Julian Gough — The Egg and The Rock (Infinite Loops Classics)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1af241f3140ee198

A storm is coming! You know, cosmology is gonna get turned upside down by this when they finally realize it's an evolved universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals randomly chosen?
With random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog.
It grows up, it bounces around the place, gets more interesting and funny and complicated as it goes. We're the point where the universe gets to know
Who it is, what it is, and what it's gonna do next, it's an amazing moment to feel.
He everyone, Jim here. We're taking a short pause on new episodes through the end of August. We'll be back at the end of the month.
But in the meantime, we're digging out some of our favorite conversations from the archive.
Enjoy!
Well, hello everyone, it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been looking forward to talking to today's guest.
Ever since I discovered him, yeah, my guest today is Julian Goff.
He uh I Julian, I don't even know how to I I it's gonna take me five minutes to go over all of your accomplishments. You've written
Five beloved children's books, the first of which
was uh nominated or actually did you get
Uh Irish book of the year in two thousand sixteen, you're nominated. No. I won a prize in France for it, but no uh no one the Irish never quite except their their their their writers to all dead, but I have high hopes after my death.
No, I was sure it was great. It was wonderful.
I love that comment about the Irish. That's right. We'll we'll give him the credit, but after he's gone.
Yeah, I'd be a bit worried if I got it in my lifetime.
Yeah, that would be a bad thing. But so
Five incredible children's books.
Yeah.
highly acclaimed novels on humans, one of which I am reading right now.
Um interesting.
A couple of BBC radio plays about God knows what.
A a a charming s stage play about an econom I love this one, an economic catastrophe caused by goats.
And for our younger
viewers and listeners, the ending of Minecraft
Knowing as the known as the N poem.
Julian, welcome. But we're not gonna talk about those today. We're gonna talk about what you're actually working on right now, but welcome. Oh good.
Well, thanks, Jim. It's wonderful to to be here. Yeah. I I
Uh ever since I discovered you're a big Robert Antoine Wilson fan, I've been interested in talking to you. It's a kind of a global uh community, underground community of big Robert Antoine Wilson fans.
Totally true. Which I discovered later in life as I was telling you before we started to record.
Um I I discovered Wilson through a rather circuitous path.
A friend of mine had written uh a piece about why people should read Jed McKinnah.
the or as I like to call them, the fictional character known as Jed McKenna.
Because he is a fictional character to that tells us that we're all fictional characters. Um, and that everything is there's no duality, everything is nondual, we all are part of the universe. We'll get to that.
Later uh when we're talking about your current book.
Um, but but
The whole thing was through
Dan, but then Rick and Morty. I don't know if you
Uh uh
I am aware of I'm aware of Rick and War. I'm quite aware of them, but I haven't really gone deep. Uh as you suspect.
Julian. If nothing else gets accomplished
By us.
Chatting with one another, you absolutely must.
Okay.
group of topics than any novel that was written recently. Yeah, the first series, certainly. Yeah, amazing. Amazing.
W Oh, you have such a treat in store for you because
R Rick and Morty does that on on uh steroids.
Um
But you know, I wasn't even finished. You also were a very famous musician singing in the toasted uh heretic.
Um Yeah, well, you you were you hit some top ten lists.
Yeah, yeah, top ten in Ireland. But yeah. Uh to be fair, if all your relatives buy you buy you single in Ireland, you've got a reasonable chance. But yeah, in in Ireland uh it would be uh

Surprisingly well known for a guy who just hides in his room and writes.
And you are also the writer in residence or have been at Trinity, at the University of Limerick, at the University of Singapore. My God, but I I love how you demure and say, I just sit in my room and write. I you certainly seem to get around a lot, Julian.
I sat around in Singapore in my room and wrote. I was writing in residence. It's like they they they send you over in a box and they don't even take you out.
Look, we have a writer, they point at the box. It's the perfect job, I love it.
Well, that way you avoided all of their draconian laws about not spitting on the sidewalk or chewing gum.
You're much safer in your room, I'm I'm sure.
Yeah. Today I really want to talk about it.
Yeah.
About your new non fiction.
Uh book called The Egg and the Rock.
Yes.
What's very interesting to me, well
It's very interesting to me in many, many regards. But
The first thing that grabbed me is you're doing it in public.
Which I think
First off, I think that
Being creative, uh engaging in any artistic uh uh endeavor.
Requires a lot of courage.
Mm-hmm. Just just in and of itself.
Right.
But to do it in public
Wow.
For a guy's done, man. Yeah, you you but
Wha what what made you decide to do it in public and in the format that you're doing it?
This is a very different book to my previous books. My previous books were
I would not show them to anyone until they were done. I I knew what I wanted to do and I was very in control of the material and uh well, you're never in control of the material, but I knew what I wanted to do. Even when I wanted what I wanted to do was extremely weird, uh I would just chase my obsessions and get it.
to the point where I was completely happy and then I'd show it to someone. And then there was an editorial process and back and forth, or it got rejected, or it got accepted, or whatever.
This one's different because this one
Um
It's about the universe. It's about
All of the universe.
Uh it's about the
Rehistory of the universe The scale of this is so ridiculous. I even I mean I'm a writer, writers have an ego. They they you know they're putting their ideas out into the word world, they think they're great.
Uh I think I'm great, but I'm not great enough to do this on my own. Jesus. So
I really wanted to uh
Uh.
Try out everything in public.
Uh make my mistakes in public, make have my successes in public, get feedback, get feedback, get feedback.
Build a community for the ideas. Get get other scientists involved who more who more um
who are domain experts. Uh because I'm not a domain expert here, but but you know, who is it's the universe.
So um
I
I've developed an extremely broad
knowledge base over the last decade'cause I've been working on this book for over a decade.
And uh but in private for the first
And it's only in the last two
Two and a half years that have gone.
public. I've decided I had to to start doing it in public. It's been so good. It's been an amazing experience. I've
I was terrified doing it, yeah. I didn't
Do it.
Do stuff in
public when it's not finished.
But but I had this moment that unfortunately there was not unfortunately, what fortunately it turned out it's turned out great.
There was this moment that came up.
Where I realised
I had to start talking about these ideas in public because there was a way to test them.
There was a way to test them and it was time constrained. I had to get some of the ideas out.
before the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's and the European Space Agency and the Canadian
uh the the the new uh extremely powerful, extremely technologically accomplished
infrared telescope uh was was going to be launched, it was gonna be online.
And it was gonna send back data and I realize if the theory I was working on about the universe had any
Value it should be able to make predictions.
About the early universe.
That could then be.
Either
Proved or disproved, yeah.
found to be accurate or not by the James Webb Space Telescope. So suddenly I had a clock running after a decade of just like
luxuriating in my room and just thinking, Well, I love this theory. It's such fun. When the book is eventually finished in a decade
Yeah. I think people will be interested. And suddenly I just I realized the timer is really running on this. I got it.
So I I started thinking everything through from first principles and I put some predictions up.
on the uh on Sub Stack on the internet and I sent them out to some
Some subscribers.
that I'd I'd built up.
And s and suddenly the whole game was happening in public, and that's really changed things in a really interesting way. That's the reason we're talking, like the reason you got in
Yeah, O'Shaughnessy Ventures got involved in in the project, uh
uh emergent ventures, Tyler Cowans thing got involved in the project. It's all because I started talking about this in public. And a lot of scientists are now
Uh interested, they're intrigued.
It's been a wonderful experience, but yeah, it's very scary, right?
I I you have no idea how scared I was the night I put up my predictions online.
And sent them out to the subscribers.
Uh in public.
When I could be wrong. I could be wrong. It was a horrible I just didn't want to press send. I didn't want to press publish.
But yeah. Yeah. So this is an unusual book for me, yeah. So
I I I don't know what I'm doing either, man. I'm uh I'm just trying it out in public. But you get great feedback. You get you like you improve all the time because
I wish I'd I'd done more of my work in public now.
Yeah.
Yeah, the um
Uh Ruper Sheldrake.
uh who I've had on the the podcast uh told me once that there is a huge group of scientists like himself.
Right. Who are basically in hiding.
And and he says they're in hiding because of the draconian
Iron fist.
That the kind of materialistic worldview, the universe is dead
It's a one off.
Um is is in ascendancy and it is very difficult given the structure.
Of how scientists get their work or get their grants or get any of that.
to suggest something different. Rupert did and paid a huge price.
He was vilified publicly for his first work. The editor of Nature, the premier British scientific journal.
Essentially I love this because he didn't even know that he was owning himself.
But he was on BBC back um in the seventies when Rupert published his book and he said
I have it his name was uh Sirmatics.
And he said, I have exactly the same right.
to excommunicate Professor Sheldrake that the Pope did with Galileo. I remember that. Yeah. I yes, I know, I know. I actually I you you don't you don't know this, do you? I I I know Rupert. Um yeah, I've I've uh
We actually and you're right, there is this underground. I've actually worked on a I worked on a
in a little email group with him a couple of years ago, a few years ago. Uh
on consciousness and the universe where we're trying to work out ideas about that. And uh but it was the sense that you it you had to kind of almost
Keep it quiet that you're working on this. I mean you eventually wrote a great paper on consciousness, uh
Uh and you know, and the sun.
Yeah, it was yeah. Uh which was published in a very respectable journal and that but getting it through there.
Their uh peer review process. You know, they were scared to publish it in a way. Yeah. There's so many things you can't talk about in public. He's completely right. I really like Rupert. I actually sent him a draft of the new thing I'm writing.
About uh
Yeah.
Uh
structure only structure formation in the universe. Uh this weekend got you know got feedback from him. So he's I'd still uh really like to
Get his ideas, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he's been demonized. I I I uh here's a funny thing. The the theory I'm working on
Maybe uh
Cosmological natural selection. The first you know scientists to put that
out there as an idea.
You know.
Coherent.
As a coherent theory was
Lee Small and
Small and you know and Rupert have talked, but Small and doesn't want to work with
with Rupert because I think he's scared. I think he's scared to be seen to be talking to Rupert about the universe. And that's crazy. Lee Small's a great guy.
But so's Rupert. You shouldn't talk to each other, you know. It's it's very sad.
There's a there's a real uh hidden
Catastrophe inside science at the moment. Yeah.
I agree and and I uh I liken it often. Again, Wilson is my touchstone here with his book.
on the the return of the Inquisition.
Uh in uh the
citadel of science.
And and it dismays me to no end.
that the the scientific method
suddenly became scientism trademark.
With people saying you may never question the science.
The science is always right.
Yeah.
Th that is the ananthema.
Of the scientific method.
The scientific method, I think of a David Deutsch is another.
Um the the scientific method is question everything.
Yeah.
theories and not you know they do sneak in law.
a couple times. Uh but but they're not laws.
Their theories.
And they most of them represent the best
Guest.
estimate for what we think
No, the universe is how it proceeds, how it was created, et cetera.
But but that's what they are. They're theories and
Like Galileo
Or Copernicus, right?
Why?
Why why did this happen?
Wha why did they w why why did they assume almost
Pope poke invincibility.
in in their assertion that they were right and anyone questioning them was a heretic and wrong.
Well it's it's been a long, slow process. The the what's interesting is it's it's bit
Some things that Galileo set up when he basically wrote the rule book for science.
Uh at the start.
was that it was gonna be purely mathematical. It was gonna be just you know, the the language of science is just, you know
angles and lines and it's just gonna be purely mathematical and I'm not gonna speak beyond the mathematics.
And I've I write about this in my in the book I'm working on.
Um
I think he was terrified.
By what had happened to Bruno a few years.
earlier because Bruno
You know Bruno applied for the same job that that uh Galileo actually got?
And was turned down. And then a few years later Bruno gets burnt.
Yeah, it gets.
Taken to the field of flowers in Rome,
Uh
Iron bolts driven through his cheek, through his tongue, so he won't speak his heresies to
The crowd, he's hung upside down naked and jeered at for a while and then he set fire to.
Like
That could have been Galileo and Galile and he and that happened to Bruno, apparently because Bruno went beyond the data. He went beyond the data. And he said, I think I know what it means. And he spoke about the fact that look at these stars in the sky. They're probably suns like our own.
Those those suns probably have planets like our own. Those planets probably have life like our own. There are souls on these
other worlds. And they want that's one of the things they kill them for.
So
He went beyond the data and
So what does it mean, you know? And Galileo never went beyond the data. He just looked at things and
That's a shiny thing, right? Not gonna go beyond it. It's that far seems to be that far away, not gonna go beyond it. And that was a vow of humility.
That was he was saying there are more important things, and I'm gonna leave them to the church, right? There are more important things, and that's not my territory. I'm not gonna step on anyone's toes. I'm just gonna do this little mathematical science.
That was a vow of humility and what it's turned into is exactly the opposite.
Now all of the important truths that were outside of that narrow realm, which Galileo and
I would tell you were more important.
And ma the mathematical sciences.
They're now seen as beneath the mathematical sciences. It's an extraordinary shift. The r only real truth is the mathematical truths of reductionist materialist science.
All the other truths.
Yeah, the the the truths that you get through literature and s through singing, through comedy
True.
Intuition through
Yeah.
Transcendental experience. They're not truths at all.
inside a mathematical science.
And it's really it's real um
Transformation into the opposite of what it's set out to be.
You know.
What we need is a reformation. We need a reformation in science.
Yeah. I'm actually thinking of
Of printing out some of the things I've I've uh
I've come up with in
in in the book. And uh I'm thinking of actually nailing them to the door of the Royal Astronomy, the Royal Astronomy.
Uh building in uh Greenwich, uh right on the line that divides the world into
Yeah.
Time zones.
I'm thinking of nailing it to the store. I think that might
get the point across. I think we need I think we need dramatic actions here to pull into um'cause I think the way they'd react would be delightfully um
Uh people.
Yeah, I think they need to get a few more little pokes to because they they don't but they don't understand. They don't understand.
is at the core of science. Science says we're humble, we are always prepared to change in the light of the evidence.
But a humility that says
This is the only possible route to truth. That's not humility anymore.
Yeah.
It's I agree with you on this. Strongly agree with you. Yeah, it's it it is, in fact, the height of arrogance.
And I think w one of the things through all the rabbit holes I've
Uh

Doked down.
That I've learned is I
don't know almost anything. Yeah. Sure. None of us do. We like we're like we're mammals running around.
For domesticated primates.
As as Robert Anton W Wilson would call us, we are domesticated primates.
And and so I think we need to be open to all of the various
Other views.
Because you know, again, Wilson, uh perceptions form opinion, opinions reinform perceptions, and it is a tight loop that logic cannot
Mm-hmm.
Get through to
And and to see it done in the name of
Supposedly objective science the scientific method.
Is is just
Madness to me. And what's funny is if you if you're familiar with
The uh history of it, this is nothing new.
Right. So so David Baum, who wrote about the implicate and explicit
Order.
Order.
W was was meant uh to be a communist.
According to
to the higher ups in Washington.
And they told uh Oppenheimer, who had been a supporter of Bob's
No, no, no, no, no, no. You you you he's a commie
He's a commie.
You can't, and so there are letters.
With Oppenheimer to his other fellow scientists.
Saying we must it's like mean girls, the movie, right? Don't sit at our table, you can't talk to us. Like literally.
He has there was a letter in which Oppenheimer said
If we cannot disprove bomb, we must ignore him.
And and and this out of I I mean it it I find it just
Incredibly crazy.
that science could become so reductionist and and so deeply fearful of anything
seen as uncertain.
That's what the scientific method is for!
But the scientific method is in conflict with human nature. It's that's that's why it's so powerful. It's a way of escaping our human nature, but we can't escape it and we constantly go back into it and we're social apes. So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields that can lock them off from
Truth of uh you know over time. And they and that keeps happening. You know, there's a sort of startup energy to scientific fields when it's just a bunch of guys.
Um some gals, but historically it was a lot of guys.
Uh coming up with a bunch of ideas and it's like a
A hundred people know about this in the whole world and they all mean
meet up sometimes and they and that's when all the breakthroughs happen. And then it then the startups turn into corporations and the corporations have
structures and you end up with this kind of management bloat and you end up with
What has happened to
practically every science. They've gone from startup energy to corporate bloat.
And innovation has slowed down in every field. And it's sociological. It's huge it's a huge amount of sociology there. You need to go back to like Paul uh Feuerband, was it, uh wrote uh
Against method of the book in the seventies saying you need you need an you need
You know, you need an an anarchy of ideas, you need an anarchy of approaches that there isn't a scientific method.
Re in real life, we think there is, but when you look at how the breakthroughs happen, they happen in the most extraordinarily odd sideways, very human ways, unexpected ways, down unexpected channels. They don't come through this iterative, iterative, iterative approach where you just
Expanding the horizon a little, expanding the horizon a little bit because what often happens
is you've got a an unexamined assumption
underlying the entire field.
Так.
That the field isn't structured to notice. And in fact, noticing the unexamined assumption under the field, which is wrong, is considered heretical. And
the the the trouble is the the the sociology of science as they as they develop
they get cut off from the ability to fix their fundamental flaws. And that's exactly what's happened with cosmology. I one of the things that's been really interesting over the last decade of studying this is is is
A huge part of the interest is the science. Of course, it's the science, it's the data. But another part is the sociology. It's the extraordinary human dynamics that have basically suppressed
An approach to cosmology that is
Far more
productive and useful than their current approach. And it was suppressed for sociological reasons. You can actually you can actually trace out
Mm.
Kind of.
Um
shot down who over a period there was a little period of
of very polite warfare inside um
Inside kind of physics, kind of cosmology.
It was happening w we basically.
Happening in theoretical physics because that's
Where the idea that I'm
Thing with
came from, but it was shot down by other people inside the field of theoretical physics.
For sociological reasons.
It you know,'cause the string theory guys didn't want an alternative
uh explanation for why our universe was this complex and interesting.
They had a string theory approach. There's 500 million string theories, and there's so many string theories, one of them could give you a complicated universe. They use the anthropic principle.
Uh and then Snollin comes along and says
Um, I think there's this other approach.
Using this stuff called evolutionary theory that comes out of this thing called biology that none of us fucking read. But you know, I've actually read a bit of it and there's this weird idea of a thing called evolution. Evolution gives you complicated things inside a membrane that develop over time. And our universe looks awfully like
A complicated thing that develops over time inside a space time membrane.
And maybe evolution's the explanation for that. And he came up with the uh the pretty good basics of a theory. And
It got shot down by a bunch of string theorists.
For completely sociological reasons,'cause it it'cause it messed up. It was gonna mess up.
their primacy in in their theoretical physics field. And cosmology was just a a kind of a bystander to all of this, you know.
And it got robbed of a theoretical approach that is so powerful
An outsider
Like me, who doesn't even
you know, doesn't have a profound knowledge of the the specific domains, can make better predictions about the early universe than the mainstream. That's crazy.
Yeah.
It is indeed. I I'm I'm a big proponent of the power of uh
uh markets and and one that shows a lot of promise in my opinion is
Oh if you tie these predictions that uh many make
In a variety of fields, not just science.
If you tie them to some sort of bet with the people who are taking the opposite side.
Uh that that makes people
For for whatever reason. Uh and any any Duke is a friend of mine and and she gave me the shorthand.
heuristic which
is if you wanna see how some much somebody really believes in something that they're saying
All you have to do is look at them and say, Wanna bet?
And and she said all of a sudden you can actually yeah, you can you can see them recalibrating as right after that said is said.
But I also completely agree with your notion that
We we
Cannot
You know, Cedarus Peribus is never happens. Other things remaining equal.
No, they're they're never rema never remaining equal. And at the center of all of our endeavors sit
Us.
We humans.
You might remember the Pogo cartoon, We've Met the Enemy and it's uh uh us.
Yeah.
And the idea behind the sociological aspects of science I find
Incredibly intriguing.
Simply because
What you see is what you see in many other fields.
A hierarchy emerges.
What do people at the top of that hierarchy do?
They want to remain at the top of that hierarchy.
Yeah.
bubble up to a point where it hits a crisis mode.
That's when you see the flips happening. So for example
Do you know how long they tried to save Ptolemy's version of the cosmos, right?
But the telemic universe, right? With all of its sure circle uh its epicycles and everything. And then Copernicus and and others come along and say
Well, wait a minute, if we just do this and I'm gesturing and making the sun
The center of the galaxy as opposed to the Earth.
It but it was also an interaction, wasn't it, right? Because
We often
Fail to understand how much of our world view.
Beyond science.
is formed by scientific beliefs.
So back to Ptolemy, right?
The telemic universe was one of order and hierarchy.
God sat at the top of it.
And God picked the kings and the pope.
And therefore the kings were ruling by divine right. God told me that I was meant to be king.
The
Hopes were infallible in matters of religion because God told me
And then when Copernicus comes along
All of that
Slowly
slowly starts to dissipate.
People start asking, Well, wait a minute, if we're not the center of the universe here.
I wonder what else is wrong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very destabilizing. The changes in in how we see the universe are very destabilizing it on in how we see ourselves and our political structures. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And you know, the the the challenge is
I'm I'm also a fan of uh Charles Dodson, better known as Lewis Carroll.
Uh who who wrote
uh about this extensively
Um if you haven't read his s very short piece What the tortoise said to Achilles, I
recommend it because it plays into Agrippa's trilemma or the Muckhausen trilemma.
Which says that essentially logic
is has three problems that you cannot surmount.
The first is it's often circular.
And uh the second is it's and this is where Dodson or Carol comes in.
It goes into an infinite regress because each time you get to ask the question
Well, if A implies B and you say B implies C
Does that mean C implies D?
Well, yes, it does. Well does the and then you keep going and going and going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and then you finally get to the one that I'm really interested in, which is the planted axiom.
in all logical systems.
Which creates dogma, and that planet axiom is this.
According to Carroll
When you get
All the way down.
In a logical system, what are you gonna find?
You're gonna find a base
Right.
An axiom
That a human simply assert.
Was true.
With with no proof.
With no fruit.
Right. And and so
B.
You know, again to our mutual uh
mutually admired Wilson.
The wrong software guarantees the wrong answer.
Right. If if if you keep feeding things into the wrong software, it's gonna keep spitting back.
The same answer.
But that's what's happened with um that's what's happened with cosmology. Cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics. The unexamined assumption there, which goes back to, you know
Yeah, Newton, whatever, it goes back to Galileo.
The R well the R universe is a is a one shot universe.
But it's
Measure in it is just random measure.
uh obeying arbitrary laws. They just happen to be these laws and it happens to be this matter and it happened to happen once and it's just
Right.
And
If you make that assumption, you end up s treat just trying to treat the entire universe.
As though it you can just do
essentially use simple gas laws to work out what's going to happen next.
And that's not how the universe behaves at all.
It doesn't seem to obey simple gases. It's not it's not all spread out evenly everywhere. It has all sorts of complex structure that we didn't anticipate at all until like nineteen seventy eight. Like it's it's the seventies.
Punk at was already
It it passed its bloom when we discovered that the structure of the universe is
Nothing like what we predicted. Because that's the first time we got 3D maps of uh the universe. It's the first time we actually did a proper redshift.
uh survey of how fast galaxies were getting away from us, and we realized holy crap, there's huge voids between these galaxies. And there's these huge structures.
Uh you know eighty percent of the universe has nothing in it, like essentially nothing in it. It's like eighty percent of the universe
the the the average density in those parts is like less than 10% of the the average density of the universe. They're very empty of stars and galaxies.
Uh
Most of the marineers.
It's is gathered in just these nodes, but
clusters and superclusters of galaxies which are connected by filament. And they only but they only take up the nodes only take up about one percent, one or two percent of the of the volume of the whole universe. The the other
So eighteen, twenty percent is filaments that join the nodes.
going between these huge voids that have almost nothing in them. And the filaments are full of gas and some galaxies, some stars. But that is a crazy structure that was not anticipated.
At all. And in nineteen seventy eight we discover oh
Up until that point they're assuming that the galaxies were all spread out.
analogous to just random molecules of gas in a in a vague simple gas laws.
That's it.
Big mistake.
You know, and and there's no humility when they
When they realise oh we have been completely wrong about the structure of the universe. Well
Well what they do is they try to get it back to simplicity.
by just throwing more matter at it, and you end up with this using dark matter to s solve every problem.
So you've now got no
But to solve the problem you have to throw more and more dark matter at it.
And then you have to give it.
Quirky little.
you know, attributes that work in this situation, but not in that situation, but you don't you don't synthesize the two and say, well it then it can't exist. But you you say, well, maybe it's like this because that solves this problem. Maybe it's like this, it's that solves this problem. And you have this completely incoherent response. And fifty years of dark matter we still haven't seen any.
We've no detections.
We still and we still don't even know what kind of stuff it is. Is it?
Is it sterile neutrinos? Is it an unknown particle of some kind? It's this it gets less defined over
fifty years of investigation rather than more, which is exactly the opposite of what should happen in real science.
In real sense, you should say.
We've made a fundamental error here that's underlying all our assumptions. We need to go back down to that fundamental error and fix that.
You know, but it can't they're stuck inside a paradigm.
That's based on assumptions that just aren't true. The idea that we're in a random one shot universe w we're m
Matter just debates arbitrary loss.
But they're not. They're everything's fine tuned. It this is you can't go from a hot ball of gas
That doesn't even have
the elements in it yet, you know, they haven't even been formed yet. It's just hydrogen, essentially.
To you and me talking to each other.
True.
Advanced technologies in
You know, in a in abstract language.
And while we're doing this, we're doing it inside a biosphere that
Sustains itself as a homeostatic
Dynamic out of equilibrium system for billions of years with an external energy source, which is also a homeostatic.
dynamic, out of equilibrium system that maintains itself for millions of years with incredibly frugal output of power. People say hydrogen's a uh that hydrogen fusion and is
Oh, with so much energy. Yeah, there's so much energy from each individual.
Fusion.
incident, but the rate at which stars do it is incredibly frugal. It's it buys you the time for life to develop and evolve and so forth.

Everything like the the the fact that the molecules that make up you and me
Exist is down to
Multiple rounds of star formation building out.

When they get to the end of their lives as
Supernova explosions to make the next round of stars, which will fuse the next round of elements, which will then explode out.
Into the
surrounding gas to make the next round. So that by three
rounds of star formation, you can build planets. This is an unbelievably sophisticated developmental process that leads to where we are now.
And the idea that random
Gas happens to bump into itself under arbitrary
Uh laws.
And it ended up doing this by mistake.
It's so
Fucking stupid.
And to not even see that there's a there's a problem here.
That needs to be explained.
It just it blows my mind.
Like you don't think there's a problem here because
Every time
Every time an astronomer looks down a telescope
They they look through the telescope and they say
I can just see random guess.
It happens to interact in strange ways, but they're not looking down the other end of the telescope, is it?
There's an astronomer there in an institution built out of technology using all these elements that were assembled by that random gas. You got to look down both ends of the telescope. And you know, I I I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by where we've ended up with cosmology.
And
Astrophysics and astronomy.
Where you can't say it means anything because they're terrified you if you say
This obviously means something, this this self complexification, and it needs an explanation. If you say that, they're terrified. What you mean is.
And the explanation is God.
And they're so scared of God because because the the origins of science were so
Scared of God.
I'm scared of the
Yeah, everything that the uh and the church and everything else.
But they're still scared.
But the and the funniest thing is
The answer isn't God, the answer is evolution. So what you've got are people rejecting evidence of evolution because they're terrified it's evidence of God. It's the most
Ironic, paradoxical situation.
I'm just I just love it.
Uh a as do I. And uh you've set the table nicely for uh
For our listeners and viewers for a fuller explanation.
of the cosmological natural selection theory.
Um I I'm familiar with it from Lee Smollin's work uh in the nineties, I think, uh when he came up with that. But as you point out, I also want to just uh make it aside.
uh what you were talking about. Oh, the answer's dark matter. It sounds a lot like throwing more epicycles.
into the telemic uh universal model, doesn't it? Right. And the thing is you can you can
do great with a lot of enough epic cycles, you can do great, but it's just not true. That's the problem is it's just not true. And you know, you can you can sort of make dark matter do a lot of interesting things if you invent enough of it and place it exactly where you want. But you if you look at the simulations that they use.
to to uh
to do this to to play out how
You get
uh structure in in the universe.
There's a there's there's
Ten, eleven free parameters that you can adjust.
With that many free parameters, you can make anything happen.
Anything. It's a it's CGI.
You know?
Yeah. Marvel can do this too. They can give you a very convincing universe.
Using computers.
And enough free parameters. It doesn't mean it's true, you know.
I love crazy.
But but now let's take a step back and and'cause you you extend
uh small's work uh by making predictions by
Doing a lot of things that he didn't do with that theory. But if you're not going to be able to do it And there's good reasons why he didn't. There's been more data since the stuff he just couldn't have he couldn't have come up with some of the conclusions I came to because he didn't know.
We didn't know enough at the time, but yeah. Exactly. And we didn't have the James Webb um and all of that. But it let's let's give a layman's definition of the theory of of cosmological natural selection.
And and then I'm gonna go into some of the specific uh talk about brave. Some of the specific predictions that you made. And there's a really exciting one, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do a spoiler before you
Tell our listeners about about the theory itself.
Well, I I think it's worth going all the way back. I think there's always been an intuition.
that something like this might be true, that the universe might have evolved. Uh you see uh David Hume the great
Um
Scottish philosopher.
Intuiting that perhaps you know perhaps there were many labours
Many worlds lost before this world came into being. He he's talking about this kind of thing, but in a pre-Darwinian world. So there's no mechanism for this to happen. He's just saying
It seems strange that we ended up with this complex.
world or their earlier failed worlds, right?
Uh and then
Darling comes along.
And he comes up with a theory of evolution.
But he comes up with a theory of evolution for
Living.
DNA organisms for
biological organisms. He comes up with it at a time when the assumption is that the universe is
Infinite and eternal.
Like that's the the the basic scientific assumption is the the universe is infinite and eternal. That's why it's called the universe. There's only one of it. And
So
Uh that that assumption means you everything happens inside this one.
Eternal infinite universe.
Charles Pierce.
After Darwin.
Start at the
Great American pragmatist philosopher.
Thanks.
Wait a minute.
This is interesting because
Mm-hmm.
N natural laws.
Are very
Odd things that that that probably need an explanation. And evolution seems like the natural explanation for something that has.
It seems fine tuned, that seems
To be
precise, that seems to have consequences that are complex and interesting. So
Charles Pierce was the first guy to say
Wow, maybe evol there's an evolutionary theory.
behind the physical laws of nature.
But he didn't know where to place the evolution.
Because he was still living inside an infinite.
And uh eternal universe.
Right.
But he's all
Maybe they somehow evolved inside this year.
Universe.
Yeah.
You get into the twentieth century and suddenly we had this weird moment.
There wasn't a moment it was dragged out over a long time, that it took us a long time to work out this was the case, but you end up with this transition from the infinite eternal universe, which we've always assumed to be the case under science.
Two
The discovery of the big bang.
And you know, it's a slow burn.
'Cause you know they discover the galaxies are flying apart, Dedington discovers that, and that's really freaky. Then they discover realize the implications of that are they fly up they're flying apart from a point from somewhere.
Then we start looking for evidence of that, then we eventually discover the cosmic microwave background radiation in the sixties were.
And uh we realized holy crap, we can hear the big bang. There was a there was a moment of
Creation. There's a moment of generation for this particular universe. This universe isn't infinite and it isn't eternal. It started at a specific
Point.
Yeah.
And it expanded from that, uh you know, and and you've got the
speed of light constraining everything. So it's it's only a certain size.
And it's only a certain age. It's th and now we think it's thirteen point eight billion years and it's as big as it could expand in that time.
But that's just a bubble of space-time. It's not infinite. It's not eternal. That should have really made
Cosmology.
astrophysics, astronomy, they should have all gone back to their
Absolutely.
Basic foundational beliefs at that point.
and examine them again and they didn't.
They
didn't. So what you've got now is a is is a
Cognitive dissonance.
in in in the in those sciences where they're kind of assuming m assuming in some ways that everything's
Infinite turtle.
But but you've got this new piece of information. The universe started at a point and grew.
developed rapidly.
Developed rapidly.
We used to think we had an infinite amount of time. An infinite amount of time.
for something complicated to happen.
Fair enough, in an infinite amount of time, something complicated will probably eventually happen.
We don't have that.
luxury anymore. We've only got thirteen point eight billion years, which is not very long.
And uh
The person I think that that made the big breakthrough in thinking about how that
You can score.
Why are these various circles?
It's very complex.
universe we live in, which is very
Recent.
was Lee Smaller. Lee Smaller was a
No, I'll actually go back to uh a mentor of his.
Uh John Wheeler.
John Wheeler.
At this point, realized there are John Wheeler's a great American physicist. He realized there's two problems that we haven't solved yet in our universe that involve singularities.
A singularity is a point of infinite density.
Where mass mass energy just gets crushed down to a point of infinite density, right?
Uh and weird shit happens at that point. We not none of our rules work at that point. When we get out to a singularity, general relativity doesn't apply anymore. We can't do a quantum mechanical explanation. We we literally none of our theories operate at that point. So we don't know what happens.
And there's two of those in our universe now, right?
One black holes.
Uh when stars get to the end of their lives.
They burn out their fuel.
There's no longer radiation pressure to keep them apart.
Keep them
Expanded, so they collapse.
Under gravity.
And if they're big enough, they keep on collapsing to the point where they form a singularity. They're a black hole. That mass energy vanishes from the universe.
And we don't know where it goes.
We don't know what happens. Information can't come back from a black hole.
That's mass energy is gone. That's a singularity.
The big bang is the other singularity.
In the big bang.
From a singularity, mass energy expands to form
our space time.
And John Wheeler was the first person to say, what if they're the same thing looked at from different sides?
What if the
The collapse.
of mass energy to a point that is a
Black hole.
In a parent universe.
Bounces to form.
Uh
singularity that expands to form uh mass energy expands out of to form a baby universe.
What if universes give birth to universes through black holes?
through black holes and big bangs because remember the the the big bang the new the new baby is outside the parent universe it's not inside it it's it it's gone
Yeah.
So
That was a r I think that was one of the great
Like
Obvious like
Brilliant insights.
But he didn't know what to do with it.
Um
He said maybe the child universe is randomly different.
uh from the parent universe. And maybe if if there's enough random differences you'll end up with a complicated universe like ours, okay.
It's not a great explanation, but it's he's he's groping towards something. But one of his students or one of his
Uh
One well, one of the students influenced by him.
was Lee Smollin.
But very good theoretical physicist.
And Lee Smollin realised it,'cause he was reading
A lot of uh evolutionary theory on the side.
That if
Um
If instead of being randomly different, the child universe was slightly different.
Uh.
Then
The basic parameters of matter, if they were slightly different in the child universe, that child universe would, as a result of that, be likely to either create more black holes or less black holes.
be more reproductively successful or less reproductively successful.
Okay.
And was if that's the case, you get Darwinian evolution.
automatically because you've got you've got inheritance
with variation.
And
Uh
Yeah, so
You you will get uh

child universes that produce more black holes will have more offspring. That line of
basic parameters of matter will we be
varied on again. Some of those offspring will produce more, some will produce less.
And you'll get runaway you should get runaway uh reproductive success of universes. Because universes
aren't like biological organisms. They're not in conflict in a narrow
constrained environment where there's only a s limited amount of food or anything, you're generating a whole new
space time from scratch each time. That's one of the really interesting things about our universe.
Which gives you
Uh
Gives you
Mm uh let's say a clues towards the fact this might be an evolved
Thing.
It's it's
The the
the mass energy and the gravitational energy balance out to zero.
You could make this universe for nothing.
Right.
Um
And that if that's the case, you could uh universes can produce huge numbers of offspring.
For free.
So
And it's this isn't controversial. Like we know that we can make it pretty much make universes out of nothing, that they balance out to nothing.

So
You've got this
Uh abity to make
Very
uh productive fecund uh universes.
And our universe.
produces s has well, so far it's probably produced something like
Borty quintillion black holes.
Yeah, that that's the latest survey. They think that we've probably got about forty quintillion. So there's a lot. We produce a lot of black holes.
And and that was kind of Snollin's idea.
Mm.
that you would get that you would g basically get
the basic parameters a matter of fine-tuned to produce more and more black holes. And if that required more complex structures over time, you'd get more complex structures that were more better at and more efficient at producing.
Black holes.
Uh and it's a great theory and I I
Um
Really um
Upset.
Taken more seriously at the time and given more
of the community's uh attention and and budget. But what happened was
Sociologically.
Well uh he was he was in trouble. Because
He published
His first paper, Did the Universe Evolve?
In the
The journal of
Classical and quantum gravity.
who reads the journal of classical and quantum gravity, you know, like a hundred guys and all they're interested in is quantum gravity, right? That's it.
So nobody
Who could do anything with it read it.
So a few years later he he uh writes a book about it, uh The Life of the Cosmos. And I it's a I I've I've been rereading it and I I used to be harder on it. I it's it's actually a lovely, lovely book. But he he he hangs off telling you the really exciting, interesting part for about 150 pages because I think he's scared to tell you. I think he's scared. It's like it's too big, it's too weird, and he's not
Sure, and so on and so on.
And the book didn't
And then
But when people did start to and it was before the internet when you published that paper, like the the that journal didn't go online for another six years. So nobody could stumble on it.
You know?
It was it was on a hundred print copies in a hundred libraries.
In the quantum gravity section. Like
You're not gonna find it by mistake.
You know?
So the the
But nobody's n all the people that could have done something with it, they didn't even know about it. And then when the book comes out
Uh Leonard Suskin did the main string theorist in that.
Really try to put it down. There's a there's a an online debate between the Suskand and Small and
Like on the edge, still still up there. And you can see them arguing back and forth about about cosmological natural selection. And Suskind uses arguments against.
The theory that
Uh
completely wrong.
But nobody notices'cause they're all
Dearests.
So they're all physicists, yeah.
So he he ba his basic argument against smollen was
If universes evolved to
uh to optimise for black hole production, they would produce the most black holes you could possibly produce.
That's a mathematician uh mathematician's idea, right, of how things how evolution works.
So I can imagine a universe that produces
Loads more black holes.
That's just nothing but little tiny black holes.
And this isn't that. So this isn't evidence.
of optimization for black hole production.
No.
Translate this into
turns we're more familiar with and you can see how stupid this argument is.
Uh it's like saying
Giraffes can't have evolved.
Because because giraffes only have one or two offspring a year.
I can imagine giraffes that produce billions of offspring every second.
Ha ha
Right. So clearly giraffes were not optimised by evolution for reproductive success.
That's a that's a that's a theoretical physicist's idea of an argument, right?
Because you have to have
A direct evolutionary line
From the beginning.
To the
Universe you're observing.
And all of the way along that line, all the intervening universes have to be reproductively successful.
Right.
There's no what you give me the evolutionary line from
an ultimately primitive beginning that is not that reproductively successful at all to
trillions of black holes in every cubic meter and I will
grant your point, but you can't fucking do it, can you?
Uh.
So
That the the problem was nobody nobody took this seriously as a genuinely evolutionary
Theory.
And
The theory then got expanded a little.
Uh like one of the glories of this theory is it it does explain the fine tuning of the basic parameters of matter, because we've got a very fine-tuned universe here.
You know, if you change many of the parameters, the parameters would be things like the mass of the electron, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and so on.
If you change them by very much.
You do not get complex structure. You don't even get atoms, right?
And it's just you just get mush.
Um
And in any if you any randomly chosen set of parameters, you're nearly always gonna get mush.
The fact that we don't get mush, the fact that we get
Self complexification at all scales.
really needs explanation and evolution gives you an explanation. Evolution will give you a fine-tuned
set of parameters that gives you a giraffe.
Or a complicated universe.
from a bunch of sludge.
If you give it enough generations, right?
So
That was great.
Mm.
The theory wasn't there yet, though. There was some development of the theory.
uh by people who thought there's a hand there's really something here.
And the next breakthrough in the theory, which I find
Uh very interesting. This is the bit where some people think this is too speculative, it's too science fictional. I don't think it is. I think this is just logical. Uh, was by people like Clement Vidal, he's a very good um Belgian uh philosopher of science and
He's he's worked on
Yeah.
He's worked on uh astrobiology and
The search for alien life and stuff. Good guy.
Um
And John Smart, very interesting futurist and thinker.
and uh Louis Crane is an excellent mathematician in uh Kansas. Th a few people worked on this
thinking, but you have to explain life. Why would you have life in
complex evolved universe because the thing that's reproducing the the the unit of selection is the universe, right?
So why why would intelligent life be useful to a universe?

And there's actually an answer to that, right?
In this universe.
I worked a little bit with
With some of the guys on this.
Yeah.
Um intelligent
Uh life forms.
Start to manipulate.
Other matter make technologies, so on.
And they want to optimize their energy.
Sources.
As everything does, as a cat does. A cat optimizes its energy sources. A fish, a bacterium, they all optimize their energy.
so that they don't die. So that they can get the most chance to live and reproduce.
Uh with the
amount of energy that's available and they'll tap whatever sources of energy they can.
humans and other intelligent life forms on other worlds.
Can tap.
I'm
As David Deutsch would say.
Anything that doesn't break the law of physics. Eventually we're gonna tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics.
And what are the limits of that in our universe?
What's the ultimate form of energy released in our universe that's realistically
uh tappable inside the laws of physics. It's black holes. If you can artificially make small black holes
You can use them to convert.
Up to forty two percent.
Of the
Of the mask.
of a a piece of matter.
into energy forty two percent.
That's an incredible uh
Rate of return.
Uh
Fusion in the in the sun, like fusion reactions only give you point seven percent of the mass back as energy. Fission, you know.
The nuclear.

uh point one percent of the mass spectrus energy. So forty two percent's unreal.
And
I need
Technologically advanced.
uh civilization is eventually probably gonna technologically produce small black holes.
For energy production.
'Cause that's the best you can get. And any universe that accidentally in
Following, blindly following the uh exploring the possibility space for matter.
If it ends up generating
Intelligent life that's able to manipulate technology.
Uh
it will end up producing colossal numbers of small black holes that couldn't have been produced by natural processes.
But previous to life.
So you'll have
Lots of stellar mass black holes, stars will
Try and form.
uh black holes, but you'll also get far more
technologically produced black holes.
Far more efficient.
reproductive success. It's gonna be hugely conserved by evolution if it ever happens even once.
So
That's why you've got intelligent life. It it makes sense from the point of view of the universe, which is the unit of selection.
It will heavily select for that.
Okay, that's great.
You need one more breakthrough to for this theory to
To really
kick off and and it it ha it didn't happen at the time because we didn't know enough about supermassive black holes. And this is my contribution, I think, to the
to the uh
to the theory, okay?
Um
There's a supermassive black hole at the core of every
Galaxy.
Okay, we've got it.
Very, very roughly a trillion galaxies.
in our universe. And everyone see that we've looked at in any detail seems to have a supermassive black hole at its core. Now a supermassive black hole is really big. Uh they range in size, but
They're super nice, they're really big.
There some of them are
millions of times the mass of our sun. Some of them are billions of times the mass of our sun.
Yeah.
It's hot the the
Existing
Set of theories on how
you get those supermassive black holes, how they came about.
tended to just involve lots of small black hills.
in a trench coat.
Lots of stellar mass black holes in a trench coat.
That they you get a lot of s stellar mass black holes early enough and maybe they'd merge and then more of them would merge and then more of them would merge and they end up somehow they're billions of suns. Okay, great.
Um
My contribution to the theory was to rethink
rethink the whole process from first principles.

Um, if the theory was true, what are the implications from first principles? And this is what I did when I knew the James Web was gonna come online. The James Webb was gonna show us the first billion years, okay?
Uh, which we'd never seen before.
Um
'Cause I realise that if you've got supermassive black holes in our universe
They are probably
Conserved.
From an earlier era of

Because the early imagine the earliest most primitive universes.
Well, you didn't have complex matter, you didn't have ninety something stable elements, you didn't have
You and me talking to each other, you didn't even have stars, you didn't have galaxies, you didn't have complex systems for producing.
Black holes. You just had
Big bangs and black holes. Just as with
Biological life, the earliest life forms were prokaryotic bacteria. All they did was reproduce.
They they they would split into whatever they'd reproduce and they didn't do much else. They didn't do complicated structures, they didn't even have a nucleus, right? They were just primitive reproducers.
You're gonna have to have something similar. If this theory is true.
in the evolutionary history of universe. Go back far enough and all they're doing are big bang black hole, big bang black hole. Eventually some some you know it's it's just earliest the most primitive matter flip flopping between.
Big bang back up.
If you
Eventually get one that's
That produces
Two black holes.
Big bang. Two black holes. Great. Now you've got Darwinian evolution and off we go. Right.
But they they are producing
Yeah.
By direct collapse, no intervening stars or anything complicated, no technology, no life.
Direct collapse, supermassive black holes.
All they're doing is is splitting into several parts that collapse.
That's all they're doing.
That is direct collapse supermassive black hole production. If we have supermassive black holes in our universe, they won't evolution will not have invented a whole new complicated way of making them. It will have conserved
The original.
way of making them, which was direct collapse, no intervening bunch of stars or galaxies needed.
Supermassive black holes. So my prediction then was
Based on that insight.
Uh which I really can't believe didn't occur to anybody else, but I've never found anyone else it occurred to.
Um was okay, that means that all the supermassive black holes in our universe
Must have been produced by direct collapse.
When were they produced by Direct Collapse? Well, they weren't produced recently by Direct Collapse because we bloody see it. It's an amazing like thing for billions of
Yeah, or mil you know, millions of uh stars worth of gas just collapse in one go without without forming stars on the way. It's very difficult thing to do. What are the conditions under which you can do that? You can only do that if the gas is smooth enough, right? If it's not smooth, if it's little um
Density fluctuations in it, denser parts.
As it collapses, those denser parts will collapse.

into and form stars.
Right? That's how stars form. Uh little dense pockets collapse to form stars. But if it's smooth enough, you can collapse.
smoothly past the point where you would get
Localised
Nucleation into little stars.
The whole area can collapse in format.
By direct collapse of supermassive black hole.
Interestingly enough, the mathematics on that had already been done about eighteen years ago by uh Priya Natarajan uh of Yale, the uh astronomy department and a few other people, I think Ball
uh Volker Blom and even Abby Lobe.
A few like heavy h heavy hitters were involved in
in realizing that you could actually technically in our universe get by direct collapse.
Supermassive black health. Oh supermassive black holes.
But it was a theoretical oddity. Nobody expected to find lots of them. It was just like under very
Difficult.
My prediction was
The conditions that allow for
That are gonna be the conditions right after the big bang, when everything's really smooth. We know it's smooth from the microwave, cosmic microwave background radiation.
Unbelievably smooth gas in the
In the early universe.
Which is a problem for star formation in the current set of theories,'cause you can't nucleate out stars when it's that smooth, right?
But you can do direct collapse supermassive black holes. So I predicted what you're gonna see
What the James Webb will ultimately see when it sees back far enough.
Is
A huge wave.
Very early on, in the first fifty million years, hundred million years.
Definitely inside the first hundred million, probably inside the almost certainly inside the first fifty million, you're gonna get a wave of direct collapse supermassive black holes.
the a trillion of them, uh the m the number you see in our current universe, they all form there.
And
You and they are then gonna
generate the conditions for star formation.
Conditions are optimized for
Supermassive black hole formation?
And that's been conserved by
Evolution.
But they then generate the conditions for
Star formation. And I've I've I've
I've expanded a bit since I'm writing some stuff that you haven't even seen yet, uh, on on on structure formation. It it comes out of the supermassive black holes. So
As they
More.
They
Gas falls in.
It's ionized, so it's turbulent it it falls closer. You get a hot
Blazing hot donut of gas called an accretion disc or
around the supermassive black hole.
And those generate then intense magnetic fields. They're dynamos. They're incredibly powerful dynamos.
And they generate um jets.
of charged particles that go north and south out of the magnetic poles, and they shock the surrounding gas.
And nuclear those shockwaves nucleate out star formation. So I predicted what you should see is
Very rapid, very early.
Very compact galaxy formation.
In the very early universe.
Not the bottom up slow a star here, a star there, a few stars dripped together.
Some more stars clumps drift together, eventually the clumps clump, blah, blah, blah. And you get eventually something a bit like a primitive galaxy, and eventually some of the black holes form to form a
bigger but that's not what you're gonna see. You're gonna see early rapid
Galaxy formation.
dominated by supermassive black holes.
And that's what they're seeing.
That's what the James Web eventually had uh when it started sending back data started to see.
It's seeing galaxies.
Forming compact.
Early.
Rapidly.
dominated by supermassive black holes. And I I
Don't think anybody else predicted that. I I've not been able to find anyone else who predicted
Uh precisely that. But that's what we're seeing.
Okay.
And and so
For my much more simple minded approach to this.
We get these super massive black holes which in turn give birth to galaxies, right?
They generate the galaxies around themselves. Yeah. Around themselves, right. And then that gives us stellar mass, yeah.
And the stars then. Yes. And then the stars
jet the stars as they get to the end of their life collapse to make stellar mass black holes. So you can see how that would have been a reproductively successful breakthrough.
But
along the history of universes. Let's leave life out of it for a while. Yeah, great. Let's do this. Let's explore it this way.
Uh there would have been early primitive universes that just did direct collapse with massive black holes.
Some of them would have left some matter over.
That matter would have explored the possibility space uh uh you know, as as lots of different
Child universes had different variations in the basic parameters of matter. Some of them made slightly more complicated.
Atoms and molecules like right.
Um, they're all just made out of protons and electrons. It's all very
simple building blocks, but they built up more complex structures.
And uh you would have had
Supermass black holes.
where they left over some matter and that matter formed, was able to form stars that formed stellar mass black holes.
A lot more stellar mass black holes than supermassive black holes. So that's a big revolutionary
Break through.
in the evolutionary history of universes more reproductive success.
They explore the possibility space. They get more efficient at making stars smaller, therefore getting more
Super m more more stellar mass black holes, star sized black holes.
Uh w interestingly, one of the things that you
Um
have in stars that makes them so efficient?
And you can therefore make smaller ones and they can build out
Uh more matter of so is
uh carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen form the CNO cycle, which is a fusion cycle inside
uh stars, right?
It
It makes stars fuse more efficiently, blah, blah, blah.
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.
Are then the ba building blocks for the next evolutionary breakthrough.
Which is life.
which then and then technologically made black holes. But you can see what's happening here.
You have a you have ex
A process that we're very familiar with in biological evolution, which is exaptation. Exaptation is when you take something that was developed to do one job.
By evolution.
And you adapt it.
to do a completely different job.
Mm-hmm.
And it forms it it performs a function.
That couldn't have a
Yeah.
Couldn't have evolved.
From scratch, it's just too big a jump.
But it doesn't have to jump because it's building on something complex that was already there.
Thank you
Plastic example in biology is um
Uh swim bladders. Swim bladders are the
Of the air sacs.
In fish that helped them go up and down.
Keep their buoyancy, keep their level in the water.
air goes in, air goes out, and they they they stay at the height they want to in the water'cause it's otherwise the spread.
Otherwise they have to swim very hard. So a swim ladder.
Uh there.
helps the fish do that.
Swim bladders were water.
was exapted to make lungs when the first amphibious fish went up onto land.
They didn't invent lungs from scratch.
They exapted, they they adapted in evolutionary terms.
The swim bladders to form the lung, the basis for the lungs. Likewise
The C and O cycle in in stars
W you know carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, they they evolved.
Um
To help make.
Star is better at making little star back holes.
Star size black holes.
But the next breakthrough came on top of that using carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, which are the
as the basics for biological life, which led to this next breakthrough. You don't have to invent life from scratch.
Which would be a hell of a
Break through.
Um you can build on the on the previous complexification, the previous more complex uh
structures that were developed. So you what my my my version of cosmological natural selection.
is a kind of a three stage
version. I'm saying
Our universe has three kind of
rounds of reproductive success.
Each of them is a i is an is an evolutionary breakthrough that happened at a different era. Each has been conserved, each builds
Uh because it's built on by the next one.
Right.
So
Our universe you see supermassive black holes.
They evolved for us in the history of universes, but we still have them.
They come first.
In the development of our specific universe?
They
Generate the conditions for
Uh
Star formation and galaxy formation and thus
Stellar mass black holes, star sized black holes, of which
Yeah.
hundred of millions more than there are supermassive black holes,'cause there's hundreds of millions of stars in in the average galaxy.
Which only has one supermassive black hole and hundreds of millions of stars.
And then
Um
Stars.
build out the periodic table and distribute it so that you can have planets, so that you can have life, so you can have technology, so that you can have us.
And we will ultimately generate a hell of a lot more.
Or many orders of magnitude more.
Very small black holes.
we even more reproductively successful at the level uh uh for the for the universe that we're part of.
And а сайн да.
mirrors the
Evolutionary
process that led to this specific universe. Does that make sense?
It does.
And
Uh it would also posit
If I'm if I'm
correct in my interpretation of your theory.
It would it would also posit literally trillions of exoplanet uh
Exoplanets which contain light.
Right.
Yeah, I'm predicting I'm predicting very, very large amounts of life in this universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ultimately, we're not finished yet. So we're undergoing a developmental process. What another what
Another implication of the theory is that probably it's
Likely that most of the life
Um
On
Yeah, most of the life in our universe is probably more likely to be on icy moons with liquid water oceans than it is on exposed rocky surfaces like Earth.
Because if you look at if you look at our
uh solar system and and assume it's relatively
Normal.
Uh relatively normal.
Um
You
You you you look for the liquid water. Like where's the liquid water? Because the life is gonna need liquid water more than it needs anything else.
Liquid water seems to be the the the the the most necessary
Chemical.
Uh yeah.
Is liquid water on the surface of the earth great.
Yeah.
But the vast majority of liquid water in our solar system is is
Under the crusts of icy moons
And the mechanism by which that water stays liquid.
Isn't the same as the mechanism that keeps the water
Liquid on earth, right?
I see moons go around big planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
Right?
And as they're going around them, they their orbits are usually a little bit eccentric, right? That means they they go a bit fur they're a bit further out at this part point, a bit closer at this point. If you're if you have an eccentric orbit and you're going around a really big planet like Jupiter.
Or Saturn.
There's a lot of tug on the core.
Of that moon.
It tugs on it every time it goes closer and further away, it's tugged.
Uh gravitationally.
And that
melts that friction, that gravitational friction, melts the core.
uh of these icy moons.
Keeps them molten and liquefies a lot of the ice. So a lot of these moons, you look at them on the surface, you think, Jesus Christ, that's frozen.
Because it is. The sun isn't doing jack. Like the sun is like very, very, very, very dim in the sky. Uh if you're a moon of Saturn.
But under
ten, twenty, thirty, forty miles of ice.
You then get to a
a liquid water ocean that gets warmer and warmer the further t closer to the core you get, and that has nutrients coming up into it from the from the from the molten molten rocky core.
Right. So it's got the nutrients for life coming up.
Uh it's got a massive liquid water ocean. It's protected by an incredibly
Shallow ice.
That's like an ice at that temperature is like steel. It's harder than steel.
Right.
Yeah.
And there's lots of them.
Even weirder, we discovered
In the last year.
By looking at a star making region very close to us, the the Orion
Um
The
That star in star formation regions where stars are forming, there are there's
There's also a lot of
Jupiter sized planets forming.
On their own with no stars.
And if those
Moon if those Jupiter sized planets have
Moons.
I see moons.
They'll have liquid water oceans because of the gravitational
friction going around the Jupiter sized planet. They don't need a star. So most life in the universe might not even need a star.
Right?
All the liquid water is is
It's only Europe's a small moon, it's got twice as much liquid water as Earth.
And if you look at the rocky planets on Earth.
Mercury's been boiled to death. It's got liquid
Lead puddles.
It's a horrendous environment.
Venus got cooked by
uh greenhouse gases and it's
You know, it's raining sulfuric acid.
Earth is doing fine, kinda. We nearly got wiped out by asteroids that kill the dinosaurs, and we did turn into a snowball twice, and we have had some problems, but we're still hanging in there. It's doing we're doing pretty good.
Mars? Oh no, it's it's the oceans have evaporated and it's and its entire uh
Uh atmosphere is blown away.
There's only one out of four have been able to hold on to life.
of the four rocky planets and have have been able to hold on to liquid water.
All of the icy moons are hanging on to their liquid water. It's a much more efficient way of producing liquid water oceans and the conditions for life.
So
Maybe rocky planets with liquid water surfaces were an earlier, more successful
Yeah.
way of generating life, but I it looks to me like
Evolution is optimizing for the good water oceans and icy moons.
And that that brings us right back to the well known Fermi paradox, right? Which is
Uh for those who don't know, and I would guess that
Virtually all of our listeners and viewers know about the Fermi Paradox, but if you don't
It's like okay, if this is all true, where is everybody?
Okay.
I I come
We're we're not seeing anything, which also
leads to our good friend Nick Bostrom with his great filter theory.
Basically
I remember reading it for the first time and and I think he opens, if memory serves, he opens with, I am praying we find no life on Mars.
I'm like what what what are you what what are you going on about here Nick?
And then he makes the point.
That he posit that
uh any advanced uh technological civilization
would have to make it past what he termed the great filter.
Right.
What where with the great filter is usually a cataclysmic event which wipes life out.
Sometimes caused by meteors, sometimes caused by that intelligent life itself.
Right, blowing themselves up, all of those things.
So so where where does Nick
And and Fermi, where where where do they figure into this theory?
It's a really good question. Uh'cause I am predicting lots of life in this universe, so where is it?
I think this
What I've just described to you gives a possible answer to that, right?
This is an interesting one.
If most life
Is in fact on
in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, imagine what their view of the universe is.
They're under a hundred miles of steel hard ice.
They develop a civilization.
They have no idea they're in a universe.
They don't know why.
The center is warm and the surface is cold.
They don't know it's a surface.
It's just that's the end.
They don't have stars in the sky.
They don't see a sun.
They don't have they can't see planets. They're they're
Would they ever
Dig through the
Ice?
A hundred miles?
And then fall into space. What the
What I don't know what I don't know what the
The logic or the psychology of any kind of civilization that develops under those is do that
Mm.
They're not
I can't see spacefaring civilizations coming out of that.
I don't know. They may never leave. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? I do.
I do, I do. We're stuck on the surface. We're like we're being hit by rocks.
Like we're very aware that we're in space.
They're not. They're not.
But the other factor is

The the chemistry is just colder.
It's gonna take longer for life to evolve. So life could be germinating away, but it hasn't reached the intelligent technology wielding stage.
On a huge number of icy units.
And a huge number of uh
Uh
Yeah, galaxies. I don't know. I don't I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
As I listen to that though, I'm reminded of Plato's allegory of the cave, right?
What you're basically saying is that
the life that could be underneath those uh hundred miles of ice.
Are are like the people in many respects.
I'm calling them people, God knows what they are.
Uh but but sentient beings, let's put it that way.
that that the essential beings in these
uh environments where they have no stars, they have no rocks hitting them. They're under a
A hundred miles of ice.
They're essentially
Not gonna ever
Get the idea? Hey.
Sure.
Do you think we should kinda like drill and see? Yeah, keep digging.
The trouble is they're that they're digging up.
It's there's it's harder for them. Like
Th if the the direction the d the natural direction for them to dig in is doubt, like work with gravity. But that's towards the core of their rocky
Uh you know, there's the modern towards the modern core. So I mean this is not saying they're not gonna do it. I just I'm just trying to work out what's the logic. It's of it's gonna be of such a different reality. I don't know how they're gonna
Navigate it.
I also don't know how the hell they do space travel.
Given that they have to bring liquid water with them, they live in liquid water, do they
Wha what's the mass if if they're using small black holes?
As energy sources?
This is another thing. Small black holes anchor you like nothing else. Like if your major energy source is a small black hole, you ain't accelerating anywhere.
It's yeah everything er your Parasaurus has the has the massive Mount Everest.
You're not accelerating it.
So it really slows down
space travel like you you have to use different less efficient forms of energy to to do actual space travel.
Your most efficient energy source is not
is not accelerationable.
Yeah. And but would wouldn't this also imply uh that those of us who happen to be lucky enough
To live on a rock.
uh that uh has access to seeing the stars, to seeing the galaxies, to seeing all that. Wouldn't that give us like an unusual advantage?
Over other yeah, over life forms stuck under early and lucky. Yeah.
Yeah.
So so what would that imply about because the third type of black hole that you um infer
is those that are created by technology.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. And and would you would you under the theory that you're developing
Would you expect to see
An anomalous enough black hole.
True James Webb, for example.
That could be
Wow, that looks like it was not created naturally.
If we saw a lot of little ones, yeah, I it's can you see a lot of little ones? Like the the the are they big enough to do any kind of gravitational lensing effect that you would would that we would be able to pick up on. Like if if it's an ever sized
Like oh, it's really not bending that many photons. It's really it's small. Um like Louis Kane is uh Louis Kane and
has done some uh
work on what's the optimum size for small black holes if you were technologically producing them.
Um
And they're they're pretty small. They're kind of you know
Not ever sized mass.
Shrunk to something.
ludicrously tiny. It's just hard to see
Uh
I
That would be
Be detectable.
That's not to say it's not possible. I mean
Down the line.
Yeah, technology gets better and better, but
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah, it I I I wonder too
Uh uh because we haven't even touched on
uh where consciousness enters.
Uh and that is that's
That's been an obsession of mine for decades.
I think I may have to do that in a second book. That complicates that complicates everything so much. What I wanna do with this what I wanna do with the egg and the rock, what I'm doing with the egg and the rock is I'm
I'm laying out
An explanation
Inside all the rules of contemporary science.
For the material reality we experience.
And I'm just e just explaining material reality.
You a self complexifying universe.
That
seems to develop upward into complexity over time, that ekes out its energy
Uh
so as to do that, that channels its energy so as to do that.
To get to living creatures.
Uh and that contains supermassive black holes and stellar mass black holes and intelligent life. And I'm trying to explain all those things.

Surely in terms of material reality.
with no extra physics, there's no no additional physics, no additional particles, nothing.
And
That's enough for one book.
Once you bring in consciousness, it becomes um unbelievably
Different book. And I would
Happily write that one.
after I've written this one. I I think it just it will it will put off too many people if I bring in consciousness.
But you are completely right that the implications are colossal.
If if it
We know consciousness is part of this universe.
If this universe
Evolved from a a line of other universes.
There are also other evolutionary lines.
But maybe far more advanced than us. We don't know if our universe
Is
Uh a gazelle?
Or a whale?
Or an Amoeba.
Aura
Bacterium
Yeah.
It could be a prokaryotic bacterium. We don't know.
We're on an evolution an evolutionary line. But there could be universes
Far w more complex than ours. And if there if consciousness is part of being a universe
Imagine what their consciousness is like.
But can universes in any way
Uh this brings in the horrible problem of can universes
communicate with each other. Can
Conscious universes.
somehow communicate with other universes. Do
Conscious universes care about other universes, yeah.
I don't know, but that's a whole other book and it and it's too big for this book.
I totally agree with you though that these are the
Fascinating questions.
Fascinating question. I've had my own transcendental experiences and I have my own theories on this, but
But um
That's not the book I'm writing this year.
But yeah, yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts? Like throw in some what do you what do you think?
Well I I'm the relationship between consciousness and matter and consciousness and the universe is
Is so profound and again so badly explored by science.
Uh that's you've just uh summarized my view.
Um the idea
that uh the that they're trying to set uh consciousness aside calling it the hard problem.
Right. Yeah. Well yeah, it's a hard problem.
What?
But you can't simply set aside
Consciousness.
Because
Virtually every
What we are doing right now is predicated.
On the fact that we are conscious.
We have no workable definition.
That is
Even
Been proposed.
It's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're we're we're lost. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And and and so I I am absolutely um
enamored of it and have been trying to figure it out. That talk about a route hole, man.
Yeah.
The the idea though that
We just ignore it.
Seems to me to be to be
A bit of an oversight, uh, to say the least.
Yeah.
But it's baked into reductionist materialist science.
You can't put consciousness into the picture.
Even though consciousness is almost all is is always part of the fucking picture. So
It so distorts. It so distorts science.
It's such a distortion. And they're not even
They're not even
Aware of it half the time.
crazy. It it absolutely does. And I became uh absolutely
Uh fascinated with both consciousness and time.
When I started reading a lot of quantum physics when I was young.
Uh because I was fat I was fascinated by it. And now
They're seeing theories that say
Oh, by the way.
Uh because of quantum entanglement, which under Bell's theory, right, everyone thought he was the madman, right? Oh, that's crazy. What do you mean? Uh God doesn't play dice and blah blah blah blah blah, but then they then they proved it experimentally. But now I'm reading about the idea
But
They're they are also positing retro causality.
Yeah. In other words, our version of the future changes the past.
When doing the double slit experiments
And so
Wait a minute. That that kinda calls into question the idea that our
Conception of time.
It seems to me that if that is true, our conception of time is completely fucked.
And we we we need to be a little bit more than very tricky one. Time is very tricky. Consciousness time very, very tricky.
So I I think that they would absolutely uh make a great uh subject for a a second book. You will have me as your very first read. I'll give I'll give you I'll give you I'll give you a highly speculative uh integration of the two right now, uh which is highly speculative.
I'm not putting you y you you can disagree with this and still like a lot of what I'm saying about material reality.
But yeah.
Uh entanglement. Go back to Bell, yeah.
Yeah, good Belfast man.
Um
In entanglement.
Implies.
That
Everything in our universe is fundamentally connected at a quantum level in because at the time of the big bang, it was a singularity. Every it's it's it's coming from a singularity. They were all entangled at the start.
No matter how much you've spread them out, they haven't stopped being entangled. So that gives you a possibility for a kind of cosmic consciousness, for a kind of
A kind of n knowledge of itself.
That the universe could have
That
Mm.
That doesn't
That isn't bounded by
The speed of light because
Everything is quantum entangled. So that the the insight that the the mystics get when they've they've meditated for a few years, the insights that the Buddha had, the insights that you see in the Bhagavad Gita.
Ah, that there is a transcendent
Consciousness that underlies
It all
That connects it all, and that we are just floating.
Nodes, little knots of
localized consciousness, but we're attached to the
The great
Web.
could have completely
Ex
Explainable material roots.
in quantum entanglement. It's quite
Possible.
We're just knots in the consciousness field, which is an entangled
State of
All the
All the atoms in the in the universe.
Because they were all they were all they were all
hyper entangled at the singularity of the big b of the big bang.
And what's interesting, that's the one I'm it' but you talk about that and and you're treated like you're a nut because
Like even though nobody's got a better
Better take on it, you know.
Because we don't have mixed consciousness and screen and physics. What's interesting to me though is you know Schrödinger uh highly regarded in physics uh for many many breakthroughs in quantum
Uh his book What is Life is essentially if you haven't if you if you haven't read it, you should read it.
Because one of the things Schrodinger says is
Uh all minds are one.
Essentially.
Right. And and then you learn, well, wait a minute, he's just quoting Heraclitus
A pre Socratic uh Greek uh philosopher.
And what the other thing I find really interesting is is that that you look into the lives of many
of what the even the the the least scientifically informed
Uh people would know who these folks were, right? Einstein, Oppenheimer, Schrödinger.
Uh Payman, uh, et cetera.
What's really interesting to me is that they all
became devotees
of esoteric and eastern traditions.
Like Einstein.
Yeah, right. When when Einstein died, he had a copy of Isis Unveiled by his bedside.

And Feynman Feynman uh was in no was in no way religious
Uh, but he loved lily tags, which I also love.
uh isolation sensory deprivation tanks because yes he did yes he yeah yeah and he believed that you could
gain all sorts of insights that way. So these uh Oppenheimer, he's quoting the Gita.
When when he's talking I am become deaf.
The geet is the geet is pretty good. I'm reading it again at the moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I really read the documentary is like
I if you've had like profound psychedelic experiences, you you read the G and you go, Oh my God, there's like
This is just documentary realism.
Yes. That is shocking. It's like someone is here before me.
And they do hugs. But but but what's really interesting to me is how getting back to kind of the the the fearful
Um uh
Kind of.
authoritarian view of modern science right now.
The the these guys are your heroes.
And you're just conveniently avoiding the fact that they all went a very different way.
Late in life, pretty much all rationalist materialists have a little bit of a crisis, but they they don't, yeah. It's and they should. They should.
Actually, payment's interesting. I had a
I I I stumbled on something recently. Uh he did his great uh documentary back in nineteen seventy three or something.

Uh on Yorkshire television, because I think his wife was from Yorkshire or something. I used to go there.
And uh it's just this lovely documentary, but at the end of it he's slightly tipsy in a pub.
Uh talking to Fred Hoyle, the astronomer Fred Hoyle.
Yeah, who came up with the theory of
Uh nuclear uh
Stellar nuclear synthesis, the idea that stars made the elements.
And um they're having this great conversation about the future of physics and they're both slightly drunk.
And uh
And Feynman kinda griffs on the fact that every science except physics
Has a story of how
You got to where you are now.
You know, biology knows how how do you get to where we are now? Well, this is the e there's this evolutionary history, and every science has its evolutionary history.
And he thinks physics is the only one that says
TIS THE LAW!
It has always been the law.
And never asked where it comes from. And he's saying that might be the future of physics, that we really discover that there was an evolution, he says it, an evolutionary history.
To the laws of physics. So in the seventies Feynman was thinking, Yeah, you
You gotta explain this thing and evolution some evolutionary history might be the
the solution. I was delighted to find he was on our team.
Yeah, I've a I he's one of my heroes. And uh I was aware of that uh view of his
And I always had the image of uh the great and powerful Oz.
Right. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. And you made me you made you made me think of it when you were saying physics is this is the law.
Yeah, yeah. I am the great and powerful Oz what we need is Toto to pull back that little curtain. Where do the laws come from? Why are the laws like this?
You know. It's a it's a perfectly valid question and I think I think cosmological natural selection gives you an answer.
There's a there's a there's a a a mechanism
Yeah, Darwinian evolution. There's a there's a specific way it could happen through black holes and big bangs through singularities where where we know that the our laws don't work anymore. So you know.
But that's a transition point where you could definitely get a reset that would
That would allow this to happen.
And you and now at this point we've got a three stage model that gives you the evolutionary history of universes and shows how universes could step by step have iterated their way to this point. This is a very good
theory and it's insane that I'm probably the only person on earth being funded to research it, you know. Okay, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Like, do you really want to spend the rest of your life
Doing another failed big tank of Xenon dark matter experiment.
You know, have you looked at the history of some of those experiments?
Like the the one under the mountain in Italy?
That experiment where they started off with like one and a half liters of liquid xenon and it only cost a million dollars and they didn't find any dark matter, so they they buried, you know, three hundred liters of liquid xenon and they only cost you know fifteen million dollars and then they didn't discover anything, and the the result of not discovering anything was they were given another fifty million dollars to bury three.
thousand gallons of salon.
And there's no level of failure will get your experiment cancelled if it's
If it's officially sanctioned by the church.
But there's no level of success that will get your experiment funded. It's not officially sanctioned by the church. It's just the most funny thing. And that set of experiments, by the way, which they funded up to, I can't remember, 70, 100 million.
has now hit the neutrino fog.
They have now they're now picking up their now their their instruments are now so sensitive. This was announced like last week, I think.
That they're picking up neutrinos from the sun through their
Mile and a half of mountain.
Uh, which means that they're never gonna find what they're looking for,'cause their their instruments are gonna be fogged out by the sun's neutrinos. So they've explored the entire possibility space where you could possibly find the dark matter they're looking for. It
doesn't exist as I could have happily told them for a lot less than 70 million dollars.
And they've burned through
You.
Ex
Like
round after round of failed experiment until they're blinded by the fog of the sun
And
That's
That's where people's lives are going.
Yeah.
Join the heresy, guys. If you're an astronomer or an astrophysicist,
Stuck in one of these silos of despair, bail out, talk to me.
Email me, you don't have to do it in public. We can talk privately, but get on, get on, get on the team. There's gonna be a reformation, a storm is coming. You know, cosmology is gonna get turned upside down by this when they finally realize it's an evolved universe.
All of their
Yeah, what's happening here is they are looking
And a sack of chemicals, right?
And they're trying to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals.
And they're using
Really nice simple models to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals. But the sack of chemicals is a dog.
It's a dog, okay?
Dogs
Do things for dog reasons because they involved.
Right.
And if you're looking at
The same sodium and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen.
But it's a dog. It's not just a bag of random chemicals. It just behaves differently. It develops differently over time. Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals randomly chosen?
With random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog.
It grows up, it bounces around the place. It gets more interesting and funny and complicated as it goes.
No.
Yeah.

It reminds me of have you read any of Howard Bloom's stuff?

The
No no no.
The other guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other guy. I think I think you will love uh some of his his stuff.
I think I've been tight a bit, but I definitely haven't read the the the the main stuff. No.
I'm I'm getting the hook from my producers here and we haven't even had a chance to talk about
Literature and all that fun stuff. I I so I will right now invite you I will invite you back on for further and
Of this conversation, but also I want to get into
to tragedy and comedy because I like you
Think that the comedy is a much richer vein to mine, and it's a shame.
That uh it doesn't seem to be so.
If you if you've listened or watched the podcast in the past, you would know that our final question is always
Uh we are going to make you the
Emperor of the universe.
Uh for for one day you can't
kill anyone, you can't throw anyone in a re education camp.
But what we're gonna give you is a magical microphone.
In which you can say two things.
And
Everyone, let's just keep it on earth. Just let's keep it to the eight billion people on earth.
But you're gonna say two things into a magical microphone.
That are gonna uh
Incept the entire population.
They're gonna wake up the next day, whenever their next day is.
And they're gonna say, you know what?
I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times, I'm not gonna ignore them.
I'm gonna act on them.
And I'm gonna see where that leads.
What what two things are you going to accept?
Yeah.
I actually have a very clean, simple answer to this question.
Because when I was uh
A young man.
I was
I it took me a long time to grow up. It really took me a very long time to grow up.
But um
What is the young man?
I I meditated a certain amount and uh and
I had one meditation session.
Where I somehow
Even though it was a very
Uh
Irresponsible, silly young man, he didn't know anything.
I actually went pretty deep.
I actually went pretty deep. I just sat there long enough that even I went pretty deep.
And I heard a voice.
I heard a voice.
And the voice said
Except.
Everything.
And I would like to accept that to everyone because accept everything.
Uh I've
applied it as much as I can and it's really, really good advice. It really changes things. And because I was a greedy young man, I felt wow, I've had this
I was coming back out then after this hearing this voice saying, accept everything.
I was like
It almost lifted me out of the experience.
And I was greedy, so I said
Any else I should know?


added something which I will make the second part of my inception.
Uh the voice added
Do not
Russian your love.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah.
So that's what I'm gonna tell everybody. If if I were the emperor of the universe, I would say accept everything.
And do not ration your love.
Wow.
Those are
Fabulous.
Kind of reminds me of Amor Fate, right?
Uh that that
in line very nicely with Except Everything. Julian, this has been
This is actually surpassed.
My expectations.
Which were very high coming in. Oh that's great to hear. So I love it. Talking about this is I just love these ideas. I love these ideas. Why aren't more people playing with these ideas? Come and play with me.
It's it's just
But why aren't all people playing with this?
It's like this giant lump of gold for purely sociological reasons got left in the road and I get to play with it. It's like please just turn it into something useful, guys. Like come it's this is too much gold for one guy.
Oh yeah. Well I'm writing the book in public on uh a sub stack uh on a website called uh The Egg and the Rock.
Uh the egg and the rock.
Uh is our universe behaving like a an egg or a rock?
Um two views of of this universe.
Uh and the egg in the rock is just the egg in the rock dot com. So come and join me there. Uh you can subscribe to it for free. All the posts are up for free. Some people
pay to help me do it, which is nice. You pay to help me do it, which is nice.
Uh but uh you don't have to I it's all free. I want the ideas to spread.
And uh subscribe, but also comment. You can you can just comment on the site. You can email me, it's my name at
Gmail.
Like dot com. Just email me. Uh you can uh get get in touch. There's all sorts of channels for getting in touch with me. Uh use all of them. I'm on
Twitter him here and there.
Uh talk to me down any channel that you're comfortable with and
Give me your ideas. This is a whole new continent.
Uh to explore and nobody is exploring it. And people from outside the mainstream field can make actually make real contributions. It it's
Unbelievably rich frontier.
Um and but if you're if you're a deep domain expert in any of these areas, like please talk to me as well. I'm talking to a
uh uh um an astrophysicist on on in two days time who's who's an expert in gravitational uh lensing and she's got some really interesting uh
Uh
data on how them the the oversimplic models they're using for gravitational lensing.
Are where they're explaining everything through dark matter because they can't explain why things are so magnified. It turns out that there's just complicated lensing effects.
when you have complex uh
uh gravitational structures like like cluster and superclusters.
Uh and it's all you know, oh my God, there's so many so many things are being missed in cosmology because they they've they've used
Dark matter is a fudge factor to fix everything that's wrong with the
the underlying basis of the theory. We live in a complicated universe that's doing complicated things.
And
We need to
Mm.
We can't keep trying to simplifying it back to up.
to to just a bunch of random gas. It's that's not what we're living inside. That's not what we are, and it's not what the
Uh
Yeah.
great membrane bound strange structure that we're part of that generated us is
We're not an accident at the edge of a simplicity.
We're we're the simplicity inside a complexity that we're completely failing to understand. When we don't understand what we're looking at.
And I think an evolutionary approach
liberates us to see what we're actually looking at.
A living it's a living universe.
We're just the taste buds or the
the the the sense organs of a living universe that is developing, that's coming into knowledge of itself. And we're the point where it's coming into knowledge of itself. We're the point where the universe gets to know.
Who it is, what it is, and what it's gonna do next. It's an amazing moment to be alive.
And to have a dead matter of cosmology with a one shot universe that means nothing at the core of our belief system, it's a catastrophe for humanity that that's the case.
Okay.
That's the
No, that's the classic mic drop, which is perfect. What what what a perfect way to end.
Julian, until I have you on for the second time, I have so enjoyed myself. Thank you so much. It's lovely to talk to some of the guests.
Where I'm coming from and where I'm going to. It's just a joy. It's a joy. I love it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jim.
Thank you.
Bye bye.