at once didn’t work. We know historically that’s not what happened. That has left us with the scenario of Ugarit and the Hittites going down virtually simultaneously.

That would have been enough to bring down the whole thing. But interestingly, the rest of them, the Assyrians going down, the Babylonians going down, whatever, none of that would have been enough to take out the entire network. So it does show that it’s not easy to collapse a network and that I would say you’re much more likely to be able to be resilient and overcome a catastrophe than you are to be taken down by it, but it really depends on how effectively you react to it. And if you are actually trying to survive the collapse, instead of ignoring it and denying it is happening, but that brings us to another question of whether they even knew they were collapsing while they were collapsing, did they?

Systems collapse and the Dark Age debate

So what we’re talking about at the end of this late run stage with the collapse is what is known as a systems collapse. This was a term that was invented by Colin Renfrew at the University of Cambridge in the late 1970s, but it basically describes what happens when you have one of these complex systems collapse. You’ve got your central economy collapses, your upper elite, the 1% go away. You’ve got the government, the centralized government collapses. You have all these hallmarks of what had made your society so vibrant and thriving, they now all go away. And along with that, you’ve got a huge decrease in population, both death and migration. And that’s what we see at this end of the late run stage. So I think we’re looking at a systems collapse.

It’s not unique here. There are systems collapses that have happened elsewhere and else when. The Maya collapse, follow the Roman Empire, the Harappan civilization in India, it happens. And in most cases, when you have one of these systems collapse, you have then a dark age that happens immediately afterward where you revert back to a lower level of socio-political economic functioning. You go a whole step backwards into what historians call a dark age. And you basically have to start all over again.

The thing is a systems collapse doesn’t happen overnight. It can take up to a century to take place. So like life was very different in 1200 BC from 1100 BC and completely different in 1000 BC. So we’re looking at a systems collapse and then we’re looking at a dark age afterward. And in the dark age, that’s when you try and regroup basically. And one thing that Colin Renfrew said is one of the hallmarks of a dark age is that they look back at the age that has just disappeared and consider it a golden age and they frequently tell stories about it.

That’s exactly what we’ve got with Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey and the story of the Trojan War and so on. So I do think we’ve got a systems collapse and I do think it segues right into what historians have called a dark age because some of the same things that we lose because of a systems collapse are the very same things that define a dark age. They lose, for example, the knowledge of how to put up big buildings. They lose writing, linear B in my Sydney and Greece is not used again after the collapse of the Mycenaeans.

What we’ve got then is in the years, in the centuries, after the collapse, say for 400 years, say from 1200 BC down to about 800 BC, four centuries. This is what historians have called the world’s first dark age and they point to everything that I’ve just said. Now, that’s not fair, I would say, in a way because each of the different societies is affected to a different degree. Some actually did okay in the collapse.

Others, like the Hittites, completely disappeared. And it’s also an era of invention and innovation, in part because they had to, right? What’s the saying, necessity is the mother of invention? If you’re having trouble getting tin, for example, and you can’t make copper, you might turn to another metal that you already knew about, but that you hadn’t been exploiting yet because it was too difficult, too hard, didn’t have enough, whatever - iron. Iron does not really come into use until during and after the collapse and it becomes a replacement for bronze.

That doesn’t mean bronze completely goes away, but it does mean that iron takes its place. We also get the standardization of the alphabet at this time, which the Phoenicians bring across the Mediterranean. Now, the Phoenicians who come from central Canaan, what we would call today Lebanon, they’re actually survivors of the collapse. They actually are among the people that do the best in the aftermath of the collapse in terms of resilience and transformation.

The Phoenicians standardize the alphabet. They don’t invent it, it’s already been around, but they standardize it, they bring it over to Greece and they bring it over to Italy, and it becomes the Greek alphabet and it becomes the Latin alphabet, which we’re still using today.

The Phoenicians and the Cypriots, alphabet and iron, because the Cypriots, who had been the source for all the copper, now seem to be the first people to be using iron. We get the first bi-metallic weapons and tools where we’ve got like an iron blade and a knife, but bronze rivets in the handle and the Cypriots send them out to Greece on one hand and the Levant on the other.

They seem to have been very nice about it because they sent the technology as well, oh, you like this? Well, here’s how you make it. And every country had iron ore, it wasn’t like the copper in the tin. And we can see the development of iron working spread across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. So I would say Cypriots with their iron Phoenicians with the alphabet and don’t forget purple dye as well, they’re doing the best. But that also means that our dark age might not be a dark age.

One of my colleagues has said that any age that sees the invention of iron and the standardization of the alphabet cannot be considered to be a dark age. It’s an age of invention. And so what we archaeologists are trying to argue now is stop calling it a dark age, just like the medieval people don’t want theirs to be a dark age anymore either. And now it’s like late antique or the early Middle Ages.

Same thing with us. We don’t want a dark age now. What we wanna do is simply call it what it is. It’s the iron age. It’s when they start using iron. And that’s got no pejorative sense or anything like that. It’s just a fact. You had the Bronze Age, now you have the iron age. And so I think that actually is a better way to describe this.

Uneven survival and the problem of labels

Now, I will admit that many of the societies do go back down to a lower level of socioeconomic political circumstances, like the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, on the Minoans on Crete. Others disappear entirely like the Hittites. But, Cypriots do okay, Phoenicians do okay, Assyrians and Babylonians do okay. So we actually, we need to be specific here and differentiate between the different societies as to how well they did or didn’t do. And then see if there are any lessons that we can learn from that.

One of the other things to keep in mind, and which is at the basis of the debate between archaeologists and ancient historians as to whether we’re looking at a collapse or a transformation at the end of the late Bronze Age, has to do with the idea of how much survived and how much didn’t, in terms of the people themselves versus the societies that they make up. So, for instance, and this is a part of a problem too - all right, you take something like ancient Anatolia and we talked about the Hittite Empire.

There’s actually a whole mess of different ethnicities that are living in Anatolia at that time. The Hittites, per se, might have been the overlords. They might have had the Empire, but the Luwians that are there would have said, “I’m not a Hittite,” right? The Trojans up in Troy, “I’m not a Hittite,” right? But we talk about this, you know, big entity. So when we get to the collapse and then the survival afterward, when I talk about a collapse, I don’t mean that everybody dies. I mean, a lot of people do.

The estimates in Greece, for example, or maybe as much as 40% of the population died or migrated between, say, the 13th and the 11th centuries BC. So, you know, a lot of people do die. It wasn’t a wonderful time, but not everybody does. Same thing with Anatolia, with the Hittites, same thing with Mesopotamia and the Assyrians. So what we have to realize is there is some level of continuum that life does continue, but what changes is the political entities, if you will, the societal entities.

So we no longer have the Hittites, per se, in Anatolia, but we do have some of the survivors, and we call them the Neo-Hittites down in North Syria. Others, though like the Urartian, you do have new peoples moving into some areas, and we know this from the records, like the Phrygians coming in, we know about their invasion, but you’ve got other people who are still farming in Anatolia that are basically looking over their shoulders saying, “Okay, who am I paying taxes to tomorrow?” Right, “I’m still here. My Hittite government isn’t here.” So we do have to keep this in mind.

Even in Greece, for example, nobody called themselves a Mycenaean after about 1050, but that doesn’t mean that Greece was empty. It means that the survivors were just dealing with life and figuring out what to do after that. So this is where we still have our arguments in academia. What is a collapse? What is a transformation? Right, and where do the two meet? Where’s the gray area?

That’s why I took, I wouldn’t call it the easy way out, but I wanted my cake and to eat it too. And so in the sequel, I said, what collapsed was the network that connected them all? What transformed are the various societies? And they didn’t always transform, some just coped, some adapted, but that’s where you get the nuances.

But you also have to realize too, that you’re really talking about the whole group. And if you get down to the individuals, that’s where it’s, first of all, I’m gonna get very, very interesting. I mean, what I wouldn’t give to have a time machine and go back and yeah, it’d be great to talk to the kings and the pharaohs. I’d also like to talk to the farmer in Messenia, living near Pylos and saying, so how did your life change after the palace went down? And that is nearly impossible to answer, unless you get lucky doing some archeology. But I do think we have to keep this in mind, the ethnicities versus the societies, the people versus the government, and just realize that we’re frequently talking about the forest and not the individual trees. Because in part, that’s all we can do.

Part 2: After the Fall: Resilience, Recovery, and the Road Back

Chapter 1: The Riser of the New World Order

One of the questions that I think is extremely relevant today comes in the sequel that I wrote, After 1177 BC, which simply asks the question, what do you do if your society collapses? If the globalized network that you’re a part of collapses, what do you do? How resilient are you? Now, resilience is a word that’s bandied about today by lots of people, and that’s part of the problem. It has different meanings for different people and in different situations. For me, resilience is how well you do in the face of adversity.

How do you bounce back when something has gone wrong, sometimes very wrong? And I think there are basically three ways you can deal with it. And I get these from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They won the Nobel Prize back in 2007. They are the ones that put out reports on climate change every year or every couple of years. And they put out something back in 2012 that was dealing with resilience and mitigation that what do you do after disasters? They’re more looking at things like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

But in that publication, they had some definitions that I thought fit very well with the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And what they say is that when you have such an event, there are basically three things you can do. You can either just try to survive until tomorrow, which basically means that you’re coping, right? You’re trying to make it until the sun comes up again. But you could also do a little bit more. You could adapt. You could be looking to next week or next month and just saying a little bit longer term survival. So coping is just tomorrow, adapting is a little bit further out.

But they also said there’s a third thing. If you were to say this can never happen again, we can’t let New Orleans be flooded by the next hurricane. We have to transform. We have to do something about it. They said that’s the top of the heap, basically. Yeah, you can cope. Yeah, you can adapt. If you transform, that’s now, that’s where we’re talking. And so I think that we can take a look at the G8 that was affected by the collapse and ask, how well did each of them do? Did they simply cope? Did they adapt? Or did they go the extra mile and transform? Or did they do none of the above and they disappeared?

So I think we can actually rank them and then try to ask, although this gets very difficult, try to ask what made each of them resilient or not? What made them be able to transform, cope, adapt or not? And that’s where it gets down into the nitty gritty and the weeds, but it’s hypothetical. But I think it’s worth exploring because again, I think that’s where we have lessons that might still be viable for us today.

The new world order after collapse

One of the things that we see in the aftermath and the collapse is basically a new world order. As each of the societies does or does not deal well in the aftermath, we can see new political systems popping up, for example. We can see new economic systems as they try and either grow back up from the ground like the Mycenaeans had to do - and again, we don’t have Mycenaean society after about 1050 BC, we now have the Greeks going back to ground zero and trying to build everything back up.

In other places, the huge empires that had been around, the Hittites, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, some of them go away and are replaced by a new world order. The Hittites, for example, up in Anatolia, they’re replaced by smaller city-states and kingdoms. We’ve got some survivors whom we call the Neo-Hittites, the new Hittites in North Syria, but we’ve also got new groups, the Uratians, over in the eastern half of Türkiye and the Phrygians over in the western half of Türkiye. They come on in and establish new, albeit smaller, kingdoms in the Iron Age.

I think we see this especially though, down in the southern Levant, the area that today would be Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, part of Lebanon, because where we had the Canaanites in the Bronze Age and the Egyptian overlords, if you will, because the Egyptians basically ruled that area as part of their kingdom or empire, that all goes away at the end of the Late Bronze Age and it’s replaced with much smaller city-states and kingdoms, which will sound familiar because we know them from the Hebrew Bible.

We now have, after the collapse in the Iron Age, we now have the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah. We’ve got the kingdom of Edom, the kingdom of Moab, the kingdom of Ammon. All of these areas that we know from the biblical stories, they come into existence during these 400 years after the collapse. They are a reaction to what had just happened.

In fact, some scholars have suggested that maybe that’s more than natural order of things, to have smaller city-states and smaller kingdoms and that the empires of the Late Bronze Age were, as one person has put it, a failed experiment that they tried and it didn’t work all that well. I think I would disagree with that. I mean, that system survived for 500 years. I think that was pretty good, but it has no place now in the aftermath and we get all of these smaller city-states that are now flourishing.

On the other hand, again, it’s not all that cut and dried because what about the Assyrians and the Babylonians over in Mesopotamia? They’re still there. They’re now called the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians, the new ones, but they have survived the collapse, pretty much intact. They didn’t do as well as the Phoenicians and the Cypriots who I would give a gold star rating to, number one, in my book, but I would give the Assyrians and Babylonians number two. They adapted, they almost sort of transformed, but at least adapted, they’ve still got their government, they’ve still got writing, they’re still writing, they’ve still got their religion, they’ve still got the king and all the government and all that, still got the economy. It’s just things have changed slightly.

In fact, one of the things I think changed and I explore this in the sequel After 1177 BC is that they’ve lost their trading partners because that globalized network has broken down and some of the people with whom they’d been interacting are now basically gone. Like they can’t interact with the Hittites anymore ‘cause they’re not there, there’s no big Hittite king. Instead, what the Neo-Assurians do after it took them a little while to come back also, they do have drought there for a while, but when they bounce back by the 10th and certainly by the 9th century BC, like halfway through the Iron Age, the Neo-Assyrians take over pretty much the entire ancient Near East. Basically all the areas they had been trading with and had commercial and diplomatic and marital ties back in the late Bronze Age, they’ve now just conquered. It’s now part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and down to Egypt in fact at one point.

We see things change and we do now see empires growing again, but for a different reason. The Neo-Assyrians are now taking what they need rather than trading for it. And this is when we also begin to see the rise and fall of civilizations. I mean in Hamilton, it talks about oceans rise, empires fall, that’s basically what we’ve got here because yes, the Neo-Assyrians rise up and they’re dominant for a while, but then they go down and collapse and the Neo-Babylonians take over for a while and then they collapse and turn and we’re off and running with the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans and follow us up until today.

But that’s in part why I would again argue that the collapse of the late Bronze Age is so important and what happened after the collapse of the Bronze Age is perhaps even more important because it shows what happens if you are or not resilient, but it also set us on the path for what we’ve got today in the Western world. That is where everything comes from that we’ve got. I mean, yes, you can look back to Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that for some of the things that we’ve still got today, but out of the collapse of the late Bronze Age is gonna come Greece, archaic and classical Greece with the invention of democracy and so on. So we’re gonna be on a, I wouldn’t call it a straight path, but we can trace ourselves back to what happened 3,000 years ago to what we’ve got today.

Chapter 2: The winners and losers

If we’re ranking these societies as to how well they did in the aftermath of the collapse, I would put the Cypriots and the Phoenicians in the top category. They not only transform, but they’re actually anti-fragile. Now, this is a phrase that Nicholas Nassim Taleb has used. In fact, it’s the title of one of his books. And what he says is that anti-fragile is something that actually flourishes in an age of chaos. It takes advantage of the chaos. So one might actually say, you know, collapse is not always terrible for everyone. For some people, it’s an opportunity.

In this particular case, for example, we see the Phoenicians from central Canaan. They spread out across the Mediterranean - one of my colleagues has called it a Phoenician lake - they take advantage of the fact that Ugarit has been destroyed and that the navies of some of the others, like the Hittites and the Egyptians, have either been destroyed or are not what they once were. So I would say both the Cypriots and the Phoenicians are actually anti-fragile. They are flourishing in this age of chaos. They do better than anybody else. So I put them up in my top category.

The Assyrians and the Babylonians, they adapt, but they don’t really transform that much because they don’t need to. They simply carry on as they were, but they are better than the Egyptians, for example. Now, I would put the Egyptians in my category three. They are adapting a little bit, but more they’re just coping, if you will. They don’t go down, they don’t disappear. And in fact, that was one thing that I changed from book one to book two. And the end of book one, I was like, “Ooh, Egypt is the only one that really survived.” And then book two, I’m a bit more nuanced. And like, no, actually there are others that survived better than Egypt. And I would put Egypt in the middle category three.

They didn’t do wonderfully, but they didn’t do terribly. They’re still there, but they have now withdrawn a bit from the international world because they are having problems back home, if I can put it that way. So this is into the third intermediate period, as Egyptologists call it. And at one point, we’ve got not just one, not just two, but three, and sometimes even four, people all saying that they are the pharaoh of Egypt at the same time, but in different areas of Egypt. Now to my mind, that’s not a good system. Egypt is supposed to be one king, one ruler, one country.

We look back to the new kingdom period. King Tut, Akhenaten, Amitoah the third. And so in comparison to the way it had been, in what I would say is the glory days of the 14th and 13th centuries, Egypt in the 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th centuries is not even really comparable, but it’s not terrible. And we do have some highlights.

For example, there’s one guy Psusennes I who is known as the Silver Pharaoh. His tomb was found in 1939, right before World War II. If it had been found at any other time, it would have made worldwide headlines because it’s, I believe, the second wealthiest tomb in Egypt just behind King Tut’s. But most of the stuff in the tomb is silver rather than gold. So that’s a high point. We also have one of the pharaohs, a guy named Shoshenq I, Shishak of the Bible, probably, he’s Libyan, he’s the founder of the 22nd dynasty, and he actually tries to recreate the good old days, leaves us an inscription where he went up to Israel and Judah and campaigned up there. And may have even conquered, for example, Megiddo where we find an inscription with his cartouche up there.

It’s not terrible in Egypt, but it’s not like it used to be. One Egyptologist said to me, actually, when I gave a lecture there, that that’s not a fair comparison, that it’s like apples and oranges. And you can’t compare third intermediate period to the new kingdom period. And I’m like, well, maybe not, but I’m comparing the iron age to the Bronze Age in all the other societies. So I do think it’s a fair comparison, but- so it turned out what I said to them is, these categories I’m putting the societies in, ranking them one, two, three. I said, it’s just my gut feeling based on everything that I’ve studied, but, you know, I’m not the be-all and end-all here. You wanna present data that would persuade me to move them up or down. I’m quite happy to do that.

I will say now that you could put Egypt up in category two with Assyria and Babylon, and I’d still be able to sleep at night. But I’d also be quite happy to put them down into category four where they were like with the Mycenaeans and Minoans. So it’s all fluid. And, you know, that’s the beauty of archeology in ancient history, is we put out a hypothesis and then we try and test it, and then we go and excavate and find something completely new next week that makes us rearrange it. And that’s all good. It’s called science. That’s how we advance. That’s how we progress. But for now, I’m gonna keep Egypt in category three.

The Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, and Canaanites

Category four, as I’ve just mentioned, is Minoans and Mycenaeans. They are just barely coping. They’re not adapting. They’re just coping. We see all the big palaces in mainland Greece. And even on Crete for that matter: Mycenae, Tyrans, Pilos, or Cominos, Knoosos, they either are burned, invaded, internal rebellion, earthquake, you name it, they’re all basically abandoned. And with them goes the writing system. Linear B, which we now know, is an early form of Greek that ceases to be used by about 1050 BC, because it was only being used by the scribes in the palaces to create inventories. What came into the palace, what went out of the palace? Though surprisingly, they never mentioned overseas.

The linear B never mentions contacts with Egypt or the Hittites, whatever. It’s a big problem, because I know from the archeology that they are in contact. At any rate, what we would have called the Mycenaeans and Minoans, it comes crashing down. And as I’ve mentioned, they had to rebuild from the ground up. They do it successfully, but it takes quite a while. And that’s why I end After 1177 BC with 776 BC, which is the first Olympics. And by that point, everything in Greece is back up and running, and we’re very quickly going to get them using the new Greek alphabet. We’re gonna get Homer, we’re gonna get Hesiod, we’ll get Sapho, we’ll get the Archaic poets and Greece is off to the races, but it has taken 400 years. So I put them in my category four, because they did just about as badly as you could possibly do and still survive.

And then the last category, that’s the Hittites. Don’t be a Hittite. The Hittites do not do well at all, in part ‘cause they’ve already got internal problems. We know that there was a schism in the royal family and that one part moved. We also know that the Hittite capital city, Hattusa, was actually already abandoned before the end came and that it was only partially destroyed afterward and probably from people that otherwise had nothing to do with anything, the Kashka from the Northwest that had already destroyed Hattusa a couple hundred years earlier, they came back.

I think the Hittites probably did it to themselves anyway, though it certainly didn’t hurt that the Sea Peoples were on the shores of Anatolia. And they would have been a primary example of the domino effect. And remember that the Hittites and Ugarit going down at the same time may have been what caused the collapse of absolutely everything. So I put the Hittites down there. I also put the Canaanites in Southern Canaan into that lowest category, because we really don’t see them again after the collapse of the late Bronze Age.

We do not refer to the Canaanites in the Iron Age by that name, we now call them by other names, the Judahites, the Israelites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites. And so I’m of two minds, either they were wiped out or they assimilated one of the two. And we’ve got both stories in the Hebrew Bible, look at the book of Judges versus the book of Joshua, is it a genocide or is it assimulation? Either way, I don’t think the Canaanites in Southern Levant, coped or adapted or transformed or anything like that. And so I put them down in my bottom category.

On the other hand, if you were to argue, as some of my colleagues have done, that the Edomites, the Israelites, the Ammonites and all those guys are actually Canaanites who have transformed, then I would say, okay, in that case, they should be up in category two. You know, again, it’s all flexible. I only put this out as a suggestion for what we might think about doing.

I fully expect that my suggestions hopefully will start the discussions rather than end it. And I think that the new discoveries that we’re making every day, every week, every month, every year, especially in biblical archeology, are going to get us to alter things just like we’ve altered. Now what we think caused the late Bronze Age collapse will be able to fine tune how everybody did in the aftermath. But I wanted to start the discussions and I think they’re pretty interesting discussions, which again, have some bearing on us today when we are grappling with some of the same things that brought down the late Bronze Age network and that the survivors had to deal with in the aftermath. And look around today, we’ve got the same things here.

Chapter 3: How to avoid civilizational collapse

This is where we have room to maneuver and where I think investigations are going to go in the future, because even though I think we can rank these societies as to how well they each did, one of the difficulties is to try to figure out why they did, like why were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians able to be that much more successful than the Hittites, for example. So archeologists and ancient historians are now starting to try and answer these questions to grapple with the concepts.

We’re getting a couple of interesting things. For example, it’s now been suggested that maybe some of the societies were more fragile than they appeared and that they might have been more vulnerable to the stresses than they appeared to outsiders. Like the Mycenaeans, they had been over exploiting the lower classes and those lower classes might have been quite happy to see the palaces fall and even cheered and they may have been in all part of the internal rebellions. So it may be that something that looked very strong like the Hittites was actually weakened internally and the first big gust of wind came and knocked that tree over and boom, no more Hittites.

But it also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that’s where water comes into play because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category two and they’re right by the Tigris and Euphrates. And the Egyptians, of course, have the Nile.

Now, those are three of the big four in the ancient world. I mean, my poor Mycenaeans and Minoans, they’re not quite up there with the others. You know, the big two in the late Bronze Age are the Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four, Egyptians, Hittites, the Syrians, Babylonians, the Syrians and Babylonians have the Tigris and Euphrates. The Egyptians have the Nile. The Hittites are the only one of those four without a major water source. They’re also the only one of those four that go down completely. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In fact, in talking to various people, I’ve heard time and time again that wars over water are gonna be what are fought in the coming century. And we can already see that in California with water, with Colorado, with Mexico and all of that. So I think in some ways, the fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might’ve been just luck of the draw. That they were so far inland that the Sea Peoples didn’t get to them and they were on the two rivers, Tigers and Euphrates, so that the drought didn’t impact them as badly as it did others. But having said that, we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are hit. It’s not that long though. It’s like less than a century.

It came well after everyone else had been hit. So there is something there to be said for where you happen to be. So again, I think this is where we’re gonna be looking in the future is how did these people manage to survive? Or why didn’t they survive? Were they not aware that they were collapsing? And again, we have to keep in mind and actually say this at the beginning of the sequel. Most of our records are from the 1%. They’re from the elite. We know how the kings did and the central authorities that were living high. We don’t know as much about the 99% if you wanna call them that, about the farmers and the peasants out in the fields in Messenia in Greece or the Hinterlands in Anatolia.

We don’t really know their story that well, but we’re learning it because archaeologists are now moving out and excavating the little villages, the little towns that are inhabited across the divide, Bronze Age and Iron Age. And so we’re gonna get more evidence. We’re gonna get more answers. And again, that’s what I love about archeology. It’s not cut and dried. And if you will pardon the pun, it’s not set in stone. It changes depending on the new discoveries.

So everything you’re reading in the books, not just my books, but the history books and all that, it’s gonna be different to a certain extent within five years, 10 years, 50 years. I’ve already come out with the revised version of my first book and I have a folder in Dropbox of new articles that have already come out since 2021 that I need to take into account if we’re ever able to do a third edition. It just keeps coming. It doesn’t stop. And that is what is absolutely wonderful about it.

Leadership and resilience

In addition to all the other factors, whether it was luck in the draw, where you were situated or anything like that, the other factor to bring into account is how good were your leaders? That is, were they able to lead you through this time of turbulence and catastrophe? Did you have the right people in the right place at the right time or not? Now, I suspect that contributed a lot to this as well. So for example, when Egypt had three or even four people all saying that they were the Pharaoh at the same time in different parts of the country, that’s not good leadership. It’s not how you’re gonna get through this.

Similarly, the Hittite royal family had a schism at exactly this time and parted the waves. That was exactly the wrong time to do that. You needed a strong leader in place at that time. Now, the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian rulers seem to have been the ones that got their societies through this.

In fact, a couple of fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist, have said that that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about a hundred years before everybody else, before they were impacted to a certain extent by the collapse. They said it was because they had strong rulers in place that they were able to stave this off for a couple of decades or a century at most. So I do think that leadership is incredibly important because in part that leadership will determine how well you respond.

Seven lessons for today

Having studied all of this, what happens in the aftermath and all of that, I was again wondering what lessons could be learned from the late Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath. Was there anything that is of use to us today? And I did come up with seven things that I think are common sense, if I may, that are things to remember, things to live by, things that will help us if we’re ever going down that same path.

1. Have multiple contingency plans in place

So I think the first one is pretty obvious, that you need to have redundant systems in place. We talk about that all the time today, but I think it’s incredibly important. You need to have a plan A, and if that somehow doesn’t work, you need a plan B. And if that doesn’t work, you need a plan C. I just like having a generator in place in case your electricity goes out.

But I would say not just a plan A, B and C, you need a D, E and F as well. You need multiple redundancies in place and plans that you can go to if all of your major ones fail. And I think that is something that they needed to do back then and that we would still need to do today.

2. Cultivate resilience to invasion

The next couple I would say are, again, common sense. Be strong enough to resist invasion if you can. Know who your friends are and who they aren’t. And also be resilient enough to go with the flow as you need to be. Don’t be rigid, don’t be just, you know, no, this is how we’ve always done it. But be prepared in case you’re invaded. Be prepared to reach out to allies.

3. Be self-sufficient but avoid alienating allies

And in that same tone, try and be as self-sufficient as you can, but not to the detriment of alienating your allies, I would say, because you’re gonna need each other. So if you’re gonna make it through this crisis, it’s gonna be because you’re leaning on each other.

4. Be Innovative and Inventive

The other lesson that I think has a major takeaway from the Iron Age, and I will deliberately call it the Iron Age rather than the Dark Age, is to be innovative and inventive, right? The fact that in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age, they were innovative and inventive with Iron and the alphabet, I think, is precisely what we would need to be again here today.

This is what evolutionary biologists and others would talk about in terms of the adaptive cycle, that when you have a crash in one area, you then have an immediate era afterward where you are innovative and inventive. It’s basically the rise and fall of empires, but here we’ve got a Mobius strip on its side, I would say, and I think that’s where this would come into place. If you are crashing, if your society is coming down, one of the ways you can best be resilient is to be innovative, is to be inventive.

So back in the Iron Age, what they did was turn to iron when they were having trouble making bronze. That actually, tin back then has been compared to oil today, petroleum gasoline, and their need for tin back then is much like our oil today, but I actually think it’s changing now. So just like in the Iron Age, they change to iron. So what we need to be more worried about, I think in this day and age, are rare earths like lithium that are used in chips in computers and cars and microwaves and everything else.

If something happens to the supply chain and we are not able to get that - I mean, and remember what happened during the pandemic, during COVID, which wasn’t that long ago, that we had such supply chain issues, and all of a sudden there was problems getting everything from computers to cars, and we need to be innovative and inventive. We need to be looking already for substitutes that can take the place of lithium or whatever. This needs to be not another dark age.

When we go down, if we go down, and I actually think it’s gonna be when we go down, we need to be prepared to turn on a dime and be innovative and see what we come up with next. If we’re gonna survive the collapse of our society, which I do think is coming, I don’t know when, but I don’t think it’s are we gonna collapse, I think it’s when are we gonna collapse? And in this case, we’re gonna need to be innovative and inventive.

5. Prepare for extreme weather conditions

The other thing we need to do, and again, I think this is very relevant to today, is to prepare for extreme weather conditions. Now back then in the late Bronze Age, I was talking about a mega drought that lasted 150 to 300 years. That I believe would qualify as an extreme weather event. Today, we are also having extreme weather events. We see it almost on a daily basis now.

What I would say here, my rule of thumb is, look, prepare for extreme weather events, because then if they come, like intense hurricanes, then you’re prepared. And if they don’t come, what have you lost? Not much. So I would say one of the big lessons from antiquity is prepare for extreme weather conditions.

6. Have a secure water supply

And along those same lines, I would say one of the other lessons is to really be careful of your water resources. Be very careful of where your water is gonna come from, whether it’s from a river or elsewhere, but we saw what happened in the late Bronze Age, and we’re seeing what’s happening today, where people are already fighting over water resources, and especially rivers. So I would say that that’s another takeaway from the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath.

7. Keep the working class happy

And then the last thing that I would add, the last common sense thing is keep the working class happy. I mean, any historian from any period of history will tell you that that’s essential. Keep the working class happy or there will be consequences to pay. And I think we see this in the late Bronze Age collapse, especially if internal rebellions are a greater factor than we have thought even till today. And even now, I would say we need to look around and ask, are we keeping the working class happy? And if not, what’s gonna happen?

If people point to all sorts of things, like the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and all of that, we’ve seen what happens if the working class is not happy. So I think that that is, again, that would be my last of the common sense takeaways, but surely we can add to it. I mean, I think we could probably easily get up to a top 10, but for right now, I’ve got a top seven.

Tipping points and warning signs

One of the things we need to be worried about is the tipping point. When are we gonna reach the point of no return for ourselves? Are there warning signs? I do think there were warning signs back in the late Bronze Age. We know that the Egyptians, for example, were trying to cross-breed their cattle. Their normal cattle was Zebu or Zebu cattle who thrive better in arid conditions. Is there anything we can do today if we notice signs warning us that we may be approaching a societal collapse, that there might be a tipping point coming up soon? I think we’ve already got some of the signs out there. Not everybody believes them, but I do think they are there.

I think the extreme climate, the weather conditions, is one of the signs that we’re approaching, possibly a tipping point. But we’ve also got other things that some may or may not remember, back during the pandemic, when we had all sorts of supply chain issues and had trouble getting toilet paper, right? That was a systemic problem, and I think a warning of what might come. The ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for five or six days, that I think was also a problem. And it really drove home the fact that one ship stuck in one canal can affect people worldwide for a week or more. And imagine if you had that at the same time as some of the other problems. We might have been looking at a systems collapse very quickly.

And in fact, one of the things I am now wondering about, back in 2008, we had the Wall Street financial crisis. What if that crisis had happened 10 years later or a dozen years later? What if we had had the Wall Street financial problems at the same time that COVID was hitting or beginning to hit? What if they had both happened in about 2020? I’m not so sure that we would be sitting here today. I think we might be scrambling in the ruins of our globalized network. I think we might have come this close to our tipping point and we’re lucky that they were 10 or 12 years apart.

So I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. And I really do think that when people say to me, “Oh, we can’t collapse. We’re too big to collapse. We’re too big to fail.” And I answer it, “no, we’re not.” That’s hubristic. Every society in the history of humankind has either collapsed eventually completely or has transformed so much that they’re almost unrecognizable in their new form. And to say that that’s not gonna happen to us, I think is just foolish, hubristic for sure. So when people say to me, are we gonna collapse? I look at them and I say, “Yes, we are gonna collapse. The question is when are we gonna collapse?” And for that, I don’t have an answer. It could be next week, it could be next year, could be 10 years from now, could be 50 years from now. But I am sure that at some point we are gonna collapse or have to transform. I mean, maybe AI is gonna create it and cause it right now, but who knows?

Final reflection

My big question to those that are asking me is to ask them back “When we collapse, how are we gonna deal with it?” Are we gonna be fragile? Are we gonna be vulnerable? Are we gonna be anti-fragile? In the aftermath of our society collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians? Or are we gonna be mycenaeans? And I personally am a bit worried. As an archeologist, I look back. And when I tell my students that they’re the next generation and they’re gonna be inheriting all of the problems we’ve created, we know that.

I’m not saying anything new, but this is where archeology, I think, can be of use. And especially archeology when it’s applied to ancient history. Because if we’re willing to listen and to learn from the past, then we can deal with what’s happening in the present and that will affect our future. So you need to know the past, to deal with the present and go into the future. Otherwise, we’re just doomed to repeat the past again and again and again. And personally, I think we’re smarter than that. But I may be wrong. Let’s hope I’m right.

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Mini Philosophy | Starts With A Bang | Big Think Books | Big Think Business

In this interview, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explores the mysteries of time, from the Big Bang and the “block universe” model to time travel and the famous “grandfather paradox.”

He breaks the “problem of time” into four key questions: Does time actually flow? How can quantum field theory be reconciled with general relativity? What defines the present moment? And why does time seem to move in only one direction?

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Timestamps

0:00:00 Introduction: The problem of time
0:01:00 Chapter 1: Does time flow?
0:02:42 Why time feels faster as we age
0:03:56 Time and change in philosophy and physics
0:05:28 Einstein and the end of absolute time
0:06:19 Time in the equations of physics
0:07:50 Chapter 2: How do we reconcile quantum field theory with the general theory of relativity?
0:12:10 Evidence for time dilation: Muons
0:14:29 Gravity slows time: General Relativity
0:19:22 Space-time and the block universe
0:21:55 Does time really exist?
0:26:33 The debate: Eternalism vs presentism
0:34:12 Chapter 3: Is there a “now”?
0:40:40 Chapter 4: Why does thermodynamics have a direction in time?
0:49:38 Quantum entanglement and the direction of time
0:55:10 Did time begin at the Big Bang?
0:45:00 Will time end?
1:05:40 Chapter 5: Is time travel possible?

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

My name is Jim Al-Khalili and I’m Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey. My book is called On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick. If you look up the problem of time online, there will be various definitions of what is regarded as the problem of time.

The problem of time

I like to lay out four different distinct problems. One is whether time flows. The second, how can we reconcile quantum field theory with Einstein’s general theory of relativity? Third, what is special about now?

The fourth and final problem of time: where does this direction of time come from?

At the end of this interview, hopefully we’ll lay out the problems and the questions and the paradoxes, some of which we’ve figured out, others remain.

Chapter 1: Does time flow?

Physical time vs manifest time

For me as a physicist, I try to understand the external world, try and make sense of it. And to do that objectively, we have to extract ourselves from the thing that we’re studying. When it comes to time, there’s a problem because we are unavoidably embedded within time. We can’t extract ourselves from it and view it objectively.

Very often, physicists and philosophers who study the nature of time make this distinction between physical time that is embedded within the laws of physics and our own perception of time, psychological time.

I like to use the term manifest time. I think it was first used by the philosopher Craig Callender. Manifest time is a way of compartmentalizing our perception of time from time that is external to us.

One of the most powerful distinctions between our perception of time, manifest time, and physical time, time that appears in our laws of physics external to our senses, is this notion that we feel very strongly that time is flowing. There’s some continuum. There’s change. We tend to think that time speeds up as we get older.

Where did time go? Suddenly, I’m — the last 10, 20 years, my kids have grown up. How did that happen? And yet your childhood seemed to stretch on forever.

Why time feels faster as we age

There’s a theory that suggests it’s to do with the laying down of new experiences.

It’s true that one year when you’re five years old, the period between one birthday and the next is a really long time. One year when you’re 50 years old goes by in a flash.

There’s the opposite property to time when you look at shorter intervals. Rather than the laying down of new experiences and being active slowing time down, compare half an hour sitting in the dentist’s waiting room when you have nothing to do — you haven’t got your phone on, you’re not reading anything — with half an hour at a party where you’re enjoying yourself.

At the party, you’re laying down your experiences. You’re meeting people, you’re chatting to them, you have a lot of input coming into your senses. And yet that half hour at the party goes by much more quickly than the time that drags when you’re sitting in the dentist’s waiting room.

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Time and change in philosophy and physics

A concept closely related to the nature of time is the idea of change. When something changes, we think of it in a common sense way as changing over time, as time flowing and something changes.

This idea goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks who couldn’t agree on whether time was fundamental, that it had to exist and then change happens within it, or whether change is the fundamental concept and time simply reflects that something changes.

Physicists have argued about this and they argue about it to this day. The great physicist Richard Feynman said that “time is what happens when nothing else happens.” That somehow time exists in and of itself.

Isaac Newton had the view that time was external to the universe, external certainly to space and things that happen within space.

That there’s this cosmic clock that inexorably ticks by the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the years regardless of what we are doing. You know, we can’t stop that time. We’re just caught in the flow and time keeps on going. So that absolute notion of time is something that Isaac Newton explained and something that, in everyday life, I guess, is the common sense view of time. There is this external clock that’s ticking by regardless of whether we think time is speeding up or slowing down.

Einstein and the end of absolute time

Of course, that idea of an absolute external time was thrown away entirely when Einstein developed his theories of relativity.

Einstein explained there is no such thing as absolute time. Time is relative. And yet we still have this strong psychological feeling that there’s a past, there’s a future, there’s a now, there’s a flow.

Our consciousness is moving along this river of time, gobbling up the future, spitting out the past. The present moment is ever changing. So that notion of change is embedded within this idea that time’s flowing. And yet, in the laws of physics, there is change, but there is no flow in and of itself to time.

Time in the equations of physics

In most of our equations of physics that describe how something, a system changes, — yes it changes over time, but time comes in in a very almost trivial way. As a humble coordinate, a number, a parameter, a symbol, lowercase t that sits inside your equation. It’s not changing.

If you have an equation that describes a system, you can look at the math — look at the equation. What does it mean when we evolve this equation in time?

It just means we’re solving this equation for a value of this coordinate. What a system is doing now is described by what it’s doing at this particular value of coordinate time.

We can also evolve it forward to see what it’s doing in the future, or evolve it backwards to see what it’s doing in the past. But there’s no flow.

Time is simply a number that appears in the equations. And there must be more to time that. Or certainly that’s our psychological feeling about time — that there is change and we experience this change as a continuum, but where is that change? Where is that flow in the equation of physics? Doesn’t exist.

Chapter 2: How do we reconcile quantum field theory with the general theory of relativity?

Special relativity and time dilation

It seems quite natural to us that time can speed up or slow down depending on what we’re doing. If we’re having fun, time goes by quickly, if you’re bored, time drags. But we know that’s just in our subjective experience. It’s not what really happens to time. Surely, external to our experience, time continues at a constant rate everywhere in the universe. Well, of course, that’s Newtonian time, and that’s the time of our everyday experience.

But Einstein comes along and says, “Actually, the idea that time speeds up, slows down isn’t just subjective, isn’t just in our heads. There is a real physical phenomenon whereby time can run at different rates for different observers.” What we say in different frames of reference. That was a revolution in physics.

Einstein, of course, had two theories of relativity. The first one in 1905 was forced upon him by not studying the nature of time and space, initially, but by studying the nature of light and the speed of light.

Physicist the late 19th century had been searching for the medium that carries light. Now, light was known to be a wave. Light, therefore, physicists believed, needed something to travel through some medium, this ether. The fact that I couldn’t find it was very puzzling, and Einstein overthrew the whole concept of what it means, what time and space means, by suggesting that light doesn’t need an ether at all.

Which means that however fast you’re moving relative to someone else, you should still see light moving at the same speed. What does this mean? If I shine a torch out into space, and then a friend jumps in a rocket and flies, let’s say, at three quarters of the light speed. So I will see light overtaking them in their spacecraft at a quarter light speed. Einstein says, “You would expect that they would see light overtaking them at that same speed.” But no, they would still see that light overtaking them at the same speed that you see it leaving you. All observers, however fast they’re moving relative to each other, will see light moving at the same speed.

It shouldn’t make any sense at all, until you realize that they must have different concepts of space and time. And in fact, my friend traveling in the spacecraft trying to catch up with this light beam, if you were to look at their clock on board their spacecraft, you’d see it ticking by more slowly. That’s the sun’s workout. You change the nature of space and time in order to preserve the constancy of the speed of light for everyone.

So Einstein came to this conclusion in his special theory of relativity due to the constancy of the speed of light and the fact that all motion is relative. So no one can say, “I am definitely standing still and you’re moving.” To come up with the idea that time and space get altered. And since we’re talking here about the nature of time, this is what leads to the idea of time dilation.

That time can be seen to run slower on a moving clock as it moves past you. Now, if someone’s moving past me close to the speed of light, I will see them doing everything in slow motion. It’s just not just that their clock is moving slower. Somehow their high speed is messing with the mechanics of the clock.

That whole frame of reference I will see time running slower in it. However, since all motion is relative, the person board the spacecraft that I see behaving in slow motion would see me behaving in slow motion because for them, I’m doing all the moving. And so it’s my time that is running slower.

Evidence for time dilation: Muons

This idea of time dilation seems like just a thought experiment or some notion that Einstein’s come up with surely doesn’t happen in the real world. Well, it does. For example, muons are subatomic particles that are created in the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays hit the molecules of air in the upper atmosphere and the energy from the collision creates a whole stream of particles.

Among them is this particle called the muon, which is like the more massive cousin of the electron. Muons aren’t like electrons in the sense that they’re not stable. They only live for a fraction of a second. These muons that are created in the upper atmosphere then stream down to earth.

Now, we can measure how fast they’re moving close to the speed of light. Nevertheless, for the distance they have to cover at that speed, they would have to live a lot longer than their normal lifetime, the lifetime they would have at rest. But of course, they do manage to get down to the ground and we can capture muons in our detectors so we know they’ve arrived from the upper atmosphere. How do they do this? Well, because they’re going close to the speed of light, their clocks, their internal clocks that tick by their lifetime slow down. So they are living their life in slow motion, which gives them enough time to reach the earth.

Now, the counter explanation to this is how does the muon see things? Surely, if all motion is relative, the muon sees our clocks running slower. Well, of course, from the muon’s perspective, something else happens when you go close to the speed of light, namely distances shrink.

So along with what’s called time dilation, the slowing down of time, there’s length contraction. And the length contraction is the distance the muon has to travel from the upper atmosphere to sea level. The muon is moving so close to the speed of light that it sees this distance shrunk. And it says, “Well, I’m only living for two microseconds. I’m counting how long I’m living for.

The reason I can get down to the ground is because I don’t have to travel that far.” So everything fits and works logically. But this idea that time slows down is real.

Gravity slows time: General Relativity

This notion of time dilation is part of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. There’s another way that time slows down. And that is part of his general theory of relativity, which he developed a decade later. And that’s where we have to bring gravity into the story. You see, in special relativity, it’s all about things moving at constant velocities. No acceleration, no speeding up, slowing down, going around in circles. Things have to move in a straight line at a constant speed. And then you can use the rules of special relativity to talk about time intervals and lengths and how fast clocks tick and so on.

Once Einstein wanted to generalize that, he realized he had to bring in acceleration. What he referred to as the happiest thought of his life was something we now teach as the principle of equivalence, which is to say that acceleration is equivalent to gravity.

Now, we’re sort of aware of this in everyday language because when a car or an aircraft is accelerating, we talk about the G-force. Now, that G is G for gravity. When you’re pushed back in your seat as your car accelerates, that’s exactly the same force as you feel when you’re laying down with your head resting on the pillow, if you’re accelerating at 1G. This principle of equivalence led to the idea that in order to explain the structure and nature of four-dimensional space-time, one has to come up with a different picture of gravity, since gravity is linked to acceleration. And that led to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was a theory of gravity that replaced, yet again he’s replacing something that Newton has given us.

In general relativity, Einstein gives us a new picture of gravity. In that intervening 10-year period between special theory in 1905 and general relativity in 1915, Einstein and other physicists realize that time is the fourth dimension, and it’s actually you have to talk about it in terms of four-dimensional space-time. His general theory says, “Yes, time is the fourth dimension, part of space-time, but gravity curves space-time. Gravity changes the shape of space-time.”

Now, we can’t perceive space-time as a four-dimensional whole. We can only have instruments that measure distances in space or clocks that measure intervals in time, so we have to sort of separate the two. So how does that look to us? Well, time gets slowed down by gravity. And again, this is not an optical illusion. This is in a sense more fascinating, more fun than the time-dilation of special relativity, because special relativity, you only see that effect when you’re going close to the speed of light.

When I explain this, for example, when I give school’s talks, and the kids will ask, “How do you know you’re just making this up?” So, well, everyone of you that uses a smartphone, you use GPS, you use Google Maps, you are making use of the fact that time is running at different rates, depending on how strong gravity is.

You see, the closer you are to the surface of the Earth, the stronger the gravitational field and the slower time runs. The further out you’re going to space, the weaker gravity is, and the faster time can run. It’s only just tiny fractions of a second, but it matters. GPS, the satellites that are sending radio signals down to our phones, they are in orbit around the Earth.

They’re feeling slightly weaker gravity than the clocks on Earth. And so time is running faster on board those satellites than it is on Earth. So we have to take this into account, in a sense, slow down the clocks on board the satellites so they synchronize with clocks on Earth. Because if we don’t do that, satellites would not be able to locate our position accurately. So it’s a real effect.

It’s true, you know, that my head is aging faster than my feet. But I’m tiny, tiny fractions of a second, but it’s there. And of course it gets much more dramatic if you go and find a much stronger gravitational field. It sounds ridiculous, but actually the physics is all correct.

We’re used to describing events that are happening at a point in space and a moment in time. So in physics, when you want to define an event, say the snapping of my fingers, it happened at this point in space and at that moment in time, we need four numbers to describe it. We know that. Even Isaac Newton would have understood that.

Space-time and the block universe

In special relativity, once we unify time and space, time is not just another disconnected number, a place in space and a moment in time. It’s a point in four-dimensional space time. Time is this fourth dimension. Now, saying time is the fourth dimension is easy enough, but what does it actually mean? We can’t visualize four dimensions. We can only visualize three dimensions. Our brains are three-dimensional. There’s a trick we can do here. So I have a three-dimensional construct. What if time replaced the third spatial dimension? Now I have a three-dimensional construct, two of space and one of time, that I can visualize. And this leads to an idea very useful in physics called the block universe.

In a sense, it’s a bit like sheets of paper in a book. So each sheet or slice is all of space at one moment in time. At the one end is time at the earliest moment. The direction is the time axis. And then you have these slices of space for each moment in time. Now, we experience time as going by continuously, but you can imagine there’s a slice for every moment in time.

The idea of a block universe is very useful because we can now draw a picture of it and think about space time having thrown away one of the dimensions of space. What does it then mean for us to be moving through space time? While here, physicists use the idea of a world line. So this is a line that moves through this block universe. It can start at a particular point, which coincides to a point in space, and a moment in time, and ends with another point in space at a later moment in time. Every one of us has a world line.

My world line began when I was born. I mean, let’s make an approximate point about that being the moment of my birth, being the beginning of my world line. And it will end when I die.

That world line isn’t a straight line. It’s wavy because although I’m moving through time, I’m also moving through space. Now, if I were to spend my whole life without moving, then I would have a straight line, world line. But actually, it waves as I move through space while traveling through time.

And physicists use world lines very usefully when it comes to describing things like particles colliding with each other and how they move and the speed that they’re moving at.

Does time really exist?

Probably the most ambitious project in physics over the past, certainly half a century or more, has been to reconcile quantum mechanics, or more correctly, one should say quantum field theory, which is the more modern reincarnation of the quantum mechanics of 100 years ago, quantum field theory with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, namely, the theory of the very small that has time as a coordinate and the theory that describes the structure of space-time itself.

One early attempt at doing this led to what we call the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Wheeler, John Wheeler and DeWitt, were two cosmologists who try to come up with a way of unifying quantum mechanics and relativity theory and devise this equation, which has a very remarkable and strange feature, namely that it has no time in it. It just is. And this is an equation that one can argue describes the state of the entire universe, the quantum state of the universe, and there’s no time in it. So this would then add support to the notion that at a fundamental level, time is an illusion, time doesn’t really exist at all.

Now, of course, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation describes the universe as a whole, and you can only really appreciate the universe as a whole if you were able to extract yourself from outside it. We only ever view the universe from within. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has led to the idea that since we perceive time, it seems very real and other areas of physics, maybe time is a so-called emergent property of reality.

Now, emergence is a rather complex notion. There’s what you might call weak emergence, which is the idea that, for example, an example of weak emergence is the wetness of water. You can’t appreciate the wetness of water just by examining one H2O molecule. You need trillions and trillions of water molecules to come together, and the notion of wetness appears. Or temperature is another example. There is no such thing as temperature when you’re just looking at one or two molecules bouncing around and bumping into each other. But zoom out and look at a box of gas molecules bumping into each other, and suddenly you get this notion of temperature that you can ascribe to it.

We could, if we studied the microscopic structure of a system enough, determine, deduce that once you scale it up, you will see properties like temperature or the wetness of water emerging.

Then there’s a notion of strong emergence, which is, so consciousness is a good example of that, that you could never hit upon the idea of consciousness just by looking at the interaction of individual neurons in the brain.

So, emergence is something that appears, grows out of something more fundamental. And there’s been this argument that time is also an emergent property, it grows out of something deeper, something more fundamental. And the suggestion is that that deeper thing is embedded within the quantum realm.

So, in quantum, even though in quantum mechanics and the famous equation of quantum mechanics, Schrodinger’s equation, we’re Schrodinger developed this equation 100 years ago, and it describes how the quantum state of a, say, an atom evolves in time. That’s an equation that does have time in it. We teach physicists at university that this Schrodinger equation that depends on time can be tweaked and modified, and you can arrive at a new version of it, which is called the time independent Schrodinger equation, where time doesn’t exist at all.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation for describing the whole universe, which brings gravity into quantum mechanics, behaves in a similar way. You’ve extracted time from it entirely. So, how is it then that time emerges from a timeless universe? And that is still a subject that’s being studied and debated and argued about today.

The debate: Eternalism vs presentism

In order to then try and have some concrete idea of what time is, philosophers have come up with different ways of describing, you know, whether there was a special present moment that devised the past from the future. Einstein tells us that time is the fourth dimension, and others will argue that time doesn’t exist at all. It’s all just an illusion. It’s a construct. It’s something that we’ve invented, or it’s the thing that clocks measure. So, for example, if we divide time up into three parts, the past, the present, and the future, one might argue that the past has gone. We no longer have access to it. All we have access to is records of the past, but these are records that we don’t access in the present moment. The actual events of the past are gone. They don’t exist. The future has yet to be, even in a deterministic universe where everything is preordained, nevertheless, the future hasn’t happened yet, so it doesn’t exist. All that leaves is the present moment.

But the present moment isn’t extended. It’s the dividing line between the past and the future. It’s the shadow between the light and the dark. It doesn’t have an existence in and of itself. It’s just the gap between them. So, if the past doesn’t exist, the future doesn’t exist, and the present doesn’t have any extent that it doesn’t exist either, we’ve done away with all of time, then time is an illusion.

Now, that sounds a bit like sort of a philosophical trickery, and in a sense it is, because there’s the opposite view which is the one that’s given to us by Einstein, which is to say that if time is the fourth dimension, then just like the dimensions of space, all points in space exist and are equally real. If time is also a dimension, then all points in time exist and are equally real. Therefore, rather than the past, present, and future all being an illusion, they are all equally real. They all exist. Time is, in a sense, frozen. We experience a present moment. We are sort of, you can think of it in terms of our consciousness drifting along that time axis, and we’re stuck on that rail, we’re moving along. But the time itself, for all eternity, just is. All times coexist.

So, this is an idea called eternalism, and I think probably if push comes to shove, most physicists would subscribe to it, because we know that Einstein’s description of time is the best one we have. The idea of eternalism, that all times are equally real in the block universe, can seem quite bleak.

Now, we already had a notion that reality is rather bleak if we follow what Newton taught us, namely that we might well live in what’s called a deterministic universe, where the future is predetermined, preordained, even though it hasn’t happened yet. That’s what’s called the clockwork universe, where everything is ticking by mechanistically and everything. Causes lead to effects, and if we were powerful enough, we could work out what those effects would be. We could be able, we could predict the future. In reality, we can’t predict the future for a number of reasons. But in Newton’s clockwork universe, even though that future is preordained, it’s destined to be, it still doesn’t exist. And so, we can still imagine that we have free will, free agency. You know, maybe you look back after something has happened, you say, well, it was ever thus that was ever going to be the way it has, because the universe has evolved deterministically. But when it comes to the block universe and eternalism, that future, it’s not that that future has yet to unfold, it’s already there waiting for us.

Somehow that is a more stark description of determinism and a stronger assault on free will. What’s the point of thinking that I’m making free choices if that future is already out there? Now, of course, what saves us is that we are embedded within the universe, within the block universe. If you could pull yourself outside of space-time, the so-called God’s eye view, you could see all times mapped out. You could see exactly past, present, and future all equally real. But we don’t have that privilege, vantage point.

Embedded within the universe and even in a fully deterministic universe, the fact is we can never predict what is going to happen in advance. We are unable to predict this. So you may refer to that as just the illusion of free will, but for me, I think that’s good enough. So I subscribe to a philosophical view called compatibilism, which says that, yes, I have free will even though I live in a deterministic universe. And the reason I say that is because even if the future is preordained and set out in the block universe in this eternalist picture, I’m never able to predict it in advance. So I’m thinking of making that I’m making free choices, and that’s good enough.

Of course, eternalism, the idea that all times past, present, and future all coexist, according to relativity, isn’t the only option available. Philosophers have also argued that maybe an alternative idea is what’s called presentism, which is that only the present moment exists, or past presentism, the past and the present exist, or the growing universe model where the past and present exist but slowly gobble up the future. There’s something called the spotlight theory, the idea that it’s a light shining on one moment that’s changing along the time axis.

But the problem with all these alternative theories to eternalism, presentism, past presentism, and so on, is that they come into conflict with all our current attempts at coming up with a theory of quantum gravity, whether one subscribes to things like string theory or loop quantum gravity, all these mathematical ideas that unify quantum mechanics of relativity all seem to require the eternalist picture.

It’s the one that makes most sense when we’re trying to combine quantum mechanics and relativity to solve this problem, the first problem of physical time. And of course, most importantly here is that the eternalist picture says there is nothing special about the present moment. There’s nothing special about now. We experience now subjectively and think it’s special, dividing the past from the future, but in physics there’s nothing special about this moment. It’s just a point on the time axis in four-dimensional spacetime.

Chapter 3: Is there a “now”?

Even in Einstein’s special theory of relativity, we can appreciate the concept of a now, an absolute universal present moment simply doesn’t make sense. One can imagine two events. I can experience two events that to me seem to have happened at the same time. They’re simultaneous events.

Now, if I know they took place at an equal distance from me, then even though it’s taken some fraction of a second for the light from those two events, the signal to reach my eyes, I can work back with and say, “Well, if I saw them happening at the same time, going back, they must have actually like flashes of light. Those flashes of light will have happened simultaneously because I’m halfway between them and I saw them happen at the same time.”

But for another observer moving past me at close to light speed, they will not look as though they’ve happened at the same time. This is something that generations of physics students have to learn, something called the relativity of simultaneity, which very clearly shows that what one observer regards as now, as two events happening at some moment in time that they say is happened now, another observer will disagree.

So, no one event happened before the other. In fact, we can even imagine a scenario where I see one event happening, let’s call it event A, happening just before event B. For another observer moving very fast relative to me, they may see event B happening before event A. So, where is now, if our past and future are mixed up? Now, of course, what we’re forbidden from doing is something called the violation of causality. So, if event A was the cause of event B, then no one can see B happening before A. You know, if event A is me shooting a gun and event B is someone being shot and falling down, you’re not going to see them being shot before I fired the gun, because you can imagine them then stopping me from firing the gun, even though they’ve already been shot. I know that’s a rather violent example. I don’t tend to use violent examples in physics, but there we go, that might illustrate it. But the fact is if one event can affect the other, then there is an order that you can’t mess with. Cause has to come before effect.

But if those two events are far enough apart and close enough in time such that there’s not enough time for a light signal to transfer between them, then we say they are not causally connected. And in physics, we talk about them as being space-like separated.

So in that case, events A and B can have their order fuzzy. Someone can see A before B, someone else can see B before A. And once you realize this, you realize you cannot pinpoint a universal present moment if we can switch past and future around. So that present moment becomes rather fuzzy according to relativity theory.

And while in relativity theory, we clearly see there’s a fuzziness about what we would refer to as a universal now. No such thing exists in relativity. Even in manifest time, our psychological or experienced time, there’s a fuzziness about what it means to say now. Apart from the fact that it’s ever-changing, you pinpoint a moment in time as now, but it’s already in the past by the time you’ve said it.

But the notion that now is a moment is also really not something that we see in psychological time. It’s an extended present. It has a thickness to it. To begin with, when an event happens, of course in relativity, I said an event, events A and B happen, and there’s a certain finite time for the light to reach my eyes from the events.

There’s a further time for that light to enter my eyes, travel to my brain, be processed, and for me to be conscious of that event has taken place. So there’s what’s called perceptual latency, a delay between an event happening and us being conscious of it. And that can be anything from up to a third or more of a second later.

So when is it that we should regard something as happening? When it’s happened or when we’re conscious of it? There’s already that fuzziness there. But let’s say that’s the moment that something happens. What about when does the now start for us? Well again, it’s rather fuzzy.

An example is how we appreciate a piece of music. We don’t just hear one note at a time that replaces the previous note because that’s gone and it’s in our past. No, we experience music as a continuum. And the way we do this is through what’s called episodic memories. We are storing memories of events in our brain that are then stitched together in a continuum so that it’s not just the present moment note that we are conscious of. We’re conscious of some finite time in the past, weaved together to give us the music that we appreciate. Added to that the fact that we anticipate where the music is going in the future, even though we haven’t heard it yet. And so what we regard as the present now is really an extended period of time that relies on past events that are still stored in our memory that we have access to. Even though we are only ever accessing any moment in the past in the present moment. It’s still there and it gives us this sense that we’re experiencing a flow of time or a finite duration of a present moment.

Chapter 4: Why does thermodynamics have a direction in time?

The arrow of time and entropy

One if there’s nothing special about now, about the present moment, we still have to admit that it divides up the future from the past. So what is it that’s different between the past and the future? Certainly, it’s almost tautological to say the past comes before the future. That’s what the word before means. But there’s this asymmetry. They are different, certainly in the way we perceive them. And the flow, even though we might decide that the flow of time is an illusion, there’s certainly a directionality to time pointing from the past to the future.

Many physicists will argue this is due to the error of time, that the difference between the past and the future is due to what’s called the error of time. But you don’t need an arrow to talk about what’s different between them, any more than you need an arrow to point from the shallow end of a swimming pool to the deep end to tell you there’s a difference between the shallow end of the deep end. They are just different. Nevertheless, we experience time moving only in one direction, that time is irreversible.

Now, is that irreversibility just something again that we can regard as an illusion in an eternalist picture? Or is there really an arrow of time? Well, the third area of physics that gives us a direction to time really stems from 19th century work of people like Ludwig Boltzmann and the laws of thermodynamics. One of the most famous ideas in physics is the second law of thermodynamics. It’s always amusing that it doesn’t even make it to the top of the list of laws of thermodynamics. It’s only number two. And yet, it is regarded as almost sacred in how true it must be. Even

Einstein said if you can’t reconcile time as a coordinate in quantum mechanics and time as a dimension in relativity theory and time as a direction or arrow in thermodynamics, then it’s the arrow of thermodynamics that’s the one that’s going to survive. The other two may have to go if we want to come up with some theory that unifies all these concepts.

So where does this arrow of time come from? Is it real or not? Now, the reason why physicists hesitate with this is that nowhere else other than in thermodynamics is there this notion that time has a directionality? All our fundamental equations of physics are time symmetric. We say they’re time reversal and variant. If you change the sign of the symbol time, the coordinate time in the equations, if you make t -t, and more often than not, you have to make a few other tweaks as well, which we don’t need to go into, then you realize that the system that this equation describes evolves perfectly well in the opposite direction. So time can move forwards or backwards, and these equations would describe physical reality very sensibly.

Time is symmetric according to the laws of physics, and yet we see irreversibility all around us. I get older. The balls roll down hills. Batteries run out of charge. Things decay, get older. The universe gets bigger. Wherever you look, you see things happening in one direction of time, but not in another. And this is the fourth problem of time, the second problem of physical time, namely, where does the directionality of time come from if all our fundamental equations of physics are symmetric in time?

Normally, when we talk about the arrow of time, the direction of time, pointing from past to future, we have to explain the concept of entropy. Now, entropy is not a vague concept. It’s just a very versatile concept because it can mean very many different things.

The simplest way of describing entropy is to say that it’s what follows from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, that things move from higher-ordered states to less-ordered states. Disorder increases. A box of gas, where all the molecules of the gas are all squashed together in one corner of the box, we say that has high order. It’s neat and tidy, and it’s a very special state. But as the molecules diffuse and fill up the box, evenly, entropy increases.

So there are many ways of describing entropy, but basically we say entropy always either stays the same or increases in an isolated system. This is what the second law of thermodynamics tells us. But what happens when entropy has reached a maximum? In a box of gas, what happens when all those molecules of gas have spread out evenly? Now, if you were to zoom in and look at the detailed motion of the molecules, you’ll see them all jiggling about. But if you were to film them jiggling about and then run the film backwards, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Because at what’s called thermal equilibrium, things look exactly the same forwards and backwards in time.

I’ve had this argument with other physicists who will say the hour of time disappears at thermal equilibrium. Well, sure, it disappears in the sense that we cannot perceive a direction to time. We can’t tell the difference between a movie running forwards and backwards, but that doesn’t mean that time has ceased to go on.

Of course, if you could extract yourself from outside of this box, then you will see entropy continue to exist outside. But what if the whole universe reaches thermal equilibrium? In some distant future, the heat death of the universe, where everything is dispersed, all matter has fallen to black holes and black holes have evaporated out and everything is just thermal radiation or sort of moving apart as the universe expands. At thermal equilibrium, does time cease to exist? Well, I would argue no.

Just because you can’t perceive a direction to time doesn’t mean that it’s not going by. Indeed, if the universe continues to expand forever, as our current theories would suggest, then time is pointing in the direction of expansion of space, because cosmological arrow, so-called, of time.

And in any case, we would never be able to check whether there’s time going on or not, because at thermal equilibrium, we can’t exist. We are special states, that that’s what defines life. We are low entropy constructs that have some complexity. At thermal equilibrium, we have to be part of this thermal spread, even spread of everything in the universe.

Now, of course, what’s interesting is that even at thermal equilibrium, maybe entropy can fluctuate, maybe just randomly, in the same way that you can shuffle a pack of cards. And when it’s fully shuffled, you really can’t tell whether it’s any more shuffled or less shuffled, but maybe now and again, just through chance, very unlikely, but just through chance, you may shuffle it and retrieve some order. You’ll get a running flush as a poker player would say. You know, some you get cards that are ordered just through sheer chance. What happens in a universe at thermal equilibrium, where just through sheer chance, you suddenly get temporary isolated bits of the universe that have lower entropy, that have moved away from equilibrium?

This is something called Boltzmann-Brains, the idea that there is a non-zero, you know, highly unlikely, a non-zero chance that’s out of thermal equilibrium at maximum entropy, some lower entropy state can appear temporarily and then disappear again. So things can still happen at thermal equilibrium, but certainly time, just because we can’t perceive which direction is going, doesn’t mean it isn’t continuing to evolve.

Quantum entanglement and the direction of time

One area I’ve been interested in in recent years is what’s called open systems or more specifically open quantum systems. So the idea that the dynamical equations of physics that we know and love really almost all apply to what are called isolated systems, systems that are isolated from their surroundings. But we know that nothing is completely isolated from its surroundings.

There’s this wonderful example of molecules of gas in a box that are bouncing around, and the way they evolve in time after multiple collisions depends on so many factors. I mean, this has origins things like the butterfly effect, how the flapping of the wings of a butterfly on one side of the world would eventually lead to a storm on the other side of the world. Small initial conditions can grow.

Well, the presence or not of a single electron on the other side of the visible universe will affect how these molecules, its gravitational effect, will change the dynamics of these molecules after about the 50th collision, the calculation that has been done. Nothing can be entirely isolated from its surroundings.

What this means when it comes to reconciling the arrow of time with time-symmetric equations is that it’s the time-symmetric equations that have to give way. Now, normally physicists look at it the other way around, they say, “Look, you know, how does a directionality to time emerge from time-symmetric laws of physics?” Well, I’ll put it the other way. Time-symmetric laws of physics are idealizations that only apply to truly isolated systems.

There is only one truly isolated system, and that’s the entire universe. Everything within the universe ultimately eventually interacts somehow with its surroundings, and that interaction with its surroundings kills any notion of time-symmetry. It brings in a directionality to time, and down at the quantum level, this really has a profound consequence, because a quantum system not only is disturbed by its surroundings, but it becomes entangled with its surroundings. That is a truly irreversible process. Well, rather, when it becomes sufficiently entangled with its surroundings, that it leads to what’s called decoherence. The quantumness dissipates into the environment. You cannot retrieve it. So, decoherence is regarded as the one truly irreversible process in nature. But since it’s prevalent everywhere in the universe, decoherence is always taking place, that brings in a directionality to time that is fundamental.

So, when people argue or ask, where does arrow of time come from when you have time-symmetric equations, while the hour of time is already there? I would argue that the arrow of time is baked into reality. It’s baked into the universe, fundamentally, due to quantum entanglement and quantum decoherence, increasing all the time. So, just as entropy increases, we can describe entanglement increasing.

We can even define something we’ve tried to do in recent years, define the entanglement entropy, not the thermodynamic entropy of increasing disorder, the melting of ice cubes in a glass of water, the shuffling of the cards, the dissipation of air molecules in a box, the spreading of air molecules in a box -- that’s all thermodynamic entropy -- there’s also what we might regard as entanglement entropy. Increasing entanglement of a system with its surroundings is inevitable, and it gives us a direction to time. And the time-symmetric equations that we know and love are simply idealizations in the limit when we can ignore the surroundings of the system we’re interested in.

So, if I believe that the direction the hour of time is baked into reality, well, you can’t have a direction of time without time itself. It’s the smile of the Cheshire cat. In this case, you need the Cheshire cat. So, if direction of time is real, then I would argue that time itself is real.

Whether it’s emergent from something more fundamental as another matter, but we don’t live in a timeless universe in which time is an illusion. Time really is there, and it really has a direction. Now, if time is real, and if time has a direction from past to future, an arrow, then I guess the next question will be, does the arrow have a beginning and does it have an end? Did time start at some point, and will it end at some point?

Did time begin at the Big Bang?

So, let’s address the idea of time having a beginning. Well, according to general relativity, time began at the Big Bang. That was the earliest moment. And very often people will say, well, how do you know there may be a time before that? Well, I mean, basic general relativity, the answer is that what do you mean by before? You know, there has to have been a time before the Big Bang to embed the word before in. It’s a bit like I tell you to walk to the South Pole, and when you get to the South Pole, keep heading south. It’s meaningless. Once you’re at the South Pole, every step you take will take you back north again. That’s the furthest south you can go. There is no point on the surface of the Earth furthest south in the South Pole. There’s no point in time earlier than the first moment when time was created, along with space and matter and energy at the Big Bang.

In fact, people like Stephen Hawking have even come up with ideas that suggest that there’s a smoothness to space and time that, as you get closer and closer to the Big Bang, time loses its meaning. It becomes like another dimension of space. And so, in that sense, time does have a beginning. It’s the moment of the Big Bang.

Of course, that would be really boring if people hadn’t come up with other suggestions, which of course they have speculative ideas. For example, the notion that the Big Bang was simply the moment of birth of our universe. What if our universe is simply a bubble within a much larger multiverse, which is constantly undergoing what’s called eternal inflation, expanding, and every now and again, bubbles appear in this, what’s called the inflaton field. Our universe is one bubble, our Big Bang was the first moment of our universe, but time existed before it. There’s some sort of time of the multiverse that is distinct from the time that the Big Bang was distinct from the time that we experience in our universe. That’s a possibility that time really does stretch back to infinity.

There are other notions that suggest that maybe the Big Bang was the beginning of our universe, but there’s a mirror universe heading in the opposite direction. So, time for us moves forward. There’s a reflection of our universe moving in the opposite direction. If there’s any intelligent life in that universe, they would regard their time as moving forward, and our universe as time is moving backwards, even though we could never ever have access to each other’s universes. Then there are notions like time being cyclic. The Big Bang will evolve forward in time, and it will the universe will re-collapse again in a big crunch, which would form another generation, another universe. And again, this suggests that time, the universe has been constantly being created and destroyed again and again and again for all eternity. So again, the Big Bang may not have been the first moment in time.

Of course, one should also say that once you bring quantum mechanics into the picture, then that notion of a distinct moment, the beginning of time, what’s called a singularity in space-time, that gets fuzzy. Quantum mechanics brings in fuzziness. It brings in uncertainty, suggesting just like relativity brings in a fuzziness in what we call now, because of the relativity of simultaneity, quantum mechanics brings in a fuzziness to that earliest moment of the creation of space and time.

These are theoretical speculations. One may even argue as to whether they are real scientific theories, because we don’t yet know how we might test them. What observations can we make that would give us evidence that those theories are correct? Maybe sometime the future would be able to tell that. But for the moment, most physicists, cosmologists would argue that the Big Bang was the beginning of time and leave it at that.

Will time end?

Of course, the other question then is does time have an end? Does that arrow continue into infinity or does time come to an end? And again, there are various options.

So one option indeed is that one day the universe will reach a point of maximum expansion and then re-collapse in on itself into a big crunch, and that would be then the end of time. Maybe that big crunch then becomes a Big Bang for the next generation universe in which time becomes cyclic.

But what we think now is that the universe will continue to expand forever. Ending in what’s called the heat death. And this will be billions, trillions of years into the future. But it would suggest that time would carry on forever.

Now, the reason for that is because just over a quarter of a century ago, astronomers discovered that what we thought should be happening, which is that space is slowing down in its expansion because gravity of all the matter and energy in the universe should be putting the brakes on, no one anticipated that it would start expanding at an ever faster rate. Now, that was what was discovered in 1998 when astronomers looked at the rate of expansion by looking at very distant galaxies and working backwards to figure out that actually the universe is getting bigger now at a faster rate than it was in the past.

This suggests that it will never re-collapse in on itself. It will just carry on expanding forever. And we’re left with this, one might argue, bleak scenario. Although I never know why, why is it a bleaker scenario for the heat death of the universe? Why is that bleaker than the big crunch, which is quite catastrophic in my view? But the heat death of the universe will be the ultimate fate of our universe. When all the stars stop shining, they convert all their nuclear fuel and use it all up and they die. Some will collapse into black holes. Matter will gradually get colder. Black holes will evaporate according to Stephen Hawking, what’s called Hawking radiation. Just giving out thermal radiation and the black holes will then shrink and disappear. Ultimately, the universe will just end up emptier and emptier, just full of thermal radiation that’s getting colder and colder and colder.

Now, of course, this will be a universe in thermal equilibrium, which comes back to this other idea that, well, will time cease to exist at thermal equilibrium? Well, no. If a Boltzmann brain were to suddenly appear out of the fluctuation of thermal equilibrium and that Boltzmann brain could think and just through sheer chance, it evolved some way of seeing the universe around it, it will see the rest of the universe in thermal equilibrium and it wouldn’t be able to discern the directionality at the time.

But time would still exist. The universe, if it’s going to expand forever, will continue to expand and there will be a directionality at the time in the direction of the expansion of the universe, the further cooling down of the radiation that’s left in the universe. So, in that sense, time would go on forever. It would be a very boring universe. Nothing would happen. But just because nothing is happening doesn’t mean there isn’t time continuing because that would be defined by the continuing expansion of space.

Now, of course, there is a third scenario, which is that the expansion of space, which we now understand is due to what’s called dark energy, the nature of which we’re still trying to determine for sure. Dark energy is making the universe expand ever more quickly. It’s winning the battle against gravity. So, gravity of all the stuff in the universe are trying to slow the stretching of space. Dark energy is making space stretch and expand ever more quickly. We still don’t know the details of dark energy, and it may be that this is something with an influence that will grow over time.

So, the expansion will get ever quicker and become evident at ever smaller scales, ending up with what’s called the big rip in which it’s not just the space between galaxy clusters, the emptiness of space that’s stretching, but even the space within galaxies, within stars, within planets, within atoms, ultimately will start to spread and increase and rip the universe apart.

None of this we need worry about. There’s no existential threat to us. We should be much more worried about when our sun finishes stop shining, or indeed more worried about looking after our own planet in the near future, not worrying about what’s going to happen to the universe trillions of years into the future. But all those options are open.

My bet would be then, I guess, and this is not the way physicists should argue, just I have a feeling or opinion, but my view is that the universe did have a beginning, but won’t have an end. It’s not going forever. Which, when I think about it, I’ll realize also it’s probably not that sensible. Maybe if it doesn’t have an end, it shouldn’t have a beginning either. Maybe time is eternal in both directions. There we go. This is where we shrug and turn to the philosophers to help us out.

Chapter 5: Is time travel possible?

Okay, so if you’ve come with me this far, and we’ve been through some heavy stuff, talking about arrows of time and unifying the laws of physics and so on, maybe it’s time for some fun, a little bit of dessert. A question I’m often asked when it comes to the nature of time is whether we can travel through time. After all, if you think about time, according to Einstein, as part of four-dimensional space-time, then I can move through space. I can exist at this point in space or that point in space. I can come back to this point and I can travel around. How is it? Why is it that we can’t do the same with time? Why can’t we move up and down the time axis? Why are we stuck in extra-able moving along the time axis when all times supposedly are there and exist?

Well, of course, time isn’t exactly like another dimensional space. It is different. It is special. Einstein’s theories of relativity may not be the last word on whether or not we can travel through time, but they’re the best we have at the moment, and they do tell us something about the possibility of time travel. Of course, we’ve all watched many movies and TV shows involving time travel. I don’t want to go on record after criticizing the really bad time travel movies (hot tub time machine) but they’re also some really intelligent ones.

But Real Physics says when we talk about time travel, we have to make a distinction between the possibility of time travel into the future and time travel back into the past. It turns out one is easier than the other. Time travel into the future is easy, and I don’t just mean if I sit still tomorrow will eventually arrive. I have time travel into tomorrow. Now, what I mean by time travel into the future is getting there before everyone else. And Relativity Theory says this is possible by slowing time down. So if I were to head off in a rocket at close to the speed of light and zip around the galaxy for, I don’t know, a week, when I come back to Earth, by virtue of traveling very fast, but also one should say because I’m accelerating and changing direction and therefore acceleration, being equivalent to gravity means my time is running slower. Essentially, less time will have elapsed for me when I return to Earth than has gone by on Earth without me.

So I may have only experienced a few weeks of time travel, but I may return back to Earth years in the future. In a sense, it’s not real time travel because it’s not that the future was already there waiting for me. I’ve just sort of fast-forwarded to the future. I’ve moved along a different timeline, a different world line through space time, and arrived at the future with less time having gone by for me than for everyone else. But as far as I’m concerned, I could arrive in the future arbitrarily in the distant future, depending on how closely I got to the speed of light or how strong a gravitational field I felt. So in the film Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s character is an astronaut. They land on this water planet that’s in orbit around a supermassive black hole. That gravity is slowing time so much. The astronauts in the movie know that for every hour they spend on that planet, seven years go by on Earth. And sure enough, Matthew McConaughey’s character has time travelled in the future, having not aged that much. He’s not been away that long, but his young daughter is now an old lady. Whether or not you regard that as real time travel is up to you.

Much more interesting, of course, is where we can time travel back into the past. And again, general relativity doesn’t rule this out. Theoretically, we can think of such notions of what are called closed time-like curves, which will be the equivalent of riding on a roller coaster and doing a loop-the-loop. As you’re traveling along it, your time is unfolding normally. But you’d loop back in time, you could arrive back at the point in space that you left, but at an earlier moment in time. You can travel back in time that way. The problem, of course, is that this leads to all sorts of paradoxes.

So while general relativity strictly doesn’t rule out time travel into the past, it leads to all sorts of conundrums which we find rather difficult to get over, such as the famous grandfather paradox. You go back into the past and you’re not very nice. You kill your grandfather before he’s met your mother, your grandmother. They never meet, they never marry, your mother’s never born, therefore you’re never born. And if you’re never born, who killed your grandfather? It wasn’t you, you have the perfect alibi, you didn’t exist. So he doesn’t get killed.

I’ve always found that rather strange. Why would you skip a generation? Why not just go back and murder your own mother? Not very nice, I know. Even bleaker, go back and meet your younger self. And then, you know, and kill your younger self. So if you never grew up to be a time-traveling murderer, then you don’t get killed. So you do grew up to be a time-traveling murderer and so on. So there are many such paradoxes that would suggest that time-traveling to the past is impossible. However, we don’t yet know where the loopholes are in our laws of physics that would rule them out.

Typically, what many might say is that the only way out of this is to subscribe to potentially an even more fantastical notion, which is that we live in multiple realities. So there are parallel realities. Certainly there are areas of physics that would suggest this is true. In cosmology, there’s the idea of the cosmological multiverse bubble universes that have their own big bang, you know, that are formed. In the quantum world, one of the popular ways of explaining the weirdness of the quantum world is to subscribe to what’s called the many worlds interpretation. That every time anywhere in the universe down at the quantum level, something’s faced with a choice, the universe branches into multiple options.

Famously, Schrödinger’s cat in the box that’s dead and alive at the same time. And you open the box to make up its mind because it’s made of atoms and atoms can exist in multiple states. While in the many worlds interpretation, there’s a you that opens the box to find an alive cat and there’s a you that opens the box to find a dead cat. So these parallel universes exist.

This helps us if we’re trying to insist on the possibility of time-traveling to the past. The murdering time traveler can go back in time, but in doing so, they inevitably slip into a parallel reality. In that reality, they can meet and indeed murder their younger self. All that happens is that they will never then grow up in that universe, but the murderer was born and was never murdered in their own universe. So you can have multiple realities. And again, many science fiction writers have written about this.

But do we have evidence of parallel realities? Well, no more than we have evidence that time travel into the past is possible. One way many commentators have tried to support the notion that time travel into the past is possible, and to rule out paradox, is the so-called Novikov self-consistency principle. The idea that if you were to travel into the past, then you can alter, you can interact with the past, you can alter things, but you can only make them turn out the way they have turned out.

So the example I used many years ago when I was explaining this was the notion that we know 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, and that allowed mammals to evolve and humans to evolve from them. Had the asteroid not hit the earth, maybe dinosaurs will still be around today and we wouldn’t exist. Well, what if someone in the future invents a time machine and takes some nuclear weapon back in the time machine 66 million years in order to destroy the asteroid so that it doesn’t hit the earth? But when he gets back there, he sees an asteroid actually as much bigger than the one he recalls, and he does his best and fires his nuclear missile at it, fragments it, but a smaller fragment remains that hits the earth, wipes out the dinosaurs. And so had he not travelled back in time, something else would have maybe, you know, that he would have missed the earth entirely. So the fact that he travelled back in time caused the past to evolve the way it has into the future.

There are problems with this, of course, and people argue it gets rid of paradox. It doesn’t because what if he decides not to go back? What if he gets back to the past and sees that and thinks, “Oh, wow, my nuclear missile isn’t going to be able to destroy this, I won’t even bother?” You know, what if you go back? One example is a time traveling scientist, he gets up with one day and finds a manual for how to build a time machine in his lab. He uses that manual to build a time machine, and finally when it’s built, he gets in the time machine, takes the manual with him, travels back in time and leaves it in the lab for his younger self to find. All perfectly self-consistent, but the problem is, A, where did that manual come from in the first place? This is information, this is knowledge that seems to have been caught in a time loop, ran around forever. And secondly, what if he decides when he builds the time machine not to take, not to go back in time or not to take the manual? He has to do it because that’s how he found it.

So there’s a real assault on free will here. We are forced to do something because the future determines the past. One way that many scientists have got around the idea of the laws of physics allowing time travel into the past is to simply say that it’s forbidden for some reason. Stephen Hawking famously said, “If time travel into the past is possible, where are all the time travels from the future? Surely they should be among us today?”

Well, Stephen Hawking was had his tongue firmly in cheek when he said this because he knew the answer. Of course, it may be that no time travelers today simply because, well, maybe there are, and they’re just keeping a low profile. Maybe there aren’t because no one wants to come back to 2025. They’re waiting for us to sort out the planet properly and solve the climate crisis and so on before they organize package tours back into the past. Or it simply could be the most sensible answer is that there are no time travelers from the future among us today because we haven’t built a time machine yet.

If you build a time machine, the earliest moment you can use it to travel back to is the moment you turned it on. Because that’s the moment you hook up that moment in time and then into the future you can, at any moment, you can go back to that moment. But you can never go back before the moment because there wasn’t a time machine that existed back then. Of course, for now, the idea of time travel into the future in the past is, makes for great stories and great movies. But much of science and the technology that we’ve developed from science today would appear like magic to someone a thousand years ago or even a hundred years ago.

So to what extent might we know so much more about the laws of nature, a hundred or a thousand years from now, and look back to 2025 and say, wow, weren’t we naive in thinking that’s not possible or that’s silly?

Maybe in a thousand years from now we’ve figured out how to create a wormhole in space that can be used as a time machine. Who knows? One thing is for sure we should never be so arrogant in thinking that we already have all the answers. We know a lot about the universe and a lot of what we know we don’t think is going to be overthrown for very good reasons, but we don’t know everything. So who knows what we might discover in the distant future?

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Mini Philosophy | Starts With A Bang | Big Think Books | Big Think Business

In this interview, bestselling science writer Sam Kean brings the past back to life by rebuilding it. By recreating ancient foods, tools, and everyday practices, he uncovers the small sensory details that shaped how people survived and experimented. Those humble trials, driven by curiosity and necessity, laid the groundwork for everything that followed, from early inventions to the atomic bomb.

Kean reminds us that our progress is not a straight line. It is messy, human, and often fueled by fear as much as insight. Watch to see how our oldest instincts still echo in our most powerful technologies.

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Timestamps

Part 1: Bringing ancient history to life
00:25 Chapter 1: Resurrecting Ancient Practices
03:43 Chapter 2: Africa – 72,000 years ago
10:01 Chapter 3: Egypt – 2,000 BC
18:25 Chapter 4: Roman Empire – 100 BCE
25:00 Chapter 5: Viking – 900 BCE

Part 2: How the Allies sabotaged the Nazi atomic bomb
32:30 Chapter 1: Rumors of a Nazi atomic bomb
38:04 Chapter 2: The mission to sabotage Hitler’s bomb
46:08 Chapter 3: Ethical dilemmas in the atomic age

Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

My name is Sam Kean. I am the author of several books and my latest book is “Dinner with King Tut.” How rogue archaeologists are recreating the sight, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations.

Part 1. Bringing Ancient History to Life Chapter

Chapter 1: Resurrecting ancient practices

If you’re thinking of Indiana Jones, traditional archaeology is not that. It’s things buried in the ground that you have to dig up, put in context, and try to piece together the past. Brushing off little pot shards and bits of bone with toothbrushes. Day after day, hour after hour. Traditional archaeology is very good about what the past looked like. So they can tell you there was a wall here, there was a building over here. You get a good general sense of the landscape and probably the range of materials that an ancient civilization was using.

But what I was lacking was all of the other senses. What did the past sound like? What did it taste like? What did it smell like? So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeologists make and do things. They try to recreate the past in all sorts of different ways. Whether it be making ancient recipes and foods, stone tools, ancient medicines, building ships and heading out into the ocean. All sorts of things that involve resurrecting the past.

If you have deep knowledge about how to do something or how to make something, you’re going to ask different, better questions about it and have a better eye about what to look for, the range of things people might have used, stuff like that. Another thing experimental archaeology can do is help us solve some of the great mysteries of the past. How did they actually build the pyramids in Egypt? How did they erect those giant statues on Easter Island? Human beings? How did we hunt ancient creatures, big packadearms and things like that? Experimental archaeology can help us get at those questions.

For this book, I attended an authentic Roman banquet and ate strange foods of all kinds, everything from caterpillars to walruses. I spent a day out in Utah with a guy who built a 30-foot catapult, and we spent an afternoon hurling these giant stone boulders around the river. I got to give and get my very first tattoo. I got to fire a medieval cannon. I got to try my hand at ancient neurosurgery and all sorts of other projects.

One thing I really like about experimental archaeology is the range of people that are involved in doing it. In some cases, you have hardcore lab geeks that are in a lab collecting data, just like a traditional scientist would. In other cases, you have archaeologists who fell in love with some ancient civilization, and they wanted to connect with it on a deeper level. They figured there was no other way to do that except to go out and try to recreate certain aspects of the past. You also have indigenous communities, who in a lot of cases have kept these traditions alive for thousands and thousands of years. Often they are the ones actually teaching archaeologists about this material. It’s really a two-way street with these groups where they are the ones imparting their knowledge to the scholars and academics.

Then you can go all the way to these grouchy survivalists who live out in the woods, but they’ve picked up tricks or tricks have been passed down to them and they have a lot of knowledge, some cases implicit knowledge, that you just don’t get from armchair archaeology. In some cases, they’ve actually rewritten what we know about archaeology because they brought to bear their own knowledge on the field and showed the experts where they were wrong.

Chapter 2: Africa – 72,000 years ago

Imagine your person in Africa 75,000 years ago. You’re a bit nomadic, you probably travel around from place to place, maybe spend a few weeks sleeping in a cave. But caves have hard dirt floors, not very comfortable, so you’re going to have to make a bed of some sort. Also, your main activity is probably going to be gathering food and water, so you would have a canteen of some sort to carry water around, probably made from an ostrich egg. Then to get ready to find food that day, you’re going to have to make your own tools and go out on a hunt.

So let’s start with the bets. The first thing you would do is you would spread a bunch of debris around in the cave and you would light it on fire. It would burn, that’s going to clean the cave out, but also importantly, leave a nice soft layer of ash. That’s essentially going to be your mattress. Then you’re going to go out and gather some plants, aromatic leaves especially. You’re going to lay those down as a top sheet on that layer of ash. This is going to be fairly comfortable because ash is nice and soft, like sleeping on the beach. People have actually recreated these beds and have slept in them overnight and they said that they were in fact pretty comfortable.

It also had another benefit in that the ash kept away ticks. Insects were a big problem for people thousands of years ago. They didn’t have repellent, they didn’t have ways of keeping them off. Having a nice ash layer on the ground prevented ticks from burrowing up and locking onto your legs. I taught to a woman who actually gathered a bunch of ticks, put them in the center of a nice ring of ash and then watched what they did. The ticks tried to burrow through the ash. Most of them did not make it out, they died part way through. The ones that did make it through the ash, their mouth parts ended up so gummed that they couldn’t bite anyone afterward. The ash also provided a way to prevent ticks from biting your legs. Then the top layer of the leaves, they were usually aromatic leaves that kept mosquitoes away. In addition to providing comfort, this bed also kept away parasites that can annoy you and spread diseases.

So when you get up in the morning, you’re probably thirsty. If you’re in this cave, you’re going to reach for your water receptacle, which will be an ostrich egg canteen. Ostrich eggs are usually pretty large and they’re usually pretty thick and dense. What they would do is they would take a stone tool and they would saw the top of the ostrich egg open, usually make a little square or something like that. They would pour the insides of the eggs out and then they would clean it out with some aromatic herbs, wash it and then you have a nice little canteen. For the book, I actually bought an ostrich egg online and tried these steps myself. I got to cook the ostrich egg in a big old skillet. Parts of it were delicious. The yolk was this amazingly rich caramelly egg flavor. It was delicious. I love that part. The whites were less good, little runny, foamy, not my favorite, but you know, they weren’t horrible.

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Then after I had cut open the top of the ostrich egg with the stone tool, I washed it out and used it to hold water. It held about six cups of water and one really cool thing about ostrich eggs is that they’re slightly porous. Not so much the water is going to leak out of it, but microscopically, there are tiny little pores in the ostrich egg that let water escape from it. Evaporation cools it so it keeps the water colder than the ambient temperature. An ostrich egg is actually a self-cooling canteen.

So after you get your nice drink of water, you’re probably going to start on one of the main activities of the day, which is making stone tools. For this, you’re probably going to use churte or flint, a very hard rock that fractures very cleanly.

This is an example of a stone that you might try to make a tool out of. You’re going to hold it in your lap like this. Then you’re going to take another stone called a hammer stone and you’re going to drop it on to this tool. Imagine my fist here is the hammer stone. Usually they’re potato shaped, big and oblong and very smooth on the outside.

You would take the hammer stone and you would drop it down on the very edge of this stone. You’re not going to smash it down, you know, like really pound it on there. It’s more of a controlled drop to just strike the edge of it. You take it in your lap, you would drop it down and then a piece would come off. You can see how nice and clean this edge is. It’s not going to shatter like a pot or something like that. You’re going to get a nice edge here and you can use this piece and refine it more, you know, maybe get rid of this, make a little smaller tool.

This is an example of something that you might be able to make if you were a master footnapper. You can see a nice little head there on this little spear that I have. You can also see how it’s half dead to this wooden shaft. This would be animal sinew. From a tendon, a legament, something like that, you would pound that out, you would separate the fibers and use it to wrap around and half dead to this shaft. Then you would dribble resin probably from a tree that you would gather, you’d warm it up and you would dribble it around there to act as glue essentially to really bind it to this spear. Then you have a nice little hunting tool that you can use.

One coveted material in ancient times was obsidian, like you can see here. It’s a black volcanic rock. If you strike it properly, you can get extremely sharp flakes from it. Flakes that are sharper actually than modern steel scalp. They’re extremely, extremely sharp. Those are dangerous. I actually cut myself with obsidian at one point accidentally. I was surprised that I didn’t notice how deep the cut went. It was right across my arm. Unlike a paper cut, it did not hurt at all because that edge was so sharp. But it immediately started bleeding all over the place. I was surprised how quickly things got bad with it. I had to wrap it up pretty quickly. You can imagine if this was 75,000 years ago and you had cut yourself like that, it could get pretty dangerous pretty quickly. They didn’t have antibiotics. There was no hospital to run to. However important napping tools was, it was also a dangerous occupation.

Chapter 3: Egypt – 2,000 BC

Now let’s jump forward in time to ancient Egypt in the 2000s BC. You get up in the morning and you’re going to want some food. You’re probably going to grab some bread and some beer. Then you’re going to go about your day. This was the era when they were making the pyramids. You would actually get to see them as they’re being constructed. You might also go and talk to someone who was making actual mummies. It was a very big industry in Egypt at the time and odds are good. You would know someone who was working on those kind of things.

One real delight in the book was the chance to recreate lost recipes and eat foods that people would have eaten thousands of years ago. In Egypt especially, I found the food absolutely delicious. Bread was really the main food that Egyptians ate. They’re staple food. I got to meet someone who actually recreated an Egyptian style loaf of bread in his backyard. He was a bit fanatical about it. He went over to Egypt. He cultured the yeast that they would have used way back then. He sourced some heirloom grains to make this bread. He even got the right type of wood that they would have used in Egypt for the fire pit in his backyard. Then he had some friends make a conical mold the way that they would have in ancient Egypt. He cooked this bread in his backyard and let me try some of it. I have to say this was the best loaf of bread I have ever eaten in my life. It was so delicious.

It was very simple recipe, however. It was just emmer the grain that they used for flour. Emmer, coriander, salt, yeast, and that’s it. The taste of it was delicious, perfectly balanced, a nice springy crust on the outside. The bread that I ate was two days old and we had warmed it up in the company microwave. If I had gotten this bread fresh out of the ground, it would have been absolutely delicious. It would have drawn braves in any bistro in New York or Paris I’m convinced.

The other treat from ancient Egypt was getting to make Egyptian style beer. They used emmer as the main grain in there with some barley mixed in. It tasted a little different from modern beer that we think of because they didn’t use hops in the beer. Hopps imparts a bitter flavor to beer. Without the hops, it actually tasted a lot more like a sour beer that you might get today. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. They were out there in the sun dragging blocks around the sun beating down on them. You want something a little sour it quenches the thirst. These were a lot closer to a kambucha than they were to what we think of as a beer.

One surprising fact about ancient Egypt is that we have no idea how they built their most iconic structures, the pyramids. There’s a lot of information available about ancient Egypt and their writings and the hydro glyphs and pictures on the walls but they really did not address how they built their pyramids. It’s been a big mystery for thousands of years at this point. Experimental archaeology has not solved this mystery but it can do a lot in ruling out certain theories about how the pyramids were built. One important thing that they have ruled out is that ramps were probably not that useful in building the pyramids.

You can imagine a big ramp to the top of the pyramid pushing a block up it maybe on a log roller or something like that. But in experiments that has failed completely. However nice log rollers look on paper they do not work well in the real world. They’re not uniform they slip all over the place. It’s a pain to get the log rollers at the back run them around to the front when you’re holding a five ton block trying to push that up a hill. It’s a real hassle to do that. There are even big problems with the very idea of using a ramp.

If you look at a pyramid make a scale sized pyramid and then start piling material up in front of it. You realize pretty quick that these ramps need to be incredibly long. Maybe even a mile or a mile and a half long to get all the way to the top of the pyramid. They also have to be incredibly broad because the material you might use sand cannot form a nice steep wall. In building this ramp you’re probably going to have to use as much or more material as you’re putting into the pyramid itself. They probably use technology of some sort to winch or drag them up instead of just pushing them up a ramp.

Mummies are one of the most iconic aspects of ancient Egypt. But we really don’t know a lot of details about how they made mummies because they didn’t record a lot of this information. Either they were trying to keep it a secret or it was just passed down from person to person and no one bothered writing it down. So even though we have a lot of mummies from ancient times we didn’t know a lot of the details. Experimental archaeology turned out to be a really good way to investigate the process of mummification.

Now a lot of scientists have looked at animal mummies. A lot of people don’t realize it but the Egyptians mummified a lot more than just human beings. In fact they mummified millions upon millions of animals. There are graveyards in Egypt with 4 million dogs in it or 7 million birds. They really were creating these animal mummies on an industrial scale. So by making these mummies in modern times scientists can learn a lot about the overall process.

There have been a few rogue archaeologists who decided to make an Egyptian style human mummy in modern times. It was quite a controversial project. It took place in the 1990s in Baltimore with two people. One was an anatomist and one was an Egyptologist. Even though they got a lot of pushback from other archaeologists from bioethicist people like that they said this was a very important problem and they wanted to go forward to answer some of these mysteries. So someone had donated their body to science and they decided to use it to make this mummy.

The person I talked to for the book Bob Breyer actually went over to Egypt and he dug out the mineral that they were going to use as a drying agent in the body. So he was very committed to authenticity here. He also had a series of stone tools made, some from a bacidian or other stones, some from copper and they actually used that on the body to open it up. They had to open up a little hole to get the organs out, to dry those out. Then once they had the organs out they had to wash the inner cavity and then use the mineral that he had found in Egypt to dry the body out. That mineral was a mix of baking soda and salt, a mineral called natron.

You can actually make some at home if you want. I did this in my home with a fish and actually mummified a fish. It was very, very easy to do. We think traditionally about a fish as being one of the smelliest animals out there. But I brought this fish home, never put it in refrigerator. I just put it in a casserole dish, put this baking soda and salt mixture over it, and a week or two later I had a perfect fish mummy. Then I wrapped it up in linen just like they did with the Egyptian mummies and it’s still sitting on my counter today.

By making a human mummy they learned a lot about the process and solve some of the mysteries. One was how much natron you would even need to do this. They ended up meeting several hundred pounds of this. Another mystery was how long does it take? Ended up taking them about 70 days or so to make a human mummy. They had to change the natron in a few times but overall that’s about how long it took.

One of the big mysteries that they wanted to solve was when we find an Egyptian mummy today, you can see the very weathered skin. It’s usually changed color, gotten a little darker, the hair is very wispy and the skin is retracted on the face. They wanted to know if it the mummification process that had done that or the fact that they were sitting in a dry environment in Egypt for thousands of years. Even after four or five weeks with the human mummy in modern times, they realized that it was the mummification process that was doing this. The person I talked to, they cracked open the crust, looked at the mummy and he gasped and he said, “Oh my God, this looks exactly like Ramses the Great from Egypt.” He was stunned that in just a few weeks they had recreated an Egyptian style mummy.

Chapter 4: Roman Empire – 100 BCE

Let’s jump forward in time again to the ancient Roman Empire of around 180. You live outside the city in Avila and you’re going to walk in along a Roman road. You’re going to get into the city and you’re going to get your hair done. You have a big ball that night and you want to impress some people. After sitting there for a few hours of getting your hair done, you get a little hungry. You go around the corner, you’re dodging all of the filth in the street and you walk up to a little sidewalk stall and you order yourself a meal.

One of the main ingredients in that road and in some ways one of the secrets of Roman architecture is the amazing concrete that they made. Concrete isn’t really sexy material but the way the Romans made concrete has allowed a lot of their buildings, bridges and roads to stand even to this day. Archaeologists, when they would look at Roman concrete, they always thought they had made a bit of a mistake when making it. That one of the big ingredients in concrete is a substance called quick lime. You mix it with water and it helps form a glue to bind the concrete together. When archaeologists looked at Roman concrete, they would find big undigested lumps of quick lime in there. They thought this was a mistake.

You can imagine a loaf of bread in modern times. If you bid in and found a chunk of raw flour in there, you would think, “Okay, the baker didn’t mix the flour as well as they should have.” Archaeologists had the same thought with the Roman concrete. They thought they made a mistake. But it turns out that that was not a mistake and actually was a key feature of Roman concrete. Modern concrete is quite good, quite strong, but it’s prone to cracking. Once a crack starts, cracks widen very quickly.

But with Roman concrete, a few archaeologists at MIT recreated some of it and they found something very interesting with this concrete. With normal concrete, when water gets in there, it freezes, it expands it, it can crack it apart. With Roman concrete, when water got in there, it would find these undigested chunks of quick lime and react with them and actually create a substance that filled the space. It was essentially self-healing concrete. Because of that feature of their concrete, it strengthened it over time and actually allowed it to stand much longer than modern concrete does.

One of my favorite people to talk to for the book was Janet Stevens of Baltimore. Stevens is a hairdresser, has no formal training in archaeology. She was at a museum and something intrigued her. She saw several busts of Roman matrons there and she as a hairdresser noticed their amazing hair. She was especially interested in the backs of their hair because, you know, as a hairdresser, that’s the part she’s usually looking at. She saw that these busts had these amazing hairstyles, these mountains of curls, these spirals around their hair. She thought, “Wow, I want to go and try to recreate these hairstyles.”

So she went home, she had a few modeling dummies with hair on them that she uses to practice. Despite being an expert professional stylist, she could not recreate these hairstyles even with all the modern tools at her disposal. She got curious and she thought, “Well, how did they actually make this hair then?” So she went to the archaeological literature and the classics literature, started looking up papers about Roman beauty, Roman hair styling. She quickly realized that the people who wrote these articles had no idea what they were talking about. Just the way they would describe hair, the physics of hair, how to move it, how to pile it up, how to sculpt it, they didn’t know what they were talking about. She decided, “Well, if someone’s going to solve this mystery, it’s going to be me.”

One obstacle to her solving this mystery was that she did not read Latin at all. In fact, she had failed Latin when she took it in school. But she was motivated this time. She started tediously typing pages of Latin text into Google Translate line by line to try to figure out if she could find some clue as to how they made this hair. A few years finally, into this project, she was typing yet another line into Google Translate and the penny dropped. She read a line about the needle that the tailor and the hairdresser used. She realized, “Aha! They weren’t sculpting this hair and pinning it up with bobby pins or bodkins or something like that. They were actually sewing people’s hair into place using a needle and thread.” After that, she went home, tried it out with a needle and thread, and was suddenly able to recreate any one of the hairstyles she wanted. This hairdresser from Baltimore, who had no experience in archaeology, was able to actually publish a paper that revolutionized the field. She’s now one of the world’s leading experts on Roman beauty and Roman hair styling.

Roman food has always had a very bad reputation, mostly because of one ingredient that the Romans use in almost every dish that they made, a sauce called garum. For a long time, garum was translated as rotten fish sauce, as if they had taken a fish, let it decompose, and then squeezed the putra juices out and just dumped that all over their food. As you can imagine, people thought that must have been disgusting. That sounds terrible. Why would you eat this food drenched in putrid fish sauce? And that sentiment prevailed until modern times when a few people who actually wore cooks or chefs read about the process of making it and they said, “Wait a second. This isn’t rotten fish sauce. It’s just fermentation. That’s all they were doing. They were fermenting it under controlled circumstances, actually breaking the muscle of the fish down and producing a sauce that way.”

An equivalent in modern times is Thai fish sauce. People use that all the time and cooking, maybe even sprinkle a little bit on your food. It’s a very common ingredient. Once people realize this, they realize it was actually a very versatile dish that you could use in a lot of meals. It has a nice umami flavor to it so that savoriness that you get with protein has a lot of salt in it too. You can add a dash to brighten a dish up.

The Romans loved it so much, this garum fish sauce, that they actually used it in desserts as well. Pretty much any dish that you can imagine, they would dump the fish sauce on it. I don’t know if all of us would want it in our desserts nowadays, but I have eaten some meals with this garum fish sauce. I can tell you, it adds quite a nice kick to a lot of foods.

Chapter 5: Viking – 900 BCE

Let’s jump forward one more time to the AD 900s when the Vikings were running wild, pillaging and destroying villages all along the coast. Imagine you were in one of these villages, they rampaged through it and they attacked someone that you know and love. They cracked their skull with a big axe and they leave them lying and bleeding on the ground. Now it’s your job to save them. You have to perform a surgery on them and then prevent that wound from getting infected.

It sounds startling to say, but one of the first surgeries that human beings ever performed was a type of neurosurgery called a trepination. Imagine someone gets hit on the head and there’s skull craters in and there’s bits of bone pressing against the brain. That’s a very dangerous situation. It’s offer brain damage, even die from that as pressure and blood builds up beneath the skull. They would remove those broken bits of bone. That would allow any blood to seep out and would prevent it from pressing down on the brain and injuring the brain.

For the book, I actually got to try a trepination myself. I used a stone tool for it like you can see here, it’s a piece of flint with some serrations on it. It was like a sawtooth piece of stone tool. I tried it out on a deer skull. I essentially cut a triangular hole in the skull and then levered that bit of skull off. You can see right here, that is the piece of skull from the deer and there’s a little bit of skin still adhering to it. Cutting this small piece, it’s about the thickness of a bottle cap or so, took me about 90 minutes of work to do.

These were some of the worst 90 minutes that I had doing the book. This was an awful, awful chore. The stone tool actually worked quite well at first. I was surprised at how good it was slicing through skull for a lot because one disadvantage of stone tools, even though they’re very sharp, is that they dull very quickly. They grind down little bits, start flaking off. Eventually you’re left with a fairly dull tool where you’re just grinding away at it. After the first cut was completed, this took me a very long time. It was a very big struggle.

The other thing I didn’t expect to happen was that I was outdoors while I was doing it a very warm day and flies started coming around. There were flies everywhere. They were in my hair, crawling in my shirt, crawling up my shorts, biting me, swarming all over the wound as I was shooing them away. I was also starting to sweat and there was blood and bodily fluids coming out of this deer skull that I was working on. It ended up being a gigantic, gigantic frustration for me. But in a way, that was actually a good thing because part of the experience of experimental archaeology is show you some of the frustrations and show you the things that people must have endured in ancient times as well.

One thing you might be wondering with trepanations is, well, didn’t people die all the time? I mean, you have a big open wound on your head. You have flies crawling in it. They’re going to cause infections. The answer is people survived a lot more often than you might think. We have lots of examples of skulls with holes in them where you can see new bone growth around the rim of the skull, which proves that the person must have survived this trepanation. Especially in the Viking times, they would have had ways to combat infections.

One way was discovered in what was called a leech book. Leeches yield slang for doctor. They would actually use leeches to draw blood off people. In this leech book, a couple of modern scholars, one a historian and one a microbiologist, found some recipes that they thought might be plausible that would control infections. They decided to test one. The recipe in the leech book called for a few ingredients. Onions, garlic, wine, and what was called ox gall, so bile from the liver of a cow. You had to mix this together in a copper bowl and then let that sit for about a week or so and then use that on an infection. The book claimed that it was great with infections. It would really, really combat infections. But they wanted to see if that was true because the book had some other unusual recipes in it that didn’t sound very plausible to them.

After making this mixture, the microbiologist tested it out in her lab. She purposely chose some two pretty tough bacterial customers. One was staff and one was gonorrhea. In modern times, both of these bacteria have shown a lot of resistance to drugs. They’re running rampant in some people. It’s very hard to control these infections. But it turned out that this mixture of onions, garlic, wine, and ox gall did a really nice job killing these drug resistant bacteria. She was surprised at how good they were.

In fact, she tried them in another even tougher test and they passed this test as well. Sometimes when bacteria get inside you, they form what’s called a biofilm. Bacteria, they essentially lock their arms together and they secrete a mucus that blocks drugs from getting through. It’s a protective barrier that they produce inside living creatures. These biofilms are actually one big reason why a lot of drugs that show promise in test tubes fail when they try them in living beings. But when they try this ancient mixture on biofilms, it busted right through and killed the bacteria anyway. She was very, very excited about this because biofilms are very difficult to overcome. They’re actually developing this ancient recipe as a modern drug and moving forward into human trials with the goal of helping us combat some of these drug resistant modern strains.

One nice lesson of this example is that knowledge isn’t always a linear. I think we have an idea that we’re constantly accumulating knowledge that we knew more than people did 10 years ago, more than 20 years ago, more than a few centuries ago, and certainly more than people knew thousands of years ago. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes knowledge does fall through the cracks. This mixture was a really nice example of that, of something a doctor in the 900s would have immediately turned to, but that people nowadays would not have known unless they looked back. We should probably give people in ancient times more credit for the real knowledge that they did have.

One great thing about experimental archaeology is that it can reinvigorate people’s love for the past. If you go to a museum and you start reading the displays, looking at the objects, that’s a really nice experience. But that knowledge has a pretty short half-life. It’s probably not going to make that deep of an impression on you, and the knowledge will probably seep away pretty quickly. Imagine going to a museum and getting a slice of Roman bread or a quaff of Viking beer. Imagine getting to try on ancient leather clothing or get a whirlous spear at a dummy of a mastodon. It would really enliven the experience and bring it to a whole new level in your mind. So a lot of people call the field not just experimental archaeology, but experiential archaeology, or even living archaeology, because it really brings the past alive in a new way.

Part 2: How do the Allies sabotage the Nazi atomic bomb?

Chapter 1: Rumors of a Nazi atomic bomb

Imagine it’s World War Two, and you are a scientist who’s been kicked out of Nazi Germany and you’ve come to the United States, and you start to hear some rumors about some work going on in Germany about atomic bombs, and you are terrified. Because you know a few things about Germany. You know they have some of the best scientists in the world. You know they have a head start on important processes like fission that would help them make an atomic bomb. You know they have the best industry in the world there. Most scary of all, Adolf Hitler is head of Germany at the time. He has shown himself to be ruthless in every other circumstance. You think if he gets an atomic bomb in his hands, he is going to destroy the world.

One thing that amplified a lot of scientists’ fears was that they knew the Germans had also developed what they called their V-weapons. Essentially they were missiles. They could launch something in Germany, it could fly over to another country, and explode there. Nowadays we take it for granted that missiles can fly hundreds or even thousands of miles. But to people back then this was a terrifying thought, that even if they had Germany surrounded, they could still launch weapons over the top and wipe out whole cities. Especially if they got atomic bombs mounted on the tops of those rockets.

Werner Heisenberg, an atomic scientist living in Germany. One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. A Nobel Prize winner, a brilliant, brilliant person. But he was working under the Nazi regime during World War II. He was specifically working to help build an atomic bomb. One early experiment that he was doing was trying to create a chain reaction. Essentially in a chain reaction you have uranium atoms that split, they shoot neutrons off, these neutrons fly, they hit another uranium atom, that one splits, shoots more neutrons off. At each step it releases energy, and with each step as it progresses more and more energy gets released. It’s a chain reaction of events.

Before this time, no one had ever been able to successfully produce a chain reaction in the lab, and Werner Heisenberg wanted to be the first one to do it. He and his assistants built this giant sphere that had alternating layers of uranium and heavy water inside them. They put a neutron source in the very middle of this sphere and let it go and just started letting the chain reaction proceed to see what would happen. Unfortunately, part way through this experiment they realized that there was a leak. There was water leaking in to the uranium. Uranium does not react well with water. It’s actually explosive when the two come into contact. This is not an atomic explosion, it’s a regular chemical explosion. But it is a doozy.

Once they noticed water started leaking into there, they essentially panicked, fled the room, and a minute later, boom, there was a giant explosion as all this uranium and heavy water burst into flames. There were 20 foot flames roaring out of the top of the building. They had to call the fire department in to put it out, and this fire burned for two days. That’s how hot and intense this fire was. Now again, this was just a regular chemical explosion. But Heisenberg was working on an atomic project.

As Heisenberg started to tell his colleagues about this failed experiment, essentially a game of telephone occurred, where one person got the details, told another person, changed the details a little bit, maybe even inadvertently. But as the story kept getting passed along from person to person, it changed a little bit. It wasn’t just a chemical explosion anymore, it was a low-grade atomic chain reaction. Then things got even wilder.

Switzerland was a neutral country during the war. So scientists from Germany could travel there, but scientists from allied countries like the US or England could travel there as well. They would often meet in Switzerland and talk and exchange stories. This story about Werner Heisenberg, supposedly atomic fire, got passed to allied scientists in Switzerland. They knew Germany was already working on an atomic bomb. Once they heard about this story about this supposed atomic explosion that occurred, they panicked.

They ran right back to their countries, told everyone about it. Before long, in their minds, this was a small-scale atomic explosion with several people dead. Rumors were running wild about how close Germany was. In fact, one scientist at the University of Chicago after hearing this story did a few calculations on the blackboard, and he announced very gravely to his colleagues that Germany would have a bomb within six months. It terrified them.

This is really where the Manhattan Project got going in earnest was once they realized that Germany might be a lot farther along than they feared. So various scientists started talking, and they said, “We have to take some action on this. We can’t just be passive and let Germany potentially build an atomic bomb and not have a response for it. We need to start our own project to build an atomic bomb.” But in addition to that, we need to start our own project to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project. That is how the all-sauce mission got put together.

Chapter 2: The Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Bomb

The essential goals of the mission were to spy on sabotage, and in some cases even tried to assassinate members of the Nazi atomic bomb project. There was a real motley crew of characters involved in this mission to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project. On the one hand, you had the core all-sauce mission that was made up of military people and scientists. The military people came from the security branches of the Manhattan Project. The scientists usually came from the world of atomic science and atomic physics. You just threw them together and let them work. There’s two different worlds coming together here. There were often a lot of clashes about things like priorities, how to handle things. The scientists were a little more informal. The military people about the scientists were a little too lackadaisical. A real culture clash within this unit. But they had to figure out how to work together for this very important project.

Despite its importance, the people involved really did not get a lot of training. These were scientists coming right out of the lab. They weren’t used to being under fire, you know, running behind enemy lines, things like that. The military people involved had no special knowledge of the science. They were just winging it. But they didn’t have a lot of other resources or precedent for what they were doing. So they just threw them out there and said, “Good luck boys, let’s see what happens.”

In addition to that, you had these peripheral side branches of this project. One involved what was called the OSS, which is the precursor to the CIA. But the OSS was not the professional well-run organization that the CIA became in later times. The OSS was pretty freewheeling and in fact, chaotic in a lot of cases. They recruited a major league baseball player named Mo Berg to be an atomic spy to go into Europe, slip in their undercover and try to fair it out whatever he could about the Nazi atomic bomb project. Now it sounds strange on the face of it that you would recruit a major league baseball player as the first atomic spy in history. But Berg was not your typical average major league baseball player. He could speak five or six languages fluently. He was friends with Albert Einstein. He was the perfect person for this role.

In addition to that, you had another military branch that was essentially developing weapons that could potentially wipe out any atomic bunkers that the Nazis did build. Different branches of the mission were working on different goals at the same time. You had the core OSS unit in Europe who were trying to push toward the front lines and gather up any material or people that they could find. One early success of theirs was they were one of the first military units to actually get into Paris during its liberation. Even when the Nazis were still gunning people down in the streets trying to defend Paris, the lead avant-garde of the all-sauce mission was running in there trying to get to a few atomic scientists there. Most importantly was Frederick Joliot, who was the husband of Irene Joliot-Kierry, the daughter of Marie Curie, a very famous and prominent scientist who had in fact pioneered a lot of the atomic research and the chain reaction research that underlay the atomic bomb.

Then you had another mission in Norway that was going after one of the key ingredients in the Nazi atomic bomb, a substance called heavy water. So compared to regular water, heavy water is obviously a bit heavier. There’s essentially an extra subatomic particle on the hydrogen in H2O. It has a lot of nice properties when you’re trying to build and test atomic equipment and get chain reactions going. The Nazis were very dependent on heavy water from a plant in Norway. In fact, that was the only place in the world that was producing heavy water at the time. The people in charge of the all-sauce mission decided we cannot let this plant survive. So they snuck a few commandos undercover into Norway who spent several days trekking through the snow and ice. They infiltrated this plant and they destroyed all of the heavy water cells in there. It’s one of the big first success stories of the all-sauce mission and it really delayed and damaged the Nazi atomic bomb project. So that was one of the very big successes that they had.

In many ways, all-sauce was an unconventional mission with unconventional people on the front line. But there were conventional military aspects to the overall project as well. One important event here was the bombing of Pienemut, which is where the Nazis were building all of the rockets they were launching into England and other places. The Allies feared that here the Nazis were going to build the rockets they would use to deliver atomic weapons. So they decided to wipe it out and prevent any prospect of that happening.

One important aspect of the all-sauce mission was espionage, gathering information about what the German scientists were up to and where they were getting material and storing their material. After hunting down some leads and interrogating some scientists, they finally managed to track down a warehouse with several tons of raw uranium ore in it. They seized it immediately, not only to get it out of Nazi hands, but to get it over to the United States for our Manhattan Project. Most of that uranium ended up in the bomb that got dropped in Hiroshima the next year.

In terms of the core espionage mission, they were on the front lines. They were often in fact beyond the front lines in enemy territory while there was shooting going on both sides. One group led by Boris Pash were some of the first people in Paris during its liberation. They were under fire the entire time they were doing that. The ex-major league baseball player Mo Berg went undercover and snuck into Switzerland posing as a graduate student. While he was there, he attended a lecture by none other than Werner Heisenberg, and Berg entered the lecture room that day with a pistol in one pocket and a cyanide pill in the other. His mission was, if Heisenberg said anything about them being close to making an atomic bomb, Berg was supposed to stand up and shoot Heisenberg dead right there in the middle of the lecture. Then he was supposed to try to get away, but if he didn’t, he had that cyanide pill to take to kill himself right there. He was under a lot of danger and a lot of pressure and easily could have died undertaking this mission.

Then you had people who were trying to wipe out the Nazi atomic bunkers. This included Joseph Kennedy, the older brother of John F. Kennedy, the future president. Essentially they were trying to fly what were drone airplanes, so they would have a big bomber airplane that they were going to pack with explosives, fly it across the English channel, and ram it into a Nazi atomic bunker, which would have been a pretty good idea, a pretty big conventional bomb. But the problem was, these drone airplanes could not take off on their own. They could fly on their own but not take off. So they needed pilots to volunteer to get in these planes packed with explosives, get them off the runway, point them toward their target, and then eject out of these flying bombs. Joseph Kennedy volunteered to be one of these people, a very brave mission, and he ended up losing his life because of it.

The death of John F. Kennedy’s older brother Joe really changed the dynamics of the Kennedy family. He was Joseph Kennedy Jr., the firstborn son. He had been the one that their father had always groomed for the presidency. Their father actually said at one point that John would not amount to a whole lot. Joe was going to be the big star. But with Joe dead, they had to put all of their time and energy and passion into John instead. He became the president.

Chapter 3: Ethical dilemmas in the atomic age

The goal of the Alsace mission was to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project, however they could. Some historians think there were also people on the inside in Germany were trying to do those same things. In particular, Werner Heisenberg always claimed later that he deliberately slowed the Nazi atomic bomb project down so that they would not make progress. Not outright sabotage, but not working as hard as they could. It’s a very controversial claim and a lot of people don’t believe Heisenberg. They think he was just doing that to make himself look good after the war. But it is an open question about how much the Germans were trying to build a bomb and how much they were dragging their feet knowing that Adolf Hitler would ruin the world if he got his hands on one. So they had to decide how much they wanted to weigh those two things, saving Germany versus empowering one of the worst dictators of all time.

There were also ethical dilemmas for scientists on the other side working in the Manhattan Project. A lot of them got started with the project because they had been run out of Nazi Germany and they hated Adolf Hitler. They were happy to build a bomb to take Hitler out. But once Germany lost the war, they suddenly realized that, uh-oh, now we’re still fighting Japan, we don’t want to necessarily use this bomb on Japan. But by that point, the test had gone so far and there was a momentum to the project that they would not be able to stop. So a lot of them felt very conflicted about the idea of using it on Japan when they had originally built it to go after Adolf Hitler.

Some scientists at the time said they didn’t want to use the atomic bomb on Japan, they wanted to give Japan a demonstration, show them how deadly it was before we actually used it on innocent people. But the military said no about that, they wanted to use it in war. A lot of scientists, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, expressed regrets about this afterward. “We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Now I am to come death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all fought that one way or another.” They wished they had pushed harder for a test or tried to stop it in some way, but that’s not the way history turned out.

The big success of the All-Saus mission was in figuring out that Germany was not going to be able to build an atomic bomb by the war’s end. What this result did was it allowed the Allied planners, people like Dwight Eisenhower and the other generals to get their focus off of big surprises, atomic bombs, and they could focus on what they knew well, which was conventional warfare. Essentially, it was a big relief for them to not have to worry about this wild card. Germany suddenly coming up with something that would turn the tides of the war in their favor. So it was a big relief for them to know that we were going to win the war if we just kept doing what we were doing.

Toward the end of the war, the All-Saus mission captured most of the key players in the Nazi atomic bomb project and brought them to England where they put them up at a big country estate and just put them under house arrest, essentially. When news broke of the atomic bomb that had dropped in Hiroshima, they were absolutely stunned to hear that the United States had built an atomic bomb when mighty Germany had failed at the project. They could not believe that anyone had beaten them the greatest scientists in the world.

After Nazi Germany fell, there was a scramble to grab all of the greatest scientists that they could. This happened on both sides of what would become the Iron Curtain. The Allies were scooping up scientists like Verner von Braun, who went on to NASA to become one of the most famous scientists and one of the most famous people in the United States. But the Soviet Union was sweeping up scientists too. This was an early skirmish actually in the Cold War, was grabbing these scientists and pitting them against each other in building things like missiles and other weapons.

The Manhattan Project changed the world by ushering in the atomic age. I don’t think actually we would have atomic bombs nowadays, if not for the fear that we had of Adolf Hitler getting an atomic bomb first. One of the best scientists of the 20th century, Niels Bohr, famously said that there was no way anyone could build an atomic bomb. His reason wasn’t that the science was too hard. He said, “You couldn’t do it because you would have to turn your entire country into a factory to refine enough uranium or to get the plutonium for an atomic bomb. He just didn’t think anyone would make that commitment.” And probably no country would have, except the United States had scientists terrified about Adolf Hitler.

The Manhattan Project was one of the biggest industrial projects in history. It cost two billion dollars in 1945 money. It was a massive project. They would never have been able to justify the cost without that fear driving them. A few things about the Nazi ideology really interfered with their ability to carry out atomic research. One was the fact that they didn’t like Jewish people and they kicked a lot of very smart scientists out of Europe who ended up coming to the United States and playing key roles on our Manhattan Project. We certainly would not have built an atomic bomb without the influx of talent from Nazi Germany.

The other aspect was that a lot of Nazis were just snobs. They figured they were the most advanced civilization in the world and that no other nation could possibly reach the same levels that they did, especially not a Yahoo country like the United States. There were many scientists in Germany who were stunned to hear that the United States of all countries had built an atomic bomb where they had failed to. They were so blinded by their own supposed superiority that they never considered another country would beat them.

If the Nazi atomic bomb project had not failed, we would live in a much different world. Even if Hitler had never used the bombs per se, just the threat of it, the thought of him having the bombs would have really changed everything about how we negotiated what lands we were willing to give up. Hitler could have overrun Europe and completely dominated the continent or he would have moved into Asia and Africa. He might have even gone over to North America or farther and tried to conquer that. With atomic bombs, he was basically omnipotent. He could do whatever he wanted.

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He explains how our childhoods quietly shape who we fall for and why we keep repeating the same painful patterns. If you have ever wondered why love feels harder than it should, this conversation will change the way you see your relationships.

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Timestamps

00:14 Chapter 1: Our destructive romantic culture
01:42 How romanticism reshaped love
07:17 The cultural myths that sabotage love
10:02 Chapter 2: Lessons on love from psychotherapy
11:20 What childhood teaches us about love
14:20 Attachment theory and early separation
17:25 When familiarity matters more than happiness
24:40 Chapter 3: The playbook for a successful relationship
26:41 How are you crazy?
29:24 What therapy makes possible
34:41 Why you will marry the wrong person
42:33 Social media and the blame reflex
47:25 Chapter 4: Overcoming status anxiety and loneliness
49:00 Status anxiety in a secular age
50:30 The lost safety valves of older societies
52:31 The need for secular temples
55:02 Love as the bridge out of isolation

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

My name is Alan de Botton. I’m a philosopher, psychotherapist and founder of the School of Life.

Chapter 1: Our destructive romantic culture

We know in theory that love matters a lot. It’s in every pop song, it’s the center of most religions. We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually means. It’s really about connection. It is one of the most beautiful and one of the most complicated of all phenomena.

Even though we think we’ve been around on this planet for a long time trying to figure things out, I’d say we were still at the dawn collectively of making sense of this phenomenon we call love. It’s no surprise that most people will go to their deathbeds thinking, not quite sure I figured that side of life out. At least many of us will still be grappling with some of the complexities of love by the time time runs out on us.

The most central kind of love that people are obsessed about, concerned about, is romantic love. That is the intimate connection between two human beings who have a sexual contact. It’s worth saying that there are other forms of love. We can love our children, we can love animals, we can love ideas, we can love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things. We are capable of many forms of love, but I’d say that when people sing about love and when they cry about love, it tends to be the love of one very special person we tend to call our soulmate, our partner.

How romanticism reshaped love

It used to be the case that when people found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations. In most nations and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but by the wider society, families, the village, the court. There were, if you like, dynastic marriages. You would get together with somebody because they had a plow and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match, or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union. So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility. There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness, but it didn’t seem to matter because relationships were seen to be about something else.

There was then a momentous change that occurs in, towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know as romanticism. One of the central tenets of romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart. They should be left to decide for themselves. It’s a beautiful idea, it’s a very liberating idea, it should make a lot of sense. We have been in the romantic age now for 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer time period.

And let’s put it plainly, it’s been a disaster. We’re not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture than we were in a dynastic culture, where marriages were made for dynastic reasons. Why? Because we have failed collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties that couples will have when they choose each other according to the movements of their own heart.

Look, I think a really key prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well, it should be following instinct. There’s been an enormous veneration, it must be worship of instinct. Love is described as a special feeling, not an asset of ideas, not a sense of rationally observable principles, but a feeling. You either have the feeling or you don’t. You must be guided by your feeling.

There’s even a prejudice against language. True lovers shouldn’t talk too much. They should just feel the flattering of their own hearts. That’s why music has a huge prestige, higher than philosophy. When we’re in love, we don’t want to read philosophical tracks, we want to hear love songs.

That is to do with our sense that emotion should be guiding us, not reason. Reason is the enemy in the romantic worldview of truly happy relationships. If we follow reason, that’s cold, it may be calculating, it’s unromantic. There are so many things that are considered unromantic. I would love to train our audience. But every time something seems unromantic, question it. Is it truly unromantic if we define romanticism as the pursuit of a workable relationship? On that basis, is it unromantic to talk about money? Is it unromantic to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological development?

Is it anti-romantic to spend a lot of time thinking about families and friends and compatibility at that level? All these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of surveying whether a couple should be together. But I’m also aware that nowadays these things are considered very unromantic.

To live in a romantic culture means to live in a culture that has a set of ideas about how good couples should form. They should be formed by instinct, that everybody has a soulmate, that you’ll recognise your soulmate by a special, flattery feeling, that you shouldn’t be asked to account for that feeling. You should simply go for it and marry in Vegas in two weeks if that’s what seizes you.

And that you should be able to communicate deeply with your partner without using language. Through that special medium of the heart, through the silence. Also that you shouldn’t criticise your partner, that true partners should love each other for who they really are. Which means no desire to grow or change. You just accept someone.

Couples in romantic culture will sometimes complain, “You’re trying to change me.” And this is seen as really offensive. It’s like, “What? You complain to your friends. My partner’s trying to change me.” “Oh, what an awful person. It must be awful. You must get out immediately.”

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If you went to an ancient Greek, if you went to Athens in 400 BC, and you said to an ancient Greek, “What is love? And where is the role of criticism?” They would say, “Love is a process of education. It’s the education of emotion.” And lovers should of course be able to pick each other up for things that they don’t spot in one another.

The whole process should be trying to develop into the best version of themselves, rather than simply staying stuck in an admiration for who they are today. The whole process should be dynamic. Become who you could be, not worship who you happen to be right now. All of this sounds very strange in romantic culture, which is why relationships are so difficult in our time.

The cultural myths that sabotage love

Let’s remember that a person’s life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70% by the quality of their personal relationships. A Martian hearing that statistic, visiting planet Earth, would think, “Well, clearly Earthlings, given the enormous role of love, will be spending 70% of their money and 70% of their educational time working out how on Earth this business of love works. Is that true?”

We spend hardly any time rationally thinking about it. None of us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory, classes in apology, classes in listening, classes in communication. Physics is important, geography is important, don’t get me wrong. But is there no time for this, given its role in our lives?

Do we really want to leave this to chance? And the answer is yes. And why? Because we live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning and thinking and reflecting too hard on the business of love. It’s very deleterious and it’s been a serious problem for humanity.

One of the most powerful disseminators of romantic culture is art. By art I mean all the leading artistic media. Film, definitely. If you were learning about love from films, you would be very confused. That’s why many of us are confused, because films, and I include that television shows and other narrative forms, these things are hugely misleading. They simply do not show what a real relationship is like.

You can probably count on one hand that the number of films that have accurately shown love, I think one of the most accurate representations of love is Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, which ended up with Before Midnight. It’s a wonderful reckoning really with the real complexities of love. But most films are not that. Most films are blithe, are superficial, are not modest enough in showing us what’s really going on between couples.

It’s also intimidated through music. Music constantly gives us little miniature stories about how love works. The music is terrific, but it’s not accurate to what’s going on. It presses the wrong buttons.

Poetry, no one really reads poetry nowadays. If they did, the problem exists in poetry too. So we have so much media around, and yet we’re still so much strangers to ourselves. I would say that the single greatest, most misleading disseminator of ideas on love is culture and art. The problem is very heavily located there.

Chapter 2: Lessons on love from psychotherapy

I think we need to split history into phases. The phase of the dynastic relationship where people would get together for dynastic and financial and family reasons. That ended. That’s behind us. Then we moved into the Romantic Age, and that caused a lot of problems and it lasted 250 years or so.

We need to draw a line under that. We need to move towards something that I call the therapeutic age. The age of the therapeutic relationship. What on earth is a therapeutic relationship? Let me try and explain.

A therapeutic relationship begins with the insights of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has been with us for 120 years or so. It is the most sophisticated understanding of how human beings function emotionally. It’s based on the insights of Sigmund Freud and all those who come after him.

It is not going away. Some people say, “Oh, that’s... isn’t that old hat? Wasn’t Freud proved wrong?” Sorry, no, he wasn’t. Of course, many, many areas of Freudian thought are wrong, but the fundamental insight that we have and unconscious, that how we love as adults was shaped by our childhoods, that there are defenses that we put in place to protect ourselves as children that cause difficulties for us as adults. This is indisputably true. That’s not going anywhere.

What childhood teaches us about love

All of us are the result of a very slow and long process of emotional education that took place between the ages of zero and ten. This is extremely hard to perceive. Most of us are like, “I never went to an emotional education school. I just grew up. My parents lived in Idaho or Milton Keynes or Frankfurt or Yokohama.” There’s no sense that we’ve learned anything in particular. But my goodness, we have.

All of us reach adulthood having learned very complicated languages of love and relationships. Languages that tell us whether a human being can be trusted, whether we are worth something, whether communication is good, what happens when somebody is angry, what happens when we are shy, what happens when we sulk, how do we tell someone something important? All of these things will have been imbibed in us.

Let me give you a metaphor. Very few of us, I’d say none of us, remember what it was like to learn language, to learn to speak. And yet, most of us know how to speak. But it went in invisibly. While we were in the kitchen drawing butter cups or in the garden doing handstands, all of us will have learned incredibly complex patterns of language, of grammar.

We have learned about the pluperfect. We have learned about the subjunctive without even knowing such things exist. We have learned tens of thousands of words and all sorts of ways of expressing ourselves without knowing a thing. I want to say that a similar process goes on at the level of emotional language. In the same ways we learn a grammatical language, we learn an emotional language.

As I say, a language about trust, about kindness, about communication, about self-worth, about dialogue, etc. All these things that we take with us into adulthood, we learned, and we learned from one place in particular, our families of origin, our mother and our father, or whoever our caregivers happen to be.

These people are immensely, immensely important in shaping our emotional grammar. In the same way as they shaped our linguistic grammar, I mean anyone who’s had a parent with a regional accent of one kind or another will know that that sticks. You will pick up that regional accent from your parents and you will, in my stick with you, all of your life.

Same thing goes on with, as it were, the regional accents of emotional intelligence. You may speak a regional accent where every man is extremely frightening, or every woman has a tendency towards alcoholism, or everyone who is kind is also slightly sadistic, or everyone who you depend on is also depressed.

Now these are all very, very difficult languages to have been exposed to and to pick up on. Many of us, sadly, have come through childhood with suboptimal language acquisition, emotional acquisition, if you like, and we take that into adulthood unconsciously. We have no clue where we’ve come from, and because we don’t know where we’ve come from, we don’t know how to plot a sensible course.

Attachment theory and early separation

I’m going to mention something very important, which is attachment theory. One of the most useful tools for working out why relationships work and why they don’t was formulated by two researchers of near-genus, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, two researchers working in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. They had been very marked by a phenomenon that took place in the 40s during the Second World War.

In the Second World War, huge numbers of children were separated from their parents at a young age and were sent to families outside London to escape the German bombing of British cities. What researchers soon realized was that this was a catastrophe for the children. The children began to exhibit extremely distressed behavior. They would wet the bed, they would get very angry, they would not be able to eat.

They would be in states of almost cataclysmic meltdown. Why was this? Materially, they were well looked after. Psychologically, emotionally, they were bereft.

And researchers, this is one of the most moving stories in the history of the Second World War, researchers realized that if this carried on, this would do more damage for the next generation than any number of war dead, that the risks of German bombs were actually smaller than the risks of ruptured emotional attachment.

And on that basis, these psychological researchers wrote to the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office and got the children transferred back into their homes in the cities of the United Kingdom. And thereby a great tragedy was averted. So that after the height of the crisis, children were returned to their birth families and looked after again by their closest figures of attachment.

Why are we talking about this? Because this was the birth of attachment theory. From watching how children were around their close caregivers in childhood, it was discovered that all of us are, in a sense, tethered to a story that we first have in childhood around our caregivers.

And the researchers in attachment theory began to divide human beings into categories, highlighting their characteristic ways of behaving around relationships. To give you a few of the categories, they identified something that we now know as avoidant attachment.

Avoidant attachment is a way of relating to a troublesome and troubling caregiver who in some ways lets you down. It’s estimated caregivers let down around 50% of children. So around half of the population of any nation you care to mention has got children wandering around with attachment wounds.

It’s an important statistic to bear in mind when you go on a date. There’s a 50% chance you’ve got somebody with an attachment wound. That’s not the end of the story. We can work with attachment wounds, but we need to know that those attachment wounds are there. That’s how we’re going to try and solve the problem by knowing that the problem is there.

When familiarity matters more than happiness

An avoidantly attached person is somebody who responds to the insecurities in their relationship with their caregiver by essentially moving away, by pushing away intimacy. The classic sentence that an avoidantly attached person will say to their partner after a few beautiful weeks, a few mini breaks, a few lovely times, they’ll go, “This is feeling a bit too intense,” and then they will withdraw in some way. They’ll start causing a problem. They’ll say, “Oh, I need to spend a weekend with my friends or my mother really wants to see me.”

They’ll pull away from a relationship because it’s getting too intense. Really what they mean is, “I’m so afraid of love, and the way that I deal with my fear of love is to pull away.” So that is avoidant attachment, and we see it all over the place. Some of your viewers will be avoidantly attached. Some of your viewers will have recognized this with a partner that they had.

It’s not that the avoidantly attached person doesn’t want love. They want love. They’re just terrified of it. Why are they terrified of it? Because it didn’t go well for them in childhood. This is something that we need to really keep in mind.

We’ve got a culture that thinks that everybody’s looking for love. They’re not. They’re ostensibly looking for love, but they’re just as busy pushing love away when it comes, running away from it, and making sure it doesn’t succeed. Why? Because love is a threat.

If you have grown up in an environment where love was not possible, where relationships between caregivers and children were not safe, you will have defended yourself against the risks of disappointment. You will have insulated yourself. Then when love comes your way in adulthood, what you will do against your knowledge, against your conscious knowledge, is make sure that love does not succeed.

You will sabotage your own chances of a successful relationship. Let me give you a metaphor. Imagine that you’ve grown up in a prison camp. You were never fed, or the diet was very meager. You didn’t have much food. Then suddenly, one day, the prison gates are opened, and you get to go to a banquet, and you get to eat anything you like. What might be the response? Panic.

You might make yourself sick. You might try and eat the food. You might even kill you, or threaten to kill you, because why? You cannot metabolize the goodness on offer, because you have learned to function with an emotionally restricted diet, an emotionally restricted diet where you’ve made do with very little. When there’s a lot suddenly on offer, you panic, and you think this is too intense. You think that somebody who has been going with almost no food will think it’s far too intense to eat a rich chocolate cake. Sometimes healthy love is like a rich chocolate cake, which we cannot bear.

Some of your viewers will know the phenomenon whereby you offer somebody love. You love them, you feel that you want to give them a good life, you want to be a good partner to them, and they accept it, and then suddenly they run away. If there’s a dynamite under it, this is a very common occurrence. What’s going on? It’s not that it’s too bad, it’s too good. For some of us who had to get used to very poor relationships, the greatest threat is not a bad relationship. That’s fine. It’s a good relationship.

You get patterns, horrific patterns, where people have had an unstable and violent father, let’s say, uncaring and absent mother, and you think that these people are going to get to adulthood, and they’re really going to make it up for themselves. They’re going to find the love they yearn for, and they’re going to make it work.

What happens to them? Maybe a nice lover comes along. Someone kind offers them a home, as it were, an emotional home. Maybe at the beginning they can bear it. It’s easier at the beginning. But then the problem starts setting in when it really becomes clear that love may work. That’s when the traumatized attachment lover gets their sticks of dynamite out and starts to blow the foundations of the house up so that they can return to the suffering that feels more familiar.

What you need to understand is that in love we don’t look for what will make us happy. Absolutely not. We look for what feels familiar. For some people, happiness and familiarity are one. But for many of us, they are not.

For many of us, what is most familiar is a sense of not being loved properly, a sense of not being sure where we stand, a sense that someone may threaten us, a sense that someone may abandon us. That is our true home. If that’s our true home, we will be guided with a honing instinct to refine that, which is why you find again and again that the children of alcoholics do not head for sober partners. They head for people who are struggling with alcohol. Why the offspring of violent parents do not head for calm and kind partners. They head for people who are struggling with their temper. Now, what do we do about this?

One optimistic story is to be found in the work of Sigmund Freud, who in many ways everything returns to him. He observed something which he called the repetition compulsion. He observed that human beings are not guided by a search for pleasure. They are guided by a search to repeat patterns, a repetition compulsion often of pain.

He proposed an ingenious and I think optimistic answer to this. He argued that what many of us are doing when we repeat traumatic experiences, for example, getting back together with a violent partner or an alcoholic partner, what we’re really doing there is not simply suffering at infinite for no reason. What we’re trying to do is to master a challenge that we couldn’t master in childhood and we’re trying to master it with the resources of adulthood. In other words, we’re trying to get the alcoholic partner to stop drinking in a way that we couldn’t when we were children.

We’re trying to get the distance emotionally and communicative partner to start to talk in the way that our mother or father didn’t. We’re trying to make it up in the present. Freud realized that for many of us we wouldn’t find the kind of excitement that we need until we locate a partner who does suggest that they suffer from the very problem that our crucial caregiver suffered from. Until we find a little bit of an echo of the original suffering.

But the optimistic story is perhaps we can work with them in the relationship to heal the pain. It’s a very optimistic story. It works sometimes and sometimes we may need to cut our losses. Love is not always about keeping going. Love is also sometimes about knowing that you are in a pattern and that pattern is driving you to destruction. When that happens, it’s also important to know how to save yourself from shore destruction.

Chapter 3: The playbook for a successful relationship

First of all, the idea of a playbook sounds strange. The idea of a playbook that you need to create to get in a relationship sounds really odd. You think, I don’t need a playbook. I just need to head on in there, get a dating app and off I go and a nice new pair of clothes. But isn’t it interesting and wouldn’t it be lovely to have a playbook that would be trying to guide you to acquire the knowledge that you need for love? So the idea that love is a skill rather than an emotion is a strange one, but I think an absolutely essential one in the world view that I’m positing.

If somebody said, I’m going to climb Mount Everest or K2, you would say, OK, how have you prepared for this? And you’d be expecting them to show up with ropes, with training programs, with oxygen, with specially prepared packs of food. You can get the metaphor. We walk into the mountain of love without sufficient preparation and equipment. Then we’re surprised that we routinely tumble off the mountain and we blame the other person. We say we didn’t match the right person.

We haven’t found our person. We go back on the dating app and we go ever further to try and find the right person. Don’t get me wrong. Dating apps have their role. Sometimes we need to scan and see who’s out there and find a person who halfway meets us where we want to be. But once you’ve found a more or less suitable person, that’s when the work begins. The work is to turn a stranger into somebody that you can understand and who can understand you without bottling it, without panicking, without throwing them in the bin, without saying we can’t work this out if after five weeks in a pleasant mini break in Copenhagen we suddenly have a conflict.

No, the point is you need to stay where you are and try and figure it out. But most people give up too soon. They say we can’t possibly do this. They run for the hills, go back on the dating app and find the next person with whom they will then try out an equally unfulfilling attempt to match their heart with strangers.

How are you crazy?

What we need to do is to start to create right people rather than search for them. What does that mean to create a right person? It means to work on yourself psychologically and therapeutically so that you understand your script from childhood and do not simply play it out onto innocent person after innocent person, that you take responsibility for the problems that you are bringing into a relationship. At the School of Life which I founded, an institution that is dedicated to emotional growth and development, we tell our people that when they honour date with somebody, among the first questions is to ask people playfully, “How are you crazy?” What does that mean? How are you crazy?

Why is everybody crazy? They’re not necessarily crazy. Well, all of us have stuff that we need to be on top of. If your person at dinner says to you, “Yeah, I get the question. Yeah, I’ve got my crazy. My crazy is this. My crazy is that. My father, my mother.” This is turning out to be a safe person. If the person goes, “How do you mean I can’t possibly answer that question? That’s rude. You think I’m not right or imperfect. Run for the hills. Drop it right there and then.”

I’m exaggerating, but this is probably not a person you should be hanging out with because none of us need or can have perfect partners. But what we can have and must search for and must try to become is people who know enough about their patterns to be able to warn their prospective partners of what’s going on and take averting action. The beginning of therapeutic relationships is to know that two people, when entering a couple, are not entering without a lot of history. It is essential that couples learn as much as possible about that history so that they are ready for the challenges and perplexities of love.

A therapeutic relationship requires that each partner get on top of their dynamics, that date back to childhood, and are able to discuss them with relative grace, patience, and insight with their partner so that when problems arise and they will, they can adopt a therapeutic language. It is therapeutic to say, for example, when there is a conflict, “I hear your point of view. It may not be mine, but I hear that it’s yours.” It is not therapeutic to say, “You’re wrong. You’re an idiot, and you’re just like your mother.” Or, indeed, like your father. This is not therapeutic.

I’m kidding, but I’m making a very serious point. We do not tend to talk to each other in therapeutically informed language. We shout, we scream, we blame, we shape-shift, we don’t take responsibility. We do all sorts of things that doom us in relationships.

What therapy makes possible

Then we stand back and we say, “We’re surprised. We are a society that is obsessed with finding the right person without pausing to think, ‘How do I become the right person? How do I work on myself?’ Understanding that cannot be done simply, and this is paradoxical, by being on your own. This is another unbelievable mystery. You can’t understand yourself just by being with yourself.

You need other people. Why is that? It’s like, why do you need a mirror to see the back of your head? Because we don’t have eyes there. We need someone to help us to see the things that are really hard for us to see. Psychotherapy gives us a forum in which we can come, tell the therapist about what’s going on in our lives, explain what happened last Monday, explain what happened when we took that trip to New York or Buffalo, wherever it is, what happened, and then slowly pattern recognition sets in.

The therapist is able to go, “It’s funny. In that last relationship you did this, this new relationship you’re doing that, and you mentioned that your parent did something that sounds kind of similar.” So I wonder what’s going on, and then slowly insight comes. We start to put the pieces together. We think, “I’m up to something. I’m doing something.” And that way is liberation. We can start to break the unconscious stories that we’re living.

Psychotherapy works with this concept known as “defences” or “defense mechanisms.” In other words, these are tools that our minds adopt to try and shield themselves from accurate knowledge of their own workings. It’s going to sound really odd, like, why don’t we just embrace self-knowledge with open arms? Why do we need to run away from it? The answer is that knowledge of ourselves is frightening. It’s really awful to have to learn certain things.

It may make us very anxious. It may make us so sorrowful. It may panic us, and so we push away unwelcome information. I think that we still perhaps can’t quite bear how complicated we are. We’re very squeamish creatures. We don’t like to sit with ourselves. We don’t like to sit with our emotions.

Self-knowledge remains an enormously elusive goal. I think it is the most important goal of life. To understand oneself is literally the meaning of life. The ancient Greeks knew this, “Know thyself” was the most important command in ancient Greek culture and philosophy. “Know thyself” - the most important thing you could do.

If you said nowadays in a conversation with friends or colleagues, “What’s your goal? Where are you trying to get to next year? What are you trying to do?” Say, “Know thyself.” People would go, “That’s a strange person there. We don’t know about this person.” It’s not an acceptable goal.

We know that it’s good to make money. We know that it’s good to travel to foreign countries, to learn how to fry garlic and to learn salsa. It’s not particularly esteemed to know yourself. That’s why we wander around strangers to ourselves and therefore enormously confusing. Let’s put it frankly, dangerous to other people. Because a person who doesn’t understand themselves, if confronted with their behavior will go, “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.” Or, “I can’t think.” Or, “Ask me tomorrow.” They can’t account for themselves. They don’t know why they do the stuff they do.

They will simply, in a relationship, for example, bail out of a relationship going, “It’s getting too intense.” And why? They don’t know. They don’t understand what they themselves are doing. Even though, they may have spent five years learning Spanish.

They may have taken an advanced degree in Japanese. They may be very active in all sorts of ways. They may have learned pottery. They may be holding down a great job in marketing something. But the point is they will not have learned the really true constituents of emotional functioning because they’ve been able to get away with it.

Part of the playbook of becoming a better lover is to dial down your defense mechanisms, to observe them. A typical defense mechanism is to push responsibility onto other people, to say it’s your fault. For example, someone tries to tell you something about yourself. Someone says, “I think that you’re a little bit this when that happens.” Rather than going, “Thank you. Let me think about that.” You go, “Why are you being rude?” Or, “This is not a good time for me.” Or, “I can’t absorb this now.” In other words, you push away information that might have helped you. Not because it’s false, but because it’s difficult to absorb.

That’s often what happens to us. All of us, all of us are involved in defense mechanisms. All of us can’t quite bear the full truth about ourselves. It helps us to go to psychotherapy. I know that AIs deliver some aspects of therapy. It can be good at points.

But the good thing about a real human being is that they are not guided just by you. They’ve got their own independent judgment. Also, you’re in a relationship with them. That relationship is part of what heals you, because the relationship with the therapist is a harbinger of the relationship that you can then take out into the world, a relationship of trust and mutual understanding. This is something that AIs not going to be able to replace anytime soon.

Why you will marry the wrong person

So we need to understand ourselves. We need to understand the past. Then we need a certain spirit. One of the things that we need in that playbook of love is a good sense of humor. That could sound superfluous, like why on earth do we need a sense of humor? Well, a sense of humor is a modesty about our capacity to understand anything.

If we can signal to our partners that we’re a little stupid. We don’t get it. We don’t have all the answers. That is a wonderful emollient. It’s a wonderful lubricant to love, because it just dials down the temperature. If your partner is able to say, “Ah, I may not have understood this. I may not be getting it. That’s brilliant.” And if they can make a little joke too, that’s great.

If two people can learn to see each other as idiots, but lovable idiots, that’s a beautiful moment in love. It could sound negative. It’s not. It’s not. It’s the most generous thing you can do. We are two blind people helping each other to find a way forward. If that’s the spirit in which we can enter love, that is a spirit of generosity, a spirit of mutual forgiveness.

Too often we get on our high horses. This is the way it is. I know the answer. This is what I think. That is not a friend of love. So we need, if you like, a modesty, a humorous modesty. Let me give you another idea. Another thing that we need in order to make love work is a certain degree of pessimism. Optimism is the enemy of love. If we think that we will have a perfect love story, a love story with no ruffles in it, with no kinks in it, no, it’s not going to happen. We need to accept that even a really good relationship has constant moments of crisis. And that’s okay. The problem is not crisis.

The problem is how do we repair crises? Can we repair them with forgiveness, with understanding, and most of all with curiosity? Can we get curious about why we had a bust up? Can we be searching for why our attachment patterns are not compatible? Can we get interested in why we’re difficult to love, and that way will become easier to love?

So pessimism is not an enemy of love. Knowing that there is no such thing as the right person actually helps you to find a good enough person. A few years ago I wrote an essay that went viral. I wrote it for the New York Times. It was called “Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person”.

Why did that essay go viral? I think it went viral because people all feel... Sorry, let me correct that. Not all people, but many, many people feel that they have married the wrong person. They panic about this and they feel so ashamed. So here’s an essay in the New York Times that says, “Yeah, we’re all going to marry the wrong person.” And you know what? It’s okay. You don’t need to marry the right person. You need to marry a good enough person. Compatibility is not a precondition of love.

Compatibility is the fruit of love. If we get together with someone and we find that there are differences, right? They have one kind of attachment style. We have another. They like golf. We like tennis. They like the curtains to be green. We like the curtains to be yellow. Whatever it is. Too often in modern romantic dating culture, the answer is get out. Just get out.

Find someone else. Find someone better. That’s why all the technological tools are all about putting new people in front of you. Of course, sometimes you need to find new people. But as much as finding new people, what you need to do is to learn to live with the people who are in front of you.

With the people that you’ve found. Many of us have already found a good enough partner. Yet we throw them in the bin because we are taught by romantic culture that we can always find a perfect person with whom it will click immediately. This is such a destructive idea.

If you think, “You know what? The work starts here. The work starts when you have a problem.” Then you roll up your sleeves and you think, “OK, well, I know that I think this person is a nice person. Now we’re going to work at making sure that it can work.” So we’re going to talk and we’re going to take this problem apart. We’re going to become like engineers who’ve got a malfunctioning machine. We’re going to sort it out. This sounds unromantic, doesn’t it? Imagine saying, in order to make my relationship work every evening, I’ve talked for an hour in really patient ways.

You think, “Go to Vegas, find someone easier.” Well, good luck to you. Maybe you’ll find that person. But for some of us, especially some of us who’ve come through difficult relationships, difficult relationships in our past, we may need to go and do that kind of excavation.

Maybe that’s fine. I think that a good enough person is someone who will engage with the business of working towards compatibility. That they won’t assume that you are wrong just because there are problems. They will know how to repair crises. They will know how to be curious. They will know how to listen. They will know how to be patient.

That is compatible with all sorts of problems. Sexual problems, relational problems, administrative problems. Doesn’t matter. You can work through them. So the wrong person is someone who stonewalls, who always blames you, who blanks out, who says, it’s not my responsibility, or it was easier with my ex and why are you so difficult, etc.

These people are trouble because they are refusing the work of love. So it doesn’t matter if you have many, many difficulties. That’s okay. The problem is your attitude to the difficulties. The solution is an attitude of indulgence, of curiosity, and of calm consideration of the flaws that unite us all.

We are all mad monkeys. As long as we’ve been kind towards the mad monkey and all of us, we’ll be okay. One of the real problems, and there’s simply no solution, but we need to accept that there’s a real problem, is how long it takes to work out who we are as lovers, as people interested in relationships, who we are.

It takes so long, and it takes especially long to try and change our patterns. If we are somebody who sabotages relationships every time that love comes along, how long is that going to take to unwind this? Well, it takes insight, but then it takes, as it were, work, true work.

Sometimes people go to therapy for six sessions or 12 sessions, and they go, “I haven’t changed. Therapy doesn’t work.” And let’s come back to my earlier example about language. Imagine that you decided middle age as an English speaker to pick up Korean or Finnish, and you went to six lessons, and you tried to learn Finnish and Korean. And by the end of six lessons, you could barely say your own name or say hello. Then you blamed it on the whole process, and you said, “I’m not learning this language. It’s rubbish.” People would say, “You’re being too impatient.” I think that some of the same holds true for rewiring our emotional language.

We can’t pick this up in six sessions of 50 minutes. It takes a long time. A pattern that was laid down over decades is going to take many, many years to figure it out. It’s bad news. I wish it weren’t so. Can we do anything in the meantime?

Yes, of course we can. We can be learning and walking. We don’t have to pause and just sit by the roadside. We can be starting on the path of relationships. We can start from a relatively young age, but we need to be doing the work alongside, and we need to be able to at least do the first thing, which is to say, “I’m learning. I’m a learner.”

There’s a real difference between someone who goes, “I know it all,” and someone who knows that they are still learning. When Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, was asked why he was the wisest person in antiquity, he said, “Because I know what I don’t know.” In other words, that the birth of true wisdom is associated with the knowledge of your ignorance. I think that’s the best way we can proceed also in relation to our love lives.

Social media and the blame reflex

There are lots of questions that we could learn to ask ourselves and our partners in order to try and find a better relationship. One of them is this. When I get close to you, how does that feel? To open up a window onto some of the complexities that occur when somebody gets close. If I love you, what part of you might worry? That’s a good question. Does any part of you worry?

Another really useful question is how do I respond when someone is trying to communicate something to me? Do I stonewall or do I accept? Am I able to pause and think the issue might be with me? Or do I always have to go, “I can’t answer that. It’s the other person. You’re being unfair. You’re putting me under pressure.” What is your level of emotional dexterity? So that’s a good question to be asking yourself as well.

Also, one of the really good questions in any relationship is to say, “How have I annoyed you?” How have I frustrated you? A lot of what happens between couples is there are things that are bubbling away beneath the surface that people can’t find the courage to say. Because they can’t say them, the problem doesn’t improve. The problem gets worse. People can’t have sex anymore.

A lot of the reason why people can’t have sex has got nothing to do with sex. It’s to do with the fact they feel disconnected and angry and misunderstood. You can’t have sex with someone who you feel misunderstood by or you feel furious with. What helps desire is trust. The way to build up trust is to communicate, and particularly communicate, ruptures of trust.

If you want to have good sex, don’t get a candle, don’t go to a hotel. Start to ask each other, “Have I annoyed you? Is there something I’ve done that you’d like to tell me?” And you say this patiently, not in the middle of the night when you’re stressed or maybe you’ve drunk too much, but when you’re calm, when there’s a sense of lightness and forgiveness, use the right moment to ask the right question.

We’re living in a world where therapeutic language and insights have spread for the first time far outside the consulting room. There is mass adoption at a superficial level of therapeutic language. The area where we find this most obviously is social media and in particular Instagram, which is enormous, it’s an enormous force in the world, and it has brought up a generation, I’d say, to speak in pseudo or vaguely therapeutic terms. I don’t mean that as an insult. Some of these insights have been fantastic.

People are now able to talk about, let’s say, attachment theory, the mention of an avoidant attachment theory or an anxious attachment theory in many circles now doesn’t create the puzzlement that it was generating 15 years ago. 15 years ago, this was not common knowledge. That was still in the university, in textbooks and in the consulting room. Now it’s out in the world. The medium that has changed this, as I say, is social media.

What’s the problem? I’ll tell you one of the problems. One of the problems is whose fault it is. The tone of a lot of social media posting blames the problem for the struggles in relationships, fairly and squarely on the partner, not on yourself. There is an obsession with finding borderline people, narcissistic people, avoidance, anxious people, out in the world. And of course they exist, but the tone is the problem.

The tone says, get out. These are red flags and everybody that you’re meeting, the reason why you haven’t made a relationship work, is because these people are unbalanced psychologically. My answer is this. If you are looking to find a person with no problems at all, with no psychological disturbances, good luck to you. If you’re looking to find somebody with no red flags, good luck to you.

Everybody has red flags. That’s part of what it means to be human. That’s the story of Genesis. The story of Genesis is Adam and Eve had some red flags. That’s what it is to be human being, is somebody with a red flag. So the problem is not the red flag, it’s how you deal with it.

This is what I worry that therapeutic culture on social media doesn’t train us to do. It doesn’t train us for patience. It doesn’t train us to think we might be the problem. It doesn’t ask us to think what we’ve brought to the situation. It doesn’t create an atmosphere of forgiveness. The reason is very simple, outrage sells. It’s more fun, it feels more spirited. It’s punchier to say that ex of yours, they’re the avoidant, they’re crazy, they’re narcissistic. It sounds better and it leaves everybody happier. But long term, it’s not the solution.

Chapter 4: Overcoming status anxiety and loneliness

We mustn’t forget that one of the sources of love that is most important to us is not just interpersonal romantic love, but the love that you get from other people. Strangers dependent on your standing in the community, your status. Status is a really interesting feature of everybody’s ambitions. Why do we work so hard? We work so hard, not just for material rewards. We work hard in order to gain the esteem, the respect, the regard of people whose good affections we rely on to feel good about ourselves.

If you said to somebody, you’ve got a choice, either we’ll give you $10 million a year, but every time anyone sees your face, they’ll go, oh my God, I hate that person, they’re awful. I despise that person. You could have that option, or we’ll give you a minimum wage, absolute minimum, bare minimum to survive. But every time anyone sees you, they’ll go, “Oh my God, that person is amazing, it’s just great, etc.” We know which one we’d pick. We know that we would pick the love and affection of the stranger and the respect and esteem of our community, way over simple material rewards.

Now, in our culture, the reason why most of us work so hard and the reason why most of us are so interested in money has nothing to do with the money. It’s just that money is the chief conduit towards the love and respect that we stand to gain from our communities. If you change the status system and what you get status for, you will change the incentive structure.

Status anxiety in a secular age

There have been periods in history where the number one thing you needed to do in order to have a high status was to worship God really intently. Then if you’re good at worshiping God, you’d be considered amazing. Then people did that in droves, and that was considered very, very serious. In other cultures, it was considered very serious to be a good hunter. So people became more and more good at hunting, and that was what you did. That was the root to getting status.

Nowadays, how do we know what the status system is based on? We know it because of a very simple question that any stranger will ask us within normally 30 seconds of meeting us. What do you do? And according to how you answer that question, people are either going to be really pleased to see you. “Oh, great! We must hang out.” Or they’ll leave you alone by the peanuts and they don’t want to know you.

We’re living in a world of snobs. A snob is really anyone who takes a small part of you and comes to a global decision of what you’re worth and how much love you’re worth. That is the reality, the brute reality of the way in which we live in society. We will be judged ruthlessly by our careers, by what is on our business card. We will be given love, status love, not romantic love, but status love. Maybe romantic love too, that’s another consideration.

But generally status love according to how impressive we are in the field of careers. It’s why we work so hard, it’s why we’re so panicked about careers, and it’s why there’s such despair when careers don’t work out. We’re losing not just materially, we’re losing our sense of our good name in the eyes of society. It’s very brutal.

The lost safety valves of older societies

I think older societies, pre-modern societies, had some built-in safety valves to try and protect people from that unitary sense that what you are worth is what you do, that you are what you do. It’s always been somewhere there in the system because we are material creatures, we do depend on material goods, so it’s always been there as part of the mix. But other cultures have softened this in a way that ours no longer does. They’ve softened it in a number of ways. Firstly through religion, through the mass adoption of religion.

The interesting thing about religion is generally the gods that people have worshiped love people, not for what they do but for who they are. They look inside your soul.That’s a vital defense mechanism. You’re giving unto Caesar what Caesar wants and the rest is up to God. That gives you a sense of freedom. It’s like, well, I may not be performing so well in my career, but I’ve got an alternative route to love and affection. That’s a huge defense.

The other thing that really protected people was isolation. We are one of the first societies to be constantly surrounded. 24/7 by other people, we live in vast cities. Most of the world’s population now lives in a city. That wasn’t the case until a minute ago. This is very new.

When you don’t live in a city, what do you live surrounded by? A very important psychological tool called nature. Trees, rivers, forests, grasses, insects, animals. What on earth has these things got to do with love? Well, what they do is they break that unitary system where you are worth what another human being defines you as being worth. When you’re surrounded by nature, you’re no longer just defined by other humans. You get to live in a more expansive, a more liberated world where your value is up to wider forces and that lends a lot of oxygen and a lot of freedom that we’ve lost as we’ve moved towards urban societies and of course, as we’ve gone online.

The need for secular temples

Here’s another pet idea of mine. Religion disappeared as the guiding force in people’s lives around 100 years ago when Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” He announced the death of God. Now, you might say, “Hang on a minute, there are lots and lots of believers.” There are, of course there are. Many societies are still defined by religion.

However, one can propose that in key ways we are no longer living in religious societies. We are living in modern, secular societies that are based around romantic love, status performance, material goods, a denial of nature, a cutting off from the natural world, and a cutting off from any sense of human agency being limited. We believe in human agency being able to determine everything. Along with that comes a denial, of course, of our own mortality.

How would we start to do something about that? Well, I think we need to look to religions for answers. Religions have worked it out. I think that we need to steal from religions and to institute in secular culture many of the maneuvers of the safety valves and genuine insights that religions were brilliant at delivering.

For example, we need to break bread together. All religions bring people, strangers together to break bread from different communities in order to lessen suspicion. We need to get back to a tradition of communal dining and of breaking the barriers that separates strangers from one another. We need also to talk with intelligence and intent about love and about our capacity and possibility of loving better than we do, of reminding ourselves that we need to make an effort around love.

Buddhism does this, Christianity does this. All the main religions emphasize not just that love is important, but that love is hard, and we need a little bit of that. Religions also, almost all of them, have created spaces that are separate from the spaces of commerce, spaces that are beautiful, spaces that are peaceful, spaces that bring people together to create a different kind of fellowship, one more guided by a spirit of friendship and kindness and vulnerability. We need to replace our temples and churches with secular buildings that aren’t just going to be shopping malls and that aren’t just going to be car showrooms, but the places that will bring people together, the most beautiful community centers imaginable still need to be built, and I’d love to see them built.

Love as the bridge out of isolation

We think we’re alone in being alone, and we think there is shame that attends to admitting how alone we are. The root out of loneliness is to share your loneliness, is to dare to believe that the things you are most ashamed of cannot be, structurally they cannot be, things that exist in your heart alone, that they have to be things that despite the evidence, the surface evidence of other people’s cheerfulness, probably exist in other people. Other people are also lonely, are also sad, also feel lost, also feel that they’ve messed up, also have a hard time in their relationships.

The beginning of friendship begins with the capacity to be vulnerable and to admit to loss and sadness. We think that friendship is a mutual club for cheerfulness, it’s not. True friendship begins with tears, with the ability to admit to sadness. This is why men in many ways have a harder time than women, forming deep friendships because men, there’s still in many societies a real taboo around male tears. Men cannot admit to being sad and weak without feeling that they have lost their masculinity. Extremely unfortunate as a root to friendship because it means that your friendship will need to be based on posturing and on the recounting of triumph and success.

Whereas in fact, of course, true friendship begins with the revelation of vulnerability and fragility. As ever with a problem, self-awareness and mutual awareness is the way through. Once we can see the pattern, we can break the pattern. Once we can see that we’re living in a prison defined by a material, a material status system that many of us don’t value, that we are doing this not because we want to, but because it exists, we can start to find alternatives.

I’m not talking about throwing in your job. I’m talking about evaluating yourself and other people beyond your job. I’m talking about getting back in touch with nature. I’m talking about getting in touch with vulnerability and sharing that vulnerability. These are all tools and mechanisms that we can put in motion to escape an otherwise really oppressive and genuinely loveless environment in which we’re forced to live and can’t breathe very easily in.

You could define love as the quest to overcome isolation and understand someone else and find understanding by someone else. It is the most noble and the most complicated of goals. If anyone can reach the end of their life and say, “I have loved. I’ve loved properly. I’ve understood and been understood. I’ve helped and been helped.” This is a life well-lived. We don’t need to achieve that much that is splendid in the material world or in the world of insight in the humanities, insight in the sciences. What we really ultimately need to do to make our time worthwhile is to have built a bridge to another human and to have opened our heart and have seen theirs with respect and humility and generosity. That truly ultimately is the definition of a good life.

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In this full length interview, Chip War author Chris Miller explains how microchips are made, why their production is so insanely hard to scale, and why the world’s economic future may hinge on a technology most of us will never see.

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Timestamps

00:48 Chapter One: How to build a microchip
01:40 The center of our modern life
05:00 Inside the microchip
08:00 The unmatched pace of computing
11:32 Moore’s Law in the age of AI
14:07 The cutting edge of chip technology
16:56 Chapter 2: The first chip builders
20:00 Silicon Valley was built on chips
23:20 Chapter 3: Global impact
25:15 How the chip supply chain split apart
31:20 The manufacturing model that changed everything
37:36 The COVID-19 chip shortage
42:46 The ubiquity of chips in modern life
46:53 The CHIPS Act
48:00 Chapter 4: The AI revolution
51:35 The power problem

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

When we think about technology, we think about social media, we think about search engines, we think about apps on our phones, but undergirding all of this are chips. The reason that technology that we think of exists is because every year chips get better and better. I think we’ve actually misunderstood what technology means. We think of the easy part, which is writing the software. But the hard part is actually manufacturing the chips that give us the advances in computing that enable us to have a computer on our phone or to attach devices to the internet. All that has been made possible by better and better semiconductors.

I’m Chris Miller, a professor at The Fletcher School and author of, “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.”

Chapter One: How to build a microchip

Well, I first got interested in chips when I realized you really couldn’t understand how the world works without them. Whether it’s walking around your house and realizing there are chips in almost every device you rely on. Or trying to understand big shifts in international trade, there’s no good that is traded more than semiconductors. Or looking at the political dynamics around the world, with the US-China competition focusing on technology. Chips are at the center of all of these major trends.

A chip is a piece of silicon, often the size of your fingernail. And in it is carved thousands, or millions, in some cases billions of tiny devices called transistors, which flip circuits on or off. When they’re on, they produce a one. When they’re off, they produce a zero. All of the ones and zeros undergirding computing, undergirding data storage, all of your Instagram likes, all of your text messages, these are all just long strings of ones and zeros, which are created on the chip by these circuits flipping on and off.

The center of our modern life

There are a couple different categories of chips. Some chips process data, other chips remember data, and a third category turns real world signals, like audio or pictures into ones and zeros so that they can then be processed or remembered. And so when we look at the world, we see pictures. But when a phone, for example, uses its camera to look at the world, it takes in lots of rays of light, and then has to learn how to convert those into ones and zeros that can be stored. And so there’s very specific sensors for pictures, for sound, for radio waves that use semiconductors to convert these real world signals into strings in ones of zeros that can then be re-represented as pictures later on, for example, when you pull a photo up on your phone.

All of this is done by different types of semiconductors. So, generally, chips have a foundation of silicon, but there are dozens of other materials that are layered on top to make the transistors at such tiny scale. So a typical advanced chip could have several dozen materials. The foundation is silicon, but there are many other chemicals involved in the process. Yeah, it’s true that sand is from silicon and so are chips, but the similarities basically end there.

The silicon that’s used in manufacturing chips is among the most purified elements that we have. And the reason is that when you’re manufacturing chips with tiny transistors, you need to place almost every atom perfectly to make those chips work. Which means that if your silicon, or any of the other materials that you’re using, has even a single atomic impurity, it can cause defects in the way your chip functions. The production of the silicon wafers that are used in the chip manufacturing process requires extraordinary levels of purity. There’s really just four companies in the world today that are capable of producing silicon wafers at the right level of purity at the scale that’s required for contemporary manufacturing.

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The good news is that there’s silicon everywhere. It’s one of the most widely-distributed elements in the Earth’s crust. The hard part is really the refining and the purification of silicon to make sure there aren’t any impurities that could disrupt the manufacturing process. So on top of your silicon, you could have boron, gallium, gallium arsenide, lots of different chemicals that are used, and every chip maker has its own proprietary process. So we don’t really know, inside of a typical chip, what materials are used, because chip makers usually keep it pretty secretive. That’s their special sauce that lets them manufacture chips with the right level of capability.

Now we’re not going to run out of silicon, nor will we run out of the other materials that are generally used in chipmaking. There are some concerns that certain materials are predominantly refined and processed in a single country. So for some of the materials like gallium and germanium, China produces around 90% of those materials. So there’s geopolitical issues that could interrupt supply, but it’s not going to be that we’re running out of the capability to produce them.

I visited a bunch of chip making facilities over the course of the research. The interesting thing though is that, when you go inside one of these massive facilities, called fabs, what you find is that there are huge machines and not much else. Because the manufacturing process has to be extraordinarily automated because humans are way too imprecise for manufacturing at nanometer scale. So nside of a chipmaking facility, there are very few humans, and lots of big machines that, from the outside, are impressive in their size, but you can’t see what’s actually happening because it’s happening at microscopic level.

Inside the microchip

There are a handful of companies that play a big role in the making of the machines that make chips. A couple in the United States, one in the Netherlands, and one other large one in Japan. Five companies play the dominant role in the manufacture of the machines that make chips. In some ways, it’s actually harder to make the machines that make chips than it is to make the chips themselves. Because these tools are among the most precise tools that have ever been deployed.

Just to give you one example, ASML, a company based in the Netherlands, produces machines that are used in the manufacture of almost every high-end chip today. And these machines are capable of manipulating materials at basically the atomic level to produce chips with billions and billions of transistors like those that are inside of your phone or that are used for training AI systems. So there’s a pretty small number of companies that make chips. And when you look at specific types of chips, you find that there’s even more concentration.

The biggest chip maker in the world is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. When it comes to advanced processor chips, like the chips in your phone, or the chips in your computer, TSMC makes around 90% of them. So they’ve got an extraordinary market share, and are probably the most important semiconductor company, and arguably the most important company, in the world, because the chips that they produce, we rely on for basically everything. There’s been a lot of consolidation in the chip industry over the past couple of decades, and it’s been driven by economics and by technology.

Today, a single cutting edge chipmaking facility can cost $20 billion, one of the most expensive factories in all of human history. And so there’s just a couple of companies that can afford to put up that sum of money on a regular basis to build more and more cutting edge facilities. And to make that work financially, you’ve gotta produce a ton of chips. And so there are huge benefits that accrue to the largest firms. The more chips you produce, the more your cost structure makes sense, and the better your technology gets, because you learn from every chip you manufacture, you gather data from it, and you tweak your manufacturing process to make sure you’ve got fewer and fewer impurities at every step.

TSMC is both the world’s largest chip maker, but it’s also the world’s most advanced, precisely because it gathers more data than anyone else. Because chipmaking requires ultra-purified materials and hugely complex equipment, there’s not a single company that can do it on its own. Everyone requires a set of partnerships with supply chain providers to give them the materials, and the intellectual property, and the software and the tools that they need to produce advanced chips.

If you take for example, the primary processor inside of your smartphone, it was probably made in Taiwan, but it was made in Taiwan using chipmaking tools from the Netherlands, and from the United States, and from Japan. It was produced using chemicals from Japan, and then often assembled and packaged in Malaysia before ending up inside of your smartphone. And that’s typical. A typical chip requires components and materials sourced from dozens of different companies because the process is simply too hard for any one company to do on its own.

The unmatched pace of computing

So a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and chips today are measured in nanometers. If you look at the chip inside of your phone, for example, and try to measure the size of the transistors, of which there will be billions on your smartphone chip, each one of these will be measured in a handful of nanometers. And so that makes them only slightly larger than atoms, smaller than any sort of living thing, far smaller than a bacteria, smaller than a mitochondria, half the size, for the most cutting edge transistors, of a coronavirus. There’s basically nothing we manufacture at such tiny scale as we do with semiconductors.

Every year, we make more transistors than we’ve made all other goods combined in all of human history. And in fact, nothing else really comes close. A typical smartphone chip could have 10 billion transistors just in the main processor chip. A big data center run by Google or Amazon Web Services would have more transistors than you could plausibly count. We know that we make more transistors than there are cells in the human body, for example.

We don’t even know how many we make in aggregate, because there are just so many. Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors per chip, and as a result, the computing power per chip will double every couple of years. And that’s been empirically true since the 1960s, which means that the capabilities of chips have gotten vastly better, and continue to get much, much better at a faster rate than anything else. So I like to think, for example, of airplanes to illustrate the difference.

If airplanes doubled in speed every two years from the 1960s up to the present, we’d be flying faster, literally, than the speed of light. But chips have done that. Chips have increased in that capability because the scale of the transistors has shrunk to the level that today we’re manufacturing them smaller than even viruses. And that has enabled the explosion of computing power, both in terms of the computing capabilities in high-powered data centers or in your phone, but also the application of computing to all sorts of devices.

‘Cause today, there’s computing everywhere. It’s in your dishwasher, it’s in your refrigerator, it’s in your coffee maker, it’s in your car. And it’s possible to put computing everywhere because today it’s so cheap, we can produce it almost for free. And that has enabled the application of chips to all sorts of different devices. To understand the change and the rate of innovation, in the 1950s, you could hold a single transistor in your hand.

Today, you can hold 10 billion transistors in your hand in a chip that’s the size of your fingernail. And that’s not an expensive chip, that’s a chip that often will just cost $50 or so. So the rate of shrinking transistors, as well as the rate of decline in their cost, has been unparalleled in any other segment of the economy. So before transistors, computers used vacuum tubes, which are sort of light bulb like-devices that would turn on and off, on and off to produce the ones and zeros.

They were cutting edge for their time, but they had huge inefficiencies. They wasted a lot of heat, for example, they worked pretty slowly. And they also, because they created light, attracted moths, and so computers had to be regularly debugged in the early days of computing, which meant removing moths from the lights that they were attracted to. You can see why it was hard to scale that up into a 10 billion unit system.

You know, I think the transistor is the key reason why we’ve been able to scale down. There’s really nothing else, if you look all across the economy, that has shrunk in size and shrunk in cost at that level. It’s done so not just for a couple years, it’s done so now for over half a century. That’s why when you compare progress in the computing industry to progress anywhere else, there’s really no comparison.

Moore’s Law in the age of AI

Moore’s Law is not a law of nature, it’s not a law of physics. We wish it were, because then we could rely on it to keep delivering advances far into the future. But it’s really a law of economics. It says that, if you’re able to find a way to shrink, shrink your transistors smaller, then you will be able to find a larger market as well. And that has incentivized huge investments in shrinking, in improving manufacturing processes, and making chemicals more purified to enable it, which has sustained this rate of advance.

And if ever it turns out that the economics are on Moore’s Law break down, the technology will immediately break down as well. Thankfully, the good news is that, right now, we’re seeing a new wave of excitement about ways you can deploy computing, which has led to a surge of new investment into AI, but also a surge of new investment into semiconductors, because it’s now clear that if we can shrink even further, we’ll enable a whole new era of advances in artificial intelligence that rely on even more computing than we’ve been able to muster thus far.

You can define Moore’s Law in a bunch of different ways. Is it based on the 2D size of the transistor, or the 3D size of the transistor? Is it based on the processing speed that comes out of it? And I think there’s a lot of people in the industry that are trying to sell a certain chip with given characteristics that have an incentive to say Moore’s Law, based on the other characteristics, has come to a halt. If you look at the rate of increase of machine learning semiconductors, for example, chips that are optimized for AI capabilities, they’ve been doubling in their capabilities every two years for the past decade or so. In other words, exactly what Gordon Moore predicted when he set out Moore’s Law in 1965.

My view is that when you zoom out and look at the rate of technological progress, there’s really no slowdown that’s happening. When I started my research on semiconductors, I thought that because chips were everywhere, chips were easy to make, and because nuclear bombs were only controlled by a handful of governments, they were hard to make. But what I realized is it’s actually the exact opposite. If you take nuclear weapons, that technology has barely improved since the 1960s.

It’s so easy to make nuclear bombs, even the North Koreans can do it. But chips are everywhere because they’re cheap and they’re tiny, and making things very inexpensive and very small is extraordinarily difficult, which is why there’s just a couple companies in the world that can do it at the cutting edge. The reason is that it’s brutally expensive, and it requires manufacturing processes that get better, and better, and better every single year. If you’re trying to catch up to the cutting edge in the chip industry, you’re not trying to catch up to a static cutting edge, you’re trying to catch up to a cutting edge that is racing forward at the rate of Moore’s Law, doubling every two years.

The cutting edge of chip technology

It’s a race between companies, but it’s the fastest race humans have ever undertaken, which is why it’s extraordinarily difficult to reach the cutting edge. A couple years ago, it became harder to shrink transistors in two-dimensional format. For a long time, chips were made, they were just described as planar chips, chips in a plane, in which all the transistors were on the same level. Now we’ve started making transistors that have three dimensions, because we’re learning to stack them on top of each other to package more of them together in a way that produces more computing power.

One of the key trends over the next couple of years is going to be more 3D construction of groups of transistors, which will enable more of them to be crammed into a small amount of space. So the machines that make chips are extraordinarily precise in their manufacturing. For example, there are tools that can lay down thin films of material that are just a couple of atoms thick with basically perfect uniformity. And to pattern the transistors on a piece of silicon, you use a tool called a lithography tool.

And today there’s one company, ASML, of the Netherlands, which makes most of the world’s lithography tools. And for the most advanced chips, these tools can cost $350 million a piece for a single tool. And they cost so much because they require some of the most precise components ever used, like a mirror that’s the flattest mirror humans have ever made, a laser that’s the most powerful laser ever deployed in a commercial device, and a ball of tin that falls through a vacuum that is struck twice by that laser, explodes into a plasma measuring 40 times the temperature of the surface of the Sun, and this plasma emits light at just the right wavelength, 13.5 nanometers, to be bounced off the mirrors in exactly the right geometry and land on your chip to carve the transistors into the silicon. It’s the most complex and expensive machine that humans have ever made, and it’s required to make all of the most advanced chips.

Today, there are just three companies capable of producing cutting edge processor chips, the types of chips that go in phones, or computers, or are used for AI. It used to be a larger number of companies that could produce at the cutting edge, but it’s shrunk into three, and might in the future shrink only to two for two reasons. First, the expense is extraordinary.

$20 billion per facility is a level of spending that many governments can’t afford, to say nothing of companies. But second, the scale required to manufacture efficiently is vast. And that means that the benefits accrue to the largest firm. And in this case, that’s TSMC, the Taiwanese firm that’s at the center of the chip industry. That’s why they manufacture on 90% of the most advanced chips, because they’re cheaper, and they’re better than their competitors when it comes to manufacturing.

Chapter 2: The first chip builders

In the middle of the 20th century, all telephones were managed by AT&T. They were a monopoly, and the government regulated them, and one of the rules was that their research lab had to share its inventions with the rest of the world. And they had some of the most brilliant physicists and chemists working in the world at that time, which they hired to improve the phone system. But in the process, they created some of the key inventions that drove technological progress in computing for decades to come.

The transistor was one of the inventions that emerged out of Bell Labs, but actually many of the processes that are used to both design and manufacturer semiconductors today were first pioneered by researchers working at Bell Labs. But because Bell Labs wasn’t a computer company, they were able to take those technologies and either spin out their own startup or sell it to somebody else. And that’s how many of the key technological advances undergirding semiconductors first emerged. So William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the first transistor while they were working at Bell Labs.

They were initially planning to use these transistors as part of the telephone network. But in the late 1950s, the first engineers realized that you could take multiple transistors, and make them on a single piece of semiconductor material. And so that was the first chip, a piece of material with multiple transistors carved into it. And that was important, because if you had individual transistors, they were connected via wires in a way, that was okay if you had a handful of transistors.

But if you had 1,000 connected together, you had a jungle of wires you had to manage. But the chip managed to have the electrical connection in a piece of material. And so the jungle of connections was replaced by a single block of material, which was much more reliable, and also much more easy to shrink in its size. And so it was the invention of the chip that made it possible to deploy lots and lots of transistors together in a way that was economical, but also possible to engineer and avoided all of the wiring.

The first chips were invented by engineers working at Texas Instruments and a company called Fairchild Semiconductor in Silicon Valley. They were invented simultaneously. Jack Kilby invented one in 1958 working in a Texas Instruments lab. And for a long time they were really at the cutting edge of chip manufacturing. At first, they were building chips primarily for the U.S. government, for the space program, for example, and for weapon systems.

But they realized early on you could take the exact same chips that the government wanted to guide spacecraft, and use them for commercial applications, like computers or pocket calculators. And that set the industry off into its first phase of growth in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s.

For the past 15 years, they’ve taken a different tack. They don’t today produce chips that are used in computing, they’re not, for example, in AI systems in a large way. Instead, they produce a lot of chips that are in industrial applications, or in automobile uses. And so Texas Instruments chips are all around you, but you don’t see them because they’re buried deep in your devices, making sure your windshield wipers work, for example, on your car, or that your windows move up and down when you press the button. Those are the types of use cases that Texas Instruments produces chips for.

Silicon Valley was built on chips

One of the first startups in Silicon Valley was created by one of the researchers who invented the first transistor, William Shockley, who was by all accounts, a brilliant physicist, but a horrible manager and a horrible person. He hired a very talented set of engineers in Silicon Valley. He moved to Palo Alto, California, where his mother lived, for the purpose. Although he hired lots of great people, they detested working for him.

Eight of them in the late 1950s went out on their own, and created Fairchild Semiconductor, which became one of the key startups that would give rise to Silicon Valley, and played a major role in Silicon Valley even being named Silicon Valley, because for a long time it was the absolute epicenter of chip design and manufacturing thanks to people at Fairchild Semiconductor. Robert Noyce, one of the two inventors of the integrated circuit, Gordon Moore, who later would go co-found Intel, and many others first started their career working at Fairchild.

Intel was founded in 1969, and it initially planned to focus on making memory chips. But they realized early on that there was a potentially larger market for a type of chip that wouldn’t just remember data, but would also process it, especially if that processing could be programmed in different ways for different use cases. And it quickly focused on making chips for personal computers, which at the time was a very small market, but they correctly bet that soon, everyone, would have a personal computer.

Intel, even today, is the world’s largest producer of chips that go inside of PCs. Gordon Moore is one of the two co-founders of Intel. He’s most famous today probably for coining the term Moore’s Law, but he also played an absolutely critical role running Intel’s R&D operations from the earliest days for many years. And when it came to the microprocessor, he was an early advocate of focusing on microprocessors at the expense of the more memory-focused chips that Intel had previously made.

In some ways, he was the key figure in Intel in making the company focus on microprocessors. A tiny computer on a chip, as they originally called it. And it gave rise to the idea that you could deploy chips in lots of different use cases without having to redesign the chip itself, because the chips themselves could have a program running on top of them.

Today, we take it for granted that you can have a chip in your phone, and a chip in your dishwasher, and a chip in your car. But at the time, that would’ve required many different chips for each of those purposes. Whereas, today, thanks to the microprocessor, we have programmable chips.

That was the main source of revenue for the chip industry, the main focus of technology, until about 20 years ago when the first smartphones began being produced. And today, smartphone chips are generally designed by one set of companies, but they’re manufactured largely in Taiwan. So the largest designers of smartphone chips are Apple, which designs its own chips in California. Qualcomm, and other companies, almost all of them manufacture all of the chips that they design in Taiwan.

Today, the chip industry is split into two different parts. There’s the chip designers, which, today, is essentially like a type of programming where each of the transistors goes on the chip, and the actual manufacturing takes place generally in Taiwan or elsewhere in East Asia, where different companies specialize in manufacturing at precision scale.

Chapter 3: Global impact

The chip industry was a global industry from really the earliest days. Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in Silicon Valley before it was even called Silicon Valley, but they opened their first facility in Hong Kong just a couple years later. So there was already a globalized nature to the chip industry from day one. But one of the things that’s changed a lot over the past couple of decades is that, today, each region focuses on a different part of the semiconductor supply chain.

The first chips that were invented in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s were used for space programs and missile systems. So they were at the center of the Cold War competition. And the U.S. was ahead, but the Soviet Union realized that they also needed chips to guide their missiles more accurately or to help their spacecraft launch effectively. And so they were focused on building their own chip industry, but also on copying whatever they could from the West.

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, there were Soviet exchange students in physics, for example, studying at Stanford University, but also transmitting the knowledge that they gained back to the Soviet Defense industrial complex. And so there was a lot of copying, a lot of efforts to replicate what the U.S. was doing. But the Soviets made a couple of key errors.

One was that they focused too much on copying, and not enough on innovating. They got very good at copying, but not so good at innovating, and that left them behind. The second error they made was that they only focused on the military aspects. The military was where the first chips were used, but today, most chips go to the private sector. 99% of chips that are made go into phones, or PCs, or data centers, not for defense equipment.

If you only focus on the government and military uses, you’ve got a tiny market relative to the vast consumer market that was out there. U.S. firms were profit-seeking, they focused on the consumer market as early as they could. In the Soviet Union, they never made that shift, and so their chip industry was always tiny in comparison to the U.S., which meant they could invest less, they could hire fewer workers, and ultimately their technology fell behind even though they were pretty good at copying.

How the chip supply chain split apart

In the U.S. right now, most of the key chip firms only design chips. Most of the manufacturing of chips happens in East Asia, in Taiwan, for example, or in Korea. Many of the chemicals that go into chipmaking come from Japan. And the machines that are used to make chips come from either Silicon Valley, where some of them are still made, or the Netherlands or Japan.

The industry has globalized, but it’s also specialized in the process. And so there’s not a single region today that can make cutting edge chips on its own. Everyone relies on this internationalized supply chain that brings together the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Japan, and Korea. Japan was a major player in electronics assembly early in the 1950s and 1960s, so devices would be assembled in Japan because labor costs at the time were lower.

But Japanese firms were fixated on moving up the value chain, producing more complex, more expensive types of goods. And Japanese firms realized very early on that consumer electronics could be a major growth area for them, where they could sell not just domestically, but all around the world. And so companies like Sony, which were among the leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, bet on the consumer market to produce the types of goods that would take advantage of the advanced chip technology that they were pursuing at the time.

Although we don’t remember it much today, devices like the Sony Walkman in the 1980s was at the center of the tech industry, and it put Japan really on the map. And at that point, Japan was, by a lot of metrics, just as capable as the United States when it came to building advanced chips and then deploying them in very profitable uses like the Sony Walkman. One of the places where the Japanese excelled was in video games, which most people might not think of as driving technological advances, but actually, the computing that’s required to show graphics that look real life is extraordinarily complex.

The Japanese companies like Sony, Nintendo is another one, were fixated on how to make better graphics, and it required more and more computing power to make better and better graphics. And today, they’re no longer major players in that sphere, but NVIDIA, which is the central player in AI, actually started as a video game company, it made graphics cards for computers. And for most of their early history, they were selling chips primarily to gamers, because the graphics were better and rendered more rapidly.

But it turns out that the same essential math that’s used for showing graphics on a screen is pretty similar to the math that’s used in training AI systems. And so NVIDIA was able to take chips that were made for video games, and made for computer games, and pivot them to be used in AI systems, which is why a video game company that was founded in the 1990s has now become not just any AI company, but the most important AI company in the world. In the 1980s, the South Koreans saw Japan becoming a major player in the chip industry and saw Japanese firms rise to the top, both in terms of technology and in terms of the amount of money they were making, selling both chips and devices that used them, and South Korea wanted to replicate Japan’s strategy.

So companies like Samsung and SK Hynix were founded to establish chip industries in Korea. And they replicated the Japanese model, they get very good at manufacturing, they competed very effectively on cost. They also represented an alternative to Japanese production. ‘Cause U.S. firms in the 1980s were very worried that Japan was going to take over the chip industry. So they were excited to have another option besides Japan, and shifted business towards Koreans, both because the Korean producers were cost competitive, but also because it provided a bit more diversification in the industry that would limit the ability of Japanese firms to dominate.

One of the biggest European chip makers in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s was the Dutch company Phillips, which today still exists, but doesn’t produce any semiconductors. They got out of the semiconductor business several decades ago. But one of the legacy units that they’d created was a unit that made the tools that make chips. And in particular, they focused on the lithography tools that are capable of patterning transistors on a chip.

ASML was spun out of Phillips several decades ago, and at the time, most people thought it would likely fail, the Netherlands wasn’t a big part of the chip industry, Silicon Valley was a long way away. But ASML took a series of pretty wild technological bets on technologies most people thought would fail. And the best example of this is the current cutting edge of lithography called extreme ultraviolet lithography, the tools that cost $350 million a piece to produce, everyone else thought that was a technology that would never work.

It took three decades to commercialize, tens of billions of dollars of research and development money went into it, but ASML made that bet, and it was a bet that looked like a very bad bet for many years until about a decade ago when they first were able to build the initial EUV lithography machines. So chip makers have always used lithography to manufacture semiconductors, but as transistors have gotten smaller and smaller, we’ve needed better and better lithography systems to print smaller transistors onto silicon chips.

And several decades ago, it was clear that the cutting edge in lithography at the time was going to be too broad in terms of the wavelength of light used to print tiny transistors. The cutting edge used light with a wavelength of 193 nanometers, which sounds really small, and it is really small. But if your transistors are measured in 10 nanometers, or 5 nanometers, 193 nanometers is still too broad of a brush with which to paint your transistors on the silicon chip.

And so ASML bet on a new type of lithography system using light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, much more narrow. Which sounds logical, but it was extraordinarily difficult to produce. Research started in the early 1990s, and it took 25 years before these machines were commercialized, because it required building a supply chain that involved these extraordinarily complex components, the flattest mirrors humans have ever made, the most powerful laser ever in a commercial device, all of these had to be invented in the process of making these machines work.

The manufacturing model that changed everything

Taiwan was a major player in electronics assembly, and putting together transistor radios, for example, in the 1950s and ‘60s, or assembling televisions. And they did quite well on that, but there’s not much money to be made in the assembly, the money is made in the manufacturing of the complex components involved. And so the Taiwanese government realized, as early as the 1970s, that they needed to move up the value chain and learn to do the more complex parts of electronics manufacturing.

In 1987, there was a American engineer named Morris Chang who was passed over for the CEO job of Texas Instruments where he’d worked for several decades. And so he left TI, and was looking for something else to do, and he’d gotten to know the Taiwanese government for several years, because Texas Instruments, his former employer, operated a number of plants in Taiwan. And so the Taiwanese approached him and said, “Would you like to build a chip factory in Taiwan?” And he said yes.

And he had an idea, which was to do manufacturing differently than anyone else. At the time, most chips were manufactured and designed by the same companies, but Morris Chang realized that manufacturing is getting more and more complex every single year, that if you specialized on manufacturing, you could manufacture better than your competitors. And so he established TSMC in Taiwan in 1987 with the aim never of designing chips, only of manufacturing.

His vision was sort of like to do for chips what Gutenberg had done for books. Gutenberg didn’t write any books, he only printed them. Morris Chang didn’t wanna design any chips, he only wanted to manufacture them. That’s exactly what TSMC has done. And it’s enabled TSMC to win among its customers, some of the largest companies in the world, Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, they all rely on TSMC to produce its chips, which means that TSMC is the largest chipmaker in the world by far.

And as a result, it’s got more scale, it can drive down its costs, and it can hone its technology more than anyone else. And so TSMC, thanks to this unique business model, is both the largest and the most advanced chipmaker in the world. Today, China’s the world’s largest importer of chips. They spend as much money each year importing chips as they spend importing oil.

There’s nothing that China’s more reliant on the outside world to purchase. And China imports all these chips, both for its own use, but also because most of the world’s phones and computers and servers are assembled in China. So there’s a flow of chips into China, they’re assembled in the devices, and the many of those devices are re-exported to the U.S., or to Europe, or to Japan, or to international markets.

And so today, China’s primary interface with the chip industry is by buying chips, assembling them, and then shipping them abroad. But the Chinese government realizes this is not the best place in the industry to be. They wanna do the higher value add parts of the industry, just like Taiwan did, just like Japan did to move up the value chain. And so for the past decade, China’s been trying to build its own chip industry to manufacture more chips domestically.

And right now it’s having a lot of success when it comes to more low-end chips, the types of commodity chips that are in many different types of devices, where China is vastly expanding its manufacturing capacity and making real strides towards becoming a lot more self-sufficient. But at the cutting edge, the types of chips that are inside phones or in AI systems, China’s still meaningfully behind industry leaders like TSMC. Right now, the most advanced Chinese firm, SMIC, is about five years behind TSMC, which might not sound like a lot, but that’s two and a half Moore’s Laws behind TSMC, which means that, for the most cutting edge applications, you really take a performance hit if you want to use a Chinese manufacturer versus a Taiwanese one.

Until 2020, TSMC’S two largest customers were first, Apple, the biggest U.S. smartphone maker, and second Huawei, China’s largest phone company. TSMC manufactured ships for both of their phones. But the United States is worried that Huawei is controlled by the Chinese government, it’s worried about the surveillance capabilities that this might enable, and so the U.S. has been trying to limit Huawei’s access to advanced technologies.

And since 2020, it’s prohibited Huawei from manufacturing advanced chips at TSMC. And so Huawei’s had to turn to domestic suppliers to manufacture many of the chips that it needs. And this has been a challenge, it’s possible to find Chinese domestic suppliers, but they’re not as good as TSMC, the costs are higher, the performance is lower. And it’s been a real headwind for Huawei over the past couple of years as they’ve tried to build their own supply chain to make up for the fact that they’ve lost access to the cutting edge in Taiwan.

So until recently, India was a very small player in the chip industry. There’s a couple of chip companies in India, but they’re not at the cutting edge, and they’re not that large. Much of the semiconductor manufacturing, as well as the rest of the supply chain, the assembly of phones, for example, of computers takes place in Southern India. Tamil Nadu, for example, is one of the key hubs for manufacturing. And then Bangalore is a major center for chip design inside of India.

But right now, India is the country that’s changing the most rapidly, I think, when it comes to investment in semiconductors. There’s a series of new projects underway in India to put it more on the map of electronics manufacturing. And I think if you look at India today, you see what China looked like 30 years ago, or what Taiwan looked like 50 years ago, a country that’s on the early stages of a major change in the types of manufacturing that happened there. And so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if in 10 or 20 years we looked at India as a really central player in the production of all the computing and electronics that we rely on, because they’re taking the exact same steps that China, and Taiwan, and Japan before them took when they were becoming major manufacturers.

The irony of the chip industry is that it’s simultaneously globalized, and yet extraordinarily localized for certain types of production. And that’s inevitable I think, because the engineering involved is so complicated, the dollar values required to spend are so vast that we need specialization. And specialization implies that we’ve got to rely on other people to help in the process. And so I think it’s inevitable that U.S. firms will rely on manufacturing in Taiwan, and chemicals from Japan, and the rest of the supply chain for a very long time because no one has the capabilities they need to produce the chips that they require on their own.

The COVID-19 chip shortage

During the pandemic, the supply and demand dynamics on the chip industry were out of whack. Because a lot of people ordered new computers, for example, to work from home, and so PC production shot up in ways that weren’t expected, or people bought fewer cars in the early days of the pandemic, and so car production declined. And companies couldn’t predict what type of chip they would need. The effect of that was to create shortages of certain types of chips, when demand roared back in the later stages of the pandemic.

Car companies in particular found they couldn’t get the types of chips that they rely on to produce cars. And that was something they hadn’t focused on for a long time, they thought of their supply chain as being about engines, and wheels, and axles, and other parts of the car that you think of when you think of car parts. But today, contemporary cars require a lot of chips, hundreds or even thousands of chips for the most sophisticated cars. And the thing about cars, if you’re missing just one chip, your car often doesn’t work.

And during the pandemic, car companies found themselves often in that situation. Just a single chip, often even the cheapest chips, were causing them to have to leave cars in the factory parking lot as they waited for the right chip to arrive. And that illustrated a couple of things. First is that complex manufactured devices, like cars, need a lot of chips. Second, they don’t just need the same type of chip, they need a thousand different types of chips produced by different manufacturers.

And if even one of those is late, the car has to wait until it arrives. And the third thing it illustrated is that it’s not just the tech sector that needs chips, it’s actually everything. It’s cars, it’s tractors, it’s medical devices, all of these faced shortages during the pandemic because they couldn’t get the types of chips that they needed.

And the really interesting thing about the pandemic that most people don’t realize is that we didn’t actually produce fewer chips. We actually produced more chips each year of the pandemic. The problem was that supply couldn’t keep up with demand. And we had demand in segments in the industry that we weren’t expecting. That created hundreds of billions of dollars of losses for manufacturers like automakers, because they couldn’t finish the goods that were sitting in their factory parking lots, and therefore couldn’t sell them.

And that matters, because the shortages we saw in 2021 and 2022 are tiny in comparison to the shortages we would see if something happened to a large scale chipmaker, like those in Taiwan. Anything that disrupted chip production in Taiwan would be catastrophic for the world economy, for the United States, for Europe, for Japan, for everyone, because everyone relies on chips made in Taiwan. Earthquakes are one thing that could cause problems.

And the reality is that Taiwan’s had a lot of earthquakes, so they’re pretty well prepared. And chip facilities, because they have to be extraordinarily safe from vibration, they’re actually among the most earthquake-safe buildings that exist today. So it’s not a guarantee, but it means that they’ve done a lot in terms of ensuring themselves from earthquakes. Water is one of the materials that’s actually most widely used in chip manufacturing for a number of the manufacturing steps.

And it needs to be ultra-purified water too. And so chip plants have to draw huge volumes of water from the local water supply, and then try to recycle that at the end to make sure there aren’t any chemicals that are being discharged back into the environment. And it’s a major challenge for chipmakers, because the volumes that they use are huge. And many of the places where chips are manufactured don’t have surplus water. So in Taiwan, droughts have been an issue many times in recent years, and it’s a major limitation on TSMC’S ability to expand its manufacturing footprint in Taiwan.

The other is energy. Electricity is very important for chipmaking, and as we use more advanced chip making tools in factories, they require even more power to operate. And so electricity is a second limiting factor as well. And especially as countries try to use more green energy, that creates more challenges, because you need both more energy, but also you need energy that’s perfectly reliable. And so the Sun or wind power can’t always be relied on.

Which means that if you’re in Taiwan trying to map out your future power supply, you’ve got a limited number of options to look at. I think the bigger risk is not seismic, but rather geopolitical. It’s that China carries through on the threats it regularly makes to use force against Taiwan to take control of the island. And for a long time, I think people wrote off that risk as unlikely, because for a long time, China was weak, and the United States was pledging to protect Taiwan.

But today, China’s getting stronger every single year, its military capabilities are growing on a regular basis. And this has raised questions about whether we need to worry that China might at some point move on Taiwan. And the problem is that even a small move, a small conflict would be disastrous for the chip industry, because it’s not just about the security of the facilities themselves, it’s also about the supply chain.

Taiwan needs to import energy, needs to import chemicals, materials, tools, spare parts, many of which come from abroad, from Japan, from the United States, from Europe, energy coming in from the Middle East. And if any of this is disrupted, chip production could break down. And if chip production in Taiwan breaks down, that matters for everyone, because everyone uses Taiwanese made chips.

The ubiquity of chips in modern life

I like to think of cars as a case study in how we rely on chips for almost everything. If you sit in a new car, it’ll have, on average, 1,000 chips inside of it. It’s a chip that makes the window move up or down when you press the button. It’s a chip that manages the windshield wipers going back and forth. If you have any sort of autonomous braking features in your car, there’s a chip that manages the sensor, a chip that sends that information to the brakes to step on the brakes if there’s a object in front of your vehicle.

If you’ve got a internal combustion engine, there’s a chip that manages fuel injection into your engine to make sure it’s operating the right way. There’s of course, a chip that’s attached to your GPS, multiple chips in the display that tells you where to go when you’re looking for directions. I’ve only mentioned a dozen or so chips, and there are several hundred more that make your car work the way you expect. And cars are not really unique.

Today, everything that we rely on, almost anything with an on-off switch has at least one, and often dozens or hundreds of chips inside. The other way to think about the ubiquity of chips is just to walk around your apartment or your house, and look at the devices. The dishwasher, the microwave, your coffee maker, your washing machine, any sort of consumer electronic you have, they all require chips. And it’s often not just one chip, it’s often a fair number of chips.

And the more complex the chip, the harder it is to make, and therefore, generally, the more companies can charge for selling it. So the chip in your smartphone, for example, that runs the operating system, is extraordinarily complex, billions of transistors, it has to operate at extraordinary speed, draw on as little power as possible because your battery life is constrained. And so having perfectly optimized smartphone processors is really important. Which is why Apple designs its own smartphone processors in-house.

It doesn’t trust anyone else to do it. And so those chips are really expensive, compared to many other types of chips that you’d find in a dishwasher or a washing machine, which can cost less than a dollar, because they’re not required to do anything particularly complex. And the reality is that, as devices get more advanced, as we have more and more things connecting to wifi and Bluetooth, more sensors, more AI capabilities installed in devices, we’re gonna be using more and more chips as far as we can see into the future. Both China and the U.S. see chips as really central to the technology competition between them right now.

China’s worried that because it relies on importing chips from Taiwan and from Korea, which are both U.S. allies, it’s gonna be cut off in the future from getting the chips that it needs. And right now, that’s already happening to some degree, the U.S. is limiting the ability of AI firms like NVIDIA to sell their most cutting edge chips to China, because the U.S. wants to keep the most advanced AI capabilities for itself. And so China’s concerns are understandable.

The U.S. is worried that if it sells advanced AI chips to China, they’re gonna be used not for optimizing food delivery apps, but used for military and intelligence use cases. And the U.S. is not wrong to believe that, because just as companies are trying to figure out how they’re going to use AI, it’s already the case that militaries and intelligence agencies are deploying AI to optimize their systems too. And so both countries recognize that chips will be at the center of the AI race, and as a result, they’re trying to improve their position, become more self-sufficient, and prevent their technology from benefiting their competitor.

As of 2022, the U.S. has made it illegal to transfer the most advanced AI chips made by companies like NVIDIA to China. So today, if you’re a Chinese firm, you can access a less advanced NVIDIA chip that’s been specifically downgraded to meet the U.S. restrictions and is now legal to sell to China. But if you want the cutting edge, you’ve gotta go abroad. And the aim of these regulations is to give U.S. firms an advantage.

To make sure that U.S. companies are leaders in AI, and that the U.S. gets to write the rules of how AI will play out. And so Chinese companies in the AI industry face a disadvantage as a result, they’ve got worse chips, which means that the cost of training AI systems is higher, it takes more time, it’s more inefficient. And that’s the U.S. goal, to kind of throw sand in the gears of China’s AI ecosystem, and hope that the U.S. can race ahead as a result.

The CHIPS Act

There were two concerns that prompted the Congress to pass the CHIPS Act. The first was reliance on Taiwan for our most advanced chips. And the second was a fear that the technological edge that the U.S. has vis-a-vis China was narrowing as China invested more and more. And so in 2022, Congress put forward around $50 billion to invest in the U.S. chip industry.

Part of that money goes to directly incentivizing companies to build new manufacturing facilities in the United States, which in the past, they hadn’t been doing much, they’d been relying on suppliers in Taiwan and Korea instead. And part of the money would go on R&D, building better chips, better chip making equipment, better chemicals used in the chip manufacturing process to help U.S. companies stay ahead of their competitors. Because the U.S. government believes, and I think they’re justified in believing this, that keeping a technological advantage in chips is key for retaining your advantage in a whole set of industries that are downstream of semiconductors. And as we deploy AI in all sorts of different segments of the economy, you can already see that playing out.

Chapter 4: The AI revolution

The biggest change in the past couple of years has been the explosion of investment in AI. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 encouraged all the big tech firms to spend tens of billions of dollars building vast AI infrastructure, which means data centers full of the most capable semiconductors. And I think right now we’re seeing just the early phases of a new wave of investment in an AI industry that is just emerging.

And if we know one thing, it’s that this industry will require a ton of semiconductors. Because one of the key trends in the history of AI is that more advanced systems require being trained on larger volumes of data. If you wanna train a system on more data, you need more computing power, which means better chips to train it. And so today, companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are spending millions and millions, and soon billions of dollars training their AI systems.

And most of that budget goes to buying chips, buying ultra-advanced semiconductors from companies like NVIDIA. So to train a cutting edge AI system requires tens of thousands of NVIDIA’s most cutting edge chips. It requires using these chips for days, or sometimes months on end. So you’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars in data center capacity, and using the data center solely for the purpose of AI training.

And you need the most advanced chips inside, because the most advanced chips are twice as good, on average, than the prior generation due to Moore’s Law. And so there’s a strong incentive to buy the best chips that NVIDIA has every single year, because it actually drives down your training costs, even though the chips themselves are extraordinarily expensive. One of the key challenges of AI is gonna be to drive down the cost of deploying AI systems.

So we know how to train big systems right now, that’s what open AI and Anthropic and others are doing. But to make AI really widespread across the economy, we need the cost of using it to be so cheap we don’t even think about it. It’s sort of like Google Search today. No one thinks, “What’s the price of my Google search?” Because it’s approximately zero.

Google spends a bit of money on the data centers, but it’s so low, you don’t have to think about it. Today, AI is actually pretty expensive. A single query to ChatGPT is an appreciable amount of money, such that sometimes OpenAI has to slow the rate at which it rolls out new capabilities, because it’d be too expensive to actually deploy. There are a lot of companies that are exploring, how do you do deployment more efficiently?

And there are a number of startups that are pioneering new models of chip design that are intended to increase the speed and drive down the cost of deploying AI models. Which I think is gonna be really important in making AI cheap enough, and therefore prolific enough to make a major impact on the economy.

NVIDIA’s chips, which are at the center of the AI ecosystem right now, are pretty general purpose in their capabilities. They can train many different types of models, and are useful both for training and also for deployment. But if you design a chip for a specific type of model, or a specific type of deployment, you can make it perfectly optimized for that use case. So a lot of startups right now are looking at individual workloads, or individual deployment opportunities, and saying, “We’re gonna design a chip that’s perfectly tweaked for that use case.” And if so, it’ll run a lot faster, and run more efficiently than a sort of general purpose chip like an NVIDIA GPU will.

Now, this is startups tackling this industry, but it’s also big tech companies, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, they’re all designing their own in-house chips as well. Because they know the specific workloads that are inside their data centers, and they’ve realized, if they design chips specifically around those workloads, they can operate more efficiently in many cases than a general purpose AI chip like NVIDIA’s can do.

The power problem

On a silicon chip, the transistors flipping on and off are turning on and off electrical circuits. And so it’s electrons flowing through copper wires that are carved into your silicon chip that make all of the ones and zeros that chips rely on. And so electricity is at the center of how chips work. And one of the things that we’ve seen over the past several decades is that chips get much, much more efficient in terms of how much power they use, but they also get much, much more capable in terms of computing.

And one of the challenges that we face is that we’re getting better at producing more capable chips at a faster rate than we’re getting better at producing energy efficiency gains. Which means that we’re using more power, in aggregate, every single year. When you look at artificial intelligence, which involves some of the most power-hungry chips that exist, one of the limiting factors to building vast AI infrastructures is gonna be the availability of power.

Because for big data centers, they require a huge increase in electricity relative to smaller data centers that aren’t focusing on AI. And there are very smart people in Silicon Valley who think that the biggest limitation to AI might actually not be the quality of the chips, or the algorithms that are behind AI, it might be the ability to deliver power to data centers. Because in many cases, this requires bringing new power supplies online, building new power plants that are capable of delivering electricity to power the chips inside of these new data centers.

Well, when I look at the surge of investment in AI chips right now, I see no reason to doubt that Moore’s Law won’t continue for a very long time. That means more advanced chips, which means more computing power that we can apply to all sorts of uses, AI and all sorts of devices. And that means we’ll be using even more semiconductors, because the trend has been that, as chips get better, they get cheaper, and we put them in more and types of uses.

And so today, if your car has 1,000 chips, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has 10x that number in a decade. And that basic trend is true of everything we rely on. And that’s only made possible because chips get better, and they provide more computing for a lower price on an annual basis. The biggest geopolitical risk by far is that something goes wrong between China and Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits.

Because it’s not just Taiwan whose fate hangs in the balance today, it’s our entire economy. And if you think of the biggest companies in the United States, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, they all rely on chips that, today, are only made in Taiwan. So it’s not just a question of geopolitics in East Asia, it’s a question of our tech sector, and it’s a question of all the devices we rely on, because, today, for many of those devices, they rely on chips that, in some cases, can only be made by one company in a single factory in Taiwan. And so that illustrates the ways in which chips made in Taiwan are critical for the way we live our lives.

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In this interview, Tarter breaks down what SETI actually looks for, why the search is so challenging, and how the introduction of AI could change everything for this field. More than just a scientific quest, Tarter’s story teaches us what can happen when you ask a daring question and then commit a lifetime to trying to answer it.

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Timestamps

00:00 Origins of a cosmic detective
03:16 Hooked on the cosmos
06:06 Falling into SETI (a happy accident)
08:45 Women in engineering
14:50 Asking the big question
20:31 SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
25:41 Teaching machines to look
35:02 The Allen Telescope Array
38:57 Proving the concept
40:50 The plane “UFO” incident
44:06 False positives
50:13 Carl Sagan’s legacy
57:43 The future of SETI

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

Origins of a cosmic detective

My name is Jill Tarter, and I’m officially retired, so my title is Emeritus Director of SETI Research at the SETI Institute. SETI’s an acronym that stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Well, I actually didn’t do a whole lot with electronics (when I was a kid). I did a lot more hunting and fishing and camping with my dad. Then where all of these pictures in our photo albums from when I was a kid where I’ll be standing there in a beautifully starched little dress with ruffled lace socks and Mary Janes on my feet holding up a big fish. Because these were the tensions in my life growing up. My dad was an outdoorsman and my mother had been involved in the fashion industry and retail, so she dressed me up and then I went out and went fishing with my dad.

I had a great childhood though. I was about eight years old and my dad said, “We have to have a talk.” Clearly my mother had talked to him the night before, and so we had this washing machine talk, when my dad and I wanted to talk, he’d set me up on top of a washing machine so that we’d be eye to eye. And he said, “Your mom thinks that you’re getting older and you should be spending more time doing girl things rather than spending time with me,” and I just exploded.

I mean, you couldn’t have said anything that would’ve made me angrier. I said, “That’s not fair. Why can’t I do both? It’s just ridiculous. You shouldn’t have to choose one or the other.” I started to cry because at eight years old, I knew if you wanted your dad on your side, the tears always help. So we continued this conversation for a long time and he finally said, “Okay, all right, if you’re willing to work really hard, then you can do anything you want to do.” And I said, “Okay, I’m going to be an engineer.” Now, I don’t really think I knew what engineers did, but I knew my dad had a lot of friends, now friends who were engineers and they seemed to have happy lives. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to be an engineer.”

Then sadly, my dad died a couple of years later and I learned a really important lesson, which is the carpe diem lesson that most people end up learning a bit later in life. I always thought my dad was going to be there and if I didn’t ask him the question today, I could ask him the question tomorrow. Well, it doesn’t always work that way. I had told my dad I was going to be an engineer, and then I just got stubborn about it and I said, “Okay, I’m going to be an engineer.” I went through five years of engineering school at Cornell and got an engineering degree.

Hooked on the cosmos

I got a really good education in problem solving, but it turns out I didn’t really like the engineering so much. And in addition, I looked around when I was thinking about graduate school and I said, “Hmm, if in general, engineers are as boring as my professors, I’m going to find some other problems to work on with these great skills that I’ve acquired.” Then I started taking all kinds of different courses in graduate school and ended up taking a course from Edwin Salpeter on the star formation and the lifecycle of stars, and I was just hooked.

I thought, stars live and die. I thought that was amazing, to be able to study the lifecycle of a star. That’s what put me into astrophysics. I just had a lot of fortunate, lucky circumstances. I usually describe myself as the chief cheerleader for all things having to do with searching for life beyond Earth. And we have different ways of doing that. Astrobiologists look for what they call biosignatures, trying to discern some disequilibrium chemistry in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars.

And in my case, teams that I’ve worked with looked for technosignatures. They look for evidence that someone or something out there has developed a technology and that we might be able to detect that technology even over the vast distances between the stars. And we’ve been doing this for a while now, and I’ve been cheerleading all the way and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

When I was about eight years old, I was down in the Florida Keys, the West Coast of Florida with my aunt and uncle who were literally beachcombers. And my dad was there and he was the center of my universe. I remember one night walking along the edge of the gulf holding my dad’s hand and looking up in the sky and seeing these magnificent stars because it was a very dark site. There were no streetlights back then.

And I just had this idea that on some planet around one of those stars, there would be a creature walking along the edge of an ocean with their parent looking up and seeing our sun as a star in their sky. I don’t know what set of circumstances led me to have that particular worldview, but it’s been with me for a long time.

Falling into SETI (a happy accident)

Then I did an engineering undergraduate degree and a PhD in astrophysics and was nowhere near SETI until a very happy accident happened. My first year in graduate school, UC Berkeley acquired the first real desktop computer that had ever been manufactured, the PDP-8/S. And it had no language. You had to program the 11 things that it could do by setting all the ones and zeros. We had to program it NODIL. And I learned to do that. It’s kind of a weird skill, but I learned to do that my first year in graduate school.

Much later as I was finally getting ready to finish my graduate degree, that piece of equipment, that computer was obsolete and it was given to an x-ray astronomer by the name of Stuart Bowyer, who had been following NASA’s workshops on looking for life beyond the Earth. He said, “Wow, UC Berkeley has a radio astronomy telescope that’s up at Hat Creek, right?” And my friend Jack Welch runs that. He figured out a way that we could take the data in parallel with the astronomers and we could analyze it, or that Stu could analyze it, looking for signals that were engineered as opposed to astrophysical.

It was a great idea. But he had no money. He went begging and someone gave him this old computer and he said, “What the heck do I do with that?” Somebody said, “Ah, Jill’s still here. Ah, she used to program that thing.” He came and recruited me to work on his SETI project, which was called SERENDIP at Hat Creek Observatory. And I programmed that PDP-8 to be the processing engine for that search. So it was just a delightful accident. And I went off to do a postdoc at NASA Ames, ran into John Billingham who was starting up the, what did he call it, the Interstellar Communication Committee at NASA Ames.

And I said, “Hey John, there are more than 40 hours in a week and I’d like to volunteer with your group and see what you’re doing,” and that was it. I’ve never had any other job except thinking about life beyond Earth. I never set out to have this as a career path, but I can’t think of anything more exciting to work on. And there I was in the right place with the right set of skills, engineering and astrophysics, and we were off to the races.

Women in engineering

First of all, being a woman was the first part of it, which meant that at Cornell as a freshman in the dormitories, I was locked in at 10 o’clock at night and they didn’t open the doors until six in the morning. Which meant that I was sitting there by myself while all my male colleagues were over in their dorms or in restaurants or bars, doing all the problem sets as a group, you take the evens, I’ll take the odds kind of thing. But I didn’t have that because I was locked in and working on my own. So I got a better education, technically. It didn’t do me very well socially. I was a bit socially awkward.

Then there were all kinds of interesting situations in the classroom. First, all the professors knew me because I was singular. I was sitting there in this sea of male faces. They didn’t know most of the male students, at least not early on. So if people wanted an extension on an assignment, they’d send me to go ask for the extension. That was a little awkward, but I did get to know my professors a little bit better.

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Then there was the day when I was asked not to come to my nuclear physics class the next day because they were going to discuss the dangers of radiation and male sterility and they just couldn’t do that in my presence. And I went, “What about female sterility?” Come on guys.

First year engineering problems and methods, a required course, everybody had to take it, a lecture room with 300 people, and I was an only child. My mother was very protective of me as she sent me off to Cornell. Just the way she used to do when she sent me off to camp as a younger person, she sewed little name tags “Jill Cornell” into all of my clothes, and in particular onto a label of a sweater that I had thrown over my shoulders.

And then I flipped it off over the back of my seat and suddenly we hear this little ripple of tittering and laughter going back from me towards the back of the auditorium and then down the other side. And finally, the professor stopped his lecture and he said, “What’s going on?” Thanks, mom. The label in the sweater had originally said 100% virgin wool, but my mother put my name tape over the word wool. Then they knew that I was 100% virgin.

It was one of those moments where you just hope the floor would open up and swallow you whole, but of course it didn’t and you got through it and got some laughs out of it later. It was a little... I got good grades because I’m locked in my dorm room working by myself. There was a lot of tension because my grades were better than many of my other colleagues or students.

And then in my junior year, I made a decision that I was going to get married to the man who had been my lab instructor from my freshman physics class. And he was in graduate school and we knew that I was going to go to graduate school and we sat down and we worked out all of our finances and we said we could do this, we could make this happen, partially because I was on a full scholarship from Procter & Gamble, one of those is given each year in the engineering school and one is given in the arts school.

And I had the engineering scholarship and it was fantastic. Tuition fees, books, all of that kind of thing. We obviously counted on that. But when Procter & Gamble found out that I was planning on getting married at the end of my junior year, they took the scholarship away. They said, “You’re not serious. You’re not going to be a scientist. We’re not going to waste this money on educating you just to go be a housewife and have babies.” Ugh, wow, that was a devastating blow.

So I went to the dean of the engineering college, his name was Dale Corson, and who later became president of Cornell University. And I said, “Dean Corson, this isn’t fair. I mean, I’ve been on dean’s list every semester. I’m a good student and I intend to continue to be a student and a graduate student and a scientist or engineer.” And he looked at me and he kindly said, “You’re right. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.” And I have no idea what he said when he called up the folks at Procter & Gamble, but he got my scholarship back for me. It was wonderful, and I thanked him profusely at that point.

Then 20 years later when he was president of Cornell and had an advisory committee to help him decide how to run the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which sadly we’ve just lost now, it’s collapsed, but back then, I was on that advisory committee. I was able to come up to him all those years later and say, “See, President Corson, thank you for believing in me. I didn’t just drop out and become a housewife and have kids. I’m on your advisory committee for this fantastic telescope and I have to thank you once again,” and that felt so good. It felt wonderful to be able to tell him that he’d made such a difference in my life.

Asking the big question

Over my career, I’ve been able to watch the universe appear to become more bio-friendly. We don’t know that it is, that’s what we’re trying to find out. But over my career, we have discovered planets around other stars, exoplanets. When we started, we only knew about nine in our solar system. And then we demoted one of those.

But now we know that in the Milky Way Galaxy, there are more planets than there are stars. And additionally, we now know about organisms that we call extremophiles, forms of life, not just microscopic, but a lot of them macroscopic, living in environments which when I was a student, I was taught utterly no chance. That’s going to be sterile. No reason to look for life there. But, of course, life is there and it’s amazing.

So exoplanets and extremophiles are two big game changers. And now it makes it just seem natural to ask the question. Well, with all that potentially habitable real estate out there, is any of it actually inhabited? That’s just the most natural thing now that we have a different worldview of our cosmos than we did 40 years ago. I’m excited!

We have a real opportunity in this century to answer that “are any of them inhabited” question. I find that really exciting. It makes me mad to be old because I probably am not going to be around long enough to see the end of that story or the beginning of the next phase of our searching. But young people, graduate students now are going to have a really exciting way forward in this century.

SETI could succeed tomorrow, but the instruments that are needed for finding disequilibrium chemistry in the atmospheres of exoplanets, those are going to take a while to build. And then it’s going to take another generation to be big enough to actually do the job. For me, the fun part was getting started with this. Helping to roll this rock up the mountain.

I’ve had the privilege of being in at the beginning, and because I’m a big frog in a small pond, I’ve had the opportunity to decide a lot of different things about what we should do. And you don’t get out of bed in the morning saying, “Ah, today I’m going to get a signal,” because you’re probably going to go to bed disappointed. But you do get out of bed in the morning saying, ah, today, I’m going to figure out how to do this better.

We’re going to do something that we couldn’t do last week. We’re going to figure out how we can do it today and then how we can do it better next week. That’s really satisfying. And I’ve known all along in this business that I’m probably going to have to train my replacement because this is not a small task that we’re undertaking. This is a really large search, and our tools for doing the search are getting better all the time and now exponentially faster because computing is improving so rapidly.

I didn’t go into this thinking that it’ll be a good thing to do for the first five years of my career and then I’ll find something else to do. No, I’ve pretty much understood from the beginning and everybody who works on this program understands that we are probably in this for the long haul. We try and find ways to reach out to young engineers and students and excite them about the potential of doing this kind of work. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

People sometimes approach their science as, I’m going to do something, I’m going to publish a paper, I’m going to do something else, I’m going to publish a paper, and I’m going to be successful all along the way. And sometimes they’re wise enough to think, and I’ll do something wrong and I’ll learn from that, but this idea of working on something that might not succeed during your career is a little dicey and it takes a certain kind of personality to be eager to do that.

Then there’s the other shoe, which is the funding for this activity is anything but stable. Not only do I have to say, “Come join us. No, you might not succeed with finding a signal in your career, and hmm, maybe I can’t make salary next month.” That’s another challenge we’d like to, now in my cheerleading role, I’d like to work on establishing an endowment so that this kind of activity, this scientific exploration can be funded stably into the future because that’s what it’s probably going to take.

SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But that’s actually a misnomer. We don’t know how to define intelligence. We certainly don’t know how to detect it at a distance. What we can perhaps do is find evidence of someone else’s technology that is detectable over these vast distances between the stars. So we should actually call it SETT, but SETI’s has been around for a while and has brand recognition and we’re not changing that anytime soon, but we are looking for evidence of technologies.

And there are a couple of things that we’ve done in the past and new things that we’re going to be trying to do in the future. We’ve been looking for electromagnetic radiation, signals, either at radio wavelengths or at optical wavelengths. But we’re specifically looking for the kinds of signals that as far as we know, nature can’t produce, but our technologies do it all the time. So in the radio part of the spectrum, and that means that we’re looking for frequency compression, for power that shows up at exactly one channel on the radio dial.

It isn’t spread out over many channels, which is what nature would do, but it’s a single channel. And in the optical, we look for time compression. We look for bright pulses that last for a nanosecond or a microsecond. And again, this is something that as far as we know nature can’t do, but lasers sure can. We build instrumentation to put behind radio telescopes or optical telescopes that split the incoming signal, which is voltage is a function of time, split it up into many, many different channels, or we sample the optical telescope very, very, very quickly so we can detect these compressions in frequency.

We can see a signal that shows up at one frequency and it may over time change its frequency because the Earth is rotating and there’s a Doppler shift between the transmitter and the receiver. And because of the rotation, there’s also a Doppler drift and the frequency changes. So we write software that’s looking for those particular patterns, and likewise in the optical. We look for bright flashes that show up only at one point and then may not show up again.

So you have to be very careful in this kind of work about deciding whether or not what you have detected, what shows up in your data, is actually real, coming from the sky, moving the way the stars move on the sky at what we call sidereal rate, or whether what you’re finding in your data is coming from your own equipment, noise that you generate, or that satellites orbiting the Earth generate. We have this problem of deciding whether what we’ve detected is us or them. And over time, that gets to be more and more problematic as there are more satellites orbiting, which not only make the night sky bright with flashes, but make it very loud in the radio because of the transmissions from those satellites.

We’ve had to try and get clever over the years and we certainly spend a good half of our computing resources trying to discriminate between us and them. And I’ve long thought that the best way to do this is in the radio to use two telescopes, that are separated by hundreds of kilometers, sometimes even 1,000 kilometers, and they’re both looking at the same place on the sky simultaneously. And then if you find a signal in your primary telescope, you look at the data from the secondary telescope and you look to see if that signal is also found by the other telescope with the appropriate shift in frequency and drift that would be due to the differential Doppler of the Earth’s rotation.

And then in the optical, because we’re looking for single events, a single bright pulse, you also want to use multiple telescopes and you want to use the simultaneity with the light travel time between the telescopes taken into account. You want to use that simultaneous detection as your verification that this is something that’s really coming from the sky.

Teaching machines to look

Now we’re on a threshold where we can begin to think about using artificial intelligence to help us with this search. In my searches, we have done our signal detection always in near real time so that as soon as we have something, we can immediately follow up on it. This has turned out to be one of the best discriminants against interference for us. But now what we want to do is use, instead of saying, is there this particular narrow band pattern in the data, now we want to use machine intelligence to look at the data in a bias-free way and say, not is there this pattern, but is there any pattern? Is there anything other than noise in these data?

That will open up the search to all kinds of different modulation schemes that we have very little sensitivity to at the moment. By displaying the data as frequency versus time, as a two-dimensional image, then we can use all of these wonderful techniques that are being developed for artificial intelligence, for image recognition. And I think that’s going to open up a lot of new channels for SETI research in the future.

Because we’re interested in ourselves, we’re infinitely interested in humans. And we want to know how we stack up against the cosmos. Are we unique? Are we one of many? And if we’re one of many, how intelligent are we relative to somebody else or something else out there? In terms of technology, we can’t find anybody out there whose technology is less advanced than ours, but it’s quite probable that what we do detect will be technology that is significantly more advanced than ours.

Most of the stars in our part of the Milky Way Galaxy are about a billion years older than the sun. So there could be technologies out there that have a large head start. And for me, the real reason to work on this question is to know whether it’s possible for us to have a long future. There are so many challenges on this planet today that would indicate that maybe, maybe our future is not very long because of mistakes that we have made in terms of living on this planet in a sustainable manner.

However, if we detect a signal, then we know it is possible to have a long future. And the reason is statistical. We are not going to succeed in this project unless on average any technology out there is very long lived. That’s not long in human times, it’s long in cosmic time. So a successful detection means that it’s possible to have a long future as a technological civilization. I think that that’s really worth going after.

I don’t expect them to solve our problems, but I do expect if we succeed to be inspired by knowing that somebody else made it through this technological adolescence, and we can too. We simply have to find a way. But we know there’s an answer. And that’s inspiring for me.

When we used to ask the question, are we alone in the universe? We used to ask the priests and the philosophers or anybody else we thought was smart, we used to ask them what should we believe? But that’s the wrong verb. There is an answer to that question, but what any of us believe isn’t going to change the way the universe is. The appropriate thing is to do a scientific exploration to go and try and find out what is. So we’ve gone from belief to scientific exploration over the past 400 or actually much longer ago in terms of asking the question. And I think that’s the right trajectory.

This is an appropriate question to be tackled by scientific exploration in a very systematic fashion. Let’s approach that by thinking about something that Stephen Hawking once said. He wasn’t eager to have extraterrestrials find us because using the analogy to Columbus’ discovery of the new world, Stephen said it didn’t work out very well for the inhabitants when Columbus discovered the new world. Well, for me, I think there might be another answer.

First of all, we’re talking about them coming here, which means that they have technologies that we haven’t yet developed. And that means that they’re older than we are. And I wonder how you can become an old technological civilization unless you outgrow the bad behavior and the aggressiveness that probably helped you evolve intelligence in the first place? So I’m in the kind of Steven Pinker, kinder and gentler, better nature of ourselves school.

I think that cultural evolution when it begins to take hold will drive a civilization to a kinder and gentler end. Steven takes 900 pages to say that that’s actually happening here. We are kinder and gentler now than we have ever been. And to the extent that we work on this project, SETI, and we talk to your mother or other people out there and tell them what we’re doing, I think it actually has to change their perspective a little bit.

They have to stop thinking of themselves as just a Californian, an American. I think SETI holds up a mirror to all the people on the planet and says to them, “Look, you look, in that mirror, you are all the same when compared to something, someone else out there that evolved orbiting a different star.” And I think that that sameness, that understanding that we are all earthlings is incredibly important because these challenges that face the planet which are undeniable and which we have to find remedies for, these challenges don’t respect national boundaries.

We’re going to have to find global solutions to them. I think if we can shift our perspective to thinking about ourselves as earthlings, then that has got to be beneficial to finding a way to work together across the planet to come up with solutions to these problems that are very real. So that cosmic perspective is something that I’m eager to talk about, and I think SETI gives me an opportunity to do that.

If you think about the chairman of the astrobiology department at Columbia University, his name is Caleb Scharf, and Caleb has a wonderful way of stating this. He says that on a finite world, that’s us, we’re on this Earth, on a finite world, a cosmic perspective is a necessity and not a luxury. So to the extent that doing SETI can help us open people’s minds, change their perspective, I think it will help us get to a long future.

The Allen Telescope Array

The Allen Telescope Array is a collection of 42 six-meter radio telescopes. We had hoped it would be 350, but there was so much technology that we had to work out in order to build this array as a large number of small dishes the first time ever that we ran out of money. And 42: the life, the universe, and everything, that’s a pretty good place to stop. The telescopes are built so that they can simultaneously do radio astronomy and SETI observations.

Because the telescopes are small, they look at a large field of view on the sky, big patch of the sky at the same time. In that large patch of sky, there are likely to be objects, such as molecular clouds or supernova remnants or pulsars or quasars, that radio astronomers would like to study. At the same time, we’re collecting data for SETI. And the question of using radio wavelengths versus optical wavelengths versus infrared wavelengths has a lot to do with how those waves pass through the great distances between the stars.

Now, we think of space being a vacuum, but indeed, it’s filled with some molecular gas and dust. And when you get to be a size, a wavelength is approximately the size of one of those little pieces of dust grain, then that wavelength is heavily absorbed and scattered. That’s why at optical wavelengths, these short wavelengths like the size of a grain of dust, we’ve never seen the center of our galaxy in the optical because that radiation gets absorbed, scattered.

But when you get to longer wavelengths into the infrared and then particularly much longer wavelengths in the radio, they essentially don’t see the dust at all. So we can see vastly farther through our galaxy in the infrared and in the radio, which is why we think that those wavelengths make sense for someone who is either deliberately trying to create a signal to attract our attention or is using technologies that might very well leak or emit radio or infrared wavelengths.

If it’s warm, it’s going to glow in the infrared. So we just think that this is a good idea. We’d like to look, obviously, what we’d like to do is look at all the sky all the time at all frequencies. If you could do that, that would be the best way to, oh, and with more than one telescope, that would be the best way to find transient signals that last for only a short period of time.

But we can’t do that yet. We’re beginning to be able to do it in the optical. So yes, our range, how far the signal can go through the interstellar medium, will be more limited. But indeed, the technologies that allow us to actually look at all the sky all the time have developed there rather than in the radio, but all the sky all the time all frequencies, that’s the goal, and we’ll see where technology takes us.

Proving the concept

The Hat Creek Radio Observatory where we built the Allen Telescope Array has been run by the University of California at Berkeley since the 1960s. And it just had a series of different types of telescope there. Originally, just a very large 85 foot dish for doing centimeter wavelength observations and then an array of dishes for working at shorter radio wavelengths in the millimeter. And now the Allen Telescope Array is there and it’s really nice to have your own telescope so that you can look at the sky 24/7.

And indeed, in radio wavelengths you can. The sun is not a bright radio source. So as opposed to our optical counterparts who have to wait until it’s dark, we can observe 24 hours a day. Having that facility and having the really bright folks at UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute be able to develop this new technology, which we could not have done much before we did it because it takes so much computing to combine all of the outputs of those small telescopes together in real time, it’s been a fantastic opportunity to pioneer a new way of building radio telescopes.

And now if you look at the plans for international projects like the Square Kilometre Array, which will be built in South Africa and Western Australia, you can see that those telescopes are all built now as a large number of small dishes. So we actually did something pretty spectacular, proving out this technology.

The plane “UFO” incident

My husband, Jack Welch, who’s the gentleman who discovered water in the interstellar medium, we had an airplane that we used to fly from our home in Berkeley, California to Northern California to the Allen Telescope Array up near Mount Lassen.

And on one of these flights, we were actually returning to the Bay Area at night and we’re flying along and we’re actually under positive control, we’re talking to the ground and they’re following us, and suddenly at two o’clock position, there’s this bright light, amazing bright light, and we look at each other and we talk to the ground and we say, “What’s at our two o’clock position?” And they say, “There’s nothing on the radar,” and yet we see this thing.

It was the most confusing feeling. You say, “Oh, a UFO? Really?” Not me. I’m the most skeptical person around. How can this be happening?” It was weird. It was really weird for a good three or four minutes we’re staring at this. And then suddenly the clouds, which we hadn’t appreciated were there, the clouds broke apart a little more and we got to see the moon that was shining through a hole in the clouds.

So I’ve had a UFO experience, but it became an explained object fairly quickly. And yet I know this unsettling, confusing feeling when you’re seeing something, you don’t understand it, you can’t explain it, and hopefully you’ll be lucky the way we were and come up with an explanation because certainly didn’t have anything to do with extraterrestrials or little green men or flying saucers. It was really confusing looking at something, understanding that I really, because it was dark and there was no reference frame, I couldn’t really tell how big it was, how far away it was, but it sure as heck was there.

And then I thought, “Oh, I’ve been telling people for years to bring me data, to bring me something that I can investigate with respect to their claims of UFOs. Let’s get some data.” And here I am thinking, “Well, I can take a picture of that, but that’s not going to do very much good because there’s no reference. And besides, the ground control is telling me that there’s nothing in the sky on their radar at that position.”

“This can’t be happening to me,” that was my feeling, and “How am I going to explain this to someone and tell them what I experienced?” But fortunately, we were able to keep watching and come up with an explanation. The moon shining through a hole in the clouds.

False positives

Over the years, we’ve certainly had a number of false positives. Most of them, we can explain very quickly. But there was a time where I was in, I was observing at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, I think it was in 1998. And our second telescope was in Woodbury, Georgia. And that telescope took a hit by lightning and that fried a disk drive. And it took FedEx a couple of days to get a new disk drive into this very rural area of Georgia.

But we were at NRAO, we still had that telescope time, we’d actually rented it. This was back before we could build our own telescope, and we weren’t going to waste it, so we continued observing and instead of having a second telescope to validate the detection, what we did is we pointed our telescope in West Virginia at a star. And then we’d take data and then we’d point it off the star and take data and go back on the star and then off the star and then on the star, this is a standard radio astronomy technique called nodding.

And an interesting signal would be one that was there whenever we looked at the star, but was absent when we looked in any other direction. Early one morning, about five o’clock in the morning, I started tracking this one target. And lo and behold, there was clearly a signal. Now, we do our signal processing in near real time, so that we can in fact do the follow-up necessary to try and distinguish between interference.

And in our two-dimensional display of the data with frequency being on the horizontal axis and time being on the vertical axis, what I saw was a series of signals that looked like a picket fence. So multiple signals and the frequency spacing between each signal was the same from one to the next. Well, that’s not mother nature. That’s pretty clearly an interesting signal.

I started this nodding, and indeed, every time we moved the telescope, the signal went away and we came back and it was there. And I thought, oh, hmm. I had a very clever thought, although I was very excited and there was a lot of adrenaline going on at this point. Anyway, I thought I’ll write a program and I’ll ask this program to look at all the data we’ve collected here at the telescope in the last couple of weeks and see if we’ve ever seen a signal with that constant frequency spacing coming from some other direction on the sky, not the direction of this star.

And I wrote the program and I was so excited. I was pretty sloppy, I didn’t format the output very well. And when I looked at the output, I missed the fact that indeed, we had seen that signal a couple of times before from different directions on the sky. Now I got really excited and I called the dorm and woke up my colleague John Drayer and he came down and we just stayed on that star all day until it set in the west and we couldn’t figure out right away what it was.

But by the time the sun had set, the star had set, we knew that the signal wasn’t coming from the star because the rate at which the frequencies were changing was appropriate to a source that was rising up to the zenith, not one that was setting in the west. So we knew that it was something else and it took us a while to figure out what it was.

And it was, in fact, when you have a telescope, it’s like the telescope has peripheral vision. It has what we call side lobes. So I can still see my fingers out here, although I’m looking straight ahead, and a radio telescope is like that. And this particular telescope had a side lobe that was very weak at exactly 90 degrees away from the boresight, the pointing direction. And what was happening was the SOHO spacecraft, which was orbiting the sun, not the Earth, in orbit around the sun, was getting into that side lobe. And every time we moved the telescope in a different direction, it fell out of that side lobe.

I was a little disappointed when we quit tracking that star and went off for dinner. But actually, the worst thing was that we had told our colleagues back in Mountain View what we were doing because we had an identical setup there so they could see the data that was being collected. And we went off to dinner, convinced that no, this wasn’t really what we had hoped it would be. And I forgot to call the folks in Mountain View and say, “Sorry, no deal.”

So they stayed up until two o’clock in the morning in California when that source would rise again because they were sure we were going to continue tracking it. I had some fences to mend when I got home, for not being thoughtful enough to let them know that this was not it.

Carl Sagan’s legacy

Carl Sagan is not only a good astronomer, but he was a spectacular communicator. And he has the ability to talk to an audience about astronomy, and in particular, his interest in trying to find life beyond Earth. And he was just really compelling. So it’s quite appropriate that Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell University operates something called the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

Carl wrote, along with Joseph Shklovsky of the Soviet Union, the first real book about modern SETI. It was called “Intelligent Life in the Universe,” I think. And that book really did energize lots of students and scientists and engineers about the possibility of actually conducting a search. And it was the first time that at a popular level, there had been a scientific discussion of this idea.

So he is early into this game of thinking about life beyond Earth. And he communicated the excitement of that idea and the fact that indeed, in the 20th century, we actually had some tools to be able to launch a systematic scientific exploration to try and answer this question. So he was very, very influential. Cosmos talked to the majesty of the universe and really resonated with the public.

Carl was an absolutely brilliant communicator, and we miss him. Absolutely. There have been others that have come after him, but no one individual that still has the impact that he had. He would go out and lecture at a university and he would have students come up to him and say, “Cosmos, that’s what made me a scientist. That’s what inspired me to become a scientist.” I get a little of that today because of “Contact,” which is now over 20 years old.

And particularly young women will come up and say, “Contact, that was my favorite movie, and it inspired me to become a scientist.” So it’s gratifying. But I sure miss Carl. I was back visiting Cornell for some symposium and Carl said, “Come on up to the house tonight, we’re having a cocktail party,” and so I did. That was always fun.

And when I got there, Ann Druyan, Carl’s wife, and Carl took me off to the corner and Ann said, “Carl’s writing a science fiction book.” And said I, “Yeah, I know. The New York Times told us last weekend what kind of an advance he got for this and we’re all jealous as hell.” And Annie chuckled and she said, “Well,” she said, “I think you might recognize one of the characters, but I think you’re going to like her.”

I said, “Oh, come on, Ann. Look, just make sure that Carl doesn’t have this female character eat ice cream cones for lunch and then nobody’s going to think it’s me. Nobody will be confused.” That story is because we were over at NASA Ames Research Center and there was no good food, but we could walk at lunchtime over to a Baskin-Robbins and get ice cream for lunch. I got teased a lot about that over the years.

But indeed, Carl sent me a pre-publication copy of the book “Contact” and I was going, “Wait, wait! Carl doesn’t know this about me. How did he, how, how?” And it turns out that when I was a fresh PhD, I got invited to a meeting in Washington and I walked into a room of 80 female PhDs in all kinds of STEM fields, a life-changing experience for me. I had never walked into a room full of women, very comfortable walking into a room full of men as the only woman, but never a room full of women who were so smart and bright.

And we did a little bit of amateur demographics and it turned out that many of those women had their fathers die when they were young, just like me. Many of those women were competitive. And this was pre-Title IX, so there were no women sports teams that you could try out for.

The only thing you could try out and compete at was baton twirling or cheerleading. An overwhelming number of the women had been drum majorettes or cheerleaders in their high school years. I was a drum majorette. The T-Bird, which is a 54 T-Bird, was America’s first real sports car. I was in love with that and the character is as well in “Contact.”

It turns out that I told Carl about this meeting and we’d written a little report and I sent him the report. And I’m just very prototypical of all those women. Carl got many of these anecdotes or traits or characteristics out of that report I sent him. And because I’m so prototypical, I even thought it was me.

I’m often introduced as being the woman who was the inspiration for Ellie Arroway played by Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact.” And I am in a little way, but really that character is an amalgamation of traits of female scientists that Carl had worked with. And actually, I think the character is Carl himself. I think there’s a lot of Carl in that character.

Anyway, it was fun to be able to work on a set with Jodie Foster. She’s very, very brilliant. She’s also very kind. It was a great privilege to work with her. She told us that she was never going to teach anyone any science, but she was interested in the character of scientists. Were we passionate? Were we supercilious? Do we have big egos? All this kind of thing. And I think she did a grand job with that character.

The future of SETI

I’m sure that there’s something that we haven’t quite thought of yet. I’m sure there’s physics and technology that we haven’t yet understood or invented. So I can imagine that in the future, there will be other technologies that may make sense in terms of trying to find life beyond Earth.

Certainly, we can look forward to these new astronomical instruments, very, very large telescopes, ground-based and in orbit. We’re now in the era of 10 meter telescopes. We’re going into the era of 30 meter telescopes. And we can think and scratch our heads about when these telescopes make images of other planetary systems, what might they see that would be an indication of someone else’s technology? Not just astrophysics, but actually what kinds of technology might these large optical and infrared telescopes be able to discover accidentally and serendipitously.

I like to point out that there’s this wonderful star system, called TRAPPIST-1, it’s a tiny little red dwarf star, much fainter and smaller than our sun, but it has in orbit around it seven Earth-sized planets. One Sunday above the fold in the New York Times, there’s this beautiful artist conception of these seven worlds orbiting these tiny red star and an artist had colored them all different. And they should all be different, at least in terms of their temperature because they’re at different distances away from their star.

But what if we finally get the ability to image those seven worlds and we find out that two or three or four of them are all the same when they shouldn’t be. But perhaps some advanced technology has geo-engineered these planets to turn it into the type of real estate that they particularly prefer. So I look forward to that kind of exciting potentially serendipitous detection. And in the radio, we’re building bigger telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array, which will have more sensitivity and be sensitive to fainter transmitters.

And then in the optical and the infrared, we’re building these telescopes that can look at huge areas on the sky. Something called PANOSETI, something called LaserSETI. And this is their first opportunity to try and go towards that all the sky all the time coverage that will make us sensitive to transient signals. So I’m really excited, and eventually, we may build the Square Kilometre Array in South Africa.

We may build the next generation of VLA telescope across the southwest of the United States. And we may orbit large optical telescopes, infrared telescopes that will allow us to do these studies of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. I think that the future is really using astronomical instruments.

We’re talking about the future where some of these instruments actually might be usable for SETI in a commensal way, not dedicated to SETI, but we can use the data that they collect perhaps to do some SETI explorations. So I’m excited. Maybe what we should be looking for are zeta rays, not radio or optical or infrared, but zeta rays.

I don’t know what a zeta ray is because we haven’t invented it yet. But if we do in the future, and if it makes sense, then we should start looking for other technologies using zeta rays. In my opinion, and it’s only an opinion, I think we’re too young to start broadcasting.

Broadcasting is a difficult and more expensive job, and it does no good to broadcast for 15 minutes, for two years, for five years. Because your signal is going to go past your intended recipient in a few minutes, in a few years, in five years. If you’re going to broadcast, you need to start and not stop. So that when another emerging technology out there begins to explore its universe with tools that are appropriate to detect your signal, the signal will be there for them to find. So I think we need to grow up first. We need to become an old, stable technological civilization. And then we should take on this hard job of broadcasting and do it forever.

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Timestamps

0:30 Chapter 1: Computers and the Industrial Revolution
6:30 Computation as a tool of exploration
9:54 Measuring a nation into existence
12:22 From human computers to mechanical ones
20:06 The clockwork foundations of modern computing
24:55 Chapter 2: The power of standardization
29:11 The power of standardization
32:03 Standardizing education
37:55 Chapter 3: Computing the human experience
41:05 Expanding data to the human experience
41:58 Automating the census
46:55 Chapter 4: How computers change us
48:50 From ENIAC to ARPANET
54:45 When computing became personal
58:58 Adapting to algorithmic life
1:03:47 Chapter 5: When machines replace humans
1:12:18 The first data ownership fight
1:19:20 AI is not new

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

I’m David Allen Greer. I am currently a writer and author on issues of technology and industry and things of that sort. In the past, I have been a computer programmer, a professor, a software engineer, president of the IEEE Computer Society. I am the author of the book “When Computers Were Human” and also the book “Crowdsourcing for Dummies,” among others.

Chapter 1: Computers and the Industrial Revolution

Why is computing part of the Industrial Revolution? The Industrial Revolution is about systematizing production. It’s about producing goods of uniform quality, if not uniform design, at the lowest possible cost for the largest possible market. If you want a date that’s easy to remember and just nails things down, you go with 1776. That’s useful for my purpose as a writer, because that’s also the year that Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” is published.

And the start of that book is about the description of industrial processes, how we came to them, and how we used them to start building uniform products that would have large markets. That would increase the wealth of nations. Those first chapters deal with the division of labor, the specializations of tasks, and the systematization of work. That book was highly influential, not only in the industrial group, particularly in London, in the cotton producing and in the pottery producing fields in northern London, but also amongst the scientific crowd.

Because they also had things that were large problems that needed systematic approaches. Astronomy was the first. We had used astronomy for navigation, but there was a question of what was out there and how did things behave that was being addressed by people purchasing telescopes, or financing telescopes, and then setting up a staff to collect observations. They would night after night go to the observatory and map the heavens.

And in the process of mapping the heavens, it doesn’t take long to realize the data problem they generated. Suppose it takes a minute or two a night to get one star located. That means you can get a couple hundred, maybe even a low thousands, of stars a night. But the figures that you record depend upon the hour of the day which direction the Earth is facing, or your telescope is facing. The time of year, where the Earth is in its orbit, you’ll get different measurements of the stars at different times of year.

That means you create a massive pile of data that needs to be reduced to absolute coordinates, to a location somewhere fixed in space. That requires a lot of work and a lot of arithmetic. It required these observatories which could do the recording with a staff of two or three astronomers to have a large group of people to help them reduce these data points to something that was absolute so they could start fitting them into their map to the heavens. That was a repetitive job. There was a lot of it. The issue that they all faced was how can you do it for the least amount of money.

Part of what we think of as high tech in computing and programming is also the task of systemization, of regularization, of taking a complex thing that could be done many different ways and putting it in a form that can be marched through in a fixed series of steps.

At base, no one really needs to know the return date of Halley’s comet. There are certain few scientists for whom it helps explain the universe. But it’s mostly just a reminder that this object has been seen every 75 or so years throughout history and has been recorded as such. But at the end of the 18th century, a group of French astronomers, knowing that it was coming, asked could we figure it out?

It was a test of the science that had been developing before them, of the theories of people like Copernicus and Galileo. The question was could they get a date? Could they get the date that was closest to the sun? And could they do it mathematically? And that’s actually a tough problem at some level even now, although we have all the programs to do it, because it involves the location of several big oblogics and needing to move them through space while you’re tracking the comet around the solar system.

And what they did was divide the labor. That becomes a key theme in computing, a theme that was worked out by human beings and relatively modest mechanical devices before we started putting electronics to it and rushing off into programs and artificial intelligence and all the rest. We worked out the problems of computing because it was divided labor. For that first return of Halley’s Comet, they had two people working on the location first of the Earth and second of Jupiter, because Jupiter is a major influence on the motion in the solar system. Then another astronomer tracked the comet, which is pretty small and has little impact in terms of moving other things around in its orbit.

And they figured out how to do that and do that repeatedly, repeatedly and in a way that they could double-check their work. That’s sort of another one of the themes, that it’s not just the brilliant insight, it’s not just the algorithms. It’s figuring out how to find mistakes, how to find mis-additions, miscalculations, and even misapprehensions, misunderstandings of what’s going on. That process, which took about a month, really set the stage for the things that were to come. In particular, it set the stage for the nautical almanacs.

Computation as a tool of exploration

As I said, you and I have lived all of our lives without knowing the next return date for Halley’s Comet. Our lives will go on. When it comes, it’ll be a big party, and I hope it’s better seen than the last time when it came in the ‘80s. But it’s just a party, it’s just watching an odometer flip.

The bigger problems, the things that involve production in terms of our living our lives, of feeding ourselves, clothing ourselves, providing shelter, we need to produce goods and services. The key thing that was involved there was trade and ocean-going vessels. Knowing where they are. Once you’re out of sight of land, how do you know where you are?

The ancient astronomers, pre-17th century, had a lot of various methods that were somewhat ad hoc that sort of involved, “This is spring, we know this star is over our destination, we go out, we point the ship at the star, and we pray that we get there.” They didn’t know where they were on the Earth’s globe. That required an understanding of how to compute longitude and latitude. And latitude is fairly easy to get, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Longitude is a lot harder, and it requires knowing where stars are relative to a fixed point on Earth. That knowledge, you have to codify in a book, and you have to do it multiple years in advance, because you give these books to captains and turn them loose across the oceans, far away from wherever that fixed point might be, which in the early days of exploration were one of three points, London, Amsterdam, or Paris. To produce those books accurately, you needed a system, you needed a system that allowed you both to do the calculations, and then undo them in a way that was different, because one of the very early pioneers of calculation, Charles Babbage, discovered what he called Babbage’s Rule, which is two calculations done the same way by different people will tend to make the same errors.

There seems to be, in the process of hand calculation, mistakes that trip up everybody. Not all the time, but there’s a tendency that if one person makes the mistake, the next person will make it. So you need to approach the problem in a different way, and in particular, in a different way that exposes errors. That was thrashed out in the late 18th century in the nautical almanac in London, and in a comparable publication in Paris.

They figured out not only how to divide, because there were multiple objects they wanted to get the locations of, so they divided that amongst a variety of people, and then ways of undoing those calculations in a form that exposed the errors. That was a key innovation on their part.

That led to these publications, and that leads to the age of exploration and the start of global trade, global oceanic trade. Trade that requires boats to go out of sight, and that of course leads very directly to industrialization in the modern world.

Measuring a nation into existence

Same was true with surveying. In the United States, there was, by the early 19th century, there’s the problem of figuring out where the United States actually is, whether it’s bounds, whether it’s limits. That involves surveying first the coasts, and then moving in. That again required, they used nautical almanacs, again, to figure out the locations of places.

But a great deal of calculation, because you’re basically laying down across the earth a bunch of triangles. You can figure out where two of the corners of the triangle are, and from those two corners, you can get to the third, and then from that third, that gives you a new triangle, and you can keep marching off across the land. That, particularly when they got to California, proved to be a hard thing to do, that it was very difficult to get all the calculations you needed to get that vast space well surveyed.

And in particular, that was needed because you had a bunch of people who thought they owned land there somewhere. By thinking that they owned land, they had to know where it was. They couldn’t say from this rock to that mountain, to that tree. They had to have more exact points. The treaties that shaped the West and shaped the United States basically required the new states to figure out land ownership and the location of land.

They all faced the same problem of how do you take large amounts of data and process it, and that required them to think industrially, to think how the two pieces went together. There evolves other systems to try to do that quickly, to get first approximations, to be able to get numbers close enough so that the errors on borders are relatively minor and can be worked out in local negotiations.

It’s that process of systematizing, correcting errors, finding approximations, and making them work as civil systems that was what really drove me to start looking at human calculation and what was the foundation that it laid for the modern computer age.

From human computers to mechanical ones

Those lessons were first approached in largely the 18th century and by people doing work by hand and doing it largely but not exclusively for astronomy or surveying. One of the aspects of building systematic processes around numbers, around calculation was that very, very quickly people started asking, “What can you do with machines?” The idea of an adding machine, a machine that could add two numbers, goes back to discard. It has a long, long history. The idea that you can represent numbers by the turning of a wheel and then if the wheel turns all around, it turns the next wheel, that was well worked out early.

However, it really wasn’t part of a process. So something that you could rely on. When you talk about industrializations, you’re basically building processes that can be done by people who at base don’t know what they’re doing or more accurately. They are doing something that they gain a skill at, that they understand their steps and they learn how to do them efficiently, but they don’t understand necessarily the science and the ideas behind them. At the start of the 19th century, there’s a great explosion in the interest of what machines, levers, gears can do.

And there is a study of linkages, for example, of mechanical arms that connect together. What they could do that, I don’t think it’s quite lost. I’m sure there are mechanical engineers who will give me a lecture on this. But it’s something that has certainly vanished from our daily contemplation and contemplation even of non-specialized students. One of the people who got fascinated with this was an Englishman named Charles Babbage.

He’s a start of the 19th century. His father was a banker. Because his father was a banker, his father was also involved in the Caribbean trade. That meant he was familiar with boats going off to the Caribbean to collect largely sugar and bring it back to the United Kingdom. It’s at a point where systematized shipping is starting to really take hold. It really doesn’t kick in until the start of the industrial age, where boats run on a schedule.

And you know the schedule and you know more or less the date they’re coming. Babbage attends Cambridge. He learns astronomy, gets fascinated with it, fascinated with mathematics. Then starts pondering, how can you mechanize mathematics? What can you do with it? He had written a couple of things while he was in college that in many ways was filling up spaces and filling up shapes with smaller versions of itself to see how you could approximate them.

And what systems would work and what wouldn’t. Sometime during that early period, he got involved with an article almanac. He ends up being on an advisory board for it. This is when he discovers his rule that two people doing the same calculation the same way tend to make the same mistakes. The second job that’s starting to come up and he gets involved and interested is the understanding of insurance, of probability behind it.

In particular, insurance is at some level a savings account, nothing more than that. It’s savings that you get to cash in the savings account when you die or if it’s a health insurance, which is later in the century, when you get sick. That means the people running the bank need to know how much money they are likely to pay out. The understanding of that, the mathematics of that, the mathematics of probability, is just really starting at, again, it’s an industrial revolution start, but it’s really starting to take hold in industrial life at the start of the 19th century.

And it involves the creation of another kind of table called mortality tables, which tell you how long someone is likely to live given that they’ve lived this long. They are highly dependent on data and on what people. You don’t do them for a huge population because there are differences in the way people live, in their diets, in the work that they do, in the kinds of families that they have. So you tend to do it for smaller groups and that means you have to do a lot of these tables and you have to process a lot of data.

Babbage pondered it and he began to realize that for both astronomy and for these insurance tables, there was a common kind of calculation that could be very useful, but was by the standards of the time, very time consuming. It’s basically fitting a curve to data. You have these points and you want a curve to go nice and smoothly through them so that you can make estimates between the points and you can go project out beyond the end of your curve to figure out where it might be going.

And it dawned on him, on Babbage, that that calculation was in effect could be reduced to a lot of additions, a very large number of additions and subtractions. That meant that he could chain together a bunch of these adding machines and produce a machine that could indeed do that by just grinding away at a crank or as he thought of it, be produced by steam. He was working in the very early age of railroads and steam engineering and he saw his machine as very much in the heritage of locomotive design. He produced a machine with very large gears and numbers and the dials on it were made out of well machined brass.

The process was probably beyond the engineering ability of his time. His lead engineer pushed British engineering substantially and advanced at both working for Babbage and later. It was also probably the wrong concept to build from. Machines are very often done as metaphors. We build a machine to do something like this.

Babbage was building a machine to do calculations like a railroad engine. Railroad engines were not completely safe and secure then. They were still learning a great deal about how to build them.

Babbage never got his working. He built a number of models. He built several that demonstrated the proof of concept. He could fit not the curve he wanted, but a much simpler curve to data and in a machine that got through the calculations we know at least once.

Then he built a lot of rough parts for the machine he wanted to build. Because of that Babbage and his ideas left a legacy about what they were trying to do more than what they actually did. What he was trying to do was systematize calculations so he could handle large scale in both cases calculations, fitting curves to data and things of that sort. He had contemporaries that were intellectually in terms of direct connection, far more important, George Bool.

The clockwork foundations of modern computing

George Bool wrote a book called On the Laws of Thought. We now know those laws of thought as Boolean algebra, which is the fundamental tool underlying all of the analyses that design electronic circuits and computers. That connection has been well known and understood forever. Babbage vanished for a bit and also the exact intellectual connection is not as clear unless you look at the systemization, the building of an industrial process, the work to lessen the cost of computing and to move it into a bigger environment.

In that sense he had a tremendous impact and remains an important figure to this day. Almost 30, 40 years after Babbage did it, a Swedish father and son built one of these machines using Babbage’s idea and built it and it was fully functional using clock technology. Clocks are much smaller, they’re much easier to work with at that scale, they require less energy and there were lots of standardized parts they could borrow from. In particular, escapement clocks, which were the dominant technology until not that long ago, have an important role in science writ large and in computing specifically.

Clocks were one of the first sophisticated technologies that had wide distribution in the 18th century. The escapement clock, clocks with a pendulum with a little gear and a little thing that goes click, clock, click, clock, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Technology that were novel, they were often packaged in ways that made them in effect a luxury item, something that the rich would have. But very quickly they became common and they allowed industrialization, for example, by setting times when a factory would be open.

You don’t need a clock if you’re running a farm necessarily. There might be a few things where knowing an hour or knowing a minute is useful. But for the most part, you’re following natural rhythms of the day and those natural rhythms have a very wide margin of error. You can miss them by 15 minutes, 20 minutes and you will be just fine.

If you’re setting up a factory, if you’re bringing people together to work together, to collaborate together, and if in particular you’re dividing a task up into a linear process, which was one of the very first things that happened. Adam Smith writes about making pins and needles. In particular it’s a process of cutting the wire, sharpening the wire, putting a head on it for a pin, putting it in the paper that you’re going to sell it with and moving it on. It’s a linear thing. You have to do one step before the other.

And if you’re dividing it up across different people, it means you have to have people for all the steps. That means they all have to be there at the same time. You really needed clocks to be able to do that. Scientifically, it made a lot of measurements more interesting, in particularly the measurements of location. You needed that to determine longitude. You needed that to determine location on the earth.

Because of that, it became an important technology for disseminating ideas, for bringing them to people who became fixated with clocks with how they worked, of how they could improve them, of what they could do with them, of clockwork mechanisms that became part of other technologies. In computing, the clock, the tick-tock of the escapement ratchet, became part of computing because it became a drumbeat that stepped through the basic mechanisms of calculating devices. As you would go, you just wouldn’t let your machine run wild.

You would have a device that was going tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, that was controlling the other elements, the other parts. That allowed them to think about machines that could do calculations in a systematic orderly way. It gave them a method to control them. But more importantly, it gave them a technology to build off, to think about.

To say, “Okay, we know this works for doing time. How does it work for collecting data? How does it work for timing additions? What can we do with it?” These clockworks and clock mechanisms are deeply imbued in industrialization, deeply part of calculation, and part of the tools that people used to think about how to build the next generation of devices and how to use them.

Chapter 2: The power of standardization

Standards are a key part of the industrial world. Building things to standard models, standard parts, goes almost all the way back to 1776. The one that we usually point to is the Remington factory in Connecticut and the tools that they used to build standard firearms.

But the real standardization process, the one that has created the modern age, is much newer than that and has a much broader scope that involves the mathematics of calculation, that involves data much more profoundly, and in turn influenced how we calculate and how we work with data. The fundamental goal of all of this is reducing cost, reducing effort, and also transferring ideas to the least well-trained individuals.

If you’re going to make large-scale data processing work, you need to have people involved who are not as educated as yourself, who can deal with a part of it, who can follow instructions. If you look at the original calculations done for nautical almanacs in the late 18th century, the 1780s and 1790s, they are done by individuals who would lay them out on a piece of a paper, each used their own method, each had little tricks for identifying things, for remembering the exact calculations they were doing. There would be a collection of additions and subtractions, a few multiplications, and if you could at all avoid it, no long divisions.

There is a collection of them that belonged to one of the human computers, as they were called, that worked for the British nautical almanac who lived in the United States, and he would do his work here and send them across via a boat to London, where they would be incorporated in the nautical almanac. He had his own way, and he also had a rather cramped hand. He could not write on a straight line. If you go over his materials, you have to be very careful to make sure you’re on the right line of the calculation, and you haven’t jumped to the wrong one. He could make that work, and he was quite successful at it.

Not everyone could decode that writing. By the start of the 20th century, you see people doing it on graph paper with little squares so that all the rows line up. You start seeing people identifying the operations line by line by line, particularly in the mid-19th century in England when they were doing title recordings. We did those here as well, but they were ahead of us in systematizing them. We did that a little bit later in the 1870s for weather.

Standardization as a scientific necessity

Weather requires lots of data, because if you look at the weather channel, if you look at your phone and watch the clouds move across, there are clouds that will hit one part of our metropolitan area that will miss other parts, and they won’t be that different, that far apart. So there’s a lot of data you have to have to be able to get accurate weather forecasts beyond just the broad statement that it might get this hot for this metropolitan area on this day. When we set up a network to start doing that, we had people collecting data. There was more data to collect. It was a little more subtle about how you get rainfall and precipitation and humidity and required a certain amount of arithmetic.

It required that you be able to work with people who had not gone to college, because you weren’t going to get enough of them if you restricted yourself to just college graduates. That forced the weather people and scientists as a whole to ask about standardization. How do we follow the industrial patterns and move things into ways that are always done the same way, that always use the same methods, that always produce the same results, and that anyone can interpret?

In terms of the modern sense of standardization, I really pin it on World War I more than anything, and if you wanted one individual who was more responsible for it than any other, who was a major leader, it’s Herbert Hoover. Hoover was an engineer. He was a mining engineer, which means the big thing he’s building is tunnels and walls and things to hold up tunnels and concentration plants, which are basically pools and other big things. But he also grasped that engineering methods could be applied to other products if there was a standardization.

He worked in an era when things that we take for granted, like bolts, you know, you have a nut, you have a bolt, you put them together and you can screw them, and they work because they’re the same, were not standardized. You buy them from one manufacturer, they’re not going to fit from another one. He argued that there were a large number of things that if they were produced to standard forms, would increase the scale of our industrial processes, would allow us to make more products for more people at lower costs, and expand our ability to do things.

That led to a variety of institutions, the National Institute of Standards, then called the National Bureau of Standards, being one of them. Private standard organizations, my former organization, the IEEE, the Institute for Electrical Electronic Engineers, has a big standards group that deals with electrical standards. There is the American National Standards Institute, which deals with a lot of other standards, including a lot of standards involving computers.

If you have everyone going off and doing their own thing, that can be very good, because it means you’re exploring and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. But at some point, you’ve got to start focusing on production, at least for certain problems. In those cases, you need standards. As the computing age built, they more and more started looking at standard ways of doing calculation, standard ways of expressing algorithms, standard languages for expressing programs.

All of these became a key part of computing that would have been a lot more expensive and a lot slower if it hadn’t had the standards there. In our modern age, one of the things that companies do, that individuals do, is ask, “How can I use these to solve my problem? How can I build and extend and expand them?” So at this point, it’s so deeply connected with computing that there’s very little you can do without understanding them.

Standardizing education

At the start of the 19th century, they were at best vaguely understood and vaguely used. We live in a standardized world and we live in an industrialized world, and we industrialize lots of things. One of these things that we do, we produce at large scale and low cost, is education. Prior to the early part of the 20th century, really in the late 19th century, there were some efforts, but education was entirely a local affair in the United States.

It was something that a lot of people weighed in and provided books and sample curriculum. There were publishers primarily in New York that did textbooks that were commonly used, readers, for example, that helped kids grow up. But if you think about it, that outside places where there was large and easy transportation of children, in an age before there were school buses and paved roads often, classroom was one room teaching.

It was a group of kids together with one teacher who was there for a short time and did the best they could and moved on. 20th century starts to move that forward. It does go back into the 19th. But Carnegie’s work really comes in the 20th and it’s largely dealing with higher ed, with colleges.

Carnegie’s work really comes in the 20th and it’s largely dealing with higher education, with colleges. I suppose technically he’s Carnegie, the founder of what becomes U.S. Steel. In colleges, we have a standard amount of education that will get you a bachelor’s degree. One hundred twenty hours for a bachelor of arts, one hundred forty-six hours of instruction for a bachelor of science. You take a certain number of classes, the classes have to have a certain distribution, and they have to meet for so long.

These standards were developed out of work done by the Carnegie Institution. He funded studies of a wide variety of subjects that asked what’s the best way to teach them. The most famous is the 1910 study of medical education, the Flexner Report. The Flexner Report went and looked at how medicine was being taught to doctors, what kind of things were being taught, what were the different practices, and what were the best practices. It asked how we can produce the greatest number of doctors with uniform education at the least cost.

In the middle of that report is a line that refers to how we must devote our education in medicine to people who can devote their entire careers to medicine. A lot of deans flagged about it at universities and said, “Oh good, we don’t have to worry about women anymore because women take time off, women have families, women have other duties.” Prior to that, there were roles for women in medicine. They dealt with babies, pregnant women, and dying old people.

They were part of the medical community and the Flexner Report shoved them out the door. If you go to the early age of the suffragette movement in the United States, the women who picketed the White House, the women who wore the yellow sash, the women who lobbied state governments for the vote, they were overwhelmingly the daughters of doctors. They had time, they had money, and they had a grudge because they weren’t going to get a position in the medical community, perhaps other than being a nurse.

What happened after the Flexner Report wanders away from standards for a moment and back to computing. The sciences looked at women who had been studying medicine and largely said, “You’re nice people, please go away.” Chemistry said, “We can’t have women study chemistry. It will hurt their ability to have children and probably hurt the men’s ability to have children too.” Biology was not the field that we know today, nor was physics.

Mathematics, being somewhat desperate for enrollments then as now, said, “Women will take them. They can always be high school teachers.” In an instant, the teaching of high school mathematics becomes feminized. Women see an opportunity and they grab it. They also grabbed jobs in calculation and other things because medical education was being standardized.

This applied to other forms of education as well. It produced a standard form of a university that we in the United States understand and know how it works. The roots of those standards were in a series of reports that the Carnegie Institution put together in the early part of the 20th century. There was a time when the college course credit was called the Carnegie credit. That has largely passed from memory.

There were institutions that said, “We will become richer. We will be more productive. We can give more to more people if we do it in standard ways.” Carnegie was important, Hoover was important, but a lot of other organizations were as well. Computing benefited from this because without standardization, it scribbles on a page. With a standardized sense, you can start getting people to do it who are not trained in it and who do not have the education that the directors of the project have. That greatly increased the power and the use of computational methods.

Chapter 3: Computing the human experience

Right now, where we’re sitting in Washington is the old patent office. Back in the 1850s, that was the place the first telegraph was connected in the United States. It was from here up to Baltimore. The first message that went across it was the famous “What hath God wrought?” It was just people who were madly in love with technology, going, “My God, we can talk to Baltimore, and it’s like it’s right there, not whatever it is, 25 or 30 miles up the road.”

We don’t remember the second question. The second message was, “What time is it there?” Because at that point, every city had a local time that was measured by when the sun was directly overhead at noon. Baltimore is about seven and a half minutes ahead of Washington. One of the things that it told the scientists who were in the room, and it was a political group, but there were also a number of senior U.S. scientists at the time, was that you could collect a lot of data about where things were by measuring time differences.

They immediately set up a process, and this again points to the industrial connection. A process for determining differences in time between cities that could be done by people who basically were just following instructions and really didn’t know what they were doing beyond counting clicks on a clock. They could sit there and they could ping messages back and forth. They did not use the word ping, I should say, at that point. But send clicks back and forth, count clock motions, and at the end of the day, they would write that down.

That piece of data would tell you the difference in time. That was used very quickly to collect lots of data about time differences all over the East Coast and very quickly over the United States. Again, it had to be systematized and organized to figure out how it worked and what were the differences, and how could that be used for commercial reasons.

The big one that started to come was, of course, railroad trains. Because most places in the United States in the 19th century, you had one track between here and Baltimore, or one track from Baltimore to Philly, and you had trains running both directions. And if they came together, that was bad. They had places to pull out, but how do you know someone’s past you? How do you know if you’re reading the time schedule right?

Getting a unified time, which was in place by the late 19th century, helped eliminate a large number of train wrecks and delayed trains and other things that disrupted production, that disrupted the transportation of goods and services. So all of these things are deeply, deeply imbued in computing, and computing is so tied with the issues of production, of getting things done quickly, easily, systematically, and of capturing human experience.

Expanding data to the human experience

In the early days, the human experience was largely capturing natural experience. What’s the time difference? Where’s the locale? When does the sunrise here? When does it set there? But by the end of the 19th century, they’re starting to look and capture human data, human activity, the kind of things that people did and worked and behaved so that they could use that for making policy decisions, for making marketing decisions, for deciding how much to produce.

That became the interesting thing. Again, as just you went from doing one comet to doing nautical almanacs to doing mapping the sky and to mapping the earth, this was another big jump in the amount of data collected.

Automating the census

The census was done every ten years, it’s in the Constitution, and for the first hundred years or so, it was largely an office that appeared every ten years. They hired a bunch of people and told them to run around and count, and then they got all the stuff back in Washington, tabulated it up into how many people were in each city and each state, and published it, and it was straightforward and fairly easy.

By the 1840s, they’re starting to ask questions, how many people live in your household, how many men, how many women, how many children. They began looking at issues of public health, of disease, of general healthiness. Landowners, what kind of work people did, their ethnic background, certainly a slavery built, the problem over slavery, built in the 1850s, that became an issue.

That meant we were collecting more and more data, and the censuses took longer and longer to do, and by the 1870 census, that takes most of a decade to complete. The 1880 census is never really finished. It still isn’t really finished to this day, there are publications, but there’s data out there that we haven’t officially worked with.

As 1890 began to approach, the head of the census said, “We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to systematize it. We have to industrialize it. We have to reduce the cost.”

He put out a request for someone who could build machines that could count people. The process that came out that won the contract formed a company that was known then as the Hollerith Tabulating Company, becomes something we all know a little better, IBM. They proposed one that would send people out to the field, not with a pad of paper and something to write things down, but with a punched card and a little machine that she would punch holes in it with.

Those cards could be taken back and they could be put on a machine, and the machine would count up how many women, how many men, how many people over 45, how many people living in this city. And it sped the process so greatly that by 1893, the preliminary census was completed, and it was being widely advertised and widely used.

1893, there was a big world’s fair in Chicago, and the results and the machinery that produced those results were on display and of central exhibit at that fair. People were talking about the results in particular.

At that fair, there was a historian who got up and said, “By reading the recent census reports, I can conclude that we no longer have a frontier. America is a settled country.” And that produced a change in perception of ourselves, and that we only reached it because we were able to handle that scale of data.

They were, as is so commonly the case, in love with their machines. They were very proud of them. They were very proud of what they could do, of the results that they could obtain, and the speed with which they were able to tabulate the population of the United States, to the point where they started falling in love with the punched cards.

There is an assistant director of the census who wrote this stunning document about how he could hold up a card and he could see the person in the card. Now, I have no doubt that people got used to them enough and said, “Yep, that’s the manhole, that’s the womanhole, that’s the kidhole. I can quickly scan and guess what kind of person this is.”

But it went beyond that. It was an enthusiasm, as I said, that’s common with new technology, that he would hold it up and he felt that when he was putting it through the tabulator, he was working out the future of that person. And the bell which indicated that the card had been processed was the bell calling that soul to judgment of heaven or hell.

It’s sweet and it’s endearing, and it also shows how as we start approaching our life through data, through the large processing of data, we start seeing ourselves in new ways and we start seeing something that we couldn’t see before. We couldn’t see before, we get a hope, an intuition, and that that intuition provokes an imagination and a love that we didn’t have before.

Now, that often comes crashing down, but nonetheless, there was a time of falling in love with large-scale processing that came from seeing ourselves in new ways that were driven by data.

Chapter 4: How computers change us

How long have we been going? I’m a professor, I can talk for hours.

In the 1940s, there was again a lot of computation that was needed for the war, in particular bombing, hitting things, and specifically shooting down aircraft. Shooting down aircraft is basically like duck hunting. The hunter must search his lead and aim ahead of the duck, if he is to hit it.

You want to get up there, you want something to explode near the aircraft, and if it explodes near the aircraft, you get a hit. Unlike duck hunting, you don’t set your dog after it, but the effect is quite similar. But because of the great altitude and speed of a bomber, the anti-aircraft gunner cannot rely on dead reckoning. His leading must be a careful mathematical calculation. That’s a hard mathematical problem, because you’ve got a moving aircraft, you’ve got a gun that is probably moving on a ship, or if it’s on fixed land, it’s swinging, it’s moving back and forth.

You’re computing part of an arc, which makes it harder. They had methods from the First World War where they could estimate what the whole curve looked like, but they were hitting something on the ground or a ship that was fixed. That was easier. Shooting things down out of the air is tough, and getting where you want your shell to explode is tough.

What was then the Army Air Corps invested a lot of money in figuring out how to do that, and in particular at the University of Pennsylvania. They employed a couple of machines that had been built there to simplify it and just produce reams and reams and reams of data that were taken to another site and reduced into instructions that you could give to pilots, to gunners, and other soldiers.

From ENIAC to ARPANET

The group in Philadelphia, in working with their machine, which was what we now call an analog machine, used amplifiers and tubes to draw an arc that could have been drawn on a screen. It was usually drawn on a piece of paper. One of their numbers realized that you could do it more generally by doing the actual calculations. You could draw the curve by stepping along the line, and from that you could do more than just do the curve for a shell.

There are other problems that you could solve with it. They pitched this to the Army and set up a process to build this machine, and this is a key moment in American computing history. This machine, which would get the name E-NIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was a very direct precursor of the modern computer, and it operated in a substantially different way. Nonetheless a very large number, the first generation of computer engineers, got their training on that machine. By first generation, I mean really the next eight to ten years.

In doing that, one of the leaders was a mathematician from the University of Michigan, Herman Goldstein, and he, one of the train stations around Philly, noticed a scientist that he knew from Princeton named John Von Neumann. Von Neumann was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is an institution of higher ed that has no students, takes no tuition, gets famous people to come and just think. Einstein was one of the people there. He went up and introduced himself, said he was working on calculations, and Von Neumann said he was very interested. Could he come and look?

Von Neumann was a mathematician very skilled, could very quickly grasp ideas. He had been interested in calculation for a long, long time, and had studied some of the computing groups, particularly the one in London, those doing the Nautical Almanac. With the leader of that group, the two of them had sat down and worked out things that were really the precursor of what a program would look like. What did it mean to program a device? What did you systematize calculation to a set of instructions that would always be performed the same way?

Von Neumann goes to visit the ENIAC, which is at the University of Pennsylvania, and gets very excited about it and starts thinking about how to expand it and develop it. He wrote a report that has since remained the controversial beginning of the computing age, because it defined what a modern computer was, and it left off the names of all the people who had been working on the ENIAC. Von Neumann abstracted what had been done there. It dawned on him that the machine that they were really trying to build, not the one that they were building, but the one that had the most flexibility and the most ability to do things, had three elements.

It had a place where you could store numbers, a scratch pad, if you will, memory that we now know it. It would have a processing unit. Didn’t describe what that processing unit did. At the time, it was generally assumed that it did addition, but it could do other things. It could do the other arithmetic operations, or it could do other operations still.

There was a third element in it, and that was a program decoder. That is to say, something that would read signals from the memory, figure out what those signals meant, and send them either back to the memory or send them to the processing device to do some activity. These three elements in multiple forms are part of every single computer we have today. Some do arithmetic, but not all of them. Some of them do just various forms of symbol processing. Some do a variety of other things, but having an instruction decoder, a memory, and a processor is part of everything.

The key piece of research that laid the foundation for the Internet was the work on ARPANET. There’s a lot of work out there that’s done, but the first systematic network that was built using the principles of sharing lines, of splitting them up, was indeed the ARPANET. The people who worked on that then turned around and eventually worked on the Internet. The ideas that they work are clearly the Internet builds on the ideas that they put together for the ARPANET.

It connected a group of computer research sites that were at primarily major universities. It was funded by the Department of Defense. One of the things that that department wanted to do was to build computer science into a recognizable discipline. At the time, it was not. There were very few places you could study it. If a few you could, you were considered to be studying a form of electrical engineering.

My early study of it, which was from that period a little bit later, I studied mathematics because I couldn’t study it. I had a father who was in computing, which gave me access to lots of stuff to learn it, but I still couldn’t study it. Their goal was to build a community. In that goal, a whole lot of other things came out that were unspoken or sometimes very actively spoken about what communication should do.

When computing became personal

The first was that there was always going to be a human-to-human element. Email was not the first application. It was probably the third. People figured out all sorts of ways to do it on the fly before they got a good system that worked. In fact, that was a very important early standard, that they built a system that putting a file with a message in it, it would get to the right place without you having to intervene. That took a couple years, but it got there and it was working.

The second part that they grasped and articulated was that it was not only person-to-person, but that there would be repositories. There would be collections of information that anyone could go and get. They would be called libraries, they would be called servers, they weren’t quite sure. They would be organized in various ways, but they would involve searching and looking for things. That concept of searching is crucial and we have entirely forgotten that it is.

It’s one thing to have access to everything and everybody. It’s another thing to find the person you want and get that little bit of information that you’re hoping to use. Searching was an early computer problem. If you look at the early algorithms from the late 40s, you see lots written on efficient ways to do multiplication and clever ways of doing long division. Every now and then a little thing will bubble up and say, “Oh, if you wanted to search through a bunch of records, this is how you would do it.”

There are papers, I think you can find one from ’49, but you really don’t start seeing that kind of question until the early 50s. It very soon becomes a major issue of how you do it and how you do it well. If you’re searching for names, you know that that name is a part of a record. That’s easy. If you’re trying to search on qualities, that’s harder.

A group of Stanford graduate students in the early 60s had this great idea, which we all have borne the burden of. Wouldn’t it be great to put people’s qualities into a database and have it search through them and match the couples that are most alike? It was an early form of computerized dating. They had a party, they ran the program, they distributed the outcome to everyone who was there, including couples who had been dating. I believe there were some there who were even married. Needless to say, the walk home that night was not as much fun as they hoped it had been.

They were excited by the process. The thing energized them incredibly. But there are people that said, “What do you mean I don’t match with this person? I match with that one. What do you mean that I’m closest to these qualities rather than those qualities?”

I mentioned about the Hermann Hallruth machines, where people got very, very excited about the cards and saying they could see human beings in them, see histories in them, see their future in them. That comes up in the literature again and again, each time a new technology comes that allows us to see ourselves, our activities, our data in new ways.

The PC was that very much in the 70s. People saw this as a personal device, something that I would use in a way that we have forgotten was novel. The idea that you had a computer that was solely yours, that you could use it and have complete control of it, was quite new in the 70s. People had been able to work one-on-one with computers before. That’s not anything special. But it’s special that it was yours, that you could make it. You see it in customizing computers and putting stickers on them.

We still go on with wallpaper and other things that make it ours, that make it the reflection of us, that show our ideas are important, that our work and that our activities are positive, and that they can be reflected back to us by our machine.

Adapting to algorithmic life

But in working with systems, the fundamental rule is we adjust ourselves. We adjust our thoughts. We adjust the way we work.

That process involves us adapting our thought and our habits and the way we look at the world to the way those systems are designed. We talk about how we go shopping, about how we interact with various things. These are our actions to systems that are built on algorithms and other processes that have helped discipline us. You see that in everything you do, the way we use our phones.

We didn’t carry phones with us 25 years ago. We went from phone to phone, from office to home. In the process, we learned to pay attention to it, to use it in different ways, to get certain information and put information into it in different ways. We now look at it for advice on how we get home. If we’re commuting by car or by bicycle, where’s the busy traffic? What do we do? What do we avoid?

That was an algorithm that was once considered one of the great advances of artificial intelligence. There’s an important strain of AI that is building large databases and searching through them. The search that does it most effectively for that kind of work is called A* search, and that’s what we use on our phones to find the fastest way home. Where’s the traffic? What can we avoid?

In doing that, we look at it and we know how we give credence to that, whether we go on the roads marked red, because that’s the straight way and we don’t want to be bothered. Or whether we avoid it because we just loathe sitting in traffic and we want to keep the car moving. We adjust how we think and we adjust how we develop that strategy as we begin to see how effective it is.

Does it just make sense to go through the big traffic? Are there better things to do? That’s a simple example, but in everything we do, everything we deal with a computer, we’re fundamentally asking three questions. Are we getting what we want out of it? If we’re getting what we want, we’re likely to repeat it.

If we’re not, we’re likely to modify what we do and try something different. Is it taking too much effort? If it’s taking too much effort, we’re looking for a way to do it more cheaply, more quickly, more easily. The last one is, is it irritating me? That’s part of the cost, perhaps.

But it seems to be a slightly different thing of how does it make me feel about what I’m doing? Will I change my tactics because the way it’s presenting information or the advice that it’s giving or the response that it’s making, something that I’d rather not face and I will go on and do something else. Those are the key parts of our working with the machine.

Our goals are always, do we get something that makes it better for us? Do we improve our position, where we are amongst our friends and family? Do we see that expand and able to engage more people, would engage with them more fully, or do things that we couldn’t do before?

That’s the second part, our function, what we do. Again, we tend to do computers to either get something more done or do what we ordinarily do, but cheaper, with less effort on our part. The big one that has really been the combination of AI and all the social networking has been status, which is how do people view us? How do they think about us? How do they listen to us? Some people may think about computers and say, “Does this computer honor my status? Does it give me more status?” But in fact, it’s how we appear to our neighbors. How do we appear to our family?

So much of our response to computers at base is connected to how we respond to our family, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our community, to our office, to the people who drive next to us. We change our response to it, in effect, so that we are doing things better, doing them cheaper, and our goals tend to be in that social grouping. Does it increase our status? Does it improve our function? What we do? Does it give us a new position in this world? I’m not particularly frightened or concerned about it, other than I know that it is part of adjusting our thought to the machine.

At some level, it is our adjustment that is saying, “Well, I will accept this,” what the machine is saying, what the machine is doing, because I can view it as a reflection of myself, as a reflection of a being.

Chapter 5: When machines replace humans

The connection between human computers and the machine computers is complex, because it’s involving the division of labor. The modern computer divides three actions out, gives them each a device. Storing numbers. Well, storing numbers is something people are not particularly good at. We forget them very easily. There was a time that my hand would automatically type out my parents’ phone number or my sisters. I have no idea what any of my friends’ phone numbers are anymore, because we don’t do them, and we forget them, and that’s that.

The second part is remembering instructions. We are better at that, but again, it involves a memory which we’re not good at. But the interpretation, we tend to spin things that make life easy for us, or simpler for us, or more harmonious for us. The last piece is doing the task. In working with the human computers as the process moved forward, increasingly, that’s the piece that humans were reduced to, doing the task.

There’s a photograph that’s in my first book that is, I’m convinced that it’s going to be what I am known for in the rest of my days, that shows a room in New York with 450 people in it lined up in thin, little desks back and forth, all having a piece of paper in front of them, all of them having a pen, all of them doing addition, after addition, after addition. This room in New York City was the main office of a group known as the Math Tables Project. It was the largest collection of human computers, to my knowledge, that has ever been assembled on the face of the earth, and for its time, the most powerful computing organization in the world.

It was a work progress administration project. In 1937, the depression, which at that point had been going on for not quite a decade, tightened up again. It was often called the Roosevelt Recession. The federal government was looking for ways to put urban workers back to work, particularly New York City, which had an unemployment rate higher than most everywhere else in the country. Particularly, they were looking for jobs that were like construction jobs, but inside.

The Institute for Advanced Study proposed that they build a computing lab, and that computing lab would be a group of people doing calculations for projects that could benefit by having highly accurate mathematical calculations done for them. They would take jobs from scientists, they would take jobs from government offices, they would do some work on their own doing, and this would be of value. But it’s a work progress administration task. It means to say that they are recruiting from the unemployed, and by 1937, they were the long-term unemployed.

Largely, they were store clerks, some of them office clerks. They had some knowledge of addition, but they were not particularly well-skilled, and the WPA was the last hope. These were people who could not feed their family any other way. In taking these jobs, they did so reluctantly, they knew it was repetitive, but they knew it would feed their families. They were from the Bronx, they were from Harlem, they were from the poor parts of town.

At the same time, all of them had some at least high school education. For the bulk of them, they felt the sting two ways. The WPA gave them work, but also required them to look for work. They’re, “Hi, we’re here, we’re glad to have you there. You have to be going, you have to be looking for something else.”

Second, that problem of babbage, that people doing the same task the same way will always get the same results, will always make the same errors, too. Hung heavily on them, and they wanted to be known because of the reputation of the WPA as being a group that produced error-free calculations. They put together a process that ultimately, in terms of equivalent labor, meant that each number was calculated six or seven times, never the same way, never identically.

Most of the effort was involved in creating a group of numbers, then taking them apart and trying to figure out how they worked. They stretched to find any place that their work was used and accepted, particularly as the war came. Whenever they figured out a connection between their work and a military operation, they would promote it heavily.

Coming up to D-Day, roughly eight months before, in September of ’43, they were given a series of calculations to do that were equivalent to putting down a map, throwing coins on the map, pennies, and counting where the coins lay. They did the experiment sometimes, and then they developed a mathematical calculation from it. One of the people looked at the map that they had put on the floor to throw it and recognized it as part of Normandy, France, and speculated that they were preparing something for the invasion of Europe.

They were trying to figure out how to clear the beaches of mines by dropping bombs. The idea was to drop enough bombs so they’d explode the mines without blowing too much of the sand away. They worked through the problem. It’s tough computationally. It was well beyond some of the mathematical analysis at the time.

They were immensely proud of it, even though in terms of looking at how the D-Day planners used that information, they ultimately concluded that rather than try to bomb the mines off the beach, they would try to avoid the beaches with mines. How much they used it directly for planning is not clear, but they loved it, and they loved that connection.

They did things for radar and radar calculations for the work against U-boats in the North Sea. The big one which they did not grasp, and it’s part of their files, was calculations that involving the collapse of a sphere, of having an explosion crush a sphere into a smaller sphere. The request is in their files. It has a big statement. You cannot share this. We will not explain what it is. We will not explain what it’s for. We will not tell you what the units are or what’s going on.

Crushing a sphere, that’s what you do to get an atomic plutonium bomb to go off. It was part of the work to check the calculations at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project. When they found it out again, this was something of great pride to them. At the same time, doing it made them feel like a part of a machine.

They had trouble with labor unions, with strikes, with the typical things you have, with large labor activity, and the feeling that they were barely above a machine. When the place was demobilized, some of them were brought in and asked to take computing organizations for other groups. The bulk of them chose to be high school mathematics teachers, because they had learned enough mathematics that they could handle that and there they were dealing with kids and people. It was work for the poor, and that really is the ultimate form of that human computing.

The first data ownership fight

Prior to that, it had always been surplus labor. People who had the skills and had some trouble finding work, but they were part of the process. When you get to that last group in New York City, they’re laborers, and it’s very clear they’re laborers.

The substitution of machinery for labor is a huge part of the story of computation. There are two principal motivations for it. One, reducing activities that we thought required human intelligence to mechanization, to something that can be repeated again and again and again very quickly. That’s only part of it.

The second part is systemization. You can put it in part of a larger system that is processing information that’s doing things, that’s making decisions and working on a bigger set of problems. In all of these, you’re in effect trying to replace expensive labor with cheaper labor.

Replace labor that is less predictable, whether by labor unions or just wanting to add their own ideas, or not understanding what’s going on, with something that will do the same thing again and again and again. That transition is always hard because there is a cohort that feels quite angry and quite misused at what’s going on.

My favorite example is in the 1950s, as the American economy is growing to, in many ways, provide the same level of production for consumer goods as we did for military goods in World War II. One of the new devices that’s coming into manufacturing are automated machine tools, controlled machine tools. The ones that we see in the ’50s are things that are mimicking, that are following the motions of skilled machinists.

After a part has been produced using a combination of manual and electric control, the tape is played back for automatically producing successive parts. The tape programs the machine’s operations. The use of record playback control in this operation is expected to double production.

You would take one of these automated tools and you’d have someone machine a part or create something. The machine tool would record that and then duplicate it, replicate the process of doing it, so it would be behaving like the skilled machinist. Skilled machinist jobs were a higher level of factory work than, for example, assembly-like work in the auto industry.

In assembly line work, you are part of the machine. Henry Ford made that very, very clear in his writings. The machine is the line and you are part of the machine and you don’t, because you’re a part, interfere with the operation of the whole. Machinists were different.

During the ’50s, as they start seeing these tools come up, they protest. It leads to one of the key fights that we are having today about who owns data. The argument that the large manufacturers had is we build the factories. We created the factories. You would not have your skills if you didn’t work in our factories.

You have no place to learn them, no place to use them. Therefore, your skills are something that we can copy and we can transfer to an automated machine tool. The workers obviously saw it from a very different point of view. We learned these skills. These are ours.

We have added our own identity to those skills and you can’t have them. In the American labor movement, if the early ’50s represents a high watermark of its control over activities, this is part of the first chink in the armor. This is part of the first attack on it.

Who owns the skills of factory workers? That fight, in many ways, was resolved by the second or third, or maybe even fourth generation of machine tools, because by the ’70s, they’re not mimicking skilled machinists. They are putting together motions and activities and machining steps from computer-aided design files that are produced by computer.

For the most part, mimicking skilled machinists is no longer an issue in the labor movement, not the way it certainly was then. But that process, that same controversy, continues with the collection of data for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence algorithms, as we view them right now, rely on data.

They rely on trying to capture something of human behavior, human thoughts, human activities, and put those activities, forms and thoughts, in some form that it can store and recover, and furthermore, reason from or process from. It’s not sticking with what it captured immediately. It’s asking, how can we extrapolate out?

How can we apply it to scenes we have not seen? How can we use it for situations that are novel? The question becomes, who owns the activities that are being captured by data? If it were a factory, you’d have that same fight that we had before.

Some large capitalized firm built the factory. You work in the factory, you could not do it without that, and so you’re stuck. But it’s no longer a factory. It’s no longer a place we go to.

It’s the social media. It’s where we buy stuff. It’s the systems we do our work with. Often the things being captured are not necessarily the primal activity going on. It’s some other action that we are doing with the system.

That fight now probes much deeper into our lives. It’s asking, who owns our basic activities? Who owns our right? Who owns the way that we use computers, how that we shop, that we communicate with our friends? Who can take that and use it in a way that replicates it? It’s not clear that this fight has been resolved yet. We have seen some early efforts at legislation in California, was trying to address it and pulled back from it.

But that still remains. What do we have that we own of ourselves, own of our actions, own of our thoughts? That aspect of factory work and factory labor, that contention over who owns the skills of the factory worker was the starting point for that discussion and remains the starting point, even though our concept of factory and data gathering has grown much, much bigger.

AI is not new

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we’re lumping a bunch of different technologies into one. We are looking from a very modern perspective at a process that’s been going on for close to 75 years. The programs of artificial intelligence have been bubbling around for years, and you have seen them come and go.

It has taken a certain amount of time to get the computing power to make them work at scale, to be able to build them with enough sophistication that they work across the board with many different people. That problem of providing a system that you don’t need to be an expert at it to be able to use it has been part of it a long time.

Part of the expansion that we see of artificial intelligence is just that. We’re building systems that allow more and more people to work with them. The technologist in me sits, there’s kind of a U-shaped narrative.

Something comes and it’s very exciting and you’re writing at the high end of the U, and then there’s a dip, and then there’s a recovery. The recovery is usually less than the starting point, but there is still a recovery. New ideas are always exciting and I always enjoyed engaging them, but in the course of my career I’ve seen time and again new ideas that work in a brief demo in a controlled environment. When you try to build them out to engage a large community of users, you get problems and you get problems that are seriously wrong.

The early translation programs from one language to another were at times very clever and very laughable. I don’t play this game anymore of translating something into another language and translating it back into English. The canonical one, which I was able to demonstrate during my graduate career, was taking the phrases, “Do you accept credit cards?” translating it into Polish, which I do not speak, and then translating that back to English and having the response be, “Do you play poker for money?”

It got some of those words right, and it was quite fun and humorous, but it illustrated the issue of making a system that’s not the basis of reliable communication. By contrast, I now use in my work translate programs all the time because I’m dealing with people in China, with people in France. For my group in Ireland, I even translate things into Irish just to be snarky about it. I know that that’s a regular system. I know to keep my sentences short. I know to keep direct verbs.

I know do not put large amounts of dependent clauses and modifying words because the modifying words will end up modifying different things. I know that, and it’s a system I work with. It’s not particularly exciting. It’s not as exciting as those first ones were, but it’s a tool I use and that I work with. My feeling is with artificial intelligence now, we have seen some of the first bloom of this generation. This generation really goes back to the ’90s.

The machine learning, the large-scale neural networks, the use of these things in generative systems where you are getting a sense of the whole landscape of human behavior. All those are very interesting and very exciting in what they can do. They fail enough that they are not reliable tools for me. I don’t make much use of them because I don’t want to trust what I am doing to potential mistakes that aren’t my fault.

If I’m going to pay for a mistake, it’s going to be mine. And thank you very much.

Okay. Now you take all this and you edit the sucker. You’re the editor?

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Mini Philosophy | Starts With A Bang | Big Think Books | Big Think Business

Levine argues that we generally underestimate the amount of influence we have on how our bodies age. Many assume their health outcomes are fixed by genetics, but biology tells a much different story. By understanding the mechanisms of aging, we can make meaningful lifestyle changes that could not only extend our lifespan, but also increase our healthspan.

Timestamps

0:00 The science of aging
2:14 How we measure age: Biological versus chronological
3:58 What aging looks like across species
4:45 Aging beneath the surface
5:55 Can we measure aging?
9:39 Slowing aging to extend health
13:33 How we measure age: Epigenetic
15:36 From molecular errors to systemic decline
19:48 Intervening in aging without over-optimizing
24:00 Is aging a disease?
26:31 How disease happens
29:39 The power of lifestyle
30:48 Can we reverse aging?
32:45 Reprogramming cells to a younger state
35:53 Why measuring age changes how we treat disease
40:15 How nutrition enables longevity
41:42 The science behind caloric restriction
44:40 What diet research really suggests
50:20 Living better, not just longer

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Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The science of aging

My name is Dr. Morgan Levine. I study the science of aging, and my book is called True Age. My interest in the science of aging started when I was quite young because my father was fairly old when I was born. He was in his mid-50s, and I became very aware of the aging process from a young age. At a time when most kids weren’t contemplating their parents’ disease risk and mortality, it was something I was always concerned about. When I went to college, I learned there was an entire scientific field focused on trying to understand the aging process and potentially even intervene in it. This discovery really drove me to work on the science of aging.

My current research focuses on trying to quantify or measure aging. Can we take all of the cellular and molecular changes that people have undergone and give them a sense of how they’re doing in terms of the aging process? Are they aging slower than we would expect, or faster than we would expect?

We all age, but we don’t all age at the same rate. My lab is interested in whether we can put a number to that, can we measure how fast or slow a given person might be aging. We think this is critical because it probably has implications for future disease risk, remaining life expectancy, and other aspects people care about in terms of their health.

I think a lot of people don’t realize how much power we actually have over our aging process. Many people assume their life expectancy or risk of diseases like cancer or heart disease is due to genetic or inevitable. But we have much more ability to modulate those risks, or at least the timing of when diseases might occur. By helping people understand the biology of aging and why it matters for disease, we think this can empower people to take meaningful steps to slow aging and increase what we call health span—their time of life expectancy free from disease.

How we measure age: Biological versus chronological

Most people think of age or aging in terms of chronological time. We all know how many years we’ve been alive, and we usually measure our aging in terms of that time—months, days, and years since we were born. We put a lot of emphasis and importance on this measure, but this isn’t the number that counts. The reason we’ve become so fixated on chronological age is because it’s tied to what we consider the biological aging process.

Over time, living systems like humans or any other organism degrade and become less functional. We think of this as the biological aging process. How are our cells functioning worse than they were before, and how have our bodies changed over time? The important thing is that, unlike chronological time, this process is potentially malleable.

We know this from looking at different species. You can compare a 10-year-old dog to a 10-year-old human, and clearly the rate at which their bodies have declined over that time is quite different. Even among humans, you can look at two people who are 50 years old chronologically, and they may not look the same in terms of overall health status or overall aging rate. So it becomes important to understand the biological aging process, how far we’ve each diverged over time, and what this might mean for our future health.

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What aging looks like across species

There’s a debate in the field about whether aging is universal and whether every organism actually ages. Most scientists think aging is a universal feature of living systems, and that living systems inherently change and decline over time. But some organisms do this at such a slow rate—what we call negligible senescence—that we can’t observe aging in those systems.

To tell how fast different organisms are aging, we look at what we call survival curves. Do we see an increased risk of mortality in a population as a function of time? We think of that as the overall rate at which a species, animal, or plant is aging.

Aging beneath the surface

When we think of changes associated with old age, we think of functional changes—things we can see in ourselves and in the people around us. This includes how fast you can run or walk, your ability to go upstairs, or how much energy you have. We also think about wrinkles, graying or loss of hair, and the diseases that manifest with aging. But these aren’t where aging starts. These are the emergence or manifestations of aging.

We think aging starts at a much lower level, at the molecular and cellular level. If I ask someone how old they are, their immediate response is usually the number of candles they blew out on their last birthday, or the number on their driver’s license or passport. That number doesn’t hold much meaning except that it happens to be correlated with biological aging, which is what we really care about.

Can we measure aging?

Biological age refers to the degree to which your biology has changed over a given amount of time. We think these changes are maladaptive and lead to more dysfunction, more decline, and ultimately more disease. A major focus in the science of aging is being able to quantify or estimate this process—whether we can measure biological age.

There are three major advantages to quantifying aging. The first is understanding the science of aging—why systems age, what leads to it, and how to intervene. The second is that it provides an endpoint for clinical trials or other research that is trying to intervene in the aging process, to determine whether those interventions are successful. The third, which most people care about the most, is that it gives individuals an understanding of their overall health and is important for risk stratification.

Risk stratification means understanding who may be more at risk of developing age-related diseases. From there, people can work with a physician or reassess lifestyle and behavioral factors to see whether they can slow that process and monitor it in real time. There isn’t one right way to do this, and different types of data can be used.

Some approaches use functional abilities or the number of diagnosed diseases as indices of how much someone has changed over time. Another concept is what we call phenotypic age, which reflects changes at a physiological level. These are measures you typically get during an annual doctor’s visit through a blood draw. These measures capture organ function, including liver and kidney function, metabolic health, lipids, and to some degree inflammation and immune profiles.

When we put these together, we can generate an overall number that shows on a holistic phenotypic level, compared to other people their age. This gives us an idea of how different organ systems are working together to produce overall health. There are also more specific ways to measure aging at the molecular or cellular level, where we diving into on variables that may represent where aging actually be starting.

We think these measures are important because they capture physiological changes that precede the dysfunction seen arising in disease. We think it’s predictive of future risk of disease and it’s close enough to disease that it’s actually going to tell you how you’re doing.

On average, we expect people to gain one year of phenotypic age for every year of chronological age. If you measured yourself every year on your birthday, you’d expect it to increase by one year every year. Ideally, though, phenotypic age would increase more slowly than chronological age, which we think of as a deceleration or a slowing of the aging process.

Slowing aging to extend health

There’s no right or wrong age to start measuring phenotypic age, we always say it’s never too late. Some people think they’re already too old or already have a disease, so it may not be worth it. But we find there’s still a lot of malleability in phenotypic aging throughout the entire lifespan.

People of any age can monitor this, and you’re are already getting these measures during your annual doctor visits. It’s relatively easy to input these values into an algorithm to generate an additional variable beyond what doctors usually look at. Typically, doctors focus on whether biomarkers are in an abnormal or high-risk range, but there’s a whole spectrum on how your physiology is behaving. Even if you haven’t crossed a high-risk threshold, it’s valuable to know whether you’re closer to it than expected for your age or how quickly you’re approaching it. This can give you additional information beyond traditional risk measures.

Because of how phenotypic age and other biological age measures were derived, the average person will have a biological age that matches their chronological age.

In a population, you’d expect a normal distribution, with most people are predicted around the same phenotypic age as they are chronologically. But we know there’s also spread on either side. For instance when we look at the U.S. population, the standard deviation is about five years. While there are extreme outliers who appear 10 or even 20 years older or younger than expected, most people fall within plus or minus five years of their chronological age.

If you’ve already had an annual blood test, you can likely calculate your phenotypic age for free. Online calculators list the nine biomarkers needed, which are publicly available. You can input values from recent lab tests and receive a phenotypic age estimate for you. So if you get regular physicals, this is something you can already do. If not, you can visit a physician or a lab offering blood-based tests for relatively little cost. Over time, you can modify behaviors and see whether those changes are reflected in your biological age year to year.

Aging is the biggest risk factor for most diseases people worry about, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Scientists think that instead of treating each disease individually, if we slow the rate of aging and physiological decline could prevent or lessen the impact of many diseases. The isn’t just giving people a longer life, but a healthier and more functional one for as long as possible.

How we measure age: Epigenetic

People in the field have come up with what we might call hallmarks of aging. One of these hallmarks that my lab in particular is very interested in is this concept of epigenetics. Epigenetics might not be a term that everyone’s familiar with. We all know genetics, our sequence of DNA that gives rise to our different genes. But epigenetics is what I like to think of as the operating system of the cell. It’s what gives each cell its different defining characteristics in phenotype.

Even though the cells in your skin and the cells in your brain have essentially the exact same DNA, what makes them different is the epigenome. It gives them their overall function and structure. The epigenome is something that has been studied in science for quite a few decades now, but the program or system itself is so complex that we’re only just barely starting to understand the meaning of many of these changes that we see.

The epigenome is usually written in chemical modifications. There are different forms of these. The one that is studied perhaps the most in aging, or at least in terms of trying to quantify aging, is DNA methylation. Basically, DNA methylation is a chemical tag that’s added to specific parts of your genome. You have A, C, G, and T, and DNA methylation is added when you have a C next to a G.

When it’s added, it closes off that part of the genome. The genome folds in on itself and that part is no longer accessible. This is how cells know which parts of the genome to access and not access, and this is different for all the different cell types.

From molecular errors to systemic decline

We also know that this epigenetic program, or DNA methylation patterns, are very remodeled with aging. Even though a skin cell should have a specific pattern, as people age, the pattern gets messed up. We think this gives rise to dysfunction in the skin cell, or they lose their essential identity, their ability to perform their specific task.

Every cell in our body has a very specific function, and this function is dictated by the epigenome. The problem is that with aging, the epigenome becomes remodeled either due to stress or random errors. What this produces is that each cell is going to lose its identity and not function in the way it was initially intended.

Over time, as more and more cells become dysfunctional, you can imagine how this produces dysfunction at the organ level and eventually at the whole system level.

One form of epigenetics is DNA methylation, which is a chemical modification to different places throughout the genome. You have A, C, G, and T as the different nucleotides in our DNA, and when you have a C next to a G, they can have this chemical tag that can turn off regions of the genome.

Scientists have found that the pattern of these chemical tags changes quite dramatically with aging. Using machine learning and AI, we’ve been able to predict how old someone appears based on these patterns of chemical tags, or DNA methylation. This has come to be referred to as the epigenetic clock, which is a way to quantify biological age based on gains or losses in methylation at specific regions throughout the genome. We think that changes at this level, what we consider the molecular level, give rise to the changes we see at the phenotypic or physiological level. Over time, cells become less functional. They are less likely to represent what they were originally intended to do. We see this in many diseases. One instance is cancer.

Cells that have more rapid epigenetic changes may be more prone to being cancerous. My lab has shown that when you measure things like an epigenetic clock, it is highly accelerated in tumors compared to normal tissue. We also see that the organs in our body that are more prone to developing cancer seem to be aging epigenetically at a more rapid rate than cells that are less prone to cancer.

Many people might be wondering how to get their epigenetic age measured or find out what the epigenetic clock says for them. Right now, there are direct-to-consumer products that can provide this. This is more expensive than regular lab tests because it relies on more advanced technology to measure these changes.

Typically, if you use a direct-to-consumer product to measure epigenetic age, this is done through either a blood or saliva sample. The question is whether that is a good proxy for how different systems or organs are aging overall, because epigenetic age can be measured in different cell types and organs.

That being said, epigenetic clock measured in blood has been shown to be a good predictor of remaining life expectancy and disease risk. Over time, these algorithms are going to get better at predicting aging overall using epigenetic measures.

Intervening in aging without over-optimizing

A number of people have become interested in epigenetic clocks and have started to monitor their epigenetic age over time. Like measures such as phenotypic age or other biological age indicators, this gives people a way to track their aging process and figure out how they can change their health behaviors to try to optimize that.

For people who want to track epigenetic age at an n equals 1 or an individual level, we still don’t know exactly what changes in epigenetic age represent. If someone tracks it, changes something about their lifestyle, or adds a new regimen and then sees a change in epigenetic age, it’s not clear what drove that or whether it represents a true change in aging rate, versus phenotypic or physiological measures where we know a bit more about what those markers represent.

That being said, there is a lot of interest in the scientific community in figuring out what drives these epigenetic changes and how we can manipulate and intervene. We think the point of intervention may be better at this level, since we think aging starts at a molecular level, so understanding what drives changes in epigenetic age and what that represents functionally.

One exciting thing about epigenetic clocks is that they seem relevant to a wide array of diseases. They are implicated in cancer, where cells that appear more accelerated in epigenetic age seem more prone to cancer. We also see this in diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and some lung diseases. The remarkable thing is that this phenomenon is not disease-specific and may be a unifying driver of disease across the board.

The thing that is most exciting to me about studying the epigenome and the epigenetic clock is that this is a powerful tool for understanding cellular changes that may contribute to a wide array of diseases across different tissues. We see the same signature and the same phenomenon regardless of the cell types we’re looking at.

Another exciting thing is that this process seems to be something we can intervene in. We know that it goes both ways and may be amenable to being reversed. One worry I have with people constantly monitoring their biological age is that people will want to use this for biohacking. We can do this to a certain extent, but we need to remember that none of these measures are perfect. We haven’t perfectly measured biological age, and the measure you use might give different answers.

People shouldn’t over-optimize to a specific biological age measure. If the things you’re doing are good for health, like diet, exercise, sleep, and stress, and you see that reflected in your biological age, you can be confident that’s probably a real result.

The concern is that people will try therapeutics or supplements targeting one number, and that isn’t the goal. In the end, it’s important for people to realize how much power they have in impacting how they age and their risk of disease. Our risks of disease are not written in our genes. Yes, we will all age, and we’re not going to stop that, but the rate at which it happens and the length of time you maintain health and optimal functioning comes down to a lot of what you do in everyday life.

Is aging a disease?

There’s a lot of debate in the scientific field of aging whether aging is a disease that should be treated like we treat diseases. My personal take on it is that aging is not a disease in and of itself but it’s the process that contributes the most to many of the diseases we care about. That being said, I think we should intervene and try and treat or at least slow the rate of aging, but we shouldn’t think of it as a disease ‘cause there isn’t a clear point where you say you have aged a specific amount that you now have a disease. And we are all aging from the time we’re born to the time we die. And ultimately what’s important is how do we slow this process in an idea that will prevent many of the diseases that people are trying to treat.

A lot of people think the aging field is focused on this concept of immortality or curing death or curing aging. That is a little bit fringe to I think a lot of the science that’s going on. And what the field is focusing on is how can we prevent the diseases of aging and keep people healthy for as long as possible. And if that ends up increasing life expectancy, that’s almost a bonus. But the goal is not immortality.

Our bodies are set up to function in a very specific way. This is something we’ve evolved, but over time that function does decline. And this is what we see in terms of manifestations of disease, diseases once your body has reached a dysfunctional state in terms of one type of process. And the reason that our bodies get to that point is because of all the changes we think that are accumulating as a function of this aging process.

Granted, there can be other things like an infection or genetic predisposition that might give people a disease, but most of the diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease are progressive loss of function in our various systems that we think is directly driven by the aging process. If we can figure out how to slow our aging rate internally, science has shown, that this will probably manifest in terms of our external appearance as well.

How disease happens

Living systems are really remarkable. Through evolution, we’ve evolved to have this beautiful coordination and specificity that makes us who we are. So cells have specific roles, our organs are set up to function a specific way and this really gives us life.

However, all of these things that are determining the function of these organs and cells degrades with time. We think of this as the molecular changes that enable cells to function a certain way are rewritten with aging. And now cells lose their specificity, they become more dysfunctional. As you accumulate more dysfunctional cells in your tissues and organs, those organs are now not working the way they’re originally intended to. Over time, as your organs start to dysfunction, you start seeing this at the whole body level.

We start seeing overall declines in our bigger functional aspects. So our ability to run for a bus, or our ability to hear our friend say something to us, these bigger functional attributes are degraded with time due to all these small changes that are accumulating at the molecular and cellular level.

Living systems are also remarkable in that we’re open systems, so we can take energy in from our environment and use that to sustain ourselves. So in general, non-living systems will degrade in terms of this entropic change at a fairly constant rate. But our systems have adapted to have a buffer, resilience.

We can use energy to maintain our function and structure for much longer, but over time this will eventually get overpowered and we will still see this dysregulation and functional decline as we also see a loss of resilience.

Aging is really personified by dysfunction, and we see a lot of this in the diseases that tend to arise with aging. So one great example is a disease like diabetes where we see dysfunction in terms of our metabolic health, where we get this accumulation of glucose throughout our circulation.

But there are other diseases of aging that are also associated with dysfunction. So things like cancer are our own dysfunctional cells that are not behaving the way they were initially intended. Many diseases of aging can be attributed to dysfunction, decline in specific organ systems.

So something like diabetes can be thought of as a decline in our metabolic system. Things like Alzheimer’s disease are declines in dysfunction in our central nervous system. And another disease of aging called sarcopenia, which is the muscle wasting that we see with aging, can be thought of as declines in multiple systems including our metabolic system and also our musculoskeletal systems.

The power of lifestyle

Until the science comes up with drugs or treatments to try and target aging, lifestyle right now is our best ticket in terms of slowing our aging process. This is because, again, living systems are adaptive. We adapt to our environment, we adapt to the things we experience.

So you can boost things like resilience through different lifestyle behaviors. So for instance, physical activity or exercise can increase our resilience and buffer us against further stressors down the road. We also know that different dietary regimens can increase our resilience as well and we think slow the aging process overall.

And these aren’t new things. These are things that we’ve been told about from, let’s say, our mothers or grandmothers, eat well, get good sleep, exercise, don’t smoke. These shouldn’t be a surprise to people, but I think people don’t realize how much these impact how fast they’re going to age and also their propensity for developing different age-related diseases.

Can we reverse aging?

We think, as a science, whether we can figure out ways to slow or perhaps even reverse these biological changes that matter for the aging process. We don’t know to what extent we can reverse aging in a whole body, although we do know that you can reverse the age of a cell.

This happens in development when you have two cells from a female and male that come together and produce an entirely new age-zero organism, even though they came from parents that perhaps were in their 20s or 30s or even 40s. And we’ve found that in science we can do this in a dish. We can activate specific factors that can take, let’s say, a skin cell from a 75-year-old and convert it back into something that’s almost indistinguishable from a cell from an embryo. We know that, at least at the cellular level, this is possible. The question is can you do that in an adult organism?

For those of us that are old enough to get to go to our high school reunion, let’s say your 20- or 30-year high school reunion, we know that if you were to go there, not everyone looks like they’re at the same chronological age, even though they probably are. Some people look exactly like they did when you graduated high school, so they haven’t changed since they were 18, whereas there might be other people who you don’t even recognize. And you look at them and you think, “I can’t possibly be that old, we haven’t aged that much.”

We know inherently that people don’t all age at the same rate, and some of us are going to be faster agers and some of us are going to be slower agers. Ultimately the question is how do you become a slow ager?

Reprogramming cells to a younger state

Like many of the things we’ve talked about in terms of aging, the epigenome, again, is highly dynamic. These are things that can go, we think, in both directions. So you can increase epigenetic age, but we’ve also shown that you can reverse this in cells.

Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for discovering four factors that, when you overexpress these in cells, it can convert an old cell or basically any cell type back into what looks like an embryonic stem cell. And later as scientists were applying things like the epigenetic clock to this data, we found that not only are you changing the cell type, but you’re also erasing or reversing all those epigenetic changes that we’ve used to quantify biological age.

Then the question becomes how do you do this in a body? Can you reprogram cells from an old epigenetic state back into a younger epigenetic state? And then the question becomes what does this mean for our physiology and our health?

Some people might say that we have solved the aging problem with cells in a dish. We can age cells, and we can reverse their age and reset them to an age zero. People are now trying to do this in an organism. Right now to start out, people are doing this in mice where, in different mouse models, you can overexpress these four factors commonly referred to as Yamanaka factors. The scientists have observed that the mice seem to have improvements in different functional outcomes and there might be an increase in life expectancy, although this needs to be followed up a little bit more.

The most amazing thing about this science is that we always thought aging happened in one direction, that these were just stochastic damage that you couldn’t go back and fix because there was so widespread and so much of it, and that the only thing you could do was slow the accumulation of this damage.

But what this reprogramming of the epigenome tells us is that this is a lot more modifiable and elastic than we originally knew. So you can take a cell that has aged and is of a given type and completely change its state using just a few factors.

And this opens up this whole idea of things like cell engineering. So how do we take cells and move them to states that we think are more functional and healthier? How do we figure out what types of states give rise to health and function in our different organ systems? And then once we know those states, can we move different cells into them?

Why measuring age changes how we treat disease

A lot of the changes that cells undergo with aging, including changes to the epigenome, give rise to some diseases like cancer. So the risk of cancer increases exponentially with age. And we think some of this might be due to the types of changes that are measured when we look at the epigenome.

One hypothesis is if you can remodel or reprogram the epigenome to a younger state, you might prevent some of these cells from developing into cancers. Now that won’t deal with some of the mutations that might precede cancer, but a lot of mutations accumulate early in the lifespan. And the question is what is happening with aging later on that is still pushing these cells to become cancerous?

The epigenetic clock has been remarkable in that it can track aging across a diverse array of cell types and organ systems. You can use the same measure to track aging in your skin as you would use in your liver or in your blood.

More importantly, what we find is the difference between the age you get predicted based on the epigenetic clock and your chronological age holds biological meaning. The reason we think it holds biological meaning is because it seems to be predictive of different outcomes or diseases in whichever organ it was measured in.

When I measure epigenetic age in the blood, what we find is that measure is predictive of remaining life expectancy or heart disease risk or diabetes. We’ve looked at epigenetic age measured in the brain after people have died, and what we find is that it seems to be correlated with pathology associated with Alzheimer’s disease. We think even though we haven’t proven that this is causally driving these diseases, it does seem to be a signature for the aging processes that give rise to the diseases of aging.

As we continue to develop and improve these epigenetic clock measures, they’ll be useful for tracking aging and understanding disease risk. So the great thing is that epigenetic clock measures aren’t just giving you a whole-body aging measure, but we can measure it in different subsystems and understand how people might be aging differently across systems in their body.

Some people might be more prone to metabolic aging, other people might be more prone to inflammatory aging. And that profile, when you take it all into consideration, might give you a better idea of the interventions or the lifestyle factors that you should implement, or the specific diseases that you might be more or less at risk for.

The reason scientists are so excited about intervening in the aging process, whether slowing or reversing it, is because we think that in doing so we can stop the changes that give rise to the diseases we care about. Rather than going after one disease at a time, if we could slow or reverse aging, we could eliminate diseases or at least postpone them across the board.

Right now people are using the epigenetic clock more as a diagnostic as opposed to a means to intervene. People are using it as one indicator of how they’re aging overall. It’s not a perfect indicator, and it’s only capturing one facet of the aging process, but it can give people some indication of their health status and their risk of developing different diseases of aging.

How nutrition enables longevity

Nutrition science is something that people in the longevity and aging field have been very interested in. And for hundreds of years, people have been studying how our diets and the amount of food and types of food we eat seem to impact our aging. But the science is also really difficult because, at least in humans, it’s hard to assign people specific diets and have them maintain those for a long enough time to study them in this randomized clinical trial way. So usually what scientists end up leaning on is what we call epidemiological or observational data.

They look at populations and they compare the diets that different people eat, and then they look at the features of those people. Using things like biological aging or disease risk or life expectancy, do certain diets tend to correlate with certain outcomes? The problem with this is it’s really hard to say anything about whether the diet is causing those things, and also people who tend to have healthier diets also have other health behaviors that go along with them. So figuring out exactly what components of diet matter is really difficult.

The science behind caloric restriction

The main dietary component that’s been studied in the aging and longevity field is this idea of caloric restriction. So more than a hundred years ago, researchers saw that when they restrict the amount of calories that animals eat, they tended to live longer. And so this really sparked an entire field of studying this concept of caloric restriction. Caloric restriction isn’t starvation, it’s usually just about a 20% reduction in the overall calorie intake.

In a lot of different animal models, so anything from a worm, fly, mouse, people have seen that when animals are caloric restricted, they tend to live longer. One caveat though is that this may be different depending on genetics. So there was a study in mice that showed mice with different genetic backgrounds. Some of them benefited from chloric restriction, some of them had no effect, and then some of them did worse. We think that the amount of chloric restriction our bodies can tolerate might be genetically determined and that this should be a more personalized regimen.

When trying to figure out if something like caloric restriction is beneficial to the aging process in terms of slowing aging, one caveat is that humans today are not at baseline. We’re more prone to overeating. So some researchers have figured out that it might not be the caloric restriction that’s the beneficial thing but the tendency away from overeating.

Even if you can’t restrict your calories in terms of what’s been studied in caloric restriction, just moving away from over consumption or overeating and being more in line with your actual caloric needs, based on your energy out, is probably going to have a beneficial effect for most people. The discovery of caloric restriction was on accident. So the scientists weren’t going in to try and study how diet was affecting aging and longevity.

They just happened to find that when their, in this case it was rats, were eating a lower-calorie diet, they tended to live longer. And after that was first discovered a few hundred years ago, people continued to study this, and it really became a big deal in the 1970s and 1980s and moving even into today where people have tried to figure out what is the mechanism by which reducing your calories into this minimal deficit produces a extension in terms of life expectancy and healthy disease-free life expectancy.

What diet research really suggests

Diet is probably the behavior that’s been studied the most in terms of trying to affect things like aging and longevity. So in animals it’s shown to have a quite marked effect on life expectancy. But it doesn’t mean that your diet has to be extreme. So when we say it’s going to have a big effect, this might just mean avoiding certain diets like overconsumption or eating a lot of things that we already know are bad for us and just maintaining a moderate diet that is in line with our energy needs on a daily basis.

There are really three components of diet that seem to be impacting aging. So the first is how much we eat, the second is what we eat, and the third is perhaps when we eat. So in terms of how much we eat, a lot of science went into this idea of caloric restriction, but really, again, it’s maintaining even a slight deficit to no deficit. So most of us aren’t going to be able to maintain a 20% calorie deficit for our whole life. As long as we can meet needs that are in line with our energy expenditure and we’re not over-consuming, we think that’s going to have a benefit for overall aging in health.

The other thing that’s been studied is this concept of what we eat. So a lot of research has gone into whether things like a plant-based diet are beneficial to aging longevity, and there seems to be some evidence that a moderately low animal protein diets, so eating less animal products, more fruits and veggies, more whole foods is going to be better overall. Minimizing things like refined sugars and the things that we already know are bad for our health.

The third comes down to when we eat, and this is really a new field in aging and longevity science. So again, most people aren’t going to be able to calorically restrict, but what scientists found is that fasting can mimic some of the benefits that we’ve seen with caloric restriction. If people can fast for a number of hours throughout the day, so perhaps minimize their eating to a small window, we think that this can recapitulate a lot of the benefits that we’re seeing in the caloric restriction studies. There’s still some debate about when that window should occur.

Some of the scientists pointing to front loading your calories, so eating earlier in the day and trying to fast throughout the day. But we’re also not sure, for a lot of people it’s easier to do the opposite and have just a dinner and calorically restrict early. We’re not sure if that would have the same benefit as doing it earlier.

The idea of why things like caloric restriction or fasting might improve our aging process and increase our health is because we think this evokes this idea of hormesis in our bodies. What hormesis refers to is a mild stressor that makes our bodies more resilient and robust distress over time. So having these short-term mild stressors, whether it be fasting or whether it be a small caloric deficit, makes our bodies more robust and we think more resilient against a lot of the changes we see that increase with aging.

What we eat may also change depending on who we are. We know that our genetics might determine what we should be eating and how much, but also our age might change what we should be eating and how much. People who are older and more prone to things like muscle loss or weakness might need more protein than people who are younger, where science has shown that a low-protein diet might be beneficial.

It’s important to keep in mind that these things aren’t set in stone and really need to be considered on a personalized basis. It’s not that easy to figure out what the optimal or ideal diet is for each of us. We don’t know exactly how things like genetics are going to predispose people to different diets, but one way to do this is to keep track of a lot of these health indices, things like our biological age measures to see how our diet is affecting us.

If you were to completely change your diet or introduce something like intermittent fasting, do you see that reflected in your measures? The other things are just functionally how you’re feeling. As people get older and might be more prone to things like weakness or muscle wasting, they might want to increase things like protein in their diet to make sure they’re maintaining some of these functions that they might see declining with time.

As we move forward in the science and develop more of these biomarkers of aging, I think this will really start to accelerate our understanding of how diet impacts the aging process. But for now, what we can say is that probably the best advice is to not eat too much and try and maintain a whole foods organic diet with not too much animal protein in it.

Living better, not just longer

People have been really consumed with the idea of immortality and aging for a very long time. But the question is, is a longer life truly a better life? And in some cases, perhaps yes, but not always. What matters to most people is quality of life.

We all want to maintain our health and our functions and be able to enjoy the things that make life worth living. So really what aging science is about is not just prolonging life at all cost, but prolonging healthy life. So can we delay the onset of disease? Can we delay the onset of functional decline and keep people healthy and functioning for as long as possible?

We think if we intervene in the aging process itself, that we can delay all of the things that people are scared about when they think of aging. That’s really the goal. We want to increase quality of life and maintain that over time. And if that produces a longer life, that’s an extra bonus. But that’s not the ultimate goal.

We know that there is sometimes a disconnect between this concept, what we call lifespan and health span. Lifespan, again, is just the time you’ve been alive between birth and death. What scientists think health span is is the time you are alive in a more healthy functioning state. That’s really what we’re trying to optimize.

But sometimes we see a disconnect or discordance between these two features. So one example is this idea of the health survival paradox that we see between men and women. On average, women across the world tend to live longer by a few years than men. But women are also more prone to some of the diseases we see with aging. So things like arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease.

On average, women tend to spend more time in some of this age-related disability than men do. Some might argue is that a better life because they’ve lived longer? Or would you want maybe a shorter life but more free from these diseases of aging?

In thinking about how we want to intervene in aging and what we want to be the outcome of our science, this really comes down to this concept that we call compression of morbidity. So the idea is, can we push the onset of disease and disability as far away so that right before you die, you’re compressing the timing of disease into this really short window, as opposed to having it earlier in life and surviving 20, 30 or 40 years with these diseases of aging?

We think this is possible because you can look at centenarian populations and see that they tend to compress the timing of disease into the short window right before death. They’re spending the majority of their life in a much more healthy state.

What we want to do is figure out how we can make this possible for everyone so that we can remain healthy, functioning and happy with good quality of life for as long as possible. Another really important thing to keep in mind, in terms of longevity science, is that we don’t want to increase what we call health disparities.

Right now, even though the average life expectancy in the population is just under about 80 years, we want to make sure that we can get everyone to a longer and healthier life and not just have interventions or therapeutics that help richer or more affluent people get there. And how do we make sure that everyone can have as healthy and long a life as possible.

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Timestamps

00:00 The antidote to toxic male influencers
03:07 The risk of moral overreach
04:30 Real men in real life
08:22 Why single-sex spaces help
13:06 A different approach to therapy
21:14 Men in the classroom

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The antidote to toxic male influencers

I think the idea that you can somehow just invent a progressive version of Andrew Tate or somebody and just throw them online, add water, and here’s this new, suddenly globally famous alternative, that’s not how online influence works. But the bigger issue for me is that the best antidote to an unserious online male role model, I’m using that term advisedly, is an in real life flesh and blood actual man. By having male teachers, male coaches, fathers, uncles, neighbors, et cetera, just being a living and breathing version of what it means to be a man.

I continue to believe that in the long run, boys, young men will believe their eyes more than their ears. If there’s a lack of real life men showing what it means to be a man rather than telling you how to be a man, then I think that creates a vacuum, which then gets filled by online figures.

I’m Richard Reeves. I’m President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I’m also the author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why That Matters, and What to Do About It.”

If we’re not careful, these conversations can shut the conversation down with boys and young men, rather than opening it up. So when we’re talking about online influencers, we’re talking about some of the kinda more reactionary figures online. Sometimes parents sort of react to discovering that their son, for example, is consuming video content from somebody like Andrew Tate, pretty well known misogynist influencer. It’s almost like they’re watching hardcore porn. They slam the laptop with the same kind of moral fervor as if they caught them looking at some pretty kind of horrible porn.

That’s the wrong response. It’s a natural response, but it’s the wrong response. Instead, you’ve got to have curiosity. You’ve need to figure out like, “Well, why are you interested in this?” Let’s have that argument. Because one of the things that the most successful reactionary online figures say is, “Nobody will want you to talk about watching my stuff or listening to my stuff.” They said it as a test, and then so sure enough, if you raise this issue, you say to your mom that you’ve been consuming some of this content or you’re doubting some of what you’ve been taught. If the reaction is immediately, like, “How dare you watch that ,” you’ve just proved the point that the reactionary was making.

And this is one of those moments where it’s hard, but I’m speaking here as a parent as much as a policy wonk, is that you take some deep breaths, you try to be open-minded, you don’t in any way compromise your own values, and you have some curiosity. You try to become an ally and a partner to your son as they navigate this difficult online world and offline world.

The risk of moral overreach

I worry sometimes that the uninformed, frankly, reaction that many middle-aged policy makers are having to some of these issues online, A) They look out of touch and they sound out of touch, but it also, it has this really chilling effect on an open conversation about what’s really going on. That then just drives these boys and young men even further into the recesses of what’s online.

The question is, who’s having an honest and good faith conversation about this? I don’t think that forcing boys and girls to watch a fictional drama in schools, is going to open up that conversation. At least it won’t open it up for most boys. So I worry that it will actually backfire and be unhelpful.

There’s a big difference between a show like “Adolescence” becoming a big Netflix hit for people watching it, and governments proposing showing that in in every secondary school. Then it’s a matter of policy, and governments, as the UK government has, I think it becomes an issue that we should pay more attention to. There’s a real danger that you take something that’s fictional and assume that it’s more true to life than it really is.

It can create a moral panic. It can make many parents fear that they’re kind of inadvertently raising a monster, which is almost certainly not true.

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Real men in real life

So the good news about something like a show like “Adolescence” is that it draws attention to some of the kind of risks online, some of the more reactionary figures online. It’s good. Parents should be thoughtful about that, but the downside is that it can run into this common problem we have when we’re discussing the issues of boys and men, which is that they’re just a couple of clicks away from becoming an incel, violent criminal, and that’s just not true. The presumption that that might be about to happen can actually shut the conversation down.

I think the idea that you can somehow just invent like a progressive version of Andrew Tate or somebody and just throw them online, add water, and here’s this new, suddenly globally famous alternative, that’s not how online influence works. It grows organically. It grows through algorithms. It grows through clicks. Things don’t get created that way.

So first of all, it’s very naive, but the bigger issue for me is that the best antidote to an unserious online male role model, I’m using that term advisedly, is an in real life flesh and blood actual man in the lives of boys. The way to beat the online version of it is by having male teachers, male coaches, fathers, uncles, neighbors, et cetera, just being a living and breathing version of what it means to be a man.

I continue to believe that in the long run, young men will believe their eyes more than their ears. If there isn’t enough of a sense of, “What does it mean to be a man in my community, in my home, in my school?” et cetera, if there’s a lack of real life men showing what it means to be a man rather than telling you how to be a man, then I think that creates a vacuum, which then gets filled by online figures.

I honestly believe that the way to beat the online world is offline, is in real life. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be online. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, of course, support the people who are, and there are lots of people in the so-called manosphere, a term I think is probably now redundant because I don’t know who’s included in it anymore, but there are lots of guys online, lots doing fitness stuff, doing kind of motivational stuff.

I really love, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Pump Club.” Somebody will show a video of themselves doing their first pushup, right? And they manage to do like one or two pushups, and then Arnold himself will come on and say, “That’s great, go for it.” It’s incredibly warm, and it’s like welcoming, and so there’s a lot of really great stuff happening around this stuff online. But in the long run, you can beat an Andrew Tate video with a classroom exercise or a hike up a mountain with your scout group any day of the week.

If there’s a young man, and he watches some stuff online, and it drifts into kind of misogynist stuff, then first of all, which man is he going to talk to about that, right? Maybe the father. Certainly, it’s something I spoke to my sons about, but like who are they gonna talk to about that? Who are they gonna test those ideas on? Probably a man. So is there a man in their lives they can test that on? But also then, they’re gonna look at the guys, and they’re going to say, “Does my teacher or my scout leader or my uncle act like Andrew Tate?” No. Is he a good guy? Yes. Would I rather be more like him? Well, hopefully the answer is yes.

Why single-sex spaces help

Well, there is a big question. “Should we have any single-sex space?” Should we have male-only spaces or female-only spaces? Maybe we should just get rid of them all together. I think as a general point, we don’t want them in the workplace as places where power and favors are traded, right? There’s a reasonable suspicion of what was called the ‘old boys club’ and the idea that kind of men were congregating in male spaces, and that power and influence were being shared in those spaces. We’ve quite rightly tried to turn against that.

But that’s very different to the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. It’s very different to youth organizations, and I think it’s a mistake to move from the correct claim that we shouldn’t have an old boys club to saying that we shouldn’t have Boy Scouts or we shouldn’t have single-sex classes or even single-sex sports for both boys and girls.

I’m quite angry at the scouts for giving up Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts of America no longer exists. It’s now called Scouting for America, and girls are allowed in. Girl Scouts remains Girl Scouts and single sex. The reason I’m angry about that is because I’ve been a scout leader, I was a scout, I think for pretty progressive reasons, which is that single-sex spaces when done well, they don’t amplify the more stereotypically male or female characteristics. They help to balance them out.

In Girl Scouts, for example, there’s a huge emphasis on things like leadership and going into STEM, taking more assertive positions, et cetera. Girl Scouts don’t spend a huge amount of time with the girls talking about the need to be more caring or more nurturing or to open up emotionally to each other or be there for each other. They spend a lot more time on things like being more competitive, being more aggressive, being more assertive, right? As a result of that, Girl Scouts has done a really good job of actually kind of helping girls to kind of balance out some of those perhaps more naturally occurring tendencies with others.

In Boy Scouts, this is certainly my experience as a scout leader, you don’t have to typically work very hard with boys to make them more competitive. Boys will turn throwing trash into a trash can into a competition. This idea of more being more aggressive because that’s a little bit more on average is baked in. But what you do instead is you work on teamwork. You work on how to care for the other people in your patrol. You learn how to love each other and to serve each other. And so you balance out so that hopefully as a result of those single-sex spaces, you actually end up with both men and women who are somewhat more fully filled out.

There’s a stereotype of boys’ spaces will make boys more boyish. But actually I think the opposite’s true. I think that boys’ spaces, whether it’s teams or scouts, actually help boys learn to love, learn to care, learn to be of service, think about other people. And the same with like girl spaces done well, they don’t make girls girlier. They actually help them to develop other skills. Done properly and in the right balance, I actually think that single-sex spaces make a lot of sense.

I certainly don’t think we want to end up with a world where we think that it is necessary or good to have single-sex spaces only for girls, and we get rid of all of the ones that existed for boys.

It’s pretty clear to most people that when boys are around girls, the presence of the girls affects how the boys behave, including towards each other and vice versa. It’s one of the strong arguments that’s been made, for example, for single-sex girls’ schools, is to get girls away from some of the presence of boys and what that means. In practice in an all-boys space, what it allows you to do is work more on skills around emotion, sharing, caring, et cetera. You may not use that language, particularly if it’s a team sport or something. It’ll be more around, maybe use more masculine language, right, the other fellow first or the team first or whatever. But what you are really learning about is love and care and nurturing.

I just think some of that’s easier to do if you’re not feeling the gaze of your female peers and vice versa too. And so if you’re trying to incubate spaces where you can really develop full human beings, there is something to be said for at least some spaces where you’re doing that in a single-sex environment.

A different approach to therapy

The share of boys playing sports is going down, and that’s for all kinds of reasons. A big problem there is the loss of team sports. Team sports for boys is a place and a space within which they kind of learn to think about each other, to be part of a bigger whole. They learn to love each other. There’s a real solidarity and camaraderie in team sports that I think is very good for girls and boys but looks especially good for boys. That’s a safe space within which they learn a lot of the skills, including those social skills, those teamwork skills, those caring skills that they’re going to need to be good fathers, to be good husbands, and to be good workers.

I also think that coaches are mental health professionals in disguise. They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench or in a group. They’re working with boys or with young men, and they’re very often noticing that they’re struggling. In a non-threatening way, they can open up a conversation with them. And there’s a reason I think why so many men will say that a coach played an hugely important part in their role, especially if they didn’t have a strong relationship with their father. It’s a trope at this point to say that coaches are father figures, but it’s also a truth that for many boys they absolutely do play that role for men.

I have this image in my mind of a coach sitting next to a young man, a boy or a young man, and they’re just sitting like this shoulder to shoulder, and the coach is saying, “How are you? You seem a little bit off today. Everything okay? How’s stuff at home? How are things with your mom? Did you sort that thing out,” right? And they’re probably watching the game a bit too, and what’s really interesting about that is it’s beautiful, but it’s also they’re shoulder to shoulder.

One of the things we know is that men communicate more comfortably with each other shoulder to shoulder as opposed to face to face. When men are face to face with each other, that’s quite a threatening position. Now if I tell you this, you won’t be able to unsee it. Where every time you go to a social event, look at the way that the men are standing in relation to each other, they’re always slightly cattycorner with each other. They’re always at an angle because being face to face is a threat posture. And it also means that if you want to communicate with young men, go fishing, go for a drive, go for a hike.

A lot of psychologists now will do the walk and talk therapy. Do not sit them down and stare them in the face. That is not a very comfortable way for most men to communicate with each other. They are going to communicate much more comfortably with each other when they’re doing something else, when they are shoulder to shoulder.

There’s something also about those activities, whatever the activity is, whether it’s sports or hiking or building something or hammering something or fishing for something. It’s the only explanation for golf that I’ve been able to come up with is this sense of like you’re doing something together shoulder to shoulder, but what you’re actually doing then is communicating. And I think that’s fine.

You could roll your eyes at it and say, “Oh, well, why can’t men just sit in a coffee shop and stare at each other? Why do they have to pretend to be doing something else or be doing something else when they’re communicating?” I don’t roll my eyes at it. It’s just true, and if it’s true, then we should create more and more spaces where men feel able to be shoulder to shoulder with each other, communicating each other in a way that is just a little bit more friendly towards men. And if that means Boy Scouts and it means boys’ sports teams, then good.

There are these groups now, the men’s sheds movement, which is basically just a bunch of guys that kind of get together. It started in Australia. They get together and kind of fix stuff together, right? So they’re fixing engines, or they’re doing something. And the guys are tinkering and it just does seem to be true that, on average, men communicate a little bit more easily with each other when they are doing kind of something else, when they are in the shoulder-to-shoulder phase. And that’s what a coach will do. That’s what these activities will do, is create that space, which is actually incredibly therapeutic space but where there is no therapist to be seen, at least not officially. That’s also one of the reasons why I’m borderline obsessed with the share of men in mental health professions and in healthcare professions because they know that naturally.

I have a friend that volunteers in a school, and he goes into the school, and he says, “Which boy are you having the most trouble with?” They identify the boy, and he just takes him for a walk. He doesn’t sit down with him. He doesn’t pull up a chair in the classroom. He certainly doesn’t sit opposite him. They go for a walk, and he finds that they’re much more likely to open up. Say, “Oh, let’s just take a walk and then talk.” And again, you could roll your eyes at that and just say, “Oh, what’s wrong with men?” But we have to be really careful generally not to treat men like defective women or vice versa.

It’s just that there are some of these differences between us that we don’t really think about until it becomes an issue, which should just be part of just a natural difference between us that doesn’t in any way trap anybody, right? I’m not saying that some women don’t also communicate better shoulder to shoulder, and many men probably are fine face to face, but overall, there is a pretty big difference between those two. And it’s one reason why the right kind of male-only space is a good thing and not just a good thing for men but a good thing for women because if men come out of those spaces with better relational skills, better soft skills, et cetera, that’s good for the women in their lives as well.

A growing sense among kind of women that they want their partners’ sons to have more opportunities to hang out with other men. And the reason for that is not just because they want them out of the house, although that may be part of it. I think it’s because they recognize that actually for men to be flourishing as men, it’s great for them to have time with other men, just as it is for women.

Any spaces that have boys and girls in them, young men and young women in them should be safe. And Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, youth organizations generally have really done a very good job of ensuring that they’re doing everything in their power to make those spaces as safe as possible. We should continue to do that. It’s a good example of a space where we can’t let the very, very small risk, even today, of there something bad happening in those spaces to blind us to the overall positive benefits of those spaces more generally.

There have been plenty of scandals in institutions, including Boy Scouts and others, where quite rightly the result has been to really be much more careful about the safety of kids and have the right rules and the right practices. We have to acknowledge that. But we also, we don’t want to react in a way that just closes all those spaces down, any more than we want to say that, because there are tragically always going to be some examples of kids being abused at schools, we don’t send them to school or that we don’t want any men in our classrooms.

I’ve actually had people say to me, like, “Well, I don’t think we want any men in early years education,” right? I think there’s something a bit fishy about that, and, “Didn’t you hear that story of the male from state X where there was some horrific story?” And the danger with the argument is that it has no end.

In the end, what we’re saying is that even the slightest risk of something horrific happening, such as something like abuse, then we shouldn’t have these institutions at all. It would be a tragic mistake to take the correct concerns of every parent, myself included, to want their kids to be safe and to be safe in whichever spaces they’re in and to say that the way to do that is to shut all those spaces down or to say that those spaces can only be co-ed.

Men in the classroom

It’s always been true that men have been underrepresented in elementary school where it’s only one in five. And actually, there’s now been a big decline in secondary school where men have now dropped below half. We see men make up the minority of teachers in basically every subject now, including career and technical education.

I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, “Does it matter?” Would it matter if our entire K12 teaching workforce was female or male? Does it matter? I think it does matter. It matters because it sends a message that this is more of a female enterprise than a male enterprise. It codes education and educational success. Also, I think that the presence of men in schools and in classrooms acts as a way to have some actual role models that are a good alternative to the ones online, especially for boys who don’t have a father figure in their lives or a good relationship with their father.

My own son teaches fifth grade in Baltimore, and he’s doing great, he loves it. This is probably something about the fact of him at the front of that fifth grade classroom, which is powerful, sends a strong signal. You don’t have to have a curriculum on positive masculinity if you’ve got positive men at the front of the classroom. There is something very important about boys and girls seeing education as something that both men and women value and do.

I really struggled in English. I was in remedial English for a while. I was the kid who would like never bring the book home, and my mom would march me back to the school to get the book and read it. But the whole words, writing, books thing, it just didn’t come naturally to me. And I had a teacher in secondary school, Mr. Wyatt, and he was a Korean War veteran and had been wounded in the Korean War. He was a part-time bus driver. I have no idea how old he was. He seemed like a thousand years old, but he was probably my age as I am now. A real curmudgeon, like broody and amazing English teacher, and he had us reading poetry. He had us reading metaphysical poetry, Andrew Marvell and people like that. And he had these mostly working class boys just totally engaged in poetry and actually being quite moved by some of it.

He brought to life this idea that words and literature was absolutely not a female pursuit. Every English teacher I’d had up until that point had been a woman. I felt like it was very coded female, and who knows whether it was Mr. Wyatt that did it. But I think about him often, and I know that something happened to me in that class, which made me fall in love with words and writing in a way that I would previously have thought unimaginable. I’m pretty sure that the fact that he was a guy helped me get through that.

Now you could roll your eyes and say, “Well, what’s wrong with Reeves, that he couldn’t get that from a woman?” like what a trouble that he needed a guy to make him think all of that. I’m just sharing that that was my experience. I don’t think it’s that unusual an experience. And I do think it was just as important for me to have an amazing female math teacher. And in the end, a good teacher is a good teacher, but there’s something very important about making sure that we don’t allow education itself or particular kinds of learning to just get coded.

It is just as important that we don’t allow the love of language to become coded as a female thing as it was to break down the idea that math or science was a male thing. We’re trying to get to a point where we’re trying to see them as just things that anyone can do, but that gets harder and harder if you don’t have any guides doing it.

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Drawing on the longest study of adult life ever conducted, Waldinger traces human wellbeing across 8 decades, from the Great Depression to old age, following people from radically different starting points to see what endures.

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Timestamps

00:00 The secret to happiness
02:12 The importance of relationships
03:30 How to study a life
5:19 Can we control our happiness?
06:17 Taking stock of connection
8:20 Childhood lessons and adult repair
11:22 Relationships and emotional regulation
14:41 The impacts of toxic relationships

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The secret to happiness

I started out as an intern in pediatrics and I would see one ear infection after another, and the kids were adorable, but one ear infection is pretty much the same as every other. Whereas when you talk to people about their lives, it’s never the same. And I knew that that would keep me interested for my whole career, which it has.

I became interested in psychiatry unexpectedly. I had never known a psychiatrist growing up. But when I was in medical school, I found that the way people’s minds worked was the most fascinating thing I could possibly study. So I eventually found that there was really nothing else for me in medicine, but doing psychiatry. I am the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and it is the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done. We’re in our 85th year.

It started in 1938 as two studies that weren’t even aware of each other. One study started at Harvard Student Health Service with 19-year-old sophomores who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men. The other study was a study of juvenile delinquency and it selected middle school age boys from Boston’s poorest families, but also the most troubled families, families beset by problems like domestic violence and parental mental illness and physical illness.

This study set out to understand what makes people thrive as they grow and develop. And that was unusual because most research that’s been done is done on what goes wrong in human development so that we can help people.

But this was a study of what goes right, so it was how do kids from disadvantaged families stay on good paths and develop well? And then, of course, the very privileged Harvard group was meant to be a study of normal young adult development.

The importance of relationships

We now know that if you want to study normal young adult development, you don’t just study white men from Harvard, but at that time, that’s what they did. We study wellbeing as people go through life, and our big question is, if you could make one choice today to make it likely that you would stay happy and stay healthy throughout your life, what single choice would you make? Most of us think it’s something to do with getting rich or achieving a lot, and some people even think they need to become famous to have a happy, healthy life. But our study and many other studies show that the single choice we can make that’s most likely to keep us on a good path of wellbeing is to invest in our relationships with other people.

The people in our study who had the happiest, warmest relationships were the people who stayed healthy longest and who lived the longest. The Harvard study started in 1938, and it has followed the same people throughout their entire lives, from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age.

How we study a life

The study began with 724 young men, and then we brought in most of their wives and eventually most of their children, so that now there are over 2,000 people in these 724 families who we have followed through their entire adult lives.

We started collecting information by giving these young men elaborate psychological examinations, also medical examinations. Then we went to their homes, we talked to their parents, and sometimes even their grandparents, and the workers made elaborate notes about what was being served for dinner and what the discipline style was in the family and even what the curtains looked like.

Eventually, as new methods of studying human life came on board, we adopted those methods. Such as audio taping, videotaping, we now draw blood for DNA, and DNA wasn’t even imagined in 1938 when the study began. We’ve put many of our people into an MRI scanner and watched how their brains light up as we show them different visual images. We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out, and then we watch how they recover from stress as one more way of understanding wellbeing.

One of the things that is more common now, but was unusual when we started it was combining biological measures and psychological measures and seeing how our biology is influenced by our mental states and vice versa. It’s this combining of mind and body measurement that was relatively new in the last 20 years.

Can we control our happiness?

The question comes up, how much of our happiness is under our control? They’ve actually done some scientific analysis of this. A psychologist named Sonja Lyubomirsky did an analysis in which she estimates that about 50% of our happiness is a biological set point, probably determined by our genes. That has to do with inborn temperament.

We all know people who are kind of naturally gloomy and other people who are naturally chipper no matter what’s going on. About half of our happiness is that inborn temperament. About 10% she finds is based on our current life circumstances. The last 40% is under our control. We can move the needle. We can make ourselves more likely to be happy by building a life that includes the conditions that make for happiness.

Taking stock of connection

The questions that we might ask ourselves about our relationships are simple. One is, do I have enough connection in my life or do I even have too much connection? If I’m a shyer person and don’t need as many people in my life, so do I have what I need? ?Each person can check in with themselves about that.

Then the question is, do I have relationships that are warm and supportive? Again, each of us needs to ask that question, do I have people who have my back, who I feel I could call and would be there in an emergency? Because hard times are always coming our way.

The question is also, what am I getting from relationships? Do I have enough people to have fun with? Do I have enough people who will loan me their tools when I need to fix something in my house, or who will drive me to the doctor when I need a ride? Do I have those kinds of friends? One of the things we know about life is that we all have worries. We all have concerns that come along, worries about children, worries about health, worries about finances. And one of the best teachings I got in my training as a psychiatrist was from one of my mentors who said, “Never worry alone.”

This teacher meant that about being worried about a patient who I was treating. But what I’ve come to understand that it’s really good advice for just about everything in life, that if I’m really worried about something and I share it with somebody I trust, it makes all the difference in how much better I feel and how much less alone I feel with my worry. There are so many different things we get from relationships, and so each of us can check in with ourselves about what we have and what we would like a little more of.

Childhood lessons and adult repair

We’ve learned several big lessons about relationships, about good relationships, and one of them is that childhood experience really does matter. What happens to us in childhood sets the stage for what we come to expect from the world, and that’s often a good thing if we’re raised by people who are warm and caring and reliable. Some people don’t have that luck and are raised in environments where they feel like the people who are supposed to take care of aren’t trustworthy, can’t be relied upon. Many of those people come into adulthood with the expectation that the world is not a safe place and that people can’t be relied on.

The other thing we’ve learned is that adult experience can correct for some of those unfortunate lessons that people learn in childhood. Becoming connected with a good partner, with good friends who you can count on can go a long way to change those gloomy expectations about the world and about relationships, and allow us to realize that yes, we can find people who are good, reliable partners in our relational world.

Another lesson that we learn is that all relationships that are important have some disagreements or some difficulties. Facing those difficulties goes a long way to strengthen relationships much of the time. If we can work on relationships, that turns out to have great payoff in terms of keeping our connections stronger. What that means is that it’s normal to have disagreements, it’s normal to have difficulties, and that the more skill we can develop in working through difficulties, the better our social worlds are.

One of the biggest lessons we learned from our study is that our connections with other people help us weather the hard times of life and hard times are there in every life. Our original participants were born during the Great Depression and many of the Harvard undergraduates were of an age to go and serve in World War II. When we asked them, how did you get through these really difficult times? All of them to a person talked about their relationships. Our neighbors shared what little we had during the depression. My fellow soldiers in the trenches were the people who kept me going. The letters that came to me from back home while I was overseas in the war were what sustained me. What we find is that these connections turn out to be the best protection against the difficult times that are always coming our way.

Relationships and emotional regulation

We are pretty sure that we human beings evolved to be social animals, that in fact, staying together in groups made it more likely that we would survive the dangers that are out there in the world and pass on our genes, which is the goal of evolution. We evolved to find being together secure and safe and to find being alone a stressor. What we find is that that is still the case, that people who are more isolated than they want to be are stressed. Loneliness is a big stressor, and we think that that is biologically based as well as emotionally based.

The best hypothesis about how relationships get into our bodies and affect our physical health is through stress. We’re having stressful experiences often all day long, and that’s normal. When we’re stressed, the body is meant to go into what we call fight or flight mode, where essentially heart rate goes up, might start to sweat, a variety of changes happen. But then when the stressor is removed, the body is meant to return to equilibrium.

What we think happens is that if I have something stressful happen during the day and I can go home and talk to a friend or call someone, I can literally feel my body calm down. If I don’t have anyone I can talk to about something that happens in my life that’s stressful, we believe what happens is we stay in a low level chronic fight or flight mode. What that means is that we have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol. We have higher levels of inflammation going on in the body all the time, and that these changes gradually wear away different body systems, which is how stress and loneliness could make it more likely that we would get coronary artery disease and more likely that we would get type two diabetes or arthritis, it could affect multiple body systems through this common denominator of chronic stress.

Our understanding is that good relationships actually are emotion regulators, that what happens is that good relationships involve the exchange of positive emotion that helps our bodies stay in equilibrium. In fact, they’ve put people in MRI scanners and watched what happens to them when they go through a stressful medical procedure, and they find that if they’re holding someone’s hand, even a stranger, but certainly someone they know, their bodies stay much closer to equilibrium than if they’re alone undergoing the same medical procedure.

What it shows us is that being connected to another person makes us feel safer and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium that promotes health.

The impacts of toxic relationships

A toxic relationship is one where we can’t get beyond difficulties, unhappiness, anger. We can’t come out the other side to a place where we’re okay again with each other. A toxic relationship involves unhappiness, even if you’re quiet about it. Chronic resentment, often withdrawal, and then active arguing.

On the other hand, couples argue all the time without having these detrimental effects. What we’ve found from our research is that couples can argue often and quite vocally, but if there is a bedrock of affection and respect, those relationships continue to be positive and stable.

Research shows us that loneliness is certainly a stressor and that we have increased levels of stress hormones, increased levels of chronic inflammation. But research also shows us that ongoing acrimony in a relationship, constant arguing and unhappiness, is also hazardous to our health for just the same reasons. So there was in fact a study that suggested that staying in a really toxic intimate relationship may be worse than splitting up for that reason because a really difficult acrimonious relationship is that source of chronic stress that keeps us in fight or flight mode most of the time and breaks down our body systems.

The research shows that people who have a secure connection with a partner in late life have slower brain decline. In addition, the research shows that people who are lonely in late life have more rapid brain decline. So we know that this same process of increased stress or decreased stress affects how our brains age.

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Timestamps

00:00 The power of cognitive scripts
01:30 The Sequel Script
02:45 The Crowdpleaser Script
03:23 The Epic Script
05:01 The subtle shift to overcome cognitive scripts

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The power of cognitive scripts

A cognitive script is an internalized behavioral pattern that tells us how we’re supposed or at least how we think we’re supposed to act in certain situations. They can be very helpful for routine tasks and decisions in everyday life. Cognitive scripts were first discovered in a seminal 1979 study, where researchers found that people are following very similar scripts in similar situations, such as going to the doctor or going to the restaurant. And since then, they have found those cognitive scripts in all areas of your life.

For routine everyday decisions, cognitive scripts are actually very practical and useful. For example, you know that when you’re going to go to the doctor, you’re supposed to wait in the waiting room and then someone is going to call your name, and then, you’re going to go into doctor’s office. This is where you’re going to start telling them about whatever the issue is, right? And you know in which order you’re supposed to do all of those different actions. Great, useful, and it’s a pretty good thing that you don’t have to overthink it every time you go to the doctor.

The problem with cognitive scripts is when we use them to make more important decisions in our lives, in our careers, in our relationships, instead of asking ourselves, “Is that really what I want to do, is that my decision?”, we let our choices being driven by those stories that we have internalized by those scripts that tell us how we’re supposed to behave in a certain situation.

The Sequel Script

One of these scripts is the Sequel Script. That’s the script where we feel like we’ve always behaved in a certain way, so we’re going to keep on behaving in the same way. We feel like the narrative needs to make sense.

This is the script that makes people choose careers that are aligned with whatever they studied at university. That is the script that makes people keep on dating the same kind of people they’ve been dating before. In general the script that makes us repeat the exact same behaviors and patterns that we’ve had in the past. In relationships in particular, what’s very interesting is that we want the sequel to connect to whatever the previous experience was. That might mean dating the exact same type of person or choosing the next person in response to whoever we were dating before. They might look like the complete opposite, but the truth is we still pick this person based on the sense of continuity with whatever the previous experience was before.

With the Sequel Script, it’s quite obvious why it limits the possibilities that we might explore in life. Because we feel like whatever decision we’re making next needs to make sense in relation to the decisions we made in the past. We ignore a lot more left-field, unexpected type of decisions that might be opportunities for growth, and exploration, and self discovery.

The Crowdpleaser Script

Another cognitive script that rules our life is the Crowdpleaser Script. This is the script where we make decisions based on whatever is going to please people around us the most. Quite often, those are the people like our parents. We might make decisions based on whatever is going to make them feel like you’re safe and successful. But the audience for the Crowdpleaser Script can also be your friends, can be your partner, can be your colleagues.

And what you don’t realize when you follow the Crowdpleaser Script is that you’re not making decisions based on what you want and what would make you happy, but based on what will make others around you happy.

The Epic Script

Finally, there’s the Epic Script, and this one is very insidious because it’s actually celebrated in our society. It’s the script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big, it needs to be very ambitious, it needs to be impactful. Anything less than that is failure.

The Epic Script is an extreme version of the idea of following your dreams. And because of that, it has created a form of stigma around having a small, simple life. A life that is focused on just being happy in the moment, being present, being connected, and exploring your curiosity. Because if you don’t have those external signs of success, if you’re not following your grand passion, then are you really living a meaningful life? This is the anxiety inducing question that is created by the Epic Script.

When you think about it, this is a very myopic definition of success where we try to put all of our eggs in the same basket. We choose this one thing and we say, “If I succeed to this, then I’m successful in life.” The problem with this is that if we fail at this particular project, this particular goal, we feel like we have failed at life, entirely. And the other problem with putting all of our eggs in the same basket is that then sometimes the basket just becomes too heavy and we drop it all together.

Our modern hyperconnected online world has made the Epic Script, unfortunately, very, very popular with people. We have become overly obsessed with finding our purpose. Mentions in books of the phrase, “find your purpose,” have surged 700% in the past two decades only.

The subtle shift to overcome cognitive scripts

We see all of those stories of success of people who have found their passion and who are very happy as a result of this. We see the entrepreneur that followed their passion and was very successful, but we don’t see all of the thousands of other ones that have tried the exact same thing and failed. This is called survivorship bias, and it’s very unfortunate how nowadays we are basing all of our decisions and even our self-worth based on that incomplete information.

Once you have identified the cognitive scripts that rule your life, you can actually break free from them, and it really starts by seeing them as stories we tell ourselves rather than truth that we need to follow blindly. A really good way to do this is to stop for a second every time you hear yourself saying, “I should do this.” This word should is actually a really good signal that there might be a cognitive script at play somewhere here. And once you’ve identified the places in your life and the situations in your life where you are using that word, should, you can then decide to replace that word with another word, might.

What might I want to do instead of what should I do. What might I want to explore? What might I want to experiment with? If you wanna start writing your own scripts in life, there are three questions that you can ask yourself while designing your next experiment. The first one is am I following my past or discovering my path? The second one is am I following the crowd or am I discovering my tribe? And then finally, am I following my passion or am I discovering my curiosity?

Those three questions together allow you to embrace the liminal space we’re all in. To make friends with uncertainty, to start experimenting more, and very importantly, to deal with those three powerful cognitive scripts that underlie a lot of our decisions on an unconscious level.

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You can see the shift everywhere, from silent school buses to teens measuring themselves in likes. Morell says the answer is not more willpower or tighter screen limits. It is a deliberate exit plan that parents can lead, backed up by schools and policy.

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Timestamps

00:00 Hijacking our children’s brains
00:42 Smartphones are hurting our children
02:27 Social reward wiring
03:25 Dopamine deficit
04:00 Desensitization
05:34 A child’s brain on social media
11:32 How to exit tech and give your kids a better life
13:14 Why screen time limits fail
14:52 Tech-free families
16:12 Smart phone and mental health quality
18:08 Dumphones
19:33 Social media and social isolation
24:57 Autism and ADHD and Electronic Screen Syndrome
26:46 How smartphones distract us
28:41 Technoference
31:20 How to free your child from the perils of smartphones
32:16 What to focus on after exiting tech
34:18 Getting your kids’ buy-in
45:18 What is a reasonable age for a smartphone?
55:25 Creating policy to protect our children
57:01 The decline of reading scores
1:01:58 Section 230 law
1:08:55 The pornography epidemic

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

Hijacking our children’s brains

Social media is the perfect recipe for kids to become addicted to their smartphones because it’s hijacking a normal part of human development. Literally thousands of engineers for social media companies, it is their job to make social media as addictive as possible because the profit model is to profit off of users’ time, attention, and data. The user is the profit.

My name is Clare Morell. I’m a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and my new book is The Tech Exit, a practical guide to freeing kids and teens from smartphones.

Smartphones are hurting our children

Childhood has changed from smartphones and social media because now children, instead of playing outside, riding their bikes, spending time with their family in person, are often scrolling in their rooms on their beds alone with a screen. The appeal of social media held out to us was that we can be more connected with people than ever, and yet they’re not spending time with their friends in person. The amount of time spent in person has decreased, and this kind of picture of childhood today is a silent school bus, a silent school hallway. Kids are not laughing and making jokes and kind of rousing each other up on the school bus. Instead, their heads are hunched over a phone, scrolling silently, and even while they’re with each other, they’re not talking to each other. This is just a picture of what childhood looks like.

These phones have really flattened childhood and flattened the purpose of childhood because the message that the technology itself sends to kids, not about the content on the screen, but the medium of these technologies themselves, send the message that life is for constant entertainment and amusement, and it’s an inherently self-focused technology. That’s why we see kids hunched over these devices, scrolling their time away instead of interacting with each other in person. Humans, we’re social creatures. We’re made for relationships with other people. That’s why we do see this epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, depression among kids today because they’re missing out on those real-life interactions and those real-life experiences that give a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Social reward wiring

Social media is the perfect recipe for kids to become addicted to their smartphones because it’s hijacking a normal part of human development. So between the ages of 10 to 12, our brains as humans become more wired for what we call social rewards, which is a natural part of development. It actually helps children start to turn outward from their immediate family unit to really value the approval and feedback of their peers and other people. It’s supposed to help us form relationships with friends, with our communities.

But the sensitive period of brain development where literally the dopamine receptors in our reward pathways are multiplying is being completely hijacked by social media because now social media is providing these artificially high bursts of dopamine and making children increasingly sensitive to the kinds of social rewards that social media delivers.

Dopamine deficit

What happens is that initial burst of dopamine provides pleasure, but immediately afterwards, your brain goes into a dopamine deficit. It actually crashes below your baseline of pleasure. It incentivizes you to do that thing again. Instead of disconnecting and lifting up their eyes to the real world, they are just chasing constantly after the next dopamine high sucked into their devices.

Kids then are chasing likes and followers on social media because they want that next hit of dopamine or that next video. Then when they leave the offline world, they go into this dopamine deficit state.

Desensitization

What happens is addiction scientists explain this is called desensitization, where the brain gets used to this high level of dopamine and, to maintain homeostasis, it goes into a dopamine deficit state. Children don’t experience pleasure from the real world. The natural rewards of life don’t feel pleasurable to them. Instead, they crave going back online for that next hit of dopamine. It will never be enough. Dopamine doesn’t produce lasting satisfaction. It just produces craving.

Scientists are studying the effects of social media on developing brains. A study out of the University of North Carolina in 2023 measured sixth and seventh graders who were frequent checkers of social media and tracked their brain development over time. What they found was that those kids’ brains became overly sensitive in the reward pathways to the kinds of rewards that social media delivers. This made them increasingly sensitive and more likely to continue seeking those rewards compared to children who didn’t habitually check social media. After this peak of social rewards, their brains returned to a normal level.

This is changing children’s brains. This sensitive period of development, when we’re becoming more wired for social rewards, is being hijacked by social media features. As a result, they experience less pleasure from the real-life rewards we were made to experience pleasure from.

A child’s brain on social media

Literally thousands of engineers for social media companies are employed to make social media as addictive as possible because the profit model is to profit off users’ time, attention, and data. The user is the profit. The more time, attention, and data we spend on their platforms, the more money they make because they sell that to advertisers. What I try to explain in the book is that social media is inherently addictive. All of the features are meant to make us experience craving for more.

Things like variable rewards work like a slot machine, where you’re not sure if you’re going to win every time you play, and that uncertainty makes it extremely addictive. The same is true of social media. You’re not sure if you’re going to get a new like or a new follower when you go back on the platform. They design these features intentionally. They’ve attached metrics to our relationships, so the online world becomes about how many likes your post gets or how many followers you have.

All of those features are extremely addictive to the social reward systems our brains are wired for. We experience a burst of pleasure when we get approval from our peers or social feedback, and that is now being monetized on social media. This is not a matter of willpower. These platforms are designed to hijack human brain vulnerabilities that evolved for social rewards, which are amplified on social media.

For children’s brains in particular, the part responsible for impulse control, self-control, and emotional regulation is the prefrontal cortex. It is not fully developed until around age 25. That makes it very difficult for a child to self-regulate their use, and they are always going to want more. One scientist explained that a child’s brain on social media is like all gas with no brakes, because the desire for more is there but the self-regulation is not yet developed. In fact, the use of social media itself stunts that development.

Neuroscience research shows that kids who spend a lot of time on interactive screens have more sensitive reward pathways in the brain but an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. The connections between the cortex and the reward center, the part that helps us put on the brakes, are weaker. There are fewer neural connections between those parts of the brain in heavy users of screens or social media. Using social media actively interferes with the brain’s ability to develop self-control and regulation.

Imagine if there were a drug that children were taking all the time that produced these effects, disconnecting them from their families, making them constantly crave it, and sending them into a hyperactive state when they were on it. Any parent would say there is no way their child would be taking that drug. Yet smartphones and social media platforms have become socially acceptable despite years of evidence showing negative effects on kids and teens. The question becomes why we have not been able to wake up to this epidemic.

Part of the challenge is that these technologies do serve some function. Parents feel their child can stay in touch with them on a smartphone, and it has become the primary way children socialize. Individual parents feel it is extremely difficult to opt out because this is how kids communicate today. Even when parents suggest a basic phone with texting, they are told that kids are messaging and socializing through social media platforms. The promise of connection has made it difficult to disentangle these tools from their harmful effects.

As social creatures, it is hard for us to resist peer pressure. When we see everyone else giving smartphones to their kids, even if we feel uneasy about it, we assume it must be acceptable. Parents worry about being the one who opts out and leaves their child excluded from social settings. The challenge with smartphones and social media is that their effects are not just individual but operate at a group level. That makes them especially difficult for individual parents to resist.

Nearly every parent I’ve spoken with gives similar reasons for why they gave their child a smartphone. They want to stay in touch for safety, they don’t want their child to be left out because every other kid has one, and they want their child to have friends. Another common reason is wanting children to be prepared for the digital age, to know how to navigate technology and develop tech skills. These are legitimate reasons.

That is the core challenge. It can be difficult to step back and ask what these phones are actually doing to our kids and whether the costs are worth the benefits. Parents struggle to ask whether there is a better way or an alternative approach. That is what my book tries to offer to parents.

How to exit tech and give your kids a better life

I want to show you that there’s a better way that you can exit these technologies and give your child a healthy, flourishing childhood, and that on the other side of exiting technology is the life that you truly want for your child. I’ve spent the last several years working in the technology policy space, trying to help pass better laws to protect our kids online. In my policy work, I would frequently speak to audiences of parents, and they would approach me afterwards and say, “All the laws you’re proposing sound great, but I’m on the front lines. I can’t wait for Congress to pass these laws or for my state to take up this type of bill. What can I do? From your research, what would you recommend that I do?”

My research had convinced me that the harms were so great that I was not going to give smartphones and social media to my own children. I shared that with them, but I also recognized my children are young, all under the age of five, and these parents shared the very real pressures they faced in the teen years and were looking for resources for how to navigate this. I began asking whether there was a resource out there explaining not just how you can choose not to give smartphones and social media to your kids, but how to successfully do that. I started scouring nearly every book on technology and parenting I could find, and I found them all deeply unsatisfying.

They were accurate in describing the harms from what I had seen in my own research, but the solutions they offered to parents fell far short of the level of harms. They suggested things like set time limits, put parental controls in place, and talk to your kids about the dangers. All of that sounds like, “OK, that could be helpful.”I want to show you that there’s a better way that you can exit these technologies and give your child a healthy, flourishing childhood, and that on the other side of exiting technology is the life that you truly want for your child. I’ve spent the last several years working in the technology policy space, trying to help pass better laws to protect our kids online. In my policy work, I would frequently speak to audiences of parents, and they would approach me afterwards and say, “All the laws you’re proposing sound great, but I’m on the front lines. I can’t wait for Congress to pass these laws or for my state to take up this type of bill. What can I do? From your research, what would you recommend that I do?”

My research had convinced me that the harms were so great that I was not going to give smartphones and social media to my own children. I shared that with them, but I also recognized my children are young, all under the age of five, and these parents shared the very real pressures they faced in the teen years and were looking for resources for how to navigate this. I began asking whether there was a resource out there explaining not just how you can choose not to give smartphones and social media to your kids, but how to successfully do that. I started scouring nearly every book on technology and parenting I could find, and I found them all deeply unsatisfying.

They were accurate in describing the harms from what I had seen in my own research, but the solutions they offered to parents fell far short of the level of harms. They suggested things like set time limits, put parental controls in place, and talk to your kids about the dangers. All of that sounds like, “OK, that could be helpful.”

Why screen time limits fail

What my research had shown me was that screen time limits were no match for the addictive design of these technologies. The challenge with screen time limits is that the time limit on the device does not map on to a child’s mental or emotional time spent in the app. Kids carry the virtual world with them long after they leave it, constantly wondering, “Who’s liked my post? What new followers have I gotten?” They also wonder, “What’s happening? What are my friends saying to each other on social media while I’m not there?”

The design of these technologies creates a constant craving. Kids feel bursts of pleasure while they’re on the app, even for those 30 minutes, and as soon as they leave it, it crashes, and they crave going back on. In their brain and physiologically, it induces a craving that affects their behavior, mood, attitude, and emotions for the rest of the day, even when they’re not on the app. Time limits are no match for the addictive design and the compulsive behavior these apps induce in a child. I spent so much of my time studying how parental controls fell short of protecting kids from dangerous content or predators online. All the loopholes, the difficulties with the settings staying in place, and the bugs.

I recognized that we needed a resource to show parents that you don’t need to give smartphones and social media to your kids. A smartphone-free childhood is possible. I wanted to prove that it was possible.

Tech-free families

I had the hypothesis that a smartphone-free childhood is necessary, but I could not find a book saying that, and I couldn’t find a book showing parents how to do that. That is why I set out to write this book, “The Tech Exit,” to explain why a smartphone-free childhood is necessary. More than anything, I wanted to show parents it was possible, that other families had successfully done this, and their families were flourishing and their children were thriving.

That led me to do dozens of interviews with these families, and I heard of hundreds more, to find out how they had done this. I wanted to learn how they navigated the challenges of the teen years and dealt with the pressures toward a smartphone successfully. I could offer those practical steps and that advice to other families and parents.

The conclusion I came to in writing this book was that not only is the tech exit possible, but it’s fundamentally positive. These families who said no to tech were saying yes to so much more in life, to real-world experiences and real-life relationships for their kids. Those choices were setting their children up to flourish and succeed, both in childhood and as adults. After interviewing these families, I became convinced that this is the best possible thing we could do for our kids.

Smart phone and mental health quality

A study found that the younger the age of first smartphone, the worse the mental health as a young adult. They longitudinally studied over time, and children who got a smartphone younger, between ages eight to ten, struggled with more mental health challenges as young adults between 18 to 25. The most significant mental health challenge, what decreased the most with older age of smartphone, was suicidality. The older a child got a smartphone, the less likely they were to struggle with suicidal thoughts as young adults. There is a correlation between when a child gets a smartphone and how that sets them up for flourishing even into their young adulthood, particularly with mental health.

I think the safety concern is parents’ number one goal. They want to keep their children safe. The problem with smartphones is that we haven’t surfaced the hidden costs to child safety by handing them a smartphone. Giving them a smartphone gives bad actors, predators, and dangerous content easy access to our children. While they’re sitting in our living room on a smartphone, complete strangers online have incredible access to our kids in ways that’s very difficult for parents to effectively oversee or completely shut down.

I try to explain this concept of safety, that children are made less safe by handing them a smartphone with all these portals to the internet where predators can reach them inside your home. Because of the challenges we mentioned to their mental health and development, these are greater threats to our kids’ safety and well-being. There are other ways for parents to stay in touch with their children without handing them a supercomputer in their pocket 24/7. I talk about the alternative phone options available now.

Dumphones

I often recommend to parents, instead of a smartphone, getting a child a dumb phone. A dumb phone just means a phone that can call or text, that functions as a phone was originally meant to function. There are phones like the Gabb phone, the Bark phone, and Wisephone, allowing a child to call or text. Some of them have tools like GPS for when a child starts driving and you want to make sure they’re safe.

Without the internet, social media, and addictive games, these phones avoid making the phone an addictive device instead of truly a tool for communication. These alternative phones offer parents the ability to be in touch with their child to keep them safe, without handing them a dangerous portal to the internet that will make them less safe. I will also add that a lot of these families said they delayed the age of first cell phone as long as possible because they recognized their kids could borrow a phone at school. They could borrow a friend’s parent’s phone to get in touch with them.

They were trying to delay the age of their child having a personal device on them all the time, because even a dumb phone can still be compelling for a child to check constantly. When they opted for a cell phone because a child had more independence of movement, they were driving, they opted again for these non-smartphone alternatives. These still allowed them to keep their child safe without introducing all these other dangers.

Social media and social isolation

The fear of a child not having friends or being socially isolated is a very real concern. What I will say is three things I’ve found from parents. The first was that their decision to not give smartphones and social media was very friend filtering for their kids. Their kids found their real friends faster. Even if a friend had a smartphone or social media, a true friend was willing to accommodate their child’s difference. They would find ways to get in touch with them even if they weren’t on the Snapchat app.

One dad explained to me, “Honestly, our decisions around not giving our kids tech helped our kids find their real friends faster. If a friend wasn’t going to reach out to them because they weren’t on Snapchat, that’s not a great friend.” The second thing is it took more intentionality on the parents’ part to help children build a social life. Children do need friends. What that looked like in a lot of these families was helping their children spend time with friends in real life. One mom said, “They had a great friend that was 15 minutes away from our house, but it was an important friendship to my child. They also weren’t on a smartphone. I would spend the time driving my kid to their house to have them get time together.”

It is important to recognize saying no to tech will take more intentionality on the part of parents to help a child build a social life. It will be beneficial to kids to have those real-life friendships. The irony is, “Okay, I don’t want my child to be left out. I’ll give them a smartphone.” They may be more connected to their peers through the smartphone, but the depth of friendship is extremely shallow. These kids are lonely online because they’re not getting oxytocin through a screen.

This is a hormone that bonds us with people in real life. It’s released through eye contact and physical touch, and forms deep bonds of trust and friendship. These kids who are off social media are spending time with their friends in real life, forming deep friendships, much deeper and higher-quality friendships than the kids who are all connected online. The last thing I’ll say is these parents said, “Just finding one or two other families to opt out of smartphones and social media with them really helped provide their kids with other friends who also weren’t on the devices.” Not everyone had to share their tech restrictions in their child’s class or their team, but finding one or two other parents who were willing to also opt out made a huge difference. Their child had a few friends who also weren’t on the apps, and the parents felt like they had allies in the trenches making these decisions with them.

In response to parents who don’t want their children to be behind in this technological age, I will say that the smartphone and social media do not equal computer skills. They are not teaching children how to use the internet or the computer as a tool. They teach children how to scroll and jump between content and suck children into an immersive, addictive environment. These families I spoke with, while they didn’t give their kids smartphones and social media, allowed them access to a computer in the home. They allowed them access to use the internet as a tool. They used it publicly and purposefully.

In some of these families, a child was really interested in computer science. He read a bunch of computer science textbooks, was allowed to use the family home computer, taught himself how to code, and then got a coding scholarship to college in Ohio because he had built these actual tech skills. He’s very prepared now for the marketplace and college with these computer skills, and he never had a smartphone and social media. Sometimes we conflate that a child needs a smartphone or social media to be prepared to handle these technologies, but we can teach them how to use the technologies as a tool. With smartphones and social media, the user is the tool. We are being used by the product. We are not learning how to manipulate these things in a productive way.

A college professor explained to me that the students coming into her class know how to use smartphones, but they don’t know how to use Microsoft Excel or Google Scholar. They’re not prepared to use the computer and the internet in ways that would help them be prepared for handling college classes or entering the workforce. The habit formation that happens for a child, the brain development between zero to 18, not growing up on these technologies and having healthy brain development, allowing that prefrontal cortex to fully develop, to have emotional regulation and self-control, helps prepare children for how to use these technologies well as an adult. I interviewed grown children who had not had smartphones and social media, but then did get access to a smartphone in college. I asked them was there a temptation to binge on these technologies or were they not prepared to handle them well.

They said, no, like I’m not as addicted to my phone as my peers. Establishing those years of zero to 18 without these technologies allowed them to develop the habits to lay the foundation for their brain development. They could choose to use them maturely and operate them wisely as adults because they didn’t have the addictive compulsive behaviors and habits built up from childhood.

Autism and ADHD and Electronic Screen Syndrome

Dr. Victoria Dunckley has found in her practice that she treats patients struggling with autism and ADHD. What she found with the kids and teens coming to her practice is that often they didn’t actually have these underlying conditions of autism or ADHD, but their bodies were exhibiting these symptoms. Their nervous system was going into fight or flight mode. She coined the term electronic screen syndrome because these symptoms were induced, exacerbated, or mimicked by their use of interactive screens.

By eliminating interactive screens for 30 days, she would have all her patients do a 30-day digital detox before any other treatment. For many of her patients, taking the screens away eliminated the symptoms entirely. The symptoms they were exhibiting, poor focus, lack of attention, mood irritability, impulsiveness, mood swings, and tantrums, were being induced by the screen use. She explains that it puts a child’s nervous system, a developing nervous system, into a fight or flight response constantly. There’s no physical outlet for the adrenaline and cortisol to be released.

The screen is stimulating the amygdala in the brain, which takes over the brain and takes over the prefrontal cortex, and leads a child’s nervous system to be dysregulated. Dr. Dunckley found that electronic screen syndrome can be induced by regular use of screens. Time-limited use on a daily basis can still elicit these symptoms. It doesn’t have to be overuse or excessive screen time. She found that this is the case for any app with a reward component.

How smartphones distract us

Any type of online interactive game or tablet, even educational games that have reward components, can elicit a fight or flight response in the nervous system. Phones are also disruptive by their mere existence. Studies have found that the mere presence of a smartphone is distracting to our brains, and we have to exert self-control to not be constantly checking our device. We know that when it’s on us there could be something on that phone, a notification, a new like, a new follower, or a new text message. The presence of the phone itself, even if you’re not using it, is inherently distracting and reduces cognitive capacity and attention for the task at hand.

By eliminating interactive screens, nervous systems were able to recalibrate to a normal level. They were able to manage stress and the symptoms disappeared. For patients that did have one of those underlying conditions, the detox alone, without any other treatment, cut their symptoms in half. There is a catch-22 with screens, especially for children with autism or ADHD. Because of the behavioral difficulties parents face with children struggling with these conditions, it’s tempting to hand a child a screen because it initially calms them down and helps them regulate their emotions.

What Dr. Dunckley is finding is that cumulatively, over time, it exacerbates and worsens their symptoms because of the effects on the nervous system. This makes it difficult for a parent to imagine dealing with the child without a screen. Taking the screens away and doing a detox helps the child’s nervous system rebalance and the chemicals in the brain rebalance. It reduces their symptoms.

Technoference

There is a new body of research called Technoference, which studies the impact of technology interfering with parent-child relationships. The results are not good. Parents’ use of mobile devices or social media leads to poorer behavioral functioning, worse emotional regulation, and reduced attention spans in their children. The effects of a parent’s use are impacting their child’s behavior and emotions. Children exhibit worse externalizing behaviors, like tantrums and attention-seeking, when their parents are glued to their own devices.

It is also stunting their language development and their emotional regulation. Children get scaffolding from their parents. Our attention and interaction with our kids provide scaffolding to develop a new skill. Our interaction helps them develop new skills. Without that scaffolding, when we’re turning to our devices, children are not developing these skills.

It’s not just children’s use of technology that is stunting or impairing their development, but our use of technology. One study found that parents’ use of social media was increasing the likelihood of depression in teenagers. A teen was four times as likely to be depressed if their parent was a heavy user of social media. It’s not hard to imagine why, because if a parent is spending that time on social media and not giving that real-life relationship and attention to their child, it can lead a child to feel depressed and to not feel as valued.

Every time we pull out our phone when a child is trying to talk to us or interact with us, we’re communicating by our actions that the phone is more important than the real-life relationship in front of us. It is convicting as parents that we have to think about our own tech use because of those negative impacts on our kids, and because we’re modeling for them how we would want them to use technology as adults. Asking ourselves, “Am I using my phone the way I would want my child to use their phone as an adult?” can be convicting. Asking ourselves, “Am I paying more attention to my phone than I am to my child?” can be convicting.

Any parent would say, “Of course I value the relationship with my child more than my phone,” but is our behavior matching that? As parents, we need to critically examine our own use of screens, especially when we’re with our children.

How to free your child from the perils of smartphones

If smartphones and social media are harmful to children, and if screen time limits and parental controls are not sufficient solutions for protecting them from these harms, then what are parents to do? Is there another way? My book, The Tech Exit, explains there is another way possible, that we can opt out of smartphones and social media entirely for our children during both childhood and the teen years. On the other side of exiting these technologies is the life we want for our children. I want to explain how parents can do this.

I walk through the five key commitments to the Tech Exit lifestyle with the acronym FEAST. I wanted parents to know that this is a positive vision.

What to focus on after exiting tech

If we’re fasting from technology, what are we feasting on instead? Let me give you the five principles that make up the acronym FEAST.

F: Find other families. We can’t do this alone. We need to reach out to our communities, to other parents in our neighborhood and schools, to invite them to opt out with us.

E: We educate, explain, and exemplify. We want our children to understand the reasons we’re saying no to these screens. We want to work to get their buy-in so they can understand our rationale and be prepared for how to navigate these technologies as adults. We also do that by exemplifying a healthy use of technology ourselves as parents.

A: Adopt alternatives. There are better phone options available than the smartphone. We can give our children dumb phones that allow them to call and text without introducing portals to the internet, social media platforms, or online games that are meant to addict a child.

S: We set up digital accountability and family screen rules. This is how we use technology in the home wisely. How can children use computers or a family enjoy television together? We want to think through our family screen rules, how we use these technologies purposefully and intentionally in a way that brings the family together rather than dividing us on our own devices. We want to have digital accountability in the home between parent and child to keep our children safe.

T: We trade the screens for real-life responsibilities and pursuits. As we restrict children’s freedoms in the virtual world, we want to allow them more freedoms in the real world. Real-life activities, relationships, and responsibilities help them progress towards adulthood, not screens that stunt them from progressing towards adulthood.

Getting your kids’ buy-in

It’s important in living out this lifestyle in our families that as we’re restricting smartphones and social media, we’re working to get our kids buy-in and hearing them out if they have reasonable requests. All the families I spoke with said they wanted their children to understand the reasons and educate themselves on the harms. A lot of these children, when they realized what their parents were trying to protect them from, could understand why, even if they didn’t love it at the time. They recognized these restrictions came from a place of love and protection. As adults, these children say they’re grateful their parents made those decisions.

A key part of this is not starting with top-down restrictions out of nowhere, but starting with a conversation. Try to explain what you’ve come to observe and understand about the harms of these technologies and what you want to protect your child from. Do something together where you’re helping educate your children on these harms and the rationale behind these decisions. Many families shared that they read an article and talked about the harms of smartphones together. They tried to have a conversation and asked questions of their child.

Do you notice these effects among your peers? Do you notice how your peers or you are interacting with your phone? What do you notice? How do you feel about that? Try to engage children in a conversation about this in the context of a relationship where you’re walking these steps with your child. Come alongside them and explain what you’re trying to usher them into. What you want for them is a life of real-life relationships and friendships and connection and flourishing.

Exiting technology is part of ushering them into the life they want for themselves and the life you want for them. Many families said they watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma” with some of their teenagers. Once the teens realized the business model behind social media, that these platforms were trying to addict them and manipulate their behavior, they didn’t want any part of that. We as parents can be educators coming alongside our kids to have these conversations and expose the business model. We’re trying to keep them safe from these types of addictions because we want them to have a flourishing, thriving, successful life as children and as adults.

Another important piece of this was that these were constant conversations between parent and child. While the parents had certain non-negotiables, no smartphone or no social media, they wanted to accommodate children’s reasonable requests for staying in touch with their peers and having a social life. One family said they initially had their two sons sharing one of these dumb phones, but the older brother was getting annoyed by the texts his younger brother was getting. He said it made him miss communications from his baseball coach. He asked if he could get his own non-smartphone, and the parents said that made sense.

They still had parameters around it. He wasn’t going to take it with him around the neighborhood. It was going to mainly live at home. He could use it for general communication needs, but this wasn’t going to be a device tethered to him constantly. They stuck to their principles but accommodated his reasonable request. Another family mentioned their son had a dumb phone and was frustrated by its bad maps or lack of GPS. He was driving more and asked if he could have another phone that at least had better maps, a better GPS.

The parents said that made sense and tried to find a better non-smartphone alternative that could provide the tools he needed to drive well and navigate safely. It still didn’t have the dangers of social media or the internet on the phone constantly. Another mom mentioned they didn’t allow their son to have a smartphone or social media, but his classmates kept up through a Google chat group. He was allowed to go on a nightly basis and check that chat to stay in touch with his friends from school. Parents were accommodating children’s desire for communication with their friends in a way that still protected them from the harms of smartphones and social media as the non-negotiables in their family.

It’s never too late to reverse course on smartphones, social media, or interactive screens. Digital detoxes work. A 30-day digital detox can reset the brain, and the desensitization to real world natural pleasures can be undone. The brain comes back to a normal balance and homeostasis, and they start to experience pleasures from the real world again. I have heard from family after family that thought it would be impossible.

They said, “I can’t picture dealing with my child without the smartphone or screen.” They reached a point of saying, “We see all these harms on our child, all these ill effects. We have to try it.” I encourage parents, if the tech exit seems daunting to do over the long term, start with a 30-day digital detox. Set aside 30 days on your calendar and get on board as a family with why you’re doing this. Detox from these screens for 30 days, and fill your calendar with non-screen activities.

Make this a team effort as a family that you’re doing together, and try to give children a vision for what you’re trying to do. Many families said for their teens it wasn’t too late to reverse course on the smartphone. Even their 14-year-old son came to see the effect that the smartphone had had on him by detoxing from it. He said, “I didn’t realize how much my phone had changed me or the power it had over me,” and he was able to exit these technologies even as a teenager. I encourage parents of teens, if you do take the smartphone away, give them an alternative phone where they can still communicate, text, and call, and think of real-world freedoms you can replace it with.

One family reversed course on a smartphone with their 17-year-old son. They had given him the smartphone and within a week saw the compulsive effects and said, “This was a mistake.” They had a conversation, and the dad said, “This is not necessarily a parenting strategy I’d recommend of giving a child a smartphone and immediately taking it away.” They found it was necessary. When they took the smartphone away, they gave their son access to a truck.

He used that truck to start a moving business with his brother, gained responsibilities, and had a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that was more satisfying than the smartphone. They gave him a dumb phone instead, and the power of giving him more responsibility and freedom in the real world was a replacement for the smartphone. It is possible to reverse course even in the teen years. Their son going off to college said, “I’m not sure if I’m going to get a smartphone or not now that I can as an adult. I’m not sure because I recognized it had this weird power over me.”

What the tech exit lifestyle looks like in my own home is that we don’t have interactive screens in our house. Our children don’t have access to tablets. We don’t have a smart TV. We do have a dumb TV that my husband pulls out on Friday nights for us to watch a family movie, but it’s not a daily habit. We’re using it purposefully, and we’re doing it together.

I don’t have a smartphone. I gave up my smartphone two years ago because I recognized it was too addictive and too powerful for me to resist checking it all the time when I was with my kids. I recognized giving up a smartphone and having one of these alternative phones would allow me to be more present with my children and less distracted by what was happening on the device. We haven’t had to navigate kids having to use screens for schools yet. All of my children are five and under.

I recognize the pressures toward using screens are only going to increase. Their peers don’t yet have smartphones. That is why I set out to interview families of teenagers who had teens now and who have successfully launched teens to college, to find out how they navigated these pressures when all of a sudden their children’s friends started getting smartphones or getting on social media apps. I also wanted to understand how they navigated when their children were required to use the internet more for school assignments. This is what helped me flesh out this framework. It’s not only taking the steps I can now with my young kids, not allowing interactive screen time, keeping passive screen time of the television to a rare occurrence we use together, and giving up my own smartphone.

It’s also how to navigate when children do need more access or have more access to technology and when their peers have more access to those devices. The last thing I’ll say is that even at a young age, we’re trying to explain and educate our children about the internet. It’s never too early to explain to your children the dangers they could come across online. I recognize there’s only so much I can do in my power, that if other kids they’re around start to have smartphones or internet connected devices, they could be shown something.

With our kids, we use a book called “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, Jr.” where we talk about how they could see bad pictures online or someone could show them a bad picture and how to respond to that. I want my kids to have tools to know how to navigate that. From reading that book, they know that if they see something, they turn away and they run and they tell me, and we’re trying to open that conversation from a young age. I want my children to be able to come to me and talk about that. I saw with these families of teens that these constant conversations and open channels of communication meant the parent was the resource a child could go to if they came across something that made them feel uncomfortable online or if a friend showed them something.

What is a reasonable age for a smartphone?

It’s never too early to start these conversations, even for young parents. They will gradually deepen and be explained more fully as children grow into the tween and teen years. When I’m asked what a reasonable age for a smartphone is, I find it’s a complicated question. What I’ve seen in these families is that they’ve rejected the premise of inevitability, the idea that at some point a child must get one. Families draw these lines differently. Many said it wasn’t about age as much as signs of maturity and whether their child could handle it well.

Knowing your child is most important. In the example of the family that gave their 17-year-old a smartphone because they thought it was an appropriate age, they quickly observed compulsive behaviors and realized it wasn’t the right decision for him. Parents shouldn’t be afraid to say, “We made a mistake,” if they’re seeing addictive or compulsive behaviors. Watching your own child is the guiding principle. If those signs are there, it may be wise to undo the decision and wait longer.

Families have drawn lines in different places. Some chose senior year of high school to gradually introduce more responsibility before college. Others waited until college. Some incentivized their kids to stay on a dumb phone through college by paying for the phone plan and letting their child choose a smartphone later as an adult, with their own money. Those parents still felt they were in a guiding role even through the college years.

Part of the challenge with screen technologies is that the harms aren’t only individual. They change group social dynamics. Even if a child isn’t on the apps, a few peers using smartphones or social media can shift how relationships function and make kids feel left out, lonely, anxious, or depressed. Some parents push back by creating counter pressures, talking to neighbors and creating havens where kids can come home to play without phones. These spaces give children relief from the constant pull of screens.

In one suburb outside Washington, D.C., two moms started by talking across the street about the kind of childhood they wanted for their kids. They agreed they didn’t want phones and wanted their kids riding bikes together. That agreement created a positive vision that spread. Other kids started coming outside to play. Not every family shared the same tech restrictions, but they shared the same vision of childhood. The neighborhood became a place where kids played outside, worked through conflicts, rode bikes, and threw balls together.

That kind of environment draws more kids in. There is strength in numbers when parents talk to neighbors or a few families at school to create a positive social dynamic. It’s possible to create a neighborhood that feels like the 1970s, with no phones in sight and kids laughing and playing outside together. That energy becomes an antidote to screens.

Families who have exited tech told me their relationships are much closer. At the dinner table, they’re having real conversations instead of being distracted by phones. People aren’t mentally pulled away by what’s happening on a device. Taking tech away strengthened their family bonds. One mom said she thought giving her child a smartphone would reduce battles, but instead it introduced dozens more conflicts each day over time limits and enforcement. Removing the smartphone reduced tension and strengthened relationships.

These families fill their time with family walks, yard games, puzzles, board games, or watching a movie together intentionally. Many parents with smartphones say they can’t even watch a family movie without kids checking their devices. Without phones, entertainment becomes a shared experience again. Parents say they enjoy time together more, and children rediscover pleasure in real-world experiences that once felt boring.

Educators told me they can see the difference between students who have smartphones and those who don’t. Kids without smartphones make eye contact, engage in conversation, and are relational. Kids with smartphones often struggle with eye contact, feel anxious, and find real-life interaction difficult. The contrast is stark. Removing screens changes how children relate to others.

This lifestyle isn’t easy, and it can be more challenging depending on circumstances. Single parents, working parents, or families whose children have had smartphones for a long time may find it harder. Still, many parents facing those challenges took these steps and are grateful they did. There will be points of resistance, and some will be harder to overcome than others. It’s still one of the best things parents can do for their children.

Parents can start small. A week-long digital detox is a place to begin if 30 days feels overwhelming. Some families tried several shorter detoxes before committing to a longer one. Even a phone-free hour, meal, or walk helps children experience what life feels like without a phone. Schools can also play a role, and parents can advocate for phone-free school days. Many schools are eager to try these policies when parents support them.

Finding community support matters. Talking to friends, neighbors, or other parents can make this easier. After-school programs or extracurriculars that are phone-free can also help. Challenges exist, but they can be overcome. Taking small steps, starting conversations, and walking alongside your child makes this possible. On the other side of exiting tech is a flourishing life, and it can be done one step at a time.

Creating policy to protect our children

Many of the negative effects and dynamics from smartphones and social media today are not possible for individual parents to fully address on their own. They require collective solutions as a society. Schools can be a helpful force for change, helping parents push back against the harms of smartphones and social media by protecting students’ learning and social environment from the influence of these technologies. Schools are on the front lines as a level of collective solutions that can help parents.

On a broader level, policy changes can be helpful for providing collective solutions in the law to back parents up, both at the state level and the federal level. There has been a push to get screens into schools as a solution for educational inequalities and for helping children advance in education. It hasn’t panned out in the data. In the latest national study of academics in the U.S., scores for reading, math, and science are at their lowest levels since the 1970s. Despite the push for screens in schools, it has not resulted in better academic improvements.

The decline of reading scores

People like to point to the COVID pandemic as the reason for these low scores, but the decline goes back further than that. COVID and screen-based learning accelerated these trends, but starting back in 2012 we began seeing reading scores fall below where they had been for the last several decades. Now they’re returning to the lowest levels we’ve seen since the 1970s. Other research shows access to technology, including One Laptop per Child, did not notably improve educational outcomes or attainment. It did not lead to an increased likelihood of going to college or graduating high school. Putting a screen on every desk has not borne out in the data the results that were expected and hoped for.

Some of the science behind learning can explain why. Studies using MRI results show that children who read texts on a screen do not engage with them as deeply and do not comprehend as well as reading on paper. The same is true for learning ABCs, letters, writing, and language skills. Children learn literacy more when they write letters by hand than when they type or do an activity on a screen. Across these recent studies, paper proves to be better than the screen. Maryanne Wolf explains this is because screens encourage our brains to skim, with eyes naturally skimming on a screen rather than reading complete sentences. Reading on paper leads children to read more fully, comprehend more deeply, and develop fuller literacy.

We are seeing some schools return to using books and paper instead of screens. One of the most effective policy changes schools can make to support parents is getting rid of phones from the school day, not just during classroom time but from bell to bell. Studies show these smartphone bans are effective. Schools see improvements in academic scores, student relationships, and behavior. Some districts adopted these policies because of discipline issues, inappropriate behaviors on phones, bullying, or coordinating activities during the school day. Phones were disrupting not only the learning environment but the social environment and the pressure students felt about being constantly photographed and uploaded to social media.

Getting rid of phones from bell to bell improves students’ mental health and reduces discipline and behavioral issues. Students start talking with their teachers again and socializing during lunch, recess, and in hallways. It creates a more vibrant social environment. Since children’s main waking hours are spent at school, protecting not only the academic environment but the social environment is a powerful supporting force for parents opting out. More and more districts and individual schools are adopting bell-to-bell phone bans.

Some entire states have gone phone free during the school day and are seeing benefits. A study in London around 2016 found that GPAs rose and performance on national tests improved. The lowest performing students saw the greatest gains, with results doubling. This solution helps address educational achievement gaps more than handing every child a laptop. Getting phones out of the school day has had the greatest positive impact, especially for the lowest performing students. It also takes the burden off individual teachers by making it a top-down decision where phones are turned in at the start of the day or made inaccessible, protecting the learning and social environment so students can pay full attention to instruction.

Section 230 law

The reason that social media has become so harmful to kids is because there’s been no legal accountability whatsoever for the social media platforms as an industry. A lot of this stems back to a law called Section 230, which is the main law that governs the internet and gives immunity to liability to platforms for the third-party content that they host. The law’s purpose and intent makes sense, that a company shouldn’t be sued for content that they host causing harm to someone else on the platform. The problem has been that this law has been overexpanded in its interpretation by courts to even immunize companies for their own wrongdoing. That includes their product design, their features, like the likes, the metrics, and the algorithms that aggressively promote content to kids.

This can look like a blackout challenge being dumped into a 10-year-old’s feed without even looking for it. It is sent to her by an algorithm, and she accidentally took her own life doing this blackout challenge. Lawsuits that parents have tried to bring for these harms, which were not caused by the content hosted on the platforms but by the design of the companies themselves, have largely been tossed out of courts because of Section 230. The normal means of holding companies accountable in our country is litigation. This is how we protect our consumers.

It’s not necessarily a lot of regulation on the front end, but there is some means of holding companies accountable if their products are harming consumers. What’s been so challenging with the social media industry is that the main channel of accountability through litigation has been completely blocked off to parents because of Section 230. There are many different angles to trying to address the problem from a policy perspective. It’s important that those solutions keep in mind the First Amendment rights of adults.

One bucket of solutions is trying to reform Section 230 and open up more liability for holding these companies accountable. Federal bills like the Kids Online Safety Act, KOSA, were trying to do this, to provide more accountability by saying that companies can be held accountable for certain objective harms to kids from their product design, not related to content, but opening up more channels for litigation. That solution protects the First Amendment rights of adults while trying to open companies up to more liability and accountability.

Other solutions at the state level have focused on age verification and parental consent laws for social media accounts. It’s important to recognize there have been advances in age verification where this can be conducted by a third party. There is no revealing of personal information to the platform. States increasingly have digital IDs, and many of these programs have verification software where all you do is let the digital ID know you’re trying to access a website, and it generates a token telling the website you’re over 18. That’s the only information transmitted, just a signal of whether the person is above 18 or not.

No other personal identifying information is transferred, similar to a two-factor authentication method that takes about 30 seconds. The good uses of technology have been these advances in privacy-protecting, anonymous ways for adults to verify they are adults in the virtual world while protecting children. These solutions have already been applied to pornography websites. A similar approach could be taken to age-restrict social media out of childhood or to require parental consent so a parent is overseeing whether a child gets a social media account.

The current state of affairs is that any child can create a social media account, falsify a birth date, and a parent would never know. They can make an account, check a box, and they’re on. Solutions that give parents more involvement prevent children from entering contracts with giant tech companies that are extracting their time, attention, and data without a parent being part of that process. Many of these laws are trying to balance the First Amendment rights of adults and their privacy while protecting kids.

Social media companies and their algorithms are playing a role in facilitating child sexual abuse, exploitation, and human trafficking on the platforms. It’s been difficult to hold them accountable because of Section 230, but their algorithms have been shown to connect predators more easily with victims. The Wall Street Journal ran a story showing that Instagram is predators’ app of choice because algorithms help them find child sexual abuse material and locate victims.

An internal 2019 study that Meta conducted on Instagram found certain categories of accounts designated as “groomer accounts.” These were adults exhibiting grooming behaviors without crossing the line into illegal activity. Of the accounts recommended to these groomer accounts, 27% were minor accounts, while average adult accounts only received about 7% minor recommendations. This shows that social media companies themselves play a role, with algorithms making it easier for predators to find children.

Other internal research showed that for Instagram, 100,000 minors a day were receiving sexually explicit messages from adults. This was Meta’s own internal research. They have done nothing about it. The problem is that companies know their product design is resulting in harmful effects to children, and because there is no accountability in the law, there is no incentive to change the business model. They profit off user time and attention.

Their algorithms are producing harmful results for children, and there is no accountability for the role they play in facilitating these abuses of our kids.

The pornography epidemic

There is a pornography epidemic afflicting our children and teens today in our country. Parents may not realize that the average age of first exposure for pornography is now estimated to be between 7 and 11 years old. Children are being exposed young and often to pornography, often through online means, and many of them are coming across it for the first time accidentally, clicking on a link or being shown something by a friend on a smartphone.

What we have to realize is the kind of pornography children are taking in. This is not your uncle’s playboy. This is dehumanizing, violent, degrading pornography. Our children are taking this in. They’re not even trying to go looking for it, but it’s finding them on social media and on smartphones because of how ubiquitous and accessible it is.

We have to grapple with this epidemic of pornography exposure among our youth and how quickly that sucks children into dangerous addictions to this extremely graphic and dehumanizing content. This is being actively served up to children in their social media feeds itself, extremely sexualized content being dumped by the algorithm into their feed. What happens is if a child even just hovers over a TikTok reel of some type of suggested dancing or sexual content for a few seconds, they’re instantly barraged in their feed by more and more aggressive content of that kind.

They have done investigative reporting to find that kids are quickly sucked into rabbit holes of more extreme content, that the feed becomes even more extreme over time. What’s happening is that the environment created on the social media accounts is hyper sexualized for kids. Teen girls think that this is how they garner more likes and followers, the more sexually suggested material that they post. It’s become very normalized. The message that the platforms send is that this type of sexual content is normal and that everyone is doing it.

It’s no surprise then that the effects this is having is now our teens, especially teen boys, are falling prey to these sextortion schemes. It’s because it’s become so normalized to send sexually explicit images and material to each other online. They don’t think anything of it when they’re approached by what appears to be a local girl in their community asking for some type of sexual photo or interaction. Then it’s quickly revealed it’s a scheme and they’re being financially extorted, threatened that this is going to be posted all over social media if they don’t pay the money.

These sextortion cases have been increasing rapidly. Snapchat alone says they receive 10,000 reports of sextortion a month. That’s just one app. It’s probably under reported. Another survey found one in five teens said that they had been a victim of sextortion.

Why is this happening? It’s because the environment that the social media apps have created has become so sexualized that teens don’t think anything of it, that this feels normal. A Harvard professor said that she did an investigation into TikTok and found that TikTok Live felt like going down the street to a strip club filled with 15 year old girls who were performing acts that towed the line of child pornography being urged on by adult viewers who were offering them these TikTok gifts that they could use in the app or exchange for cash. It’s an incredibly sexualized environment, which is warping children’s own self image, their own expectations of relationships, and is also making it easier for predators to prey on children because this has become so normalized in their social environments on social media.

Another teacher in Ireland was sharing that he started to ask his 16 year old students what they think is expected of them in a romantic relationship because he’s recognizing this issue of pornography exposure. He said, sadly, the young boys think that they should be aggressive and dominant. They should be with as many women as possible. The girls think that— they think that— on the other hand, they think that they should be dominated. Why is that normalized? Where are they getting these expectations? It’s through pornography.

Another young girl who has shared her story widely, she talks— she wrote a really compelling article about what she found when she encountered Pornhub accidentally as a 10 year old. She said, parents don’t realize that the Playboy looks like an American Girl doll catalog compared to what I was exposed to. Part of it goes back to the brain science that the dopamine released by pornography desensitizes you to the real world pleasures. Over time, your brain builds up a tolerance. You need ever more extreme content. The desensitization and the tolerance built up over time leads users to pursue increasingly violent and extreme forms of this type of sexual content to try to experience the same dopamine high that they had at first.

Unfortunately, the reality for parents has been that they have been told that it’s all on them to try to protect their children from pornography, that they have to use filters as the only means available to them to try to protect their children. Filters are ill-equipped for protecting children in this smartphone app-based ecosystem of technology that we now have. On a smartphone, there are hundreds of apps. Every app has its own in-app browser. Often, apps block external third-party controls or filters from operating with inside their apps.

When a child can click through to Pornhub, the Pornhub website, inside of the Snapchat app without ever leaving the app, a filter can’t necessarily block that content that they’re accessing from the in-app browser. There are so many challenges to the app-based ecosystem. A smartphone means that a parent now has to try to effectively shut down all the thousands of portals to the internet on that device. Often, a filter built for a web browser does not function well inside of apps. If even in innocuous educational game apps, there’s an internet browser, children can be accessing pornography through that.

I can’t even tell you all the stories I’ve heard of parent after parent saying, I had no idea that they could get to this porn website through this educational game. Those haven’t been fixed or addressed. Parents lament to me how difficult it is to completely shut down all the portals of access to a child that a smart device introduces. The Supreme Court recognized this. The justices, even in their questioning over this recent case of a Texas age verification law for porn websites, focused on how ineffective the filtering has been.

Children are tech-savvier than their parents. Smartphones are in their pocket 24/7. It’s incredibly difficult for a parent to oversee. Filters struggle to keep up with all the apps and in-app browsers. It’s impossible. It’s an impossible fight for parents to effectively cut off a child’s access to pornography on a smartphone or smart device.

Parents will always be on the front line and trying to protect our kids. There are critical policy solutions and laws that are needed to back parents up. We need to have laws that actually put the onus on the porn websites themselves age-restricting their content. So that if a child accidentally clicks on a link to Pornhub, they’re not immediately sucked into all its obscene content. Or another child can’t easily pull up Pornhub on a smart device and stick it in my child’s face.

There are necessary collective solutions that we already have had in the physical world. You can’t go to a brick-and-mortar store and purchase a pornographic magazine unless you verify you’re an adult. Yet in the online world, you can easily click through to Pornhub without having to prove that you’re an adult. These age verification laws for pornography websites would bring the virtual world into alignment with the real world.

We had a landmark victory in the United States in June 2025 when the Supreme Court upheld one of these age verification laws out of Texas as constitutional. This provides a clear path forward for states to be able to legislate in this area, better able to protect children from online obscenity. This is a huge victory. It pushes back against the status quo of the last 20 years where it’s been only on parents to try to use filters to protect their kids. It provides this critical layer of backup and makes it possible for states to pass more laws in this area of protecting kids from online obscenity.

The court applied intermediate scrutiny, which said that the burden on adult speech was incidental and that states actually need more nuance and more flexibility in being able to balance the First Amendment rights of adults and the compelling state interest of protecting kids online. One law doesn’t need to address every aspect of the problem. It opens a path for states to also pursue other laws to restrict kids’ access to online obscenity.

I’ve spent the last several years working on policy solutions to try to help support parents in their efforts to protect kids and also to ensure that all children are protected, not just those who have involved parents who can spend 40 hours a week trying to stay on top of all this stuff. Just a couple buckets of solutions. At the state level, we’ve seen tremendous victories and progress over the last several years. Twenty-four states have passed successfully age verification for pornography websites laws to age restrict those portions of the internet that are extremely harmful for children.

Numerous states have passed age verification and parental consent laws for social media accounts, recognizing that in the current state of affairs because of a federal law called COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, that says that if you’re under 13, a parent has to consent to your data collection. Social media’s de facto age became 13 because these companies are collecting data. That’s their business model. Parents are completely cut out of the equation and there’s no real meaningful age enforcement or age verification. We know 8 to 12 year olds are getting on these platforms and that there’s no parental involvement whatsoever when children are agreeing to these whole host of terms and services with giant tech companies.

Giant tech companies are entering contracts with our kids without parents being part of that process. These state laws are trying to provide some type of age verification, parental consent for kids to get access to social media accounts. At a federal level, there’s been a lot of reforms proposed and introduced around reforming Section 230 to try to allow for more liability, particularly when it comes to their design harms. The Kids Online Safety Act has been a big bipartisan bill introduced the last several years that passed out of the Senate in 2024, 91 to 3. Unfortunately it didn’t make it through the House before the Congress term expired.

I think that is looking like it will be raised again. It would put an obligation on the platforms to mitigate certain objective harms to kids in their product design. It opens up more channels of legal liability if they’re not then complying with the requirements of that law. There’s been other proposals to try to update COPPA to potentially raise the age of COPPA. Why was the age of internet adulthood set so low at 13? That law was passed back in 1998 before social media even existed.

Another recent creative solution that some states have been taking up is trying to require age verification and parental consent at the app store level. Utah and Texas have passed these App Store Accountability Acts, which are meant to put parents more in the driver’s seat over a child’s experience in the app store. It would require a parent’s consent for any app download or purchase. Efforts to bring our regulations and laws more into alignment with the state of the internet today and the harms of social media are trying to protect children. Efforts are exploring raising COPPA to the age of 15 instead of 13.

I also personally have been advocating for a national age restriction on social media. The country of Australia has done this, where they have banned social media for minors under 16. That provides that collective solution. Parents on their own aren’t having to say no to the pressures towards social media. It’s a non-option for kids under 16. The way we’ve age restricted other harmful substances or technologies to children, like motor vehicles or firearms, those are age restricted. We recognize they take maturity to operate.

The ways that social media acts on the brain, like an addictive substance, we’ve likewise age restricted tobacco and alcohol out of childhood. We have these precedents in our laws to look at these solutions we’ve taken in the past and apply those to looking at social media today. Those are just some of the categories of solutions I’ve been working on the last several years. I will say I’m excited by the possibilities because there’s been a lot more attention by policymakers on the harms of social media. The last several years, we see more and more states passing these laws. We see Congress on a bipartisan nature trying to find solutions that protect kids and empower parents in this digital age.

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Timestamps

00:00 If humans are so smart, why are we on the verge of destruction?
02:19 The rise of alien intelligence
14:20 How information technology shapes society
19:52 The rise of inorganic information
28:21 The importance of human institutions
37:09 Information isn’t truth

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

If humans are so smart, why are we on the verge of destruction?

I’m Yuval Noah Harari. I’m a professor of history, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of “Nexus,” a history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. The key question of “Nexus” is if humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? Why are we on the verge of destroying ourselves?

We have managed to reach the moon, to split the atom, to the cipher DNA, and yet with all our knowledge and wisdom, we are on the verge of ecological collapse, perhaps of a third world war. And also we are developing an extremely powerful technology AI, which might get out of our control and enslave or destroy us. So the book explores this strange dynamic in human history between our knowledge and wisdom and our self-destructiveness.

This is a question that has been often raised and a traditional theological and mythological answer to this question is that there is something wrong in human nature. There is something in human nature that makes us self-destructive, and the answer that “Nexus” gives is different. The problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information.

Humans, yes, we are generally good and wise, but if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. What the book explores is why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years of history? Why is it that even modern, very sophisticated societies in the 20th and 21st century have been as susceptible as stone age tribes to mass delusion and psychosis and the rise of destructive ideologies like Stalinism or Nazism?

The rise of alien intelligence

Storytelling has always been important from the stone age to the 21st century, whenever a large number of people are trying to cooperate on something, whether it is to hunt a mammoth or whether it is to build an atom bomb. Just knowing the facts about the objective world, about objective reality is not enough. If you want for instance, to build an atom bomb, you need to know some facts about physical reality. You need to know that e equals mc square. If you try to build a bomb and you ignore the facts of reality, the bomb will not explode. But just knowing facts is not enough because in order to build an atom bomb, you need millions of people to cooperate on the project.

You need physicists to write complicated equations, but you also need miners to mine uranium. In distant places around the world, you need engineers and builders to build the reactor and the other facilities. And you need farmers to grow potatoes and rice, and wheat, so that all the physicists, and engineers, and builders, and cleaners, and plumbers in the nuclear facility will have something to eat. If they have to grow themselves and grow potatoes and then come back to the reactor to do all their experiments, it won’t work. So you need really hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people cooperating on that.

Now, if you just tell them the facts of physics that e equals mc square, this is not going to motivate anybody to cooperate on this project. This is where storytelling comes into the picture. So what really motivates people is it could be religious stories, mythologies and theologies. It could be secular ideologies like communism or capitalism. It’s always the people who are experts in storytelling that give the orders to people who merely know the facts of nuclear physics.

So in Iran today, the nuclear scientists are getting their orders from experts in Shiite theology, in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the experts in nuclear physics, they got their orders from experts in communist ideology. Even in a completely safe free market economy, there are still stories at the basis of the system because money and corporations are also stories that humans invented. They are not physical facts.

If you consider, for instance, a dollar bill, it has no objective value whatsoever, at least not for human beings. Maybe termites can eat it, but humans can’t eat dollars, they can’t drink them. There is nothing useful you can do with them. They nevertheless have value because the greatest storytellers in the world, the finance ministers, the bankers, the investors, they tell us a story that this piece of paper is has value. I can use it to buy bread or potatoes or bananas or anything else.

As long as millions of people believe in this story, they are willing to work, for instance, on constructing and nuclear reactor because at the end of the month, they get these few colorful pieces of paper. Today, of course, it’s not even paper. Most of the money in the world today is not paper notes and metal coins. It’s just digital information moving between computers. But as long as people still have trust in the story about these digital information, it works.

People are willing to work hard for a whole month or a whole year just in order to get a few bits of data in their bank account. When we think about this kind of meeting between storytelling, which is a very ancient human capacity, going back tens of thousands of years, and the new technology of AI, I don’t think we should start with words like risk, or threat, or danger. It’s better to just understand the immense importance of what is happening right now.

The biggest risk in the AI era is misunderstanding what AI actually is. Watch Yuval Noah Harai’s Big Think Class on coexisting with non-human intelligence.

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Throughout history, for tens of thousands of years, the only entities that could invent stories, whether stories about gods, or stories about money were human beings. So we lived cocooned inside a cultural world constructed by the human imagination. If you read a holy book, or if you read an economic theory, or if you listen to a song or you listen to a piece of music, this came out of the mind of another human being. So we lived in a human world.

Now, for the first time in history, there is another entity. There is another agent out there that can create stories, economic theories, new kinds of currencies, music, poems, images, videos, and this new entity is AI. What happens to human society? What happens to human life if we increasingly live our lives cocooned inside the cultural artifacts coming from non-human intelligence, from an alien intelligence.

The acronym AI traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but I think it’s more accurate to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence because artificial, it gives the impression that this is an artifact that we create and control, and AI with every passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial and more and more alien in the sense that we can’t predict what kind of new stories and ideas and strategies it’ll come up with. It thinks it behaves in a fundamentally alien way.

I give two examples to clarify this, because there is a huge confusion around AI today. There is so much hype around AI, especially in the market. If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI. So everything now becomes AI and then people don’t understand. So what is it? And if you think, let’s say about somebody’s trying to sell you a coffee machine and they tell you this is an AI coffee machine, how do you know what what it means and whether it’s true?

Not every automatic machine is an AI. If this coffee machine, you press a button, let’s say for espresso, and the machine produces, provides you with a cup of espresso, this is not AI. It simply follows the pre-programmed orders of its human creators, the hallmark of AI. What makes AI, AI is that it is able to learn and change by itself and come up with decisions and ideas that we don’t anticipate can’t anticipate.

So if you approach the coffee machine, and the coffee machine before you press any button tells you, “Hi, hello, I’ve been watching you for the last month and based on all the information I gathered on you and on many other users, and based on the time of day and your facial expression or whatever, I predict that you now want an espresso. So I took the liberty to already prepare for you a cup of espresso.” This is an AI. Now if it goes a step further and says, “I actually invented a new drink that you’ve never tasted before, I call it bestpreso. And I also took the liberty to prepare it for you because I think you would like it.” This is an AI coffee machine.

This is not just theory, it’s also we are seeing it all around us. One of the key moments in the AI revolution back in 2016, was when AlphaGo defeated the Lee Sedol, the world champion at the game of Go. Go is a strategy board game much more complex than chess invented more than 2000 years ago in China, and it became a cultural treasure in East Asia.

For more than 2000 years, tens of millions of people in East Asia played Go, and entire schools of thought entire philosophies evolved around this game because it was seen as a mirror for life and as a good preparation for politics and for making decisions in the world. People thought that we know how to play Go and AlphaGo taught itself how to play Go. And within a few weeks surpassed the wisdom accumulated by humanity by tens of millions of people over more than 2000 years.

The most amazing thing about its victory was that it used a strategy which was considered beyond the pale. When it played its crucial moves, Go experts were didn’t understand, what is it nobody plays Go like that. And it turned out to be a brilliant strategy. It also turned out that for more than 2000 years, our human minds have explored only a very limited part of the landscape of Go.

If you imagine all the ways you can play Go as a kind of planet with a geography. So humans were stuck on one island in the planet Go for more than 2000 years, because human minds just couldn’t conceive of going beyond this small island. And then AI came along and within a very brief time, it discovered entire new continents on the planet Go.

This is likely to happen in more and more fields, in finance, in art, in politics, in religion. So before we think about it in terms of risks or threat or opportunity. Just think what it would mean to live on a planet which is increasingly shaped by the stories and the products of an alien intelligence.

How information technology shapes society

Every time there is a new information technology was invented, it completely changed society, politics, culture. About 5,000 years ago, one of the most important revolutions in information technology occurred with the invention of writing. Now, from a technical perspective, it didn’t seem like much, because to invent the invention of writing, and we are in ancient Mesopotamia, what is today Iraq, about 5,000 years ago. It basically involves mud and a stick.

People started taking clay tablets, and clay is just essentially mud. They take a stick, a reed, and they imprint signs on the clay tablet and then preserve the clay tablet. This is document, this preserves records of various things. So this is the invention of writing people playing with mud. And this had immense impact.

So to give again just one example, think about ownership. What does it mean to own something? Let’s say I have a field. What does it mean that this field is mine? So if you live in ancient Mesopotamia or anywhere else in the world before writing, ownership means a communal agreement among my neighbors, the people in my village that this field is mine. So they don’t graze their goats there, and they don’t pick fruits there without my permission.

But because ownership means an agreement of the community, it limits the power of the individual. I can’t sell my field to someone else unless I get the agreement of my neighbors because they decide who owns what field. It also means that a distant king in some capital city, a thousand kilometers away, he can’t know who owns what because there are no records and he can’t know what each field in each village belongs to whom. So it makes it very difficult to tax property, which makes it very difficult to build large kingdoms and empires.

Then mud comes along writing, you have these clay tablets, suddenly to own a field means that there is a piece of dry mud somewhere with some signs on it, which says, this field is mine. And this means that now I can sell my field to someone without getting the permission of my neighbors, because to transfer the field to that other person in exchange for, I don’t know, a couple of some gold, I don’t need the agreement of the neighbors. I just give the person this piece of clay, of dry mud. This is ownership.

It also means that the king in the distant capital can now create an archive of all the property records in lots and lots of villages. And know he has bureaucrats who know how to read these clay tablets. They know who owns each field. In numerous villages, you can start to have taxation systems. You can start have kingdoms and empires.

Paradoxically, in this case there are many other influences. But in this case, the invention of the written document, it on the one hand empowers the individual and creates the basis for private property rights and creates the basis for large scale authoritarian systems of kingdoms and empires.

We jumped 5,000 years from ancient Mesopotamia to the 20th century. The rise of mass media, and mass information technology, telegraph, and radio, and television. On the one hand, they now form the basis for large scale democratic systems. On the other hand, for large scale totalitarian systems, before the rise of modern information technology, it was impossible to create either large scale democracies, or large scale totalitarian regimes.

Totalitarian regimes, meaning regimes that try to control the totality of people’s lives. Ancient kings in Mesopotamia, or Roman emperors, or Chinese emperors, they had a very limited capacity to collect information on the people in their kingdom. So yes, they raised taxes and they used the taxes to pay for soldiers and build armies, but they could not micromanage the social, and economic, and cultural lives of every individual in the country. They didn’t have the information necessary to do it.

Large scale totalitarianism appears in the 20th century for the first time in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. And it’s based on exactly the same technology that at exactly the same time leads to the rise of the first mass democracies in the United States and the United Kingdom and other places around the world.

The rise of inorganic information

All information technologies up to the 21st century were organic networks because it ultimately, it was all based on our organic brain and this had a lot of implications. Organic entities are live by cycles. We run by cycles. Sometimes it’s day, sometimes it’s night, there is winter and summer. There is growth and decay, there are times for activity. And then there are times for sleep and for rest.

All information networks previously in history, they had these cycles. Even if you think about the financial markets, think about Wall Street. Wall Street also obeyed until today, this organic logic, the market is open only Mondays to Fridays, 9:30 in the morning I think, until four o’clock in the afternoon. And then the weekend is off. This is how organic beings function, even bankers and investors and financiers, as long as they are humans and not algorithms, they need time to rest, and they need time to be with their family and with their friends. So the market take rests.

Another thing is that there is always time off and there is always, therefore also private time. Until the rise of AI Even the most totalitarian regimes like in the Soviet Union, they could not monitor, they could not surveil everybody all the time. The Soviet Union did not have enough KGB agents to follow every Soviet citizen 24 hours a day. Even if you somehow managed to follow all the people all the time, they didn’t have analysts, enough analysts to go over all the information and make sense of it.

Even if a KGB agent saw you do something and wrote a report about it, there was a very high chance that this report will just accumulate dust in the archives of the KGB because it didn’t have enough analysts to read millions and millions of reports written every day about all Soviet citizens. So organic information networks, they always run by cycles. There is always time to rest, and there is always a measure of privacy.

We now see the rise of a new type of information network, which is inorganic, which is based on AI. It need not have any breaks, it never rests, and there is no privacy potentially it could completely annihilate privacy. Computers, they don’t care if it’s night or day, if it’s summer or winter, they don’t need vacations, they don’t have families they want to spend time with. They are always on. Therefore they might force us to be always on, always being watched, always being monitored.

This is destructive for organic animals like ourselves. If you force an organic being to be on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies. We see it happening all around us with a 24 hours new cycle that never rests. The markets never rest, politics never rest. So the people involved in these occupations, they can never really rest and this takes a toll on them.

It’s very, very difficult and will soon become impossible. Anything you do or say at any time might be watched and recorded and then it can meet you down the line 10 or 20 years in the future. You do something stupid but legal in a college party today, when you are 18, maybe in 20 years, when you run for political office or you want to be a judge or whatever, it’s there. So basically the whole of life is becoming like one long job interview. Anything you do at any moment is part of your job interview 20 years from now.

Now, all this is made possible by the fact that AI is the first technology in history that can take decisions by itself. Until today, all our big information networks, they were managed, they were populated by human bureaucrats, whether it’s government offices or corporations, or armies, or banks or schools. All the decisions ultimately have to be made by a organic brain of a human being. Now, AI has the capacity to make decisions by itself.

What we are facing is not a Hollywood science fiction scenario of one big evil computer trying to take over the world. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s more like millions and millions of AI bureaucrats that are given more and more authority to make decisions about us in banks, in armies, in governments. And again, there is good potential in that as well. They can provide us with the best healthcare in history.

But there are of course, huge risks when power shifts from organic humans to these alien inorganic AIs. It just becomes more and more difficult for us to understand the decisions that shape our life. What happens if you can no longer understand why the bank refused to give you a loan, why the government or the army did this or did that? And this is the world that we are entering.

A curious fact is that at least in the United States, there is already a legal path open for AIs to become legal persons, because in the US unlike in other countries around the world, corporations are considered legal persons that even have rights like freedom of speech. Now, until today, this was a kind of legal fiction because a corporation like Google could not make any decisions. Only the humans employed by Google made all the decisions.

But now AI can make decisions by itself. So what happens if you now incorporate an AI, you go through this legal process that you incorporate an AI, and I dunno, you call it Boole, now it’s the Boole corporation. It has no human employees, it’s run by an AI and it is now a legal person that according to US law, has a lot of rights and freedoms.

So for instance, it can open a bank account, corporations open bank accounts. Why can’t the AI do it? It’s a corporation. It can earn money, it can go online to websites like TaskRabbit and offer its services to clients, human or non-human, and earn money. And then it takes its money and invest it. Because it’s so good at making investment decisions, it earns billions and billions.

We could be in a situation when the richest person in the United States is not a human being. The richest person in the United States is an a incorporated AI. Another thing that the US legal system allows is for these legal persons to make political donations because it’s considered part of freedom of speech. So now this, the richest person in the US is giving billions of dollars to candidates in exchange for these candidates broadening the rights of AIs, the legal path to this. This is no longer kind of a science fiction scenario. The legal and practical path to this situation is open.

The importance of human institutions

To deal with the era of AI. It should be clear that we cannot anticipate how this technology will develop over the next few decades. So it’s impossible to kind of think about all the dangers in advance and regulate against them or whatever. What we need is living institutions staffed by the best human talent and with access to the best technology that will be at the cutting edge of the technological development and will be able to identify and react to dangers and threats as they arise.

I’m not talking about rigid regulation in advance, I’m talking about the need for new institutions because you can never rely on just, the letter of the law or on a charismatic individual, some genius to do it. In history humans, again and again encounter these problems and it always goes back to the same solution institutions. And in good institutions, they are characterized by having strong self-correcting mechanisms.

A self-correcting mechanism is a mechanism that allows entity, a human being, an animal, or an institution to identify and correct its own mistakes. You don’t have to rely on the environment, on something out there to correct your mistakes. You can correct your own mistakes. This is a basic feature of any functioning organism.

Like how does a child learns to walk? Yes, the child gets some instruction from parents, from teachers, but mostly it’s self-connection. You try to to walk, you fall down, you get up again, you try something else, you again fall down, you get up again, and step by step you learn how to walk by identifying and correcting your own mistakes. This goes all the way to entire countries. This is the heart of democratic systems is this self-correcting. What are elections? Elections are a self-correcting mechanism. You give power to a certain party or individual. Let’s try your policies, after some time if you think you made a mistake, this was the wrong policy, this was the wrong party, you can say, I made a mistake.

There are another round of elections. We made a mistake last time, let’s try something else this time. In dictatorships, there is no such self-correcting mechanism. If Putin or Maduro makes a terrible mistake, there is no mechanism within Russia today that can identify and correct Putin’s own mistakes.

When we come to the challenge of AI, what we need, our institutions that are able to identify and correct their mistakes and the mistakes of AI as the technology develops. Another important example of self-correcting mechanism is the way that modern science works. In contrast to traditional religions, traditional religions, they were characterized by claiming to be infallible that their holy book, their sacred tradition never makes any mistake and therefore you cannot.

There is no mechanism, for instance, in Christianity of Judaism to identify and correct mistakes in the Bible. I’m not talking just about, you know, factual mistakes, also moral mistakes. The Bible, the 10 Commandments for instance, endorses slavery. The 10th commandment says, that you should not covet your neighbors field or your neighbors ox, or your neighbors slaves.

According to the 10th commandment, God has no problem with people owning slaves he just has a problem with people coveting the slaves of somebody else. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not good. Now, even today, with all everything that have changed since these words were written in the first millennia, BCE, there is no mechanism to correct the text of the Bible.

You can interpret them in different ways, but you can’t change the text. This in contrast to what we find both in science and in modern democracies. The US Constitution originally also enabled slavery, but the US Constitution also had an amendment mechanism, a self-correcting mechanism that eventually the people of the United States amended the Constitution to forbid slavery.

And then science works in an analogous way that if you have a theory of how the planets move, or how organisms evolve, the whole of science really is a self-correcting mechanism. The only thing that scientific journals publish are corrections to previous publications. In religious publications, no, they publish again and again the same teachings.

But in academic journals, in history or physics or medicine, they never publish the same thing twice. The only thing they publish is corrections, either to pass mistakes or past lacuna. If there is something in the theory of Newton, which is either incomplete or mistaken, then they will publish Einstein’s correction to Newton’s physics.

Every large scale human system is based on an unlikely marriage between mythology and bureaucracy. If you think about a country for instance, so mythology explains the rationale, why should the country even exist? Every country to convince its own citizens why it should exist, tells them some kind of national or religious mythology like we are God’s chosen people and we have some very special role here on earth.

This is the mythology part. It gives the motivation, the inspiration, the reason, but then to actually have a functioning country, it’s not enough if the citizens believe in the mythology that they are God’s chosen people with some mission on earth. You also need to build roads, and hospitals, and armies, and sewage systems.

No large scale city, at least a modern city if you want to avoid epidemics can function without a sewage system. And in order to build a sewage system, so you need a lot of workers and engineers and you need to pay them. So you need to collect taxes from the citizens in order to build a sewage system.

So again, here mythology comes back into the picture, the mythology encourages people or explains to people why they should pay their taxes honestly, so that other citizens in our country will enjoy good healthcare services and a good sew system that protects us from cholera and so forth.

Again, when I talk about national mythologies, so it should be clear that there is nothing wrong about it. Nationalism and patriotism have been one of the most, one of the best inventions in human history. Most other social mammals, all other social mammals actually, they care only about a small circle of animals that they know personally they have intimate connection with.

This was also true for our human ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. The miracle of nationalism and patriotism is that it makes us scare about millions of strangers that we have never met in our lives. And again, nationalism is not about hating foreigners and wanting to kill the others.

It’s about loving our compatriots and showing this love, for instance, by paying taxes honestly, so that other people in the country will be defended against cholera by building a sewage system.

Information isn’t truth

The biggest misconception about information is that information is truth and information isn’t truth. Most information is not truth. The truth is a very rare and costly and expensive type of information. If you want truth, you need to invest a lot in getting it. I’ll give an example, historical example.

Let’s think about images and portraits. What is the most common portrait in the world? What is the most famous face in the world? It is Jesus. There over the last 2000 years, people have created billions and billions of portraits of Jesus. And they are hung in countless churches and cathedrals and private homes and so forth.

Not a single one of them is an authentic depiction of Jesus. They are all, 100% of them are fictional depictions because we have no idea how Jesus looked like, there is not a single portrait made during his lifetime. There is not a single sentence in the Bible that tells us whether he was fat or thin, tall or short, black hair, blonde hair, nothing. So all these images, they’re fiction.

It’s very easy to create fictional information because you don’t need to research anything. You don’t need evidence. You just come up with something and draw it. If you want to paint a truthful picture of anything, of a person, of an economy, of a war, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money to research to make sure that you get it right.

If we just flood the world with information and expect the truth to float up, it’ll not, it’ll sink. The more we flood the world with information, unless we make the effort to construct institutions that invest in truth, we’ll be flooded by fiction and illusion and delusion and junk information.

Most information is not truth and most information, what it tries to do is gain power by creating order, not by spreading the truth. If you want millions of people to cooperating on something, the easiest way to do it is to create some fictional mythology or ideology and convince a lot of people to believe in it. And the way to do it is to bombard them with more and more stories and images and so forth of your favorite mythology or ideology.

This is how you gain power. And you need to know some truth. Again, a system that is completely oblivious to truth, it’ll collapse of course, but in this balance, how much truth do you need in order to construct the Soviet Union and how much fiction and delusions do you need in order to construct the Soviet Union? You need a little truth and a lot of fiction.

This is true of most of the large scale political systems that existed throughout human history, we tend to think about totalitarianism and democracy as different ethical systems, but they are different information networks. Information flows differently in totalitarian versus democratic networks. Totalitarian networks are centralized, all the information flows to just one place where all the decisions are being made, and they lack strong self-correcting mechanisms.

There is no mechanism in the Soviet Union to identify and correct the mistakes of Stalin. Democracies in contrast, they are distributed information networks with lots of self-correcting mechanisms. The decisions in the United States are not made only in Washington. Just a small part of all decisions are made there. Most decisions are made by private businesses, and voluntary associations, and individuals, and so forth.

And there are lots of mechanisms to correct the mistakes even of the most powerful politicians and corporations. So this is the key difference in terms of information flow between totalitarianism and democracy. In the 20th century, totalitarian systems work worse than democratic systems. When all the information flowed to just one place, just to Moscow, the people there were overwhelmed by all the flood of information and they could not make the right decisions and there was no mechanism to correct their mistakes. And eventually the system collapsed.

A distributed information system was much better when the decision makers were human beings. But AI could give an advantage to totalitarian systems in the 21st century, why? Because AI can process enormous amount of information much faster and more efficiently than any communist bureaucrat. When you flood a human with too much information, the human collapses. When you flood an AI with information, the AI becomes better.

There is a scenario that it’s not deterministic, it’s not certain, but there is a scenario that totalitarian systems will become better in the 21st century because of AI. Still the other problem of totalitarian systems that they have no self-correcting mechanisms. This is still applicable even in the age of AI. It makes it even more dangerous.

A totalitarian system relying on AI that the AI makes a mistake. AIs are fallible, AIs are not God. They make mistakes. If you give all the power to a totalitarian AI and you have no way to correct its mistakes, this could prove catastrophic to the entire human civilization.

For human dictators, AI is an especially big problem because for an AI to take power in a dictatorship is much, much easier than to kidnap power in a democracy. Because all power in a dictatorship is already concentrated in the hands of just one paranoid leader. The AI needs to learn how to manipulate just this single individual in order to take power in the country. So the danger of AI taking power in a country are much bigger in dictatorships than in democracy.

In democracy, a big problem is very different. Democracy is a conversation. The the whole meaning for democracy is that you have large numbers of people conversing about the issues of the day. Now imagine a large group of people standing in a circle and talking, and suddenly a group of robots entering the circle and start talking very loudly and very emotionally, and persuasively and you can’t tell the difference who is a human and who is a robot.

That is a situation we are now living through, and it is no coincidence that the democratic conversation is breaking down all over the world because the algorithms are hijacking it. We have the most sophisticated information technology in history and we are losing the ability to talk with each other to hold a reasoned conversation.

In order to protect the conversation between people, we need to ban bots from the conversation. We need to ban fake humans. AIs should be welcome to talk with us only if they identify as AIs. If you talk online with someone and you don’t know whether it’s an AI or a human, this will destroy the democratic conversation. So we need to ban that.

If we want to ensure that we get the truth. The only way to do it is to invest in institutions like academic research institutions, like newspapers that invest a lot of effort in finding the truth. If we just expect that a flood of information will bring us the truth, it’ll not. It’ll overwhelm the rare and costly kind of information, which is truth, by a deluge of fake and junk information.

As individuals, my best recommendation is to go on an information diet, the same way that people go on food diets. Information is the food of the mind. We have learned that it’s not good to our body to eat too much food or too much junk food. So lots of people are very mindful what they feed their body.

We should be equally mindful about what we feed our mind. More information isn’t always good for you, it’s actually good from time to time, take time for information fasts. When we don’t put anything more in, we just digest and detoxify. And similarly, we should watch the quality of the information we feed our mind. If we feed our mind with all this junk information full of greed, and hate, and fear, we will have sick minds.

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The gap between what’s possible and what’s available is still massive, with only a handful of gene therapies approved and thousands of diseases still waiting for real options. But if delivery keeps improving, we may get to a future where your genetics don’t have to feel like a life sentence.

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Timestamps

00:00 The power of genetic technology
01:31 Making gene therapy mainstream
02:26 Engineering the capsid sequence
04:31 Producing and purifying capsids at scale
07:39 Automating the analysis of patterns
09:57 Permanent cures
12:03 Improving cost efficiency in gene therapy
14:12 A future of genetic agency

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The power of genetic technology

As humans, we all want the same thing, a life that’s full of good experiences, more time with family, with friends, more time to love. But sometimes genetic illness can cut that short or really, for all of us at some point, our body breaks down. And our bodies are genetic machines. For many diseases, the cause of the disease is a mutation in the genome.

Gene therapy is a vision that many have had for decades, more than 50 years. The power of genetic technology is that once you get inside of cells with a DNA molecule, that molecule can stay there for the lifetime of the cell. So it’s the potential for a one-time treatment for a disease where you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach the cells and solve for the root cause of the disease.

Today though, for the most part, the genome you’re born with is the genome you die with. Access to this molecular level is out of reach for almost all of us. We’ve tried many different things, but have really struggled to be able to get enough of the genetic payload into the cells where they’re going to be effective as a therapeutic. And it’s getting inside of the cells that has really been a challenge for many, many years.

I’m Eric Kelsic, CEO and co-founder at Dyno Therapeutics. For the past 10 years, I’ve been working to solve the grand challenge of gene delivery.

Making gene therapy mainstream

How are we going to make gene therapy a mainstream medicine? We need to solve these grand challenges like delivery. Being able to deliver a therapeutic payload to every organ or every cell where there might be some benefit to patient health. To do that, we’re engineering protein shells derived from viruses. Capsids are the protein shells of adeno-associated virus. AAVs, adeno-associated virus, is a parasite of other viruses. AAV naturally isn’t known to cause any disease. The reason why AAV gets a lot of attention is because it’s one of the smallest viruses, and that enables it to get into many places all across the body where we need to deliver a therapeutic DNA.

We still don’t know a lot about how it functions naturally. That said, we don’t need to understand everything about how the virus works in order to adapt it as a therapeutic technology, and that’s our focus at Dyno, engineering the capsid sequence to make capsids a better delivery vehicle for gene therapies.

Engineering the capsid sequence

What’s amazing about capsids is they’re evolved in nature to do so many different things. They can go through your body, through the blood, find a cell, enter the cell, and then be released into the cell cytoplasm, get into the nucleus through the nuclear pore, break open the capsid and release the genome, and that’s where it expresses. So for a gene therapy, going from the blood, into cells, into the cytoplasm, into the nucleus, and then expressing the genetic payload, that’s entirely the goal. When therapeutic genes are expressed in the nucleus, they can be treating those cells for a patient’s entire lifetime. As a one-time treatment, it can be an effective cure.

However, natural capsids, they’re not efficient enough for most therapeutic purposes. For the past 28 years, protein engineers have been working to modify the capsid to make it better as a therapeutic protein, applying a technique called directed evolution. Directed evolution is evolution like occurs in nature but for a goal that we choose. The most common approach there had been to randomly change the capsid sequence to make very large libraries, millions or even billions of different capsid sequence molecules. With a very low quality library, but a very large one, you have a chance of getting a good hit, but it’s like a needle in a haystack. The reason is because the capsid has many different functions, and if you break even one of them, then, as a therapeutic, it’s essentially useless.

Roughly 80% of the single changes that you could make to the capsid break the most essential function, which is the assembly and packaging of the genome. What that means is that, if by chance you make any mutation, four out of five times, it’s going to break the function. That’s a problem for engineering, to get improved function, we’re going to need to make multiple changes, maybe even hundreds of changes. If every time you make a change, the viability drops down, it’s really hard to have a library of changes that are going to do a chance of finding an improved capsid.

Producing and purifying capsids at scale

That’s just the basics. You need to be able to produce and purify that capsid at scale. It needs to be stable at low temperature or frozen, but even when it’s in your body, which is a relatively high temperature, it also needs to get into the right cells. For example, there’s a lot of unmet need for gene therapy in the brain because it’s very difficult to get therapeutic proteins or other molecules across the blood-brain barrier. At a high dose, you might be able to get into .1% or maybe a little bit more of the neurons in the brain. That’s not enough to treat many diseases. In addition to that, most of the capsid delivers its payload to the liver. And at a high enough dose, that can also become toxic. We need to improve the efficiency of delivery to the target cell.

Over decades of trying this approach, we just didn’t get enough improved variants or variants that were optimized for all the different functions that were needed to make them effective as gene therapies. I had seen that there was a new wave of technologies coming with the potential to change the way that we engineer proteins completely.

It starts with this DNA multiplexing technology. So we have an idea of an experiment we want to run, testing many different capsids. They might be designed to bind to a certain receptor or they might be designed in a neighborhood of sequence space that before we found is promising. And we came up with a way of building very large libraries of capsids in which the sequence was programmed, meaning we had designed it on a computer, synthesized that DNA, and then cloned it into the capsid, so this could be injected in a few mLs. The best way we have to make a prediction about what’s going to be safe and effective for humans is to do an animal experiment. We do most of our screening in non-human primates, especially in cynomolgus monkeys.

That’s one reason why we developed this technology because their lives are also very precious. We want to get as much information as we can from even one experiment. In this case, we’re measuring maybe a hundred or two hundred thousand, sometimes even a million different capsid sequences in that one animal. We’ll get all these tissues back from our animal experiments, and then we want to learn as much as we can from that experiment, meaning look at every organ. Where did the capsids go or where did they not go? Extract the nucleic acids, purify the DNA, purify the RNA. You can then work all the way back to what was the capsid sequence that this molecule corresponds to? Is there more or less of that in the library? And if there’s more, that might mean that it was functionally improved for delivery. If there’s less, it might mean that there was a problem and it was broken. We do this across all of our library. At Dyno today we’ve got petabytes of data from the DNA sequencing.

I had always thought that proteins are too complex for us to understand as humans, certainly too complex for me to understand. When you look at a string of 735 letters, it’s really hard to notice all the differences. But with all that data, what I could see, even myself, was there’s a lot of patterns in that data, patterns about which amino acids work at each position.

Automating the analysis of patterns

My thought was that if I could recognize those patterns and the data set is so vast, there’s probably a lot more information in them as well. That’s actually the perfect type of problem for a machine learning model. We can use AI to automate the analysis of all that data and to find even more nuanced patterns to maximize the chances of success, the expected value of finding an improved variant. We call that AI-guided design. But once we have that data and we’ve trained models on it, we can now query those models billions and billions of times. So our ability to scale the computational work is even higher than the molecular side. We can’t possibly test everything in an experiment.

But with machine learning, we can test many different sequences in silico, meaning on a computer, and the models will tell us which ones they think are better, or we might try many models, tens or hundreds of different models that each have a different insight. We compare the opinions of all those different experts to choose the ones that we’re very confident are worth investing in as we bring them forward into the next experiment. It’s this iterative cycle of making libraries in DNA, measuring their properties, then building models to analyze and understand those properties. Then querying the models to know where are the most promising regions of sequence space that we should go next. And then going back to design a new library, turning that into DNA.

We’re using a lot of technology, but there’s always human judgment at some point before we do another round of experiments. I think that, over time, what we want to do is put humans at an even higher point of leverage so that they’re able to use their exceptional judgment and shift some of the more routine tasks to AI agents or even just to simple scripts that run on the computer. Being able to collaborate with AIs more effectively is where we’d like to go so that we can, for example, give instructions to the AI to automate how we analyze the library or how we design it and get back the answers that we expect. We want to get the results as fast as we can. Patients are waiting for better medicines. We want to make sure that, if there’s anything wrong, we catch it quickly, and for that, we need a human in the loop.

Permanent cures

The power of genetic technology is that once you get inside of cells with a DNA molecule, that molecule can stay there for the lifetime of the cell. So for example, in the neurons where they’re not dividing, getting the right therapeutic DNA sequence into the neuron can be effectively a cure for a patient’s entire lifetime. That’s the reason why at Dyno, and myself personally, and many of us are so excited about the potential of gene therapy.

A good example of this would be Zolgensma, which is now an approved medicine and was really a breakthrough drug. SMA, spinal muscular atrophy, was the leading cause of death from a genetic disease in children prior to this treatment. The problem is that the SMN1 gene is not functional in patients. This disease, prior to gene therapy, was always fatal at a very young age. Children would die usually around two or three years old. With Zolgensma though, if children are treated very early, in the first few weeks of life, say, the gene therapy can restore the function of that gene. It can, with a one-time treatment, completely cure the disease. And it’s an example of the amazing potential of gene therapy.

What’s unfortunate is that there’s, today, just a handful of FDA-approved gene therapies, but there’s thousands of genetic diseases that we know about, 7,000 or more. And for most of them, we have no good treatment options available. What we want to be able to do with our capsid engineering work, by solving deliveries, make it easier to get into all the cells that will enable us to then apply the knowledge we have from genome sequencing and from systems biology to develop therapies that are going to treat the underlying cause of those diseases. Today, most of our attention, most of the industry’s attention is focused on a smaller number of diseases, diseases that could benefit more patients, and where the markets are large enough to justify commercial investment. There’s also a long tail of rare and ultra-rare diseases where there might only be 10 or even a single patient in the entire world who has a certain disease.

Improving cost efficiency in gene therapy

Today, gene therapies are very expensive. A single dose might cost millions of dollars. Our goal is to bring the cost of delivery down to zero, or very, very close to it. To do that, we also need to enable there to be many more genetic medicines so that there’s good competition between developers.

We can also look to other industries where there’s been really dramatic changes in the cost efficiencies and the scale economies over time. One of them is in semiconductors, as we’ve been able to dramatically improve the number of transistors that you can put on a chip.

Other areas like solar where we’d been able to bring the cost down more than 200 fold over five decades and increase deployment over 100,000 times. These phenomena are all called Wright’s Law, which is basically that with every doubling of production, there’s a percentage decrease in the cost. And in gene therapy, I think there will be something similar. So we can go from a gene therapy that might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars down to something that costs $10,000 or even $1,000 to develop. To the point where rare diseases or ultra-rare diseases, non-profit efforts could be fully funding the treatments for patients. Obviously, there’s a lot of things we need to do in order to achieve that. Solving delivery is just one of them.

The therapies are complex and we don’t understand exactly how to design them in a way they’re going to work in humans, but AI may be part of that solution because if an AI could design a therapy just for one patient and customize it to their genome sequence, customize it to their goals, that could be done on-demand. That AI could even chart out how to develop the therapy, how to produce it, how to test it, how to ensure that it’s safe.

This could be done in a massively scalable way. I think that’s the path that we can use to solve for the long tail of disease and to help patients who, today, we understand their genetics. We know what the problem is. We even, in many cases, know how to design a therapy that could help them, but we need to be able to bring that to the patient directly, and AI is a way that they can get the benefit from all this innovation in a way that’s economically affordable.

A future of genetic agency

As there’s more gene therapies, one thing that we may want to do is to be able to reset or remove prior gene therapies. It’s far away because it’s not the urgent priority today. But for a future with genetic agency where patients are making the best choice for them to live a healthy life, they may want to be able to upgrade their therapy in time. This ability to reset would give them that potential. For example, if there’s a new approach that’s even more effective, a patient wouldn’t think twice about taking that now, knowing that they could remove it in the future and replace it with a better therapy that might come along in 10 or 20 years. That makes gene therapy a much more routine decision.

What that means is that we can think about genetic technologies less as really a part of us, but just something that we choose to use in the same way that I might wear one set of clothes a day or a different set next year, but that’s not really part of who I am. And I think about that very differently than today how I think about my genome, which has always been a part of me. Up until very recently, I thought I would die with the same genome that I was born with. Because of the genetic technologies, I think we’re going to no longer associate the genetics that we have with who we are, and it’s more a decision for who we want to be or what we want to become, and you’ll be able to have much more control over that so you can live the very best possible life.

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Timestamps

00:00 The lure of meaning
01:15 The strongest arguments for and against the existence of God
03:38 Hierarchical causes and borrowed causal power
06:33 Sustaining causes and necessity of foundation
10:04 How classical thinkers framed the first cause
14:27 Suffering as the challenge to God
17:42 Between classical theism, deism, and atheism
20:58 Understanding nihilism and the human condition
24:36 Self-justifying motives and meaning
28:00 Meaning in a materialist world
31:41 Ecclesiastes and the first nihilist
36:38 Why stories explain what logic can’t
48:55 Emotion’s grip on belief
54:20 How emotivism shapes ethics
1:05:18 Where morality meets emotion

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

The lure of meaning

It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that’s written into the rules of the universe and that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some foundational principles of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause. But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is.

Nihilism doesn’t remove values, it analyzes values and finds them to be essentially groundless, or if they do have a ground, subjective preferences of people. It’s a very difficult thing to define concepts like good and bad, but we employ them all the time. Like what is the difference between a murder just occurred and it’s wrong that that murder just occurred? If you try to isolate what the actual difference is there, I think it has to just be an attitude, it’s an expression, it’s the way you feel.

My name’s Alex O’Connor. I’m the host of the “Within Reason” podcast. I think I’m best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist.

The strongest arguments for and against the existence of God

I think probably the most powerful argument for the existence of God is the so-called first cause argument, which is quite naive. A lot of people are familiar with the idea that we need a first cause for the universe, but I think people think about it wrong. There is what you might think of as a horizontal causal argument and a hierarchical causal argument. A lot of people aren’t familiar with the hierarchical version of the causal argument, which I think is probably best explained with a prop. Take this lovely glass of water.

You might ask yourself, “Why is this water here?” And the way that people tend to think about cause is in terms of time and what happened before, what might be called the efficient causes in the Aristotelian sense, which is, somebody just poured the water into the glass. Then I might ask, “Well, why did they pour the water into the glass?” “Oh, well because you asked them to.” “Oh, well, why did you do that?” “Well, because the glass was empty, because I’m thirsty,” so on and so forth, back infinitely. There’s just no beginning. It’s just as long as every single step is explained by the step before, then everything gets explained back in time.

But there’s another way that you can think about causation. I can say, “Why is this water here?” Well, because it’s being held up by the glass, right? If the glass wasn’t there, the water would just fall out, or at least wouldn’t like retain its shape even if we were in space. The water is in the glass right now because it’s being held up by the glass. In that sense, the shape and position of the water right now is being caused by the shape and position of the glass.

Okay, so why is the glass there? Because it’s being held up by my hand. Why is my hand there? It’s being held up by my arm. My arm’s being held up by my shoulder. My shoulder’s being held up by my body. My body is being held up by the chair. The chair is being held up by the ground. The ground is being held up by the foundations of the building and so on. And if you kept going, you might get to the gravity that’s pulling the building down. You might get the forces of nature which are holding the earth together. But ultimately all of this is happening now in a time slice and hierarchically. This isn’t some causation that goes back in time. It sort of goes up and down if you can see what I mean.

Hierarchical causes and borrowed causal power

There is a reason why that causation cannot go on infinitely. And that is that in each stage of this causal chain, the causal actor doesn’t have any causal power except insofar as it borrows it from something more fundamental. I’ll try and put that in simpler terms. The glass holds up the water, but it can’t do it of its own accord. It’s being held up by my hand to the extent that if I took away my hand, the glass would no longer have the power to hold the water here, right? So the glass is power, the causal power to have to cause the water to be where it is right now is literally borrowed from my hand.

But likewise, if I removed my arm, my hand would no longer have the power to hold the water where it is. So my hand doesn’t have on its own any power to hold up the glass. It borrows it from my arm. And my arm borrows it from my shoulder, and my shoulder borrows it from my body. To the extent that if I were to remove any of those parts in the causal chain, everything further up the chain than that would instantly lose its causal power to hold the water up where it is, right? Instantly. So what that means is that there is no actual causal power except for whatever is at the basis of this giving the whole chain causal power.

So if you think about that horizontal causation: imagine a series of dominoes knocking each other over. This is causation in time. Domino one is knocked over by domino minus one, and domino minus one is knocked over by domino minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five, and so on back to infinity. In this causation, when domino minus five knocks over domino minus four, and then the dominoes keep falling over, I could take domino minus five that caused all these other do dominoes fall over, I could take that earlier cause, I could take it, I could throw it in the bin. We don’t need it anymore. Those dominoes further down the chain would keep on going, right? It’s the kind of causation where you don’t require the first causes, the earlier causes to remain in existence in order for the causal chain to continue.

So another example of this would be like parents and children. My grandfather caused my father to exist. Then my grandfather died. After my grandfather died, my father caused me to exist. Right, so like you’ve got cause A, B and C, A causes B, A then just disappears, gets into C, and B still has the causal power to bring about C. You don’t need that first cause to remain there. But that’s in this so-called horizontal causation.

Sustaining causes and necessity of foundation

In a hierarchical series of causation, you can’t get rid of the earlier cause. When we say earlier or first or fundamental, we don’t mean in time. We mean further down the chain as it were. So if my grandfather causes my father, then my grandfather dies, my father still has the causal power to bring me about. But if my shoulder causes the position of my arm, then if my shoulder disappears, my arm no longer has the power to hold up my hand. The shoulder needs to stay there causing the arm in order for the arm to cause the hand. So all of that causation happens all at once, right? Which means that there is no intrinsic causal power. My father has his own causal power to bring about me, but my arm only borrows it from my shoulder. It doesn’t have it on its own. But my shoulder only borrows it from my body, and my body only borrows it from the chair.

Without the chair, none of this would have any causal power. My hand would not be able to be here. Without the floor, none of that would be able to do anything. So there’s no causal power at all in this chair, except insofar as it borrows it right now in this instant from the ground below it. So if this just goes back infinitely, well, this borrows from this and this borrows from this and this borrows, and that goes back on literally infinitely, then there is no causal power at all because it’s not being borrowed from anywhere. It’s like everyone is just borrowing from another thing which has no causal power. It only gets its causal power, it’s borrowed it from something else which has no causal power. So where did it get it from? It borrowed it from something else, which has no causal power. So where did that get it from? That can’t go back forever because then there would be literally no causal power in this instant right now.

Unlike the temporal thing where you can go back in time and imagine that goes on infinitely and there’s no first cause, because each individual causal actor in the chain has its own causal power to knock over the next domino, the hierarchical causation in this time slice right now, this glass being held up right now has some foundational cause which is giving life to this entire causal chain without which the whole thing would would fall apart. So it’s a sustaining cause. It’s things to exist and be as they are right now in time, not like a billion years ago set something in motion, but right now sustaining it in existence.

In the same way that like the law of gravity sustains all of the objects in this room in position, it’s a fundamental cause of why everything is being held up right now. If that just switched off, like the entire thing would fall apart, right? And you need that now, right now, like at the basis of this causal chain of floors holding up chairs and chairs holding up buildings and stuff like that. So you might say, “Well, maybe the fundamental cause there then is something like the law of gravity.” Fine, but you might want to ask what’s holding the law of gravity in place. What’s making sure that it won’t stop working tomorrow? And this is this great debate with something like this argument. There are lots of technical terms that you can throw in there. You can talk about contingency and necessity, and you can talk about per se and per accidens causal chains and stuff, but let’s just do away with that for a moment and just think about it in those terms.

How classical thinkers framed the first cause

What is holding up this invisible microphone that I promise our listeners is above my head right now in place? And, like, the depth of explanation you go to will be context dependent. If I say, “What’s holding up that microphone?” our audio engineer might say, “Well, it’s the mic stand,” right? But the physicist might say, “Oh, it’s the floor pressing up against the mic stand.” But the philosopher will say it’s whatever is at the foundation of that causal chain giving causal power to it all. And that is the strongest version of a first cause argument, I think, one that’s insensitive to time and one which requires that first cause to exist right now.

This alone isn’t strong enough to establish the existence of capital G God, right? This just establishes that there is some kind of fundamental sustaining principle of the universe. Now there are lots of debates as to the nature of what that thing could be, but the thing that’s really important to note is that there’s no singular argument for the existence of God. What you have is a cumulative case. You have different arguments that deal with different aspects of God. So this causal argument is discussed by Thomas Aquinas in his “Summa Theologica.” He gives five famous ways of showing the existence of God to be true, and the first three are kinds of causal arguments. You have to then do more to get the attributes of God. You have to do more to show that this thing is not material, that this thing is certainly more to show that it’s like good or loving or anything like that.

Aquinas has an argument from change. It’s called the argument from motion, but motion just means change in some older dialect of philosophy. So he leans quite heavily on Aristotle, and it gets a bit complicated, but he’ll say something like, “For something to change means that something which is potential becomes actual.” That’s what change is. Like a hot cup of coffee will cool down because when it was hot, it had the potential to become cool and that potential was actualized. Potential can only be actualized by something which is already actual. Potential can’t be actualized by potential. Like if the coffee cools down because it’s in a fridge, the potential coldness of the coffee can’t be brought into existence by the potential coldness of the fridge. The fridge has to be actually cold in order to bring about the potential coldness in the coffee, right? It can’t just be you’ve got a potentially cold fridge and a potentially a cold cup of coffee and the potential coldness brings about the potential... No, you have to have an actual thing actualizing the potential in the coffee, right?

And that’s what he thinks change is. But you have another kind of causal argument then. Any instance of change where something potential becomes actual, there has to have been something actual to actualize it. But there will have had to have been something to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing. So Aquinas follows this causal chain and says again, at the beginning, there must be a, as Aristotle might have had it, an unactualized actualizer, something which is pure act. Now this gets really technical and weird, but Aquinas then tries to draw out why it would be that if something has zero potential in it, it can’t be material, for example. Because if something is material, you could potentially divide it. You could potentially move it. There are things that are like potential about it, it has potential qualities. If the first cause of the universe has to be pure act, no potentiality, pure act, then whatever is the cause of the universe can’t be material.

So now we’ve got an immaterial first cause of the universe, and then we carry on in a similar vein using different arguments to show why this thing must be outside of time, outside of space. You end up with something like a spaceless, timeless creative first cause of the universe powerful enough to bring the universe into existence. If you don’t want to call that God, that’s fine by me, but I think it will suffice for most people.

Suffering as the challenge to God

The strongest argument against the existence of God as traditionally conceived is undoubtedly the problem of evil. I prefer to say the problem of suffering because a lot of the time being an ethical emotivist, especially a religious person will say, “Well, how can you call anything evil if you’ve got no standard of goodness?” Okay, let’s not say evil then. Let’s say suffering.

If you believe that there is a loving God who has the power to do all that is possible and who supervises not just the goings on of the universe, but also supervised its creation and the setting up of its parameters, there are a few questions that jump out, a few mysteries. For example, life on Earth is the result of evolution by natural selection. That is the reason why we have such complexity and such variance of life. Natural selection is survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the destruction and death and suffering of the weakest.

For billions of years, there’s been life on earth. For much of that, it’s existed in a brutal competition for survival, with predation and disease. 99.9% of all the species, let alone the creatures, but the species who’ve ever existed being wiped from existence, usually in a pretty dismal manner. All of this is built into the very mechanism by which God chose to bring about human life on Earth. Traditional religious communities believe that humans are very special. They think that we are the reason why this all exists as opposed to other animals and other points in history. Which means that all of this has occurred for our sake. It’s built in.

It’s one thing to talk about suffering as an abstract object. But it is unfathomable, truly, the amount of suffering that these animals, not just like the human species in its 200,000-year history, or I suppose the human species would be much longer than that, a few million years. But the animals who came before us and the animals who existed at the same time as us, it’s genuinely unfathomable the depths of despair and misery and suffering and torment, meaningless torment for those animals who don’t get to inherit eternal life. We’re told that for some reason God chose this mechanism to bring us into existence. It just doesn’t seem to be what you would expect.

Of course, this doesn’t disprove the existence of God. It’s not like logically contradictory to say that God did this for some reason. But it just seems a little unexpected. I think for most people it’s very powerful. Of course, this only really does anything to argue against the existence of a good God. Some people will then just say, “Well, maybe God is evil.” But this will then just depend on your view of God. Because there are philosophers who, in the course of proving God’s existence, have established why he must be perfectly good, for example. There are also people who belong to religious traditions who insist upon the goodness of God. So they would at least have to give up that if they were to accept the plausibility of an argument like this. I think it’s powerful.

Between classical theism, deism, and atheism

I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause. But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is. I think it probably gets a lot right and is a compilation of human theological wisdom over the past few thousand years, but it will get a lot wrong as well.

I think that if you have just personally apprehended a truth about the universe, you are just convicted that there’s some foundational cause, “I don’t really know much more than that and I don’t want to subscribe to a particular tradition,” I say more power to you. I think you’re on the right track. In the same way that if somebody is a dogmatic atheist of the new atheist variety, I have a lot of fun posing religious arguments to them and saying like that there might actually be more plausibility to these arguments than you would know from reading “The God Delusion.” But that’s not enough to say that you are wrong about your atheism or anything.

But I much prefer this person who says either I believe there’s some kind of God of some sort, maybe not even a God, maybe just something like that. But I don’t really know what it is. I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, me too, man, I’ve got no idea.” Likewise somebody who says, “I just, you know, there’s a lot of mysteries, but I just can’t buy the fact that this was designed somehow intelligently.” I’m like, “Yeah, I get that too. That’s awesome.” And then we can just discuss it, you know? And so I quite like that kind of person.

There are also the so-called deists who typically are described as people who believe that God sets the universe in motion and then went away. So does not involve himself. He could have died, he could have gone to sleep and set it all off. That explains how it got going, but it’s not there anymore. I don’t think that makes much sense. I think that this is a product of mechanistic thinking that comes about with the scientific revolution. But we think of everything as a machine where you twist it up and let it go.

For the argument that I just ran through, the reason I like it so much is because I think it gets rid of this idea of deism. You can’t have a God who sets it all in motion and then goes to sleep. He can’t knock over the first domino and then go away and the dominoes keep on falling over and he’s long dead, because he is not just knocked over a domino and then gone away. He’s holding up the microphone above my head right now in this instant. If he were to disappear, the whole thing would just collapse.

I think that there’s a more powerful argument for that kind of God, not to say personal, not to say that he cares about human beings, right? Like, because again, you can distinguish between those things. There’s like, people say, “Well, I believe that there is a God, but he has no interest in human affairs.” That’s fair enough. But someone who says, “Well, I believe in a God, but he’s just like not around anymore, like at all,” I think that might be true, there might be no God. But if you think there’s a good argument for God’s existence, I think the best versions of arguments for God’s existence require that he does stick around. I think you either have to say there’s no God at all, or there’s a God who’s still here right now holding it all in place as we speak. I don’t think this God at the beginning but not anymore makes much sense to me.

Understanding nihilism and the human condition

Nihilism comes in many forms, and depending on the context can mean many different things. But most broadly it’s probably the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as an objective purpose to life, or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we portray within life. Whenever anybody acts in any way, when I pick up a glass of water to have a drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something, there will be a reason why I’ve done that. These kinds of behaviors don’t just spring up ex nihilo. They exist for some reason.

And so if you ask me why it is that I’m reaching my arm over there, it might be because I’m trying to pick up a glass of water. Well why am I doing that? I don’t just do that randomly. Well, because I’m thirsty. Okay, well why am I thirsty? Well, now we’re getting into biological science. You might say, “Well, it’s been a while since I’ve last had a drink.” And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst. You might even give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we’ve developed this sensitivity to thirst. Eventually this has to bottom out somewhere.

But as soon as we’re in this level of biological science, which seems to be outside of my own volition and desire and control, I suddenly realized that if the reason I’m reaching my arm over right now is ultimately speaking because of some evolutionary principle that I had no control over, that’s just a result of animals fighting for survival, then my reaching my hand over there feels a bit silly now. It feels like I’m like beholden to something which is not reasonable, is not some kind of God-given purpose, there’s nothing good about about drinking the water or anything like that. I’m just following my evolutionary drives. A process like that for a lot of people will feel quite devoid of meaning because you realize that you’re just beholden to your sort of animalistic instincts essentially with almost everything you do.

The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences or aesthetic preferences. So to be a nihilist is not to, it’s not to have no desire. It’s not to have no, no motivation to act. A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist, you’d just rot away in bed. Some nihilists may do that, and I think there is actually a correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression. However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you’re doing. It’s about the purpose behind them. It’s about the meaning behind them.

And so suppose that you are feeling thirsty. I could explain to you that the only reason you are feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over. You might go, “Wow, that makes this all a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?” But you’re still thirsty. You still have that desire. You still have that value of quenching of thirst, and so you’ll still do that. The same applies in all areas of life, including art and music and poetry, but also including relationships, friendships, etc. You’re still going to want to do those things. But the nihilist is someone who takes a bird’s eye view of it and realizes that it’s all a little bit meaningless.

Self-justifying motives and meaning

It’s like Camus famously describes in “The Myth of Sisyphus” this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day, you know, waking up, having breakfast, getting in the car, going to work, taking a break, eating some food, going back home, eating some food, going to sleep, starting again. And you start to notice that you are doing this. And it’s not anything about what you’re doing, it’s realizing, taking a step back and realizing that there’s no meaning to any of this, that there’s nothing more than just my doing it. It doesn’t go any deeper than that.

Meaning is used synonymously with purpose. To have meaning is to have some kind of purpose. Purpose is something like reason to act or reason to be. So to have meaning or to have purpose, I think, is to have some reason to either act. If you’re talking about the meaning in an action, it’s the reason to act in that way. If you’re talking about the meaning of or in life, it’s the reason to live, or the reason that we are alive, right? Now, like I said before, there always will be some kind of reason, but that reason will be contingent on something else.

So the reason why I’m reaching my hand is because I want to get the water, but the reason why I want the water is contingent on something else, that is that I’m thirsty. The reason that I’m thirsty is contingent on something else. So to find an objective meaning at the root of life would mean finding a non-contingent reason to act or to be. There would just need to be a self-justifying principle where if you ask “But why?” the answer and the truthful answer would be it just is, or that why is an inappropriate question to ask any further.

For there to be something for this to bottom out in it will either have to bottom out in something completely arbitrary, which feels meaningless to people because it could have easily been something else, or this contingent chain of reasoning just essentially goes back forever, which seems implausible, or it terminates in something which is self-justifying. When people say that they found their meaning in life, I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle.

For some people, their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. If you ask them, “Why are you getting out of bed?” “To go to work.” “Why are you doing that?” “To make money.” “Why? “To provide for my family.” “Why?” “To bring up my children healthily.” “Why?” “Because I want my children to be healthy.” “Why?” “What do you mean why? That’s it, that’s what it’s about.” And the philosopher might look at that and say, “Well, you should still probably ask why as a point of interest, why do you care about that?” But in practice, that moment that you reach where that question why just seems inappropriate, that’s where you’ve bottomed out.

And if you find some self-justifying principle that ultimately motivates most of your actions, it’s what you have in the back of your mind when you’re doing anything. For most people it probably is relational, it’s probably got to do with children or spouses or something like that. For the religious, it will be God. Everything they do, even if they don’t cognize it all the time will be for the glory of God. If you ask them to proactively analyze what they’re doing, “Well, why are you doing this? Why are you sat here doing an interview with people?” Ultimately they would say something like, “Well you know, it’s all for the glory of God.”

Meaning in a materialist world

Everybody will have that self-justifying principle somewhere at the basis of their thinking. If you’re a secular person, if you’re an atheist, it will likely be something else. I might say that, “Well, I really enjoy doing this sort of thing. I think it’s a meaningful pursuit because I like discussing big questions.” And if somebody says, “Well, why are big questions in life important?” Somebody might just say, “What do you mean? Of course they are. That’s almost the definition of importance.” Now you can pick a hole with that, and a nihilist will. They’ll say that you can always go deeper and you will realize that ultimately it’s just preference, which is why the nihilist thinks that there’s no objective meaning. But most people have some self-justifying principle, it’s just usually a subjective one.

Objective meaning would look something like a reason to act that is self-justifying and not because, not dependent on some preference that you have. So if your foundational self-justifying principle is your care for your children, it seems quite clear that your care for your children is subjective, it’s dependent on you. After all, you don’t care about other people’s children in the same way and they don’t care about your children in the same way. It seems like if you died and your children with you, this principle wouldn’t exist out there in the ether. It seems completely dependent on your circumstances and your preferences.

It seems a bit crude to describe your care for your children as a preference, but broadly speaking, it is a preference. You prefer the wellbeing of your children over the wellbeing of other children. In fact, that’s a lot of the time what caring for the wellbeing of your children is about, it’s providing them with a roof over their head and a stable income, which oftentimes is to the detriment of other people who are competing for the same job, but you have this preference. But it seems quite clear that that is person dependent.

Right, like for there to be an objective meaning would mean that it is insensitive to preference. It would mean that even for somebody who just had different preferences, who just didn’t want children, if caring for your children were the objective meaning in life, then if somebody said, “Well, you know what, I just don’t want children. It’s just not something that appeals to me. I think I wouldn’t be a good parent.” Then you would say to them, “You are wrong. You are literally incorrect about the meaning in your own life.” And some people think this, but what they mean is something like, “Oh, I think that if you had kids, you’d actually like it,” right? But that’s just saying that you predict that they will subjectively prefer it too.

Like to say it’s objective would be, even if you don’t prefer it, even if you have children and actually hate the whole process and think, “Gosh, this is awful and terrible,” your life will still be more meaningful even if you don’t think it is. It would have to be something which provides meaning completely independent of your preferences, of how you actually feel about what it is that you’re doing, if that makes sense.

If meaning just means a reason to act or a reason to be, then of course ultimately I do think there is a literal explanation for why we behave in the way that we do. That will be objective in the sense that that will be the driving force behind our behaviors, whether we like it or not. So if you are an atheist materialist, you might think that evolution by natural selection has simply favored certain traits which produce certain behaviors. I could say, literally speaking, the reason why you are behaving in this way, the reason why you have these preferences is because of this evolutionary trait, right? For most people, that’s not very fulfilling.

Ecclesiastes and the first nihilist

But literally speaking, that could be something like an objective meaning in the sense of it being an objective purpose. It is literally the purpose why we all act. But I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something which feels like it’s not quite just a reason to act. It’s also something which feels worthwhile, that’s somehow justified by some universal principle. There’s almost like a moral element, that it’s a good thing to be alive, that it’s a good thing to live a meaningful life. And that is very difficult to ground objectively, unless you posit as some supernatural design, or I suppose if you have a philosophy of life, or a metaphysic which says that there is some teleology built into nature itself, which some people believe but I struggle to grapple with.

I think human beings naturally desire certain things and they have values. And I think this is probably an evolutionary trait. If you had two communities, one of which just didn’t care about anything, were completely apathetic, didn’t care about their own children, didn’t care to have children, didn’t care to get out of bed, they’re not gonna survive for very long. So I think it is just literally the case that having some sense of motivation for doing things in life is evolutionarily selected for. I think that most people are not actually fundamentally apathetic. Even people who seem apathetic actually have certain values, they value their own comfort, for example.

Like if you wake up and you just want to go back to sleep, it’s not apathy. That’s having a different value than value that would get you out of bed. You value your comfort, you value sleeping. Most people have these kinds of values. Nihilism doesn’t remove values. It analyzes values and finds them to be essentially groundless. Or if they do have a ground, the ground is within the subjective preferences of people. I understand why nihilism might make you act in a way that would be viewed as apathetic. It might make you a bit depressed, for example. And it might mean that you lay around a bit more and you have less motivation for doing the things you formally enjoyed, all of those things that come along with depression.

But you’ll still have literal values. You will not enjoy your own pain. If hungry, you will feel that hunger, whether or not you choose to satisfy it. You’ll have experiences that you want when experienced and experiences that you don’t want when experienced, which I think is a good definition of pleasure and pain. What does nihilism do then? It just removes the meaning in those values. I would like to imagine that the person who is suffering, it’s helpful to think of a person who’s suffering but is not a nihilist. You could have the worst life in the world. You could be depressed, you could be upset every single day. You could think your life is going terribly, but you could believe that there’s some reason. You could believe that there’s a meaning behind it. Maybe you’re religious, maybe you believe in reincarnation, whatever, such that you’re suffering but you’re not an nihilist.

To be an nihilist is to suffer and suffer all the more from the recognition that the suffering is meaningless. So in principle, you could also be really happy, you could be having the best time in the world and be a nihilist so long as you recognize that that happiness you’re feeling is completely meaningless. There’s no reason for it. You are just feeling it. You just exist, and you’re feeling a certain thing, and that’s it. In practice, nihilism tends to make people more sad than happy. But as a philosophy, let’s say, a philosophy of life, there’s no inconsistency with being a very motivated, very happy, very content person who yet realizes that there’s no meaning behind any of it.

There is the fact that most people, literally speaking, do feel meaning in life. And it does seem a little bit bold to say that everybody who reports that is essentially either lying or deluding themselves. That seems bold. It seems a little arrogant and too confident. Not to say that that makes it false, but I think you should be aware of how radical a claim that is, of course. But also there does seem to be this universal compulsion towards meaning. It’s like, obviously, there is this universal compulsion to think that there is some reason why we’re all here. Now, like I said before, that could be explained through evolutionary self-selecting pressures. But in a way you might just say that’s enough, because the only thing that matters is that I feel as though there is objective meaning.

Why stories explain what logic can’t

Like that might just be enough for people in the sense that nihilism as a lived philosophy, that like informs the way that you behave, you might just accept the fact that everybody universally has this drive and treat it as if it were objective. In the same way that like, if you’re trying to work out what color to paint a house, and, like, color is completely subjective, but if it just so happened that everybody, for some evolutionary reason, preferred the color blue, like, absolutely everybody just in fact preferred the color blue, you might treat it as an objective fact that blue is the best color to paint the house. In that context, that might become a meaningful statement. Even though you recognize it’s not technically objective, it’s just universally subjectively true. But in practice, that works the same as an objective truth.

So you would paint the house blue, and if anybody said you should paint it another color, you might be able to say to them, “You’re wrong,” even though you’re just dealing with preferences. So the universality of felt meaning or desire for meaning or assumption that there is meaning might be enough to raise a few eyebrows when it comes to nihilism.

Nihilism is often seen as a response to the decline of religion. You get thinkers like Nietzsche, you get thinkers like Emil Cioran. And a bit later on you get your existentialists and your absurdists, you get your Sartres and your Camus, right? But this goes way further back. Like, nihilism is not a new philosophy in response to the decline of religion. I think that religions emerge as a response to nihilism. I think it’s the other way around.

One of the still greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Just this nihilistic outpouring, “’Meaningless, everything is meaningless,’ says the Teacher.” Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous author. Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn’t really matter who it is. We know that he was a great man, a king. He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it. He keeps coming back to this word hebel which means literally something like wind, right? And so it’s translated as vanity by the King James, vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. I’ve heard some exegetes think that the best modern translation of that word hebel in Hebrew is actually absurd in alignment with Camus’ rubbing up of our expectations against the great iconoclast of reality which just shatters all of our expectations.

But “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless,” is one translation. “Absurd, absurd, everything is absurd,” is my favorite. because he’s describing these things. He’s like, “I denied my eyes no pleasure that they saw. If I wanted something, I took it. I drank wine. I partied, I lived life. But in the end I saw that it was all hebel, it was all just wind. It’s just nothing. It just happens, and then it’s gone. And it doesn’t mean anything.” And clearly whoever penned this text is struggling deeply with the exact same nihilistic themes that we talk about today.

And for him, this is a piece of religious scripture. So there’s this undertone, he keeps saying that under the sun there is nothing, there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose to any of this. It’s where we get the phrase “nothing new under the sun.” Under the sun, is this phrase that keeps showing up in Ecclesiastes. Some have suggested that this is supposed to indicate that on Earth separate from the heavenly realm, there’s no ultimate purpose to this.

But interestingly, at the very end of Ecclesiastes, there’s this passage where we’ve heard the teacher speak, Qoheleth. We’ve heard this teacher speak and talk about how meaningless everything is. And then at the end there’s a commentary on this teacher’s treatise. It says that everything he said was upright and true. Everything he said was correct essentially. But the solution is this, fear God and keep his commandments. There’s no explanation as to why that would solve the problem. There’s no like mechanism as to what that would change.

The most interesting thing is that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true, that it is all just wind. But that somehow by just fearing God and keeping his commandments, you have somehow solved the problem. I don’t think that that’s a very satisfying solution. But then I think that that is the great theme of nihilistic literature. People try for a solution, but ultimately, for me at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying.

Fast forward thousands of years and you get Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus,” which famously ends with this idea of imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe that does it for you. I don’t know what it does for me. But yeah, Nietzsche is often associated with nihilism. Not a nihilist himself, of course, but discusses a lot of nihilistic themes. And then the existentialists are the go-to figures for discussions of modern nihilism. In fact, Camus is celebrated for the starkness of the opening line of the “Myth of Sisyphus,” that “there is one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” Because everything else, you know, how many dimensions there are to space, whether abstract numbers exist, all of that is secondary. The most foundational question is whether or not you’re going to, as he once put it, have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today. Those are your options.

So nihilistic literature, so to speak, is a broad span. But literally I think it begins with, I think that the term is popularized by Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons.” Although that’s a more, I think, that’s a more restricted use of the word nihilism. It’s more culturally relevant to Russia, the Russia that he was living in. But that’s where we get the term from. It’s in novelistic form.

Interestingly, this often shows up in narrative, even in the book of Ecclesiastes it’s telling a story. Broadly speaking, most people will know, there’s this distinction between the so-called analytic philosophy, the if p then q, and logical fallacy and modus ponens. On the other side you’ve got the so-called continental philosophy, which is more narrative, it’s more poetry, it’s more grasping at ideas but not directly. So this is where you have your existentialists but also your novelists. You have your Dostoevsky and your and your Tolstoys, and you have your poets. And that’s all on that side. The nihilistic literature, at least the stuff that people care about, is almost exclusively on the continental side because it does seem to be something that resists discussion in abstract terms. It’s very personal, it’s very narrative. You need to involve yourself in the story of life in order to even understand what the problem is.

You can imagine speaking to an alien. If you tried to describe to an alien or an AI what nihilism is, and you say like, “Well, the problem is I get up and I go to work, and I just don’t know why I do it.” And the alien might be like, “Well, yeah, you do. You do it to get money and to get a job.” “Yeah, but like, why do I do that?” “Well, because otherwise you’d be on the street and you’d be suffering.” “But why?” “Well, you just it’s just built into your, you don’t like suffering. That’s like a definition of suffering. You just don’t like suffering and you’re trying to avoid it.” “Yeah, you’re right. But I just wish there was more, you know?” The alien’s like, “What do you mean? More what? Like more pleasure?” “No, not more pleasure, just like, I wish there were like a reason.” It’d be actually quite difficult to just explain in plain terms. It’s almost like it’s a problem that can only be understood by someone who lives it. Whereas you could easily explain to that alien the concept of modus ponens. the alien probably wouldn’t have a problem with that as long as it’s got a rational mind. But nihilism is something that we need to experience ourselves and explore through narrative.

I am brutally agnostic about almost everything. In fact, if somebody ever asks me how I might console myself in the face of these existential woes, genuinely, at least personally, it is in agnosticism. It’s in the fact that I do not know the first thing about, about why any of this exists. Of course, I don’t, you know? And sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast on a stage or something implicitly as if I’m going to have some answer, as if I’ve like worked it out and I’m going to be able to communicate that to people. Like, there’s just no way. This is obviously a deeply personal story that everybody has to live individually. And I’m like doing the same thing, right?

And I’m interested in philosophy. So I might have read something that helps to elucidate a concept, or I might be able to put a word on something that you’ve been thinking but didn’t know was also thought by other people. But we’re doing the same thing here. Ultimately I have absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are. That consoles me. Because like if you are a more certain nihilist, I can understand why that would be very upsetting. If you really just believe that there’s no meaning to any of this, then I can see why that would cause you some trouble. But personally, that’s just not something that I strongly believe. I think it’s plausible. I think there’s a lot of, like, it’s quite an attractive view in many respects.

You look at the level of suffering of animals in the history of the world. When you look at the seeming arbitrariness of the world around us, the way that the environment and the organisms within it seem to almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival, it all just seems a little bit like this is all just accidental and meaningless. But then on a more fundamental level, it just seems strange to suggest that it’s all just happening for literally no reason. That seems implausible to me too. So I don’t really know how to fully make sense of that. That consoles me. It’s the same on the religious question.

It’s much easier to be consoled. If you believe in God, you might be terrified because you’re constantly worried about going to hell. If you’re an atheist, you might be terrified because you think that this is the only life you have and that it’s ultimately meaningless. If you’re somewhere in the middle, you just feel like you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. Nihilism is an upsetting thing to think about. It’s a sad, it would be a sad reality. If you’re certain of it, if you really are convinced that that’s the case, I can see why that would be quite upsetting. It’s not like I’m choosing to be an agnostic in order to console myself. I just genuinely don’t know what the truth of the matter is, and that just doesn’t allow me to get really upset.

It’s like not knowing if it’s going to rain on my wedding day. It’s like, so long as I have no real conviction that it is going to rain, it’s going to be very difficult for me to get upset about the rain spoiling my wedding day, right? I literally can’t be upset about that unless I’ve got some reason to think that it’s going to happen. Of course, there’s literal reason to think this, it’s plausible that it will rain on my wedding day, but that’s not quite enough. You have to actually be convicted of it in order to be upset by it. I suppose I’m just not convicted of nihilism, but that’s not to say that I think it’s false, it’s just to say that there’s a lot of room for doubt there.

Emotion’s grip on belief

A lot of people don’t realize the extent to which their emotions are influencing their thinking. Everybody likes to think that they’re thinking objectively and rationally and with a sober mind, but our minds are never sober from emotion. When you develop a philosophical view, it’s always gonna be informed by the way that you feel. So a lot of people think, “I’m depressed because I’m an nihilist.” But I think without realizing it, a lot of the time is actually the case that people are nihilists because they’re depressed. It goes the other way around.

Nobody is ever convinced, like, out of nowhere of a philosophical position, right? Like you read a philosopher, and they will put something in such a way that makes you go, “Huh, yeah, you know what, I think that makes sense.” And that’s usually because they are putting something into words or systematizing something which you already knew. In fact, if you open Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” the very first line of the introduction, it says something like, “This book will be completely useless to anybody who doesn’t already agree with his contents.” He just admits that the reason he’s really writing this is to elucidate something that hopefully his readers had already independently come to. I think that happens all the time, which is also why, by the way, if you’ve ever tried to get into philosophy, you might look up like the 50 greatest philosophers of all time. I’m really interested. I want to see what I can learn. It will say, “Okay, well one great philosopher is Jean Paul Sartre.” And say, “Okay, I’ll give that a go,” and you pick it up and you read it, and you’re just like, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand, not only do I not understand the context, like even when I looked at the SparkNotes and I got what he was talking about and all, it just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not impressed, like why is this so famous?”

And it’s because you’ve just plucked it out of nowhere. Whereas if you’ve had like a million conversations with people and Jean Paul Sartre is a name that has come up every now and again, such that you’ve heard of him and such that just because it’s so happens that you are in like conversations and you are in situations that suited his name coming up from people who know who he is, chances are that if you then go and read him, you are actually going to enjoy what he’s saying because there’s some reason he keeps coming up. So when people ask me for a recommendation of what to read philosophically, I literally tell them to just read what they’ve heard of, because there’s a reason why you’ve heard of those philosophers, because they’re the people who’ve come up in the context that you are obviously already interested in.

And I think it’s important to recognize that you’re not gonna be convinced out of nowhere of a philosophy that you don’t already have one foot in. For that reason, I think that our predisposition towards the world will influence the philosophies which are attracted to us. For instance, I like all of the nihilistic literature, all of the famous existential nihilistic literature, if you handed that to a confident Christian, they’re not going to be convinced by it. If you hand it to somebody who hasn’t really thought about the issue, but maybe has some nihilistic undertones to their life, they might read that and go, “Yeah, he’s got a point,” right? It’s going to be more attractive if you are already attracted to it before you’ve interacted with the text.

I do think it’s not just that. I think it’s worth pointing out that any radical abandonment of philosophical consolation and principle is going to bring with it distress. But it’s not just that, because nihilism is also just quite a upsetting thing for a lot of people. It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that’s written into the rules of the universe and that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. I think it’s just a nicer philosophy.

But I think we ought be more suspicious of philosophies which are more attractive to us, not because they’re less likely to be true, but because we are more likely to accept them on less evidence because we want them to be true. I think we need to recognize that bias and be careful of it.

But it does also seem completely bewildering that we would just exist for absolutely no reason. The nihilist ultimately has to posit that there is either no reason for our existence, which seems completely ludicrous. There needs to literally be a reason why things exist. Or that there is some kind of reason, but it’s completely arbitrary, which also just seems a bit bewildering. Whatever is the answer to the grand mystery of why anything exists at all, it seems a little unsatisfying philosophically to say that it just could have gone the other way and they could have just been nothing. It seems a little, well, on the surface, it seems a little implausible. There is an inherent implausibility to nihilism too that people will wrestle with. Whether you are more convinced by the implausibility of meaning in life or the implausibility of it all just happening for no reason I think will ultimately depend on your emotional state.

How emotivism shapes ethics

Emotivism is an ethical theory. It’s also a theory of language really, but it belongs in this discussion around what is good and what is bad. Broadly speaking, people might be familiar that when it comes to morals, what’s good and what’s bad, there are two schools. You have the objective who think that there are things which are good and bad, whether you like it or not. There are the subjectivists who say it’s just all your opinion. It’s your preference. Some people like murder, some people don’t, in the way that some people like cake and some people don’t, right?

Emotivism is more on this subjective side, but emotivism is something a little different. It suggests that when people make ethical statements, what they’re doing is expressing an emotion. When you say that murder is wrong, you are literally expressing an emotional state towards murder. That sounds very similar to subjectivism. In the subjectivist framework, the phrase “Murder is wrong” translates to something like, “I don’t like murder.” A phrase like, “I don’t like murder” is a claim about my psychology. I could be lying. I could say I don’t like murder. But actually I do secretly like murder. It could be something that I’m lying about. It could be true, it could be false that I don’t like murder. It seems to be a claim about my brain, about my psychology, about my attitude towards murder.

Emotivism is not that. It’s not the reporting of an emotional state or an attitude. It is literally the expression of that attitude. It’s the difference between telling you, “I don’t like murder,” and literally going like, “Ugh, murder,” or just like pulling a nasty face. Or as A.J. Ayer’s famously had it going, “Boo, boo murder,” right? The emotivist thinks that that is what’s going on when we say murder is wrong, meaning that these ethical claims are literally not the kind of thing that can be true or false.

There are some kinds of expressions and statements that have what’s called truth value. Truth value means that it can be true or false. So a statement like the sky is red has truth value, it’s just that the truth value is false. Whereas some statements like commands, for example, “Go over there,” it doesn’t have truth value. It’s not the kind of thing that can be true or false. A phrase like, “I don’t like murder” could be true. A phrase like the objectivist theory that murder is wrong might be true, but for the emotivist, it’s literally like going, “Boo, murder,” which isn’t true. It isn’t false, it’s just an expression. It’s the same as me kicking my foot and going, “Ow.” Is that true? Is it false? Am I lying? That doesn’t apply here. You’re just expressing something. That’s what the emotivist believes anyway, that’s the broad position of emotivism.

It belongs in this category of non-cognitivism about ethics, which means that these statements don’t have truth value. There are cognitivists who think that ethical statements have truth value and non-cognitivists who think that they don’t. Emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism. So for example, another non-cognitivist school is prescriptivism, which thinks that ethical statements are essentially commands. When I say murder is wrong, what I mean is something like, “Don’t murder.” That’s the kind of statement that I’m saying. So it’s not exactly expressing an emotion, it’s giving a command, but it’s also non-cognitivist because it doesn’t have truth value. You’re just saying something that isn’t true or false.

Reasoning can be connected to ethical statements on an emotivist framework. There is this idea that if we’re emotivists, then suddenly the possibility for all disagreement on moral issues vanishes. Because how can you have a debate if there’s no truth value? And that’s true to a degree, and I understand the criticism. It’s not so much a criticism as an observation. It might just be true that we can’t do that, but a lot of people aren’t satisfied with that. But it’s way more restricted than people realize. A.J. Ayer pointed out in “Language, Truth & Logic,” he is the founder of this emotivist school. He points out that the vast majority of moral debate is not moral debate at all. It’s debate about descriptive facts that we then apply to our moral intuitions to.

So for example, if you imagine a debate about guns in America and people are having a back and forth. One person says, “Well, did you know that if we criminalize guns, it would reduce the number of gun-related deaths by 10,000 a year? And another person says, “Ah, yeah, but did you know that you haven’t taken into account this statistic that if you get rid of good people with guns, then less people will be saved?” And then someone says, “Oh, but did you know that swimming pools kill more children than guns do?” This is the debate that we’re having back and forth. But none of those claims are moral claims. They’re just descriptive, factual claims, they’re statistics, you can go and test them. It’s either true or false, right? Like a lot of what we think is moral debate is actually just debate about descriptive facts, which once those are settled, we then apply our moral intuitions to.

So for example, in the gun debate, one person has one moral view and another person has another moral view, and they’re battling it out. But actually they might have the same moral view, so to speak. For the emotivist, it’s some form of emotional expression. What might be the emotional expression? Well, suppose one person says, “If we allow guns in society, innocent people are going to die.” And another person says, “But, like, if we don’t allow guns in society, then only the bad guys are gonna have guns, and they’re gonna kill innocent people, and there’s gonna be no one to protect them, so innocent people will die.” Both of them agree, innocent people dying, boo. What they’re debating is a descriptive like truth of of the matter as to whether, literally speaking, more guns, less guns, more deaths, less deaths, right?

The idea that instantly comes to mind is that we can’t have any reasonable discussion about moral issues, like it’s true, but I just want to point out that it’s way more restricted. It’s not like you can’t have this kind of gun discussion. You can’t have a discussion about, I don’t know about abortion and healthcare. You can’t talk about, I don’t know, pick another pet moral issue, speed limits. You know, like how can we have a moral discussion about speed limits? Well, we can talk about how many people will die, the statistics about increasing by 10 miles an hour and all this kind, that’s all just facts. Then we’ll apply our moral intuitions.

And I think that when we actually break down and isolate the moral element alone, we’ll find that there is actually a lot more agreement than there is disagreement. That doesn’t do away with the problem. The challenge is like what if there really is disagreement on the moral stuff? What if two people genuinely just have conflicting boos and yays? And in that case, there are two strategies. You either say, “Well, if you really broke those down further, you’d realize that everybody ultimately has the same emotional, like, expression on fundamental ethical issues. Because we’re all human, we all have a shared evolutionary heritage that will have placed within us certain emotional predispositions, that ultimately will be the same if we just break them down far enough.” The other strategy is to say, “No, people do just have fundamental value conflicts. That’s just true, and that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Whichever of those you find plausible is up to you. But obviously the former is a bit more of an optimistic idea. I think people will be more attracted to that because it allows us to say, “Well, everybody agrees that boo innocent people dying, and so we can just in accordance with that.” But it seems more likely the case that that’s not true. On that point, it’s quite clear that there are people who do not have an adverse emotional reaction to innocent people dying. That can’t be the most foundational ethical principle that we all agree on.

But it might go deeper than that. It might be, that’s not foundational. Innocent people dying cannot be a foundational ethical expression, because it contains too many concepts. The concept of innocent, the concept of death. The reason why you might think, the reason why you might have that emotional reaction to innocent people dying, it can be broken down much, much further. If somebody thinks that their fundamental ethical principle is innocent people dying, boo, I can think of 10 situations off the top of my head in which you would be perfectly fine with an innocent person dying. It can’t be that. It must go deeper than that. It might genuinely be that if you actually go deep enough into people’s moral emotions, they will ultimately outroot the identical across the human species. That at a higher level, when someone has an emotional reaction to something, that emotional reaction, you can’t say it’s wrong because there’s no truth value, but you could say that it betrays a mistake that somebody has made.

This is really interesting. Like, suppose you were really upset because it was raining on your wedding day. But it turned out it wasn’t actually raining. You’d been accidentally watching a tape recording of the news forecast, right? And you believed it was raining, and you’re really upset about it. Then I come over to you and I say, “Hey, it’s not actually raining, right?” And suddenly you are happy again. Those emotional states, the sadness that the rain and the happiness that it’s not raining, they’re just emotional states, right? They’re not true. They’re not false. They’re literally just expressions of emotion. But I can still come in and give you information that will change your emotional state and literally convince you to feel the opposite way just based on the information that I’ve just given you.

So in the same way it might be that people have, so to speak, mistakes in their like emotional expressions at a higher level, right? In the same way that you might be sad that it’s raining, even though it’s not really raining, somebody might have an emotional reaction to a surface-level moral issue. They might be like, “Oh, I think it’s wrong that that gun law passed.” But if you actually just explain to the facts to them, they might be like, “Actually, yeah, fair enough. No, I think it’s good that that gun law passed.” So you are having what looks like rational discussion about moral issues, but all you’re actually doing is discussing the facts. It might be the case that if we actually made every human being on earth consistent internally, emotionally with all of their foundational emotional motivations, that there would be a lot more unity than disunity. But we don’t know, because, of course, that experiment has not and probably cannot ever be done.

Where morality meets emotion

I’m not sure there is a distinction between emotions and attitudes. I think these are essentially synonyms. Simon Blackburn disagrees with me about this. He is an important metaethicist. He founded a metaethical position, which he equals quasi-realism, which is a non-cognitivism about ethics. But he thinks that, for example, you can have an attitude towards something without having an emotional state, like, or being in an emotional state with relation to that thing. So you might have an attitude that that thing is bad or that you shouldn’t do that or something like that. But it doesn’t mean that you’re like emotionally invested. I’m just not sure that that’s possible. I think that to have an attitude towards something is to have a way that you prefer it to be. I think that that belongs in the category of emotion. But this is essentially semantics. Like if you want to draw out a distinction, you could probably do it and say that an attitude towards something is something like your desire for the way that you want it to be. Whereas your emotional state is the reaction you have to it not being the way you want it to be. Yeah, you could draw out some distinction like that, but I think that in practice we’re talking about the same thing.

One thing that’s important to point out is a mistake that people make. Emotivists don’t think that wrongness or badness or something that maps on to a preexisting emotion, like disgust or like anger or upset. It just belongs in that category, but it’s its own unique emotion, in the same way that anger is a little bit like sadness, but they’re not the same thing. They just belong in the same category. They’re just two unique kinds of emotions. Wrong is its own kind of emotion. It’s unique, but it’s still an emotion, you know? It just belongs in that category.

So well, why might we think that? Well, how do people talk about ethics? Okay, we talk about things being wrong, but when someone does something absolutely awful, like really, really bad, what do we say? “Disgusting.” You say, “That’s just disgusting. It’s despicable.” And the emotional reaction just comes up in your face. Now, some people will say that that emotional reaction is your reaction to the wrongness, right? There is this objective wrongness and you are having this reaction of disgust to the wrongness. I’m more inclined to say that the wrongness in its totality is the feeling of disgust.

A great example for emotivism is the incest taboo. It’s the most universal taboo that exists in human societies. Everywhere we look, there is a prohibition against any kind of marital or sexual relation with your immediate family. Some tribes, I think, found have some interesting variants whereby, like, you can marry your older sister but not your younger sister, stuff like that. But across the board there is some kind of incest taboo. It’s quite easy to explain evolutionarily why this is the case. Like, clearly there are all kinds of problems with inbreeding that will be evolutionarily deselected for, right? But evolutionary explanations aren’t a justification, right? Like I can also evolutionarily explain why people tend to be a bit racist. I can explain that in terms of your evolutionary biology, but that wouldn’t be a justification for racism. That would just be an explanation for it, right?

So I can explain why there is this incest taboo, but most people want to say that incest is wrong. Why? It’s a famously difficult thing for any, at least secular ethicist to do, especially if you’re utilitarian who thinks that the only thing that matters is the minimization of suffering. “Oh, well it’s because you can have disabled children.” Few questions jump out of that for me. Firstly, what’s wrong with having disabled children? Secondly, obviously you can control for these factors. Okay, so you make sure that it’s two women, or it’s two men who’ve been sterilized or something like that. Or a man and a woman who’ve been sterilized or two men. “Okay, well then it’s about the power imbalances in a family that,” okay, we’ll just control for that. Like, it’s so often we waste so much time on these irrelevant factors. You can literally just control for these factors. What’s wrong with it?

When it comes down to it, most people, if they search their inner experience, the enlightened rationalists will go, “Well then, I don’t think it is wrong, you know?” And okay, maybe they’re right in being consistent there, but even such people tend to still feel uncomfortable with it. Somebody actually once put me through my paces on this, because I used to be a bit of a utilitarian and I used to talk about this and say, “Well, I suppose like I can’t see anything that’s subjectively wrong with that.” And someone I know like pretended that his new girlfriend, he like introduced her to me as like his cousin or something. And then later on it became clear that they were an item, and he was just toying with me to see how I’d actually react. Because it’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that,” but you’re still gonna be like, “What?” because it’s so universal. So what’s going on there? We just think it’s disgusting. We’re just like, “Gosh, no. That’s your brother, that’s your sister, that’s your mother.” It’s like that’s all you’ve got, ultimately, when you break it down.

There will be people who say, “No, like, I believe in God and God has enshrined into the moral law of the universe that this is wrong.” Interestingly, still doesn’t tell you why it’s wrong, just gives you confidence that it’s wrong. But fine, shelving that at least for the time being, like for at least the secular ethicist among us, like even secular ethicists will say, “No, emotivism is wrong.” Okay, well then try to account for what’s going on here. Maybe you will just say that in this case people are just having an emotional reaction, and for that reason it’s not wrong. But I think that’s just what’s going on across the board.

Think about the worst, most homophobic person you’ve ever met. What do they say about gay people? They don’t just say abstractly, like completely dispassionately, “I think that is immoral.” They say, “It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting. No, no. No son of mine will be gay, no, no.” It’s got this emotional component that everybody knows. Everybody knows about this emotional component that these things have, but I think there is just the emotional component. I think that’s what this ethics is. That is the difference between a father saying, “My son is gay,” as a matter of fact, and saying, “It’s wrong that my son is gay.” I think if you isolate what the difference is between those two statements is that, in one case, he’s feeling something in relation to that fact about the world. It’s not like another fact that he’s adding on. There’s only one fact there, which is that his son is gay, and the only thing that’s being added on in saying that it’s wrong that his son is gay is how he feels about it.

You might remember that I said that emotivism is a, it’s a theory about ethics, but really it’s a theory about language, right? It’s more about what people mean when they say particular words. To say that, when someone says like, “The world ought to be this way,” what they’re doing is they’re expressing an emotional state about the world. They’re expressing their emotional reaction to the world, that they don’t like it. And you can still make sense of what’s like going on there. It’s like if we were looking for some food and I said, “Let’s go to Wetherspoons.” I don’t know if you know what a Wetherspoons is, but it’s a glorious pub chain in the United Kingdom. You looked on your phone and said, “Oh, they’re all shut.” And I went, “Ugh, God’s sake.” Like I’m expressing a preference about how I wish the world were, you know? And crucially, I’m not just reporting this, I’m not just saying, “You know, I wish we lived in a world where Wetherspoons were open all night.” That would just be a fact about my psychological state. It’s the expression itself. I think that if I said something like, “It’s just so wrong that they shut early,” or something like that, I use these moralizing terms, that what I’d be doing is expressing an emotion.

So you can still say something like, “The world really ought not be that way,” but the emotivist is just translates that language into the language of ethical expression in the same way that like, I don’t know, you might translate when... A lot of the time in like relationships with people, you have to translate what they’re saying. If your wife says to you like, “Oh, you’re back 10 minutes later than you said you’d be.” What she’s actually saying is, “Stop taking me for a fool. Like, you’re lying to me and you’re never on time and you’re lazy.” But it’s like this, there’s something more going on under the surface. It might even be a kind of expression of emotion. When she says, “Oh, well, oh no, it’s just that I thought we could maybe get dinner together tonight.” On the surface, she’s making a descriptive claim about her psychology. “I’m just reporting to you, I thought, I had a belief that we were gonna get dinner.” That’s just a fact about the world. But clearly what she’s actually doing there is expressing an emotional state to you. She’s expressing her upset, but she’s disguising it in the language of truth claims about her psychology, right? And the same thing’s going on with ethics.

When someone says, “I think that’s wrong,” what they’re doing is having an emotional reaction to something and putting it into descriptive clothing. I was always already just deeply suspicious of the idea that ethics is this... It’s a very difficult thing to define famously, like, concepts, like good and bad, but we employ them all the time. Like, outside of this conversation, if I’m a bit late to this interview, and somebody says, “Oh, I just think that that’s really bad, that’s really immoral that you were late,” like without doing any metaethic, we all get what’s being said there. Technically speaking, if I asked everybody in this room, “Well, what’s your definition of wrongness? What does that literally mean? Do you mean that it causes suffering? Do you mean that it...” Like, people might have different views and whatnot, but like on the surface level, we all use these terms and we get along using these terms and we know what they mean.

So I was interested in the fact that it’s a kind of lexicon that I was already frequently employing, but also deeply suspicious of the idea that there is this thing in the universe called like goodness. It just like where does it exist? How does it exist? Does it exist, like in people, in actions? Like, can something even exists within an act? Like where is it? What is it, you know? It’s like, “Okay, well then let’s start paying attention.” This is not an uncommon thought for people to realize that the this good and bad stuff is essentially just, it’s just people saying stuff. It’s just like viewpoints and subjective preferences. All right, but let’s get more specific. What exactly am I saying? Because I use these terms. It’s not like I’m using a term without knowing what it means. It’s not like I’ve just used the word obnoxious, but not known the definition of obnoxious. I know what I mean when I say these terms, right? But when I reflect on it, right? “But what is this, this good, this bad? I must mean something. So what do I mean?” That’s when I do this exercise of really trying to isolate the moral element.

What is the difference between it’s raining and it’s bad that it’s raining? What is the difference between a murder just occurred and it’s wrong that that murder just occurred? If you try to isolate what the actual difference is there, I think it has to just be an attitude, it’s an expression, it’s the way you feel about that particular situation. The only thing that can be added by saying that something is wrong is the expression of that attitude. That’s the way of thinking about it. That led me to emotivism. I think it is hard to remember literally how I first started becoming convinced by this, but I suppose I was convinced that there is no objective good or bad. I couldn’t even make sense of such a concept. Once that’s gone, it’s not even like you’re really doing ethics anymore. Now you’re just trying to work out, “Okay, then what do those words mean? What is the referent for the word good?”

It can’t be literally meaningless. It must have some kind of referent. That’s what led A.J. Ayer to it in the first place. He had this whole philosophy about meaning in language. He thought that like statements could only be meaningful if they were either something you could verify, so prove or disprove through empirical observation, or if they were just like analytically true, just true by definition, things like two plus two is four, something like that. Or analytically false, you know, two plus two is five. It’s a meaningful statement. It’s just meaningfully false. This philosophy, by the way, has completely fallen out of favor, this logical positivism, as it’s called, this idea that statements are only meaningful if they are verifiable or analytical, or analytically true or false, which means that any kind of statement which does not belong in that category...

It’s not just that it’s like wrong or false. Ayer thought it was literally meaningless. It was the same as just like going, “Blah, blah, blah,” or something. It just literally had no meaning. So the big problem in chapter seven of “Language, Truth & Logic” is what about ethical statements? When I say murder is wrong, it doesn’t seem like it’s something I can empirically verify. I can’t go out and like test with scientific experiments whether murder is wrong, but it also doesn’t seem analytically true. It doesn’t seem true by definition. It seems like I can meaningfully ask, is murder really wrong? And so Ayer’s philosophy led him to this position where he either had to say that ethical statements were therefore literally meaningless, again, like saying murder is wrong would be the same as just saying like, murder is blah, blah, blah. Like, just meaningless statement. But Ayer was like, “No, it definitely means something.” So if it’s not analytically true and it’s not empirically verifiable, then what do these ethical statements mean? Oh, well, they’re expressions of emotions. They’re not the kind of things that are true and false that we can test like scientifically or might be analytically true. It’s not in the realm of truth value at all. It’s literally just an emotional expression. So it’s meaningful in that sense, in a slightly different sense that the literal meaning of the expression is just that an expression.

The biggest problem for emotivism is this so-called Frege-Geach problem, named after two philosophers. It’s also known as the embedding problem. Reason for that is because it deals with this problem that, when you take the meaning of a word or a statement and you embed it in the English language into a larger sentence, the meaning needs to stay the same. So if I say, “It’s raining outside,” and then I say something like, “I wonder if it’s raining outside,” so I’ve embedded that phrase, “it’s raining outside” that atomic phrase inside a larger sentence, that isolated element of “it’s raining outside” has to mean the same thing. I’m now saying, “I wonder if it’s raining outside,” and then “it’s raining outside.” Well, “I think that it’s raining outside.” Or, “If it’s raining outside, then I will bring an umbrella,” right? Like those statements, “I will bring an umbrella” and, “it’s raining outside” have meaning of their own, and they retain that meaning when you embed them into a statement, like, “if it’s raining outside, then I’ll bring an umbrella.”

The problem for Frege and Geach is that with emotivism, if ethical statements are just expressions of emotion, that is, when I say murder is wrong, I literally mean something like boo, murder. Then how can I make sense of a statement like, “I wonder if murder is wrong.” Like, what does that statement mean when someone says that? Because if murder is wrong, just means boo, murder, that would mean someone saying, “I wonder if boo, murder.” That doesn’t make very much sense because you are expressing an emotion and then saying, “I wonder.” It’s almost like you stub your toe and you go, “I wonder if, ah, man.” It doesn’t make sense. The only way you could make sense of someone saying “I wonder if murder is wrong,” is if in that context, in the embedded context, murder is wrong means something different. In that context, it means it’s not an expression of emotion. Oh, it’s a discussion about their mental attitude or something like that. But meaning doesn’t just change like that for sentences. So the embedding problem says, “Well, if you look at a statement like, ‘I wonder if murder is wrong’ or if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong,” which seems to be a sensible statement that I can make sense of, then given that in that embedded context, those statements can’t just be expressions of emotion, means that outside of those embedded context, they also can’t just be expressions of emotions. It’s a bit of a technical problem. I hope that makes sense. It’s a little bit difficult to explain actually, but I think hopefully that comes across. People can do further reading on this, but if you think about an argument like, if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong, conclusion, therefore, murdering James is wrong. That conclusion follows from those premises. We don’t know if the premises are true, but we can say that if the premises are true, the conclusion follows. It’s a valid argument.

But logical validity relies on the truth value of the premises. To say that an argument is valid is to say that if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. Right? That’s what it means to say an argument is valid. That’s like the definition of a valid argument. So if we take that argument, if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong, premise two, murder is wrong, it follows that murdering James is wrong. That seems valid, but that would require us being able to conceive of premise two, murder is wrong, as being something which is true or false. If we’re an emotivist and we say, “No, no, no, that’s an expression of emotion, it can’t be true or false,” then we’d have to say that that argument that I just laid out is not valid. That doesn’t seem right. Seems perfectly valid. It has to be valid. Surely if you see it written down, it’s like that’s obviously, the conclusion obviously follows from the premises. So it’s as though when you take these ethical expressions and you embed them into bigger contexts like syllogisms or “I wonder if,” or whatever, if-then statements, that suddenly they’re what, like just not emotional expressions anymore? Suddenly they have truth value and we talk about them differently. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. So that’s the Frege-Geach problem.

If you’re interested in emotivism, the place to start might be A.J. Ayer’s “Language, Truth & Logic,” which is where this all comes from. It’s chapter seven in which he talks about what it means to use moral terms. Like the book as a whole explains his logical positivism as a philosophy, which like I say, no one really believes in anymore. It was popular for a while in the 20th century and then just completely fell out of favor. But that chapter seven is still the origin of this emotivist framework. But a more modern philosopher to read on this stuff would be Simon Blackburn, I think. Blackburn is famous for his introductions to philosophy. He’s written a few popular introductions for just getting into philosophy. But he’s also done some important work in metaethics. He’s not himself an emotivist, but he’s written compellingly about emotivism and non-cognitivism more broadly. He’s also compiled or constructed quite an influential response to the best objection to emotivism. Those would be the two names that jump out at me to begin exploring emotivism.

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Shipper explains why “if/then” rules break in messy reality, and how large language models actually see the world through context and pattern. He explores how AI can work with our own creativity and why these tools are unlikely to steal our humanity.

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Timestamps

0:00 Neural networks and human intuition
1:13 The limits of rationalism, from Socrates to neural networks
02:42 Socrates, the father of Rationalism
05:47 The Age of Enlightenment
07:36 The structure of social sciences
08:51 Defining AI
09:47 The origins of AI
10:39 The General Problem Solver
15:09 Neural networks
18:22 Metaphors for the mind
23:10 Seeing the world like a large language model
29:58 Should we stop looking for general theories?
32:22 Training neural networks
39:38 Will AI steal our humanity?
43:45 AI and rational explanation
47:17 Could LLMs be dangerous?
51:12 Knowledge economies and allocation economies

Transcript

The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.

Neural networks and human intuition

I get to talk to people all the time about how they use AI in their work and in their lives, and also how it has changed them as people.

There’s many different ways of knowing things, and many different ways of understanding things. Computers, science, what both of those ways of seeing the world are trying to do is reduce the world into a set of really clean universal laws that apply in any situation. If X is true, then Y will happen.

What language models see instead is a dense web of causal relationships between different parts of the world that all come together in unique, very context specific ways to produce what comes next. And what’s really interesting about neural networks is the way that they think or the way that they operate is a lot like human intuition. Human intuition is also trained by thousands, and thousands, and thousands of hours of direct experience.

The reason I love that is because I hope that it makes more visible to us, the value and importance of intuitive thought. My name is Dan Shipper, I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Every, and I’m the host of the AI & I podcast.

The limits of rationalism, from Socrates to neural networks

I think rationalism is one of the most important ideas in the last 2,000 years. Rationalism is really the idea that if we can be explicit about what we know, if we can really reduce what we know down into a set of theories, a set of rules for how the world works, that is true knowledge about the world, and that is distinct from everything else that messes with our heads, messes with how we operate in society.

You may not have heard that word, or maybe you have, but it is built into the way that you see the world. For example, the way computers work, or the way vaccines work, or the way that we predict the weather, or the way that we try to make decisions when we’re thinking about…I don’t want to be too emotional about this. I want to get really precise about my thinking on this issue.

Even the way that we do therapy, a lot of therapy is about rationalizing, or rationalizing through what you think, and what you feel. All that stuff comes from an extensive lineage of ideas that started in Ancient Greece, really blossomed during the enlightenment, and now is the bedrock of our culture, and the way that we think about the world.

Socrates, the father of Rationalism

I think the father of rationalism is Socrates, the philosopher. Socrates is one of the first people to really examine the question of what we know and how. What is true and what’s not true. To be able to describe what we know, and how we know it, to make that clear and explicit so that only people that knew how the world really works were the ones that were steering the state.

That really became the birth of philosophy, is this idea that if you inquire deeply into what is usually the in explicit intuitions that we have about the world, you can identify a set of rules, or a theory, about what the world is like, and what’s true and what’s not, that you can lay out explicitly, and that you can use to decide the difference between true and false.

I think that you can trace the birth of rationalism to this dialogue: Protagoras. In the dialogue, it’s a debate between Socrates on the one hand, and Protagoras. Protagoras is what we call a sophist. It’s where the term, sophistry came from, which means someone who says really compelling things but is actually full of shit. What Protagoras and Socrates are debating is, can excellence be taught?

Excellence, the word is often translated in English as virtue, but I think a more appropriate translation is excellence. In Ancient Greece, excellence was prized. It’s a general ability to be good at important things in life, and in society.

They approach it from very different angles. Protagoras believes that every human has the capacity to be excellent, and he tells this big myth about how we, as humans, gain the capacity to be excellent. Socrates is saying, no, I don’t want any of that. What I want is that I want a definition. I want you to say explicitly what it is and what it’s not, and what are the components of it.

That’s a really big moment. At least the way that Plato writes it, Socrates takes apart Protagoras, and it’s pretty clear by the end, that Protagoras doesn’t have any way to define in a non-contradictory way what excellence is, what it means to be good. And the implication is that then he doesn’t know it. That set western society on this path of trying to find really clear definitions and theories for the things that we talk about, and to identify knowledge, the ability to know something, or whether or not you know something with whether or not you can really clearly define it.

The Age of Enlightenment

That idea became incredibly important in the scientific enlightenment. Thinkers on the philosophy side, like Descartes, and on the science side, like Newton and Galileo, took this idea, and used it as a new method to understand and explain the world.

So what it became is: can we use mathematics to explain and predict different things in the world? And from Socrates, to Galileo, to Newton, they continually reinforced this idea that in order to truly know something, you have to be able to describe it explicitly. You have to be able to have a theory about it. You have to be able to describe it mathematically ideally.

The world around us is shaped by this framework. Everything from smartphones, to computers, to cars, to rockets, to cameras, to electricity, every appliance in your house, vaccines, everything in our world is shaped with this idea, or this way of seeing the world. It’s been incredibly impactful.

You can find this too in the rest of the culture. Anytime you see a book, or a movie, or a blog post or whatever, talking about the five laws of power, or the five laws of negotiation. All that stuff is ways that physics and rationalism in general has seeped into the everyday way that we think about the world. To be clear, it’s been super successful. But in areas of the world like psychology, or economics, or neuroscience, it has been really hard to make progress in the same way that physics has made progress.

The structure of social sciences

If you look, for example, at the social sciences, a lot of the way that the social sciences are structured is inspired by physics. What we’re trying to do is take very complex higher level phenomena like psychology, or economics, or any other branch of social science. We’re trying to reduce it down to a set of definitions, and a theory, and a set of rules for how things in that domain work.

What’s really interesting is if you look at those fields, so like psychology, for example, it’s in the middle of a gigantic replication crisis. Even though we spent a 100 years doing psychology research, the body of knowledge that we’ve been able to build there in terms of its universal applicability, our ability to find universal laws in the same way that Newton found universal laws seems pretty suspect. And we feel like we can’t stop doing it because we have no better alternative.

Defining AI

Another really interesting and important part of the world that this way of looking at things didn’t work for in many ways is AI. So this is usually the part of an explanation where I try to define it. But what is AI? And what’s interesting is, there’s no universal agreed upon definition for this. In the same way we’ve struggled to come up with a universal definition for what it is to know something, or universal definition for what anxiety is, for example, in psychology is another really good example.

There are a lot of ways to gesture at what AI is. But obviously, or maybe not obviously, AI stands for artificial intelligence. And the AI’s project is to build a computer that can think and learn in the same way that humans learn. And because of the way that computers work, for a very long time, that was a really hard problem.

The origins of AI

AI started as a field in the ‘50s at Dartmouth, and you can actually look at the original paper. They were very optimistic. They were thinking a summer’s worth of work and we’ll have nailed this. The way that they defined it is to be able to reduce down human intelligence into a system of symbols that they could combine together based on explicit rules that would mimic human intelligence. So there’s a really clear through line from Socrates’s original project to the enlightenment, to the original approach that AI theorists took called symbolic AI. The idea that you could embody thinking in, essentially logic, logical symbols, and transformations between logical symbols, which is, it’s very similar to just basic philosophy.

The General Problem Solver

There were actually a lot of early successes. For example, the two founding fathers of AI, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, built this machine that they called the general problem solver. What’s really interesting is it wasn’t even built as a computer because computers were extremely expensive back then. They originally codified the general problem solver on paper and then executed it themselves by hand.

Actually, I think one of them had their family do it with them to try to simulate how a computer would work to solve complex problems. And the general problem solver, they tried to reduce down a complex real world situations into a simple logical problems. Which looks a little bit like a game. And then they tried to see if they could build a computer that would solve some of those games. They were actually quite successful at first.

What they found was it worked really well for simple problems. But as problems got more and more complex, the search space of possible solutions got really, really, really, really big. By representing the problem in that way, the systems that they built started to fail as soon as they moved away from toy problems to more complex ones.

I think a really interesting and simple example of this is thinking about how you might decide whether an email in your inbox is spam, or whether it’s important. And you might say something like, if it mentions that I won the lottery, it’s spam, right? So it thinks its a rule, a lot like the rules that early symbolic AI theorists were trying to come up with to help you solve any problem, is to codify “if X, Y, Z is true, then here are the implications.”

What happens is if you look at that really closely, there are always lots of little exceptions. So an example might be, if it says emergency, maybe you want to put that at the top of your inbox. But very quickly you’ll have spammers obviously thinking ‘just put emergency in the subject line,’ and they’ll shoot to the top.

So then you have to create another rule, which is it’s emergency, but only if it’s from my coworkers or my family. But computers don’t really know what coworkers or family are. So then you have to define, how is it going to know what a coworkers or what a family member is?

So what you can do is say a coworker is anybody from my company. And so if it says emergency, and it’s from anybody in my company, put it at the top of my inbox. But what you may find is that there are certain people at your company who are annoying and want your attention, even if you don’t really want them to contact you. So they start putting emergency into their inbox, and now you have to create another rule which says don’t let people who are abusing the privilege of getting to the top of my inbox, abuse it even if they’re coworkers.

What you find is anytime you try to create rules to define these things, you always run up against exceptions. If you want to, for example, define what an important email is, you have to define pretty much everything about the world. You have to create a world full of definitions.

That project of making the entire world explicit in definitions just didn’t work. It’s too brittle, it’s too hard, there’s too much computational power required to loop through all the different definitions to decide if this email is important or not. There are too many definitions to create. It’s just, it’s too big of a project.

So that symbolic AI project worked in some limited domains. There were these things called expert systems, for example, in the ‘70s and ‘80s that tried to, for example, reduce medical diagnosis down to a set of rules. They were somewhat successful, but even in a case like medical diagnosis, trying to reduce down to a simple set of rules, something like do you have measles, or maybe even do you have anxiety or depression, turned out to be really complicated, and really, really hard. In fact, impossible to get right 100% of the time in an explicit way.

Neural networks

The alternative, which originated around the time that AI itself originated, but really wasn’t taken that seriously until probably the ‘80s and ‘90s is what’s called a neural network. A neural network is inspired by the way our brains work. It doesn’t work exactly the same way, but it is inspired from brains. And it basically consists of layers of artificial neurons that are connected to each other.

What you can do with a neural network is you can get it to recognize patterns by giving it lots of examples. For example, if you want it to recognize whether an email is important, what you can do is you can give it an example, say here’s an email from a coworker, and have a guess the answer. And if the answer is wrong, what we’ve done is we’ve created a way to train the network to correct its wrong answer.

Then what happens is over many, many iterations, and many different examples, what we find is without any explicit set of definitions, or explicit rules about ‘this is a important email,’ or ‘this is a cat,’ or ‘this is a good move in chess.’ The neural network learns to recognize patterns, and is able to do a lot of the more complex thinking style tasks that early symbolic AI was unable to do.

Language models are a particular neural network that operates by finding complex patterns inside of language and using that to produce what comes next in a sequence. So what we’ve done with language models is fed them basically all of the text on the internet. When we feed them a piece of text, we’ll give them a big chunk of text. And then we will say, based on this chunk, what’s the next word that comes after this chunk? And language models learn that there are thousands of partially fitting rules that they can apply based on the previous history of texts they’ve seen to predict what comes next.

All of those rules are inexplicit. You can observe them in the overall behavior of the network, but they don’t exist anywhere in the network. You can’t go and look inside of a neural network, and find this is the entire set of rules that it has. You may be able to find a couple, but you can’t find a definitive list.

In the same way that if I took a microscope and looked in your brain, I would not be able to find that. I would not be able to find the list of rules that you use, for example, to recognize a cat, or do the next move in chess. They’re represented all inexplicitly. And what’s really interesting about neural networks is the way that they think, or the way that they operate it looks a lot like human intuition. Human intuition is also trained by thousands of hours of direct experience.

Metaphors for the mind

Often our best metaphor for our minds are the tools that we use. So a really good example is Freud, has one of the most impactful models of the mind. And the way that he came up with that, is he used the steam engine as a metaphor, so it’s an explicitly steam engine-based idea.

In the 20th century, the metaphor for our minds moved into being like a computer that became the thing that we all wanted to be, we wanted to be logical and rational, and operate like a machine to make the best decisions possible. And I think one of the most interesting things about that way of thinking is it makes invisible to us. This relates a lot to Socratic enlightenment type of thinking as well. It makes invisible to us the importance of our intuition in being the foundation of everything that we do, everything we think, everything that we know.

In a lot of ways you can think of rationality as emerging out of intuition. So we have this squishy inexplicit, intuitive way of understanding what’s going on in the world. And our rational thought comes out of that, and is able to, once intuition sets the frame for us, is able to go in, and manipulate things in a more methodical, rational, logical way. But you need both.

Neural networks are the first technology we’ve ever invented that works a lot like human intuition. The reason I love that is because it, I hope that it makes more visible to us the value and importance of intuitive thought. And that actually loops back and takes us all the way back to Protagoras, and is the thing that we lost in this birth of rationalism, and back in Callias’s house, because Protagoras is arguing that everyone teaches us excellence all the time.

He’s arguing, he’s using stories, and myths, and metaphor to help understand something that he knows from his own personal experience. And Socrates is saying, well, if you can’t define it, if you can’t tell me exactly the rules by which you know something, then you don’t know it. That way of thinking about the world has been very successful for us, but it also blinded us to how important that idea that everyone teaches us to be excellent, that stories and personal hands-on experience give us a way of knowing about things that we may not be able to explicitly talk about, but we still know, just as much as we know things that we can explicitly say.

It was only when we began to embody that way of being in the world or that way of knowing things, that way of thinking into machines that we started to get actual artificial intelligence. There’s many different ways of knowing things, and many different ways of understanding things, and we may not understand all of the particulars of how our minds come to certain conclusions intuitively.

We may not understand all the particulars of how language models, for example, come to any particular output, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t understand them. It just means that we understand them in a different way than we might be used to.

For example, if you use ChatGPT all the time, you develop an intuition for what it’s good at and what it’s not good at, and when it might be hallucinating, and when it might not be. In the same way that you might develop an intuition for when a friend of yours is sad, or when a friend of yours is not being totally truthful with you. That’s not a universal set of rules that applies to everyone in every situation, or even to your friend in every situation. It’s just an intuitive feel that is a core part of understanding, but that we normally discount.

History shows that it is better to be open to more ways of seeing and working with the world. And in this particular era, it’s very important to be able to work with things that are a little bit mysterious, and be comfortable with that.

Seeing the world like a large language model

I’ve always been a huge note-taking nerd. I love taking notes, especially because when I started my first company, I started my first company in college and ended up selling it. I flew from my college graduation to Boston to finish negotiating the deal to sell it.

That whole situation for me was this trial by fire, I was like an information firehose. I had to learn so much in order to successfully run a software company as a 20, 21, 22 year old. The way that I felt like I could do that best was to start taking notes, is to be say, okay, I learned this thing from a book, and it’s about for how to hire people for example. I think it’ll be relevant for me, but I don’t know when it’s going to be relevant.

So I’m going to write it down and I’m going to try to create the perfect organizational system to categorize all this stuff so it’ll come back to me when I need it. And if you really take seriously that question of, how do you build the perfect note taking or organizational system, you actually run into the same problems that early symbolic AI theorists run into, and philosophers have been running into for a long time. Which is how do we create the perfect system to organize reality?

How do you know where to put a particular note? Is the same question as, how do we know what we know? And so when I first bumped into the language models, I realized that they had this ability to be flexible and contextual in a way that meant that I didn’t have to create the perfect organizational system to teach a computer how to organize my notes. It operated in this way that was ruleless, and fuzzy, and flexible.

I had just never seen a computer do that before. The first experience of seeing that line of words go across your screen, it’s in your voice, and it’s picking up where you left off. It understands all the little contextual cues that tell it about what you’re talking about that no computer previously could do.

The interesting difference between how a language model sees the world and how a traditional computer sees the world is this: a traditional computer tries to reduce everything into a set of clean, universal laws that apply in any situation — essentially, “if X is true, then Y will happen.” It relies on clear, context-free chains of cause and effect.

And what language models see instead is a dense web of causal relationships between different parts of the world that all come together in unique very context-specific ways to produce what comes next. I think language models do something really, really unique, which is that they can give you the best of what humanity knows, at the right place, at the right time in your particular context, for you specifically.

Where, for example, previously on the internet, you could get an answer that was written by someone for a very general reader or a very general situation, and maybe you’d have to hunt through a Wikipedia page to find the one sentence that answers your question. Language models go one step further, which is they reduce down their response to you to be written for you in your context, in your place, and in your time.

If you look at the history of machine learning from symbolic AI, where we’re trying to break down intelligence into a set of definitions of a theory and a set of rules for how thinking should work, all the way up to neural networks and language models where it’s much more contextual. It’s much more about pattern matching, it’s much more about interpreting the richness of a particular situation, and using all prior experience in an explicit way to predict what comes next.

That sweep of the history of AI, in a lot of ways is speed running the history of philosophy. So philosophy started with this attempt to make explicit what it is to know something. Now we’re in this place where it’s actually, it’s all fuzzy, and pattern matching, and it’s very, very contextual and relational. But it’s also not anything goes. It’s being done in a way that we’ve created a positive tool that you can use, and build stuff within your life. We’re not just deconstructing everything around us.

In a lot of ways, machine learning and AI’s speed running philosophy, and it’s gone a little bit of a step further, because it’s built something with it that you can do. A way of being in the world that you can, or a tool you can use. And I think, A, that’s just like critically important and very interesting. And B, I think a lot of the changes that have happened in both philosophy, and in AI, and machine learning are going to happen in the rest of culture.

So moving from this way of thinking about knowledge, which is about making everything explicit, finding theories, and definitions, and rules for how to understand the world, to a more balanced appreciation for both. And the way that a more intuitive relational fuzzy pattern matching type experiential, contextual type way of knowing about the world has to be underneath the rational stuff in order for the rational stuff to work at all. It’s really about recognizing the more intuitive ways of knowing about the world as being the original parent and partner of rationality, and appreciating that for what it is.

Should we stop looking for general theories?

A lot of what we’ve been talking about is that looking for one general rule, or one general theory about a particular part of the world sometimes is really valuable, and sometimes leads us down dead ends. Instead, what we have to pair it with is, deeply contextual understanding based on experience that allows us to work with the richness and novelty of any particular situation to understand what comes next. That’s what language models are able to do.

It begs the question, should we stop looking for general theories? Should we not be trying to unify quantum physics with Newtonian mechanics? I definitely think that it’s awesome that we’re trying to unify those things, and trying to build a universal theory.

But I think it’s also worth thinking about what that will actually tell us, and how far that will get us once we have a universal theory of physics, if we do get there. I feel that it will be beautiful, and it’ll be amazing, and it will tell us a lot. But also, there are many, many parts of the world that it won’t touch at all.

That we still, even if we have a universal theory of physics, that probably won’t filter into our understanding of depression, for instance. What is depression? How is it caused? How do you treat it? What is anxiety? How is it caused, how do you treat it? We’ve been searching for those things for a really long time.

And we have a lot of different answers. If you ask Freud, he’d say one thing, and if you ask a modern psychiatrist, neuropsychologist, psychiatrist, they might say something else. But really, we still don’t actually know. And we keep trying to find that universal theory, that explanation that says, well, if X, then Y, if you have this going on in your life or in your brain, then you’re going to get depressed. Or if you take this medication, then depression will go away.

We’ve been trying to find that for a really long time, because we felt we had no other options, because normally in order to predict an outcome, to know, “if I do this, then it’ll cure someone’s depression”. To predict it, you have to have an underlying scientific explanation, you have to have a theory about it. And I think AI actually changes this.

Training neural networks

With AI, you can train neural networks that are, for example, able to identify who is depressed or who will get depressed. You can train neural networks who will be able to predict which interventions might for which people and which circumstances in a very contextual, hyper-personalized way without having to discover beforehand any scientific explanation for the underlying phenomena that we’re trying to predict.

We don’t have to have an explanation for depression, we can just train a model on enough data that it will be able to predict what might work, or whether you have it or whether you’re going to get it. The reason why I think that’s so valuable is, one, it allows us to make progress immediately, because we turn what used to be a scientific problem into an engineering problem. And then, two, it really changes how we should conduct science, how science should be done.

It changes our view of that, because right now, if you’re a scientist, and you want to figure out depression, or any number of things in the field of psychology, what you’re going to want to do is a small scale study where you take, for instance, 16 undergrads, and maybe they have depression. I’m going to ask them to smile every day. And I’m going to put them in an fMRI, and then I’m going to measure the results afterwards. If I get a little bit of a result on a very, very small number of undergrads, then I’m going to get more funding to do a study with a hundred or whatever. You’re trying to climb this ladder of going from very small scale interventions, to very big ones. To use that to come to some underlying theory about what is actually going on in those situations.

What we found because of the replication of crisis, it’s really hard to using those 16 undergrads to find out anything that feels universal or universally applicable. It’s one of the reasons why even though antidepressants have been around for 60 years or so, that we still actually don’t know when they work or how they work. We know they work for some people some of the time, but that’s pretty much all we can say.

What AI does is it helps us realize that there’s a better way than having random academics doing small scale studies. What we should do is have Apples, and Metas, and Googles of the world donate their data to science and data trusts so that scientists can access them to train models. You can figure out ways to do it in ways that are privacy-preserving so that doesn’t violate the trust of users.

But I think that would seriously enhance the progress of science, in a way that doing billions of dollars worth of small scale studies has not been able to. I think its even more interesting is once you’ve trained models that can, for example, predict depression really well, models are actually easier to interpret and understand than brains are.

So if you have a good enough predictor, what you can do is just go into the neural network and try to figure out how it’s wired. And maybe the explanation for what depression is is too big and too complicated, and you can’t figure it out. But mechanical interpretability is good enough that you may be able to find what is a solid theory for depression in the weights of a trained neural network.

For me, I’ve just spent so much of my life trying to explain things, or understand myself, or understand my world in this theoretical definitional way. And I’ve seen how important that can be, and also how limiting it can be. In particular, if you stop paying attention to what your intuition tells you, and you just rely on your logical brain, it’s really easy to get lost.

There’s this whole richness to life that, and to what you know that comes out of this intuitive sense of yourself that helps me, for example, in business, in my personal life, and my ability to make decisions, and my ability to write or make good art. All of that is based on this ineffable intuition that I built up over many, many years.

My logical brain is helpful in certain circumstances, but I think it can blot out, or take over from my intuitive self in ways that have been destructive for me. I think that it has also been just as destructive to society. There’s a lot of stuff that we miss because we miss how important intuition is.

Now we have tools that can embody a lot of that intuition, that can take some of that intuition that we built up, and we can put it into something else in the world that we can pass around, which was never possible before. I think we’ve been pursuing explicit definitions and scientific explanations for things for a long time, because if you can write it down, you can spread it. that becomes the way that society progresses spreads explanations. But if you’re dealing with parts of the world that you can’t write down explicitly, there’s been no good way to collaborate on them or make progress on them. And what neural networks allow us to do, is to take some of that intuitive experience, or intuition that we might have built up ourselves, and put it into a machine that we can pass around.

And that’s useful, for example, for doctors, for expert clinical diagnosis. The best clinicians in the world know something about how to deal with patients that they can’t write down, they can’t embody in a set of rules, and is trapped in their head. But language models and AI in general allows us to put that intuition into a tool that will allow anyone in the world to access, for example, the best clinician in the world. Even if we can’t write down what they know.

Will AI steal our humanity?

I think AI will seriously enrich our understanding of ourselves. AI is an incredible mirror. I understand so much more about myself just from being able to talk to ChatGPT, and being able to throw into it, say “here’s a meeting that I just had, can you tell me how I showed up in that meeting?” It’s an incredible mirror. It’s also an incredible metaphor for our minds.

We’re moving from this metaphor of our minds, in an ideal world, this logic rule-based explicit computer, to a much squishier, contextually-sensitive pattern-matching, experience-driven language model that I think is a really good metaphor for the more intuitive parts of our mind. I think that will enrich our, what used to be a very narrow picture of what it means to be human.

But I think what’s what’s most important is to understand that the humanity is inside of us. We bring the humanity to the tools, to the tools that use, to the things that we build. And sometimes I think, will it take our humanity? It makes two errors. The first error is to think that you can pin down what it is to be human into one unchanging thing. That actually has evolved, and is different over time.

And I think the second error is to confuse what we are — It’s a little hard to put it, but it’s like saying that what you’re unfamiliar with is bad. And that’s not exactly the right thing. But I think a really good example is when my grandmother, who’s not alive anymore, but when she would use the phone, or text someone, or be on the phone with someone, to her, it felt very impersonal. In a lot of ways, it feels inhuman, right? A face-to-face interaction is a much more human, personal thing for her. For me, or for people who are even younger than me, texting can feel very intimate.

In the late 1800s, getting a typewritten letter from someone was insulting. It felt very impersonal not to get something in longhand. But now we don’t get any longhand letters. If you do, it’s still very personal, but it’s also not insulting to get an email from someone. If someone sends you a long email, you think ‘wow, that’s really nice that they took the time to think of me.’

I think all those are just worries of does it take away my humanity? A lot of them come from the fact that we just don’t have a lot of experience yet with these new things. They don’t have that patina of nostalgia and history that other things that we look at in our lives that our technologies do have.

Let’s look at books, for instance. At a certain point books were a very suspicious thing. And now we love books. I have such a romantic attachment to them. I think that’s one of the things that we miss when we evaluate new technologies. We just haven’t had the chance to allow them to feel human to us, because we’re unfamiliar with them.

I think the people who are super afraid of AI, it goes back to this rationalist idea that we’ve been talking about, which is if you can’t explicitly define, and prove 100% that a thing is safe, then it’s dangerous. I don’t know if anyone’s had a teacher, or a parent, or someone in school that’s believes that no matter what you do, you can be the smartest person in the world, but they’re going to find that one fuck up, and hammer you for it.

AI and rational explanation

I think a lot of people that are worried about that are, they’re just waiting for that one fuck up. And it’s true, that does happen. But the alternative is, that AI only say things that can be proved to be true. And that, to me at least, takes away a lot of the magic of AI.

The thing about it that makes it powerful is that it works on probability, it works on thousands of correlations coming together to figure out what the appropriate response is in this one very unique, very rich context. And allowing it to say only things that are provable, obviously begs the question: what is true and how do we know?

There are certain domains where we can answer that question. In math and computer science, for example, it’s pretty clear whether or not a theorem is right. It’s back to the same question from Socrates: what do we know and how do we know it? And a demand for explicit rational explanation for every single thing that we say.

I think that demand is way too strong, and actually eliminates a lot of things that we know about the world. Or parts of the world we want to work with, where we actually don’t have precise, exact explicit answers. It results in these thought experiments that get people really scared, like the one shot idea, that you have one shot, once you build a super intelligence, you have one shot to make sure that it’s aligned, that it will follow human preferences, or it will kill us and take over the world.

You can find people who are real rationalists, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believe this, and believed that we’re all going to die. Which that sucks, that’s not a great place to be. What’s interesting is we have really smart AI right now. I think it’s the AI that if you had asked rationalists, or people who were thinking about this stuff 10 years ago, is this AI dangerous? They would have probably have said yes.

If you look at how it’s actually built, yes, we don’t have any provable ways to be say it’s 100% safe. Ignoring the fact that even defining what 100% safe is impossible. And that’s the whole reason that language models work. But what we’re doing every single day is we are training these models on human preferences. We’re giving them examples over, and over, and over again of what we want and why.

Something to remember is each model builds on the models that came before it. They actually have a dense, rich idea of what it is to be good from all the data that they get. They also have a dense, rich idea of what it is to be bad. But in a lot of ways, the training that we’re doing makes them less likely to do any of that stuff.

There’s something very practical and pragmatic about, we have a machine, we don’t know fully how it works, but we’re just going to teach it, and we’re going to iterate with it over, and over again until we basically get it to work. It’s squishy. We don’t have any guarantees, and that world is the messy real world. It is how you think about interacting with a human, like ‘I don’t know if you’re gong to lie to me, but I’m going to figure it out.’

Could LLMs be dangerous?

The fact that we don’t have those guarantees from language models is what makes them so powerful. It’s not that language models could never be dangerous, but I think adopting the more pragmatic experience-based mindset, we’re going to build these things and we’re going to improve them in a fairly predictable way. It’s not predictable exactly all of the specific capabilities that they’re going to get, but we can basically tell in general, how much smarter they’re going to get every time we do a training run. Along the way, we are going to iterate with them in real world scenarios to make them less likely to do bad things. That scares people who demand a certain rationalistic guarantee.

But for people like me, people who build stuff, solving the problems in practice actually is a better way to do things than solving them in theory. I think there’s a big question about how AI may change creative work. And there’s this idea that, well, it’s going to do all the work for me, so I’m basically not even doing it anymore. It’s not mine. It’s not my work. I like thinking up ideas or metaphors for what it may actually be, or what it is now, and what it will continue to be in the future. To explain how you can still do creative work that feels authentic and feels like you while an AI is doing some part of it.

One of the metaphors that I like to use is this difference between a sculptor and a gardener. So creative work ordinarily is a lot like sculpting. If you’re a sculptor, and you have a big block of marble, or you know, big piece of clay for instance. Every curve in line in that finished product is something that you decided to do with your own hands. So you had to decide to do it, otherwise it would not be there. And I think that working with AI is actually a bit different. It’s a lot more like gardening.

If you’re a gardener, you don’t pull the plants up from the ground by the roots to try to make them grow, that won’t work. You can’t directly cause the plants to grow. But what you can do is you can create the conditions for the plants or the garden that you’re making to flourish in a particular way. You can change the amount of sun, you can change the soil, you can change the amount of water, or you can decide which plants go where, you can do some weeding. And all of that stuff is a way for you to shape something by altering the conditions under which it happens without doing it yourself. That’s a lot like what working with a model is, especially a model that is more agentic and does a lot more by itself. That’s a good metaphor for what that experience is like.

I’m a generalist. I love doing lots of different things. I run a company where we have a newsletter, we have three software products, we have a consulting arm. I am writing, I’m programming, I am making decisions all day, I’m even making little memes. My day is full of different things to do, and I would not be able to do all these things at the level at which I’m doing it without AI.

It has all of the specialized knowledge already. So it’s like having 10,000 PhDs in your pocket. I can dip into an area of study or an area of work, like writing, or programming, or whatever it is. The AI does a lot of the more repetitive specialized tasks, and it will allow individuals to be more generalistic in the work that they do. And I think that would be a very good thing.

Knowledge economies and allocation economies

What’s most important is to have hands-on experience. To have hands-on use of AI to understand for yourself. Say that here is a place where it may not work as well, and here’s a place where it may. Here’s where I need to watch everything that it does, and here’s where I can delegate more. This actually gets me to another metaphor that I really like, or another idea for understanding this wave of technology in a way that I think is really helpful, which is this idea that we’re moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy.

In a knowledge economy, you are compensated based on what you know. In an allocation economy, you’re compensated based on how well you allocate the resources of intelligence. There’s a particular set of skills that are useful today but are not particularly widely distributed that will become some of the main skills in this new economy, in this new allocation economy. And that is the skills of managers, those are the skills of human managers, which make up a very small percentage of the economy right now. I think it’s like 7% of the economy is a human manager.

But I think the skills that those people have are going to be very widely distributed. Things like knowing what you want, being able to articulate what you want, being able to break down a complex task or a complex project into a set of smaller, achievable subtasks that you can then give to the right person. Knowing what any given person on your team can do, what are they good at, what are they not good at?

Being able to know, ‘do I micromanage them? Do I delegate it entirely? How can I trust if I didn’t do the work myself? How can I trust that it was done right?’ These are all questions that human managers today, especially younger human managers need to figure out. It’s so easy to be like, well, I can’t trust this person so I’m going to go in and check every little thing.

But then you realize as a manager, I’m just basically doing the work myself. That doesn’t actually get me anywhere. But on the other hand, if I delegate everything, then it may not happen the way I want. So you have to figure out the nuances of all those situations, and I think the same thing is true of being a model manager.

You can see the overlap in the kinds of complaints or the kinds of problems that people run into using models. It’s like, well, if I didn’t do the work myself, how can I trust it? And the answer is, you have to get good at managing a model. You have to get good at having an intuitive understanding of how do I know what I want? How do I express it to the model? How do I know which model to use in which circumstance, and how do I know what are the particular pitfalls of this particular model, this particular personality, its skills, its way of being in the world? You can throw your hands up and be like, well, it doesn’t work. Or you can say, no, there’s an intuition I can build for how to manage it and how to build with it that might be a different skill than the one that I’ve developed so far in my life, but is incredibly valuable, and can be immensely effective, and productive, and satisfying if you’d learn how to do it right.

One of the most important questions in philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness. How does something become conscious out of inert matter? And if we’re looking for a definition of intelligence, one of the ones that makes a lot of sense to me is the idea that intelligence in a lot of ways is like a form of compression.

Think of problem solving as a search space, you want to find the right chess move, you want to mark a email as important, you have a whole search space of different possibilities. Something that’s intelligent is able to compress a lot of the answers into a very small amount of space. And so it’s able to, given a new situation, get through that space and find the right thing very quickly.

Brains contain an extraordinary compression of all of the situations that we’ve faced, and all the memories that we have, and all the problems that we solved, and are able to use that to apply to new situations. My guess is that consciousness functions as a highly efficient method of compression in one sense. I think there’s also something interesting and beautiful about thinking about things in the world as all having a little bit of consciousness, like a panpsychic perspective. Humans just having to happened to have a lot of it. From that perspective, like language models have maybe, probably have a little bit of consciousness.

The reason I like that is it encourages us to treat things in the world as if they were conscious, which I think is a much more compassionate way to operate in the world. I think it would actually make us more effective at getting the most out of language models. Its the same as if someone who is from a particular religious tradition might say that everything has a little bit of God in it. To operate in the world that way is to operate in a world full of meaningfulness and significance. To me, just feels like a better way to live, versus a world where everything is gray lifeless stuff. If everything’s alive, it makes doing things way more fun and interesting.

I always say please and thank you to ChatGPT because you never know when the machine apocalypse is going to come. I’m saying all this good stuff, but, it’s possible. It’s always possible. There’s no guarantee, I think saying please and thank you will make it less likely that if it does come, I won’t be on the bad list, you know?

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