there's a sort of startup energy to Scientific Fields when it's just a bunch of guys coming up with a bunch of ideas and that's when all the breakthroughs happen then the startups turn into corporations and you end up with what has happened to practically every science they've gone from startup energy to corporate blow a hierarchy emerges what do people at the top of that
hierarchy do they want to remain at the top of that hierarchy I'm fascinated by where We've Ended up with cosmology you can't say it means anything if you say this obviously means something 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 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 well hello every it's jimo shaas with yet another infinite Loops I have been looking forward to talking to today's guest ever since I discovered him my guest today is Julian Goff he I Julian I don't even know how to I I it's
going to 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 200 16 your nominator I win that no I won a prize in France for it but no one the Irish never quite except they they they right to dead but I have High Hopes after my death no I was
shorted it was great it was wonderful it was all great I love that comment about the Irish that's right we we'll give him the credit but after he's gone yeah 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 four 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 stage play about an EC 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 ome Julian welcome but we're not going to talk about those today we're gonna talk about what you're actually working on right
now but welcome oh good thanks Jim it's wonderful to to be here yeah I i' ever since I discovered you're a big Robert Anton Wilson fan I've been interested in talking to you it's kind Global Community underground community of big Robert Anon 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 circuitous bat a friend of mine had written uh a piece about why people should read Jed mcka the or as I like to call him the fictional character known as Jed McKenna because he is a fictional character that tells us that we're all fictional characters um and that everything is there's no Duality everything is non-dual 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 embi I'm aware of Rick and Wy I'm quite aware of them but I haven't really gone deep I I suspect I might not come back julan if nothing else gets accomplished by us chatting with one another you absolutely must watch the entire because you you
make the comparison about the is actually covering a more Broad and interesting group of topics than any novel that was written recently yeah the first 10 series certainly yeah amazing amazing yeah oh you have such a treat in store for you because Rick 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 heretic uh um locally yeah well you you were you hit some top 10 lists yeah yeah top 10 in Ireland but yeah to be fair if all relatives buy buy a single in Ireland you've got a reasonable chance but yeah in Ireland I would be uh surprisingly well known for a guy who just hides in his room and writes and you are also the writer and residence or have been at Trinity at the
University of limmerick at the University Singapore my God but I I love how you demure and say I just sit in my room and write certainly seem to get around a lot Julian I sat around in Singapore in my room and wrote I was writer in Residence so like 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 spinning on the sidewalk or chewing gum you're much safer in your room I'm I'm sure today I really want to talk 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 engaging in any artistic uh uh Endeavor requires a lot of Courage just just in and of itself right but to do it in public wow for a guy man yeah you but 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 till it done I I knew what I wanted to do and I was very in control of the material and uh well well you 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 reist of the universe the scale of this is so ridiculous I even I yeah I a right writers have an
ego they they you know they're putting their ideas out into the word world they think they're great 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 the ideas get get other
scientists involved who more um you know who are domain experts uh CU I'm not a domain expert here but you know who is it's the universe so um I've I've developed an extremely broad knowledge base over the last decade because I've been working on this book for over a decade and uh but in private for the first eight or 10 years really and it's only in the last two two and a half
years I've 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 no no writer wants to do stuff in public when it's not finished but but I had this moment that unfortunately there was not unfortunately unfortunately turned out turned out great there was this moment
that came up where I realized 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 web 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 going to be online and it was going to send back data and I realized 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 you know found to be accurate or not by the James
web 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 you know I think people will be interested and suddenly I had this I realized the timer is really running on this I got to so I I started
thinking everything through from first principles and I put some predictions up on the uh on substack on the internet and I sent them out to some subscribers that i' I'd built up and 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 the reason you got in you know aesy Ventures
got involved in in the project uh emergent Ventures Tyler cow 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 you know it's it's it's been a wonderful experience but yeah it's very scary I I you have no idea how scared I was the night I put up my predictions online and sent them out to
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 yeah 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 wish I'd
done more of my work in public now yeah yeah rert sheldrick uh who I've had on the podcast 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 world viiew the universe is dead it's a oneoff um is is in ascendency 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 rert 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
70s when rert published his book and he said I have it his name was somatics and he said I have exactly the same right to excommunicate Professor sheld that the pope did with Galileo I remember yeah I yes I know I know I actually you don't you don't know this do you I I I know Rupert um yeah I've 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 couple of years ago a few years ago uh on Consciousness in the universe where we were trying to work out ideas about that and uh but it was the sense that you you had to kind of almost keep it quiet that you were working on this I mean eventually he wrote a great paper on Consciousness uh uh and you know and the
sun uh which was published in a very respectable journal and that but getting it through their their uh peer review process you know they were scared to publish it in a way you know you you there's so many things you can't talk about in public he's completely right and I I really like rert I actually sent him a draft of the new thing I'm writing about uh uh uh structure early 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 here's a funny thing the the theory I'm working on uh cosmological natural selection the first you know scientist to put that out there as an idea in a coherent as a coherent theory
was Lee smallen and Lee smallen you know and Rupert have talked but smallen 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 rert about the universe and that's crazy Lee's a great guy but so is rert 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 I 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 sence the science is always
right that is the anathema of the scientific method the scientific method I think of David deuts as another um the scientific method is question everything these we call them theories and not law you know they do sneak in law a couple of times uh but but they're not laws they're theor and they most of them represent the best guest estimate for what we think you
know the universe is how it proceeds how it was created Etc but but that's what they are they're theories and like Galileo or cernus right why why why did this happen what why did they why why did they assume almost Pope popel likee 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 what's interesting is it's it's some things that Galileo set up when he basically wrote the rule book for science uh at the start was that it was going to be purely mathematical it was going to be just you know the the language of science is just you know angles and lines and it's just going to be purely mathematical and I'm not going to speak beyond the mathematics and 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 Galileo actually got and was turned down and then a few years later Bruno gets burnt you know he gets taken to the field of flowers in Rome an 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 Jered that for a while and then he set fire to like that could have been Galileo and G and he and and that happened to Bruno partly 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 him for so he went beyond the data and said 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 going to go beyond it it's that far seems to be that far away not going to go beyond it and that was a vow of humility that was he was saying there are more important things and I'm going to leave them to the church right there are more important things and that's not my territory I'm not going to step on anyone's toes I'm just going to 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 would tell you were more important than ma the mathematical Sciences they're now seen as beneath the mathematical Sciences it's an extraordinary shift that the only real
truth is the mathematical truths of reductionist materialist science all the other truths you know the the the truths that you get through literature and through singing through comedy through intuition through your it transcendental experience they're AR truths at all inside of mathematical science and it's really it's a 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 you 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 I'm thinking of actually nailing them to the door of the royal astronom uh the you know the Royal astronomy uh building in uh Greenwich uh right on the line that divides the world into you
know time zones and thinking of nailing it to the door I think that might get the point across I think we need I think we need dramatic actions here to pull into U because I think the way they'd react would be delightfully um uh papal you know I think they need to get a few more little pokes to to because they they don't but they don't understand they don't understand the
like the the humility of science because humility 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 roote to truth that's not humility anymore you know it's very I agree with you on this strongly agree with you yeah it's it is in fact the height of arrogance and I
think one of the things through all the rabbit holes I uh Dove 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 domates as as Robert Anon Wilson would call us we are domesticated primates yeah 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 get through to and and to see it done in the name of supposedly objective science I know the scientific method 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 B who
wrote about the implicate and explicate order order yes was me to be a communist according to the hups in Washington and they told Oppenheimer who had been a supporter of bombs no no no no no no no you you he's a commi he's a commi 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 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 you know over time and they that's keeps happening you know there's
a sort of startup energy to Scientific Fields when it's just a bunch of guys some gals but historically was a lot of guys uh coming up with a bunch of ideas and there's like a hundred people know about this in the whole world and they all me 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 you need to go back to like Paul uh foyer band was it uh
wrote uh against method the book in the 70s saying 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're just expanding The Horizon a little expanding The Horizon little because what often happens is you've got a an unexamined assumption underlying the entire field that 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 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 who 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 we basically happening in theoretical physics because that's where the idea that I'm playing with came from but it was shut down by other people inside the field of theoretical physics for sociological reasons it you know because 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 smallen comes along and says um I think there's this other approach that using this stuff called evolutionary theory that comes
out of this thing called biology that none of us [ __ ] 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 SpaceTime membrane and maybe evolution is the
explanation of that and he came up with the pretty good basics of a theory and it got shot down by a bunch of string theorists were completely sociological reasons because it it because it messed up it was going to mess up their Primacy 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 specific domains can make better predictions about the early Universe than the mainstream that's crazy you know it is indeed I I'm I'm a big proponent of the power of uh uh markets and and what one that shows a lot of Promise in my opinion is all 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 whatever reason uh Annie Duke is a friend of mine and and she gave me the shorthand puristic which is if you want to see how some much somebody really believes in something that they're
saying all you have to do is look at them and say want to bet and and she said all of a yeah you 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 Cedar as peribus is never happens other things remaining equal no they're they're never 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 us 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 and what
happens when the underlying ideas 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 palmes version of the cosmos right the tmic universe right with all of its with all of it Circle it epicycles and everything andus 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 center of the solar system but it was also 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 Tommy right the tmic 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 was me to be king the popes were infallible in matters of religion because God told me and then when cernus 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 on in how we see our elves in our political structures yeah yeah yeah absolutely and you know the the challenge is I'm also a fan of Charles Dodson better known as Lewis Carroll uh who who wrote uh about this extensively um if you haven't read his
very short piece what the tortois said to Achilles I recommend it because it plays into agrippa's trilemma or the muken trilemma which says that essenti logic is has three problems that you cannot surmount the first is it's often circular and uh the second is it 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 and then you keep going and going and going and and then you finally get to the one that I'm really interested in which is the planted axium in all logical systems which creates dogma and that planted Axiom is this according to Carol when you get all the way down in a logical
system what are you going to find you're going to find a base rule an axiom that a human simply asserted was true of course with with no proof with no proof right and and so the you know again to our mutual mutually admired Wilson the wrong software guarantees the wrong answer right yeah if if if you keep feeding things into the wrong software it's going to 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 which goes back to you know you know Newton whatever it goes back to [ __ ] Galileo there's this unexamined assumption that the Universe the r well the r universe is a is a one-hot universe that it's master
in it is just random matter 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 know you end up treat just trying to treat the entire universe as though it you can just 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 aade simple gasel 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 1978 like it's it's the 70s you you punk was already pasted its Bloom when we discovered that the structure of the universe is nothing like what we addtive
because that's the first time we got 3D maps of the universe it's the first time we actually did a proper red shift uh survey of how fast galaxies were getting away from us and we realize holy crap there's huge voids between these galaxies and there's these huge structures you know 80% of the universe has nothing in it like essentially nothing in it it's like 80% of the
universe 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 matter in the universe is is gathered in just these nodes where the Clusters and superclusters of galaxies which are connected by filament and they but they only take up the nodes only take up about 1% one or two% of the
of the volume of the whole universe the other 18 20% 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 1978 we discover oh up until that point they were assuming that
the galaxies were all spread out analogous to just random molecules of gas in simple gas laws that's a big mistake you know and and there's no humility when they when they realize oh we have been completely wrong about the structure of the universe what what they do is they try to get it back to Simplicity by just throwing more Mas at it and you end up with this using dark
Mas to solve every problem so you've now got now 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 then it can't exist you you say well maybe it's like this because that solves this
problem maybe it's like this that solves this problem and you have this completely incoherent response and 50 years of dark matter we still haven't seen any we have no detections we still and we still don't even know what kind of stuff it is is it aons is it sterile neutrinos is it an unknown particle of some kind you know it's there's it gets less defined over 50 years of
Investigation rather than more which is exactly the opposite of what should happen in real science in real science 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 they 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 where matter just obeys arbitrary law but they're not that everything's fine-tuned 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 so you and me talking to each other through Advanced Technologies in in in in abstract
language and while we're doing this we're doing it inside 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
you know 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 it buys you the time for life to develop an evolve and so forth the everything like the fact that the molecules that make up you and me exist is down to multiple rounds of star formation building out the
elements then Distributing them 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 happened to bump into itself under arbitrary uh laws and it ended up doing this by mistake is so [ __ ] stupid and to did 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 gas it happens to interact in strange ways but they're not looking down the other end of the telescope there's a 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 complex ification 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 and scared of the you know everything that the and the church and everything else that 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 its evidence of God it's the most ironic paradoxical situation I'm just I just love it 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 and I I'm familiar with it from Lee smallin work uh in the 90s I think uh when up with that but as you point out I also want to
just make it aside what you were talking about oh the answer is dark matter it sounds a lot like throwing more epicycles into the tmic uh Universal model doesn't it right and the thing is you can you can do great with a lot of enough epicycles 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 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 10 11 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 you know 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 that crazy but but now now let's take a step back and and because you you extend uh Small's work uh yeah by making predictions by yeah doing a lot of things that he didn't do with
that theory but if you and there's good reasons why he didn't there's been more data since like 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 yeah exactly and didn't have the James web um and all of that but it let's let's give a Layman's definition of the theory uh of
cosmological natural selection and and then I'm going to go into some of the specific I 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 think it's what 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 labors and 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 hav ended up with this complex world or their earlier failed worlds right uh and then Darwin comes along and he comes up with a theory of evolution but he comes up with the theory of evolution for living you know for DNA organisms for biological organisms it comes up with it at a time when the assumption is that the universe is infinite and eternal
like that's the the basic scientific assumption is 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 the Great American pragmatist philosopher thinks wait a minute this is interesting
because 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 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 thought maybe they somehow evolved inside this universe you get into the 20th century and suddenly we had this weird moment it wasn't a moment it was dragged out over a long time it took us a long time to work out this was the case but you end
up with this this transition from the infinite Eternal Universe which we've always assumed to be the case under science to the discovery of the big bang and you know it's a slow burn because you know they discover the galaxies are flying apart lettington discovers that and that's really freaky then they disc discover realize the implications of
that are they fly 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' 60s 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 uh and it expanded from that you know 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 and now I think it's 13.8 billion years and it's as big as it could expand in that time but that's just a bubble of SpaceTime it's not infinite it's not Eternal that should
have really made cosmology astrophysics astronomy they should have all gone back to their absolute basic foundational beliefs at that point and examin 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 in those Sciences where they're kind of assum assuming in some ways that everything's infinite Eternal 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 13.8
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 could Square these various circles is very complex Universe we live in which is very recent was Lee smallen Lee smallen was a let no I'll actually go back to uh a mentor of his uh John Wheeler John Wheeler at this point realized there
John Wheeler is 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 [ __ ] happens at that point we not none of our rules work at that point when you get out the
singularity general relativity doesn't apply anymore we can't do a quantum mechanical exclamation 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 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 has 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 SpaceTime 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 the singularity
that expands to form 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 universe is outside the parent Universe it's not inside it it's it's gone so that was a 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 there's enough random differences you'll end up with a complicated Universe like ours okay it's not a great explanation but he's groping towards something but one of his students or one of his uh well one of the students influenced by him was Lee
smallen very good theoretical physicist and Lee smallen realized because he was reading a lot of 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 and 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 the The Offspring that child universes that produce more black holes will have more
offspring that line of basic parameters of matter will be be varied on again some of those Offspring will produce more some will produce less uh and you'll get run away you 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 limited amount of food or
anything you're generating a whole new SpaceTime from scratch each time that's one of the really interesting things about our universe which gives uh gives you let's say Clues towards the fact this might be an evolved thing our universe is essentially flat it's it's the the the mass energy and the gravitation energy balance out to zero you could make this universe for nothing
right um and that if that's the case you could universes can produce huge numbers of Offspring for free so and 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 ability to make very uh productive fun to your universes and our universe produces has well so far it's probably produced
something like 40 quintilian black holes yeah that's the latest survey they think that we've probably got about 40 quintilian so that's a lot we produce a lot of black holes and and that was kind of Small's idea that that you would get you would basically get the basic parameters a matter of fine tune to produce more and more black holes and if that required more complex structures
over time you'd get more complex structures that were better at more efficient at producing black holes uh and it's a great Theory and I I'm really um upset that that that it wasn't taken more seriously at the time and given more of the community's uh attention and budget but what happened was sociologically Pro 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 100 guys and all they're interested in is quantum gravity right that's it h 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 I I
I've been rereading it and I used to be harder on it 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 and it's too weird and he's not sure and so on and so on then the book didn't and then when people did start to and it
was before the internet when he published that paper like that that journal didn't go online for another six years so nobody could stumble on it you know it was it was on 100 print copies in 100 libraries in the quantum gravity section like you're not gonna find it by mistake you know so the the the nobody's 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 the main string theorist and that try to put it down there's a there's a an online debate between the susin and smallen on the edge still still up there and you can see them arguing back and forth about about cosmological natural selection and susin uses arguments against the theory that are completely
wrong but nobody notices because they're all theorists so they're all physicists you know so he he his basic argument against smallen was if universes evolved to uh to optimize for Black Hole production they would produce the most black holes you could possibly produce that's a mathematic mathematicians 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 now translate this into terms of War familiar with it you can see how stupid this argument is 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 right so clearly giraffes were not optimized by Evolution for reproductor success that's a that's a that's a theoretical physicist's idea of an argument right because you have to have 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 [ __ ] do it can you uh so 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 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 course it's on if you change them by very much you do not get complex structure you don't even get atoms right it just you just get mush um and in any if you any randomly chosen set of parameters you're nearly always going to 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 it the theory wasn't there yet though I mean you interrupt at this point and and ask any questions or anything are we good keep going you're
out of roll there was there was some development of the theory uh by people who thought there's 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 it's just logical uh was by people like clemont Vidal he's a very
good u a Belgian philosopher of Science and he he's worked on uh 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 Louie crane he's an excellent mathematician in Kansas they a few people worked on this thinking but you have to explain life why would you
have life in a 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 and I worked a little bit with with some of the guys on this the 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 uh a fish a bacterium they all optimize their energy so that they don't die so 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 as as David deuts would say anything that doesn't break the law of physics eventually we're going to 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 release in our universe that's realistically uh tapable 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 42% of the of the mass of a piece of matter into energy 42% that's an incredible uh rate of return uh Fusion in the in the sun like Fusion reactions only give you 7% of the mass back as energy fishing you know the Nu you know primitive nuclear bombs fishing will only give you uh 0.1% of the mass
backers energy so 42% is unreal and any technologically advanced civilization is eventually probably going to technologically produce small black holes for energy production because that's the best you going to get and any universe that Accidentally In following blindly following the uh you know 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 previous to life so you'll have lots of Stellar Mass black holes Stars will die and form uh black holes but you'll also get far more technologically produced black holes far more efficient reproductive
success it's going to 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 h it didn't happen at the
time because we didn't know enough about super massive black holes and this is my contribution I think to the to the uh to the theory okay um there's a super massive black hole at the core of every Galaxy okay we've got a very very roughly a trillion galaxies in our universe and every one of them see that we've looked at in any detail seems to have a super massive black hole
at its core now a supermassa black hole is really big uh they range in size but they're super Massa 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 it's 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 holes in a trench coat lots of Stellar Mass black holes in a trench coat that they you get a lot of Stellar mask 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 their billions of sons 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 going to come online the James web was going to show us the first billion years okay uh which we've never seen before um because I realized that if you super massive black holes in our universe they are probably conserved
from an earlier era of universes because the early imagine the earliest most primitive universes where you didn't have complex matter you didn't have 90 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 ological life the earliest life forms were procaryotic bacteria all they did was reproduce they they they would split into whatever they 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 going to 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 would some you it's just earliest most primitive matter flip-flopping between Big Bang black if you eventually get one that 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 by direct collapse no intervening stars or anything complicated no technology No Life direct collapse super massive black holes all they're doing is is splitting into several parts that collapse that's all they're doing that is direct collapse super massive black hole production if we have super massive black holes in our universe they won't Evolution will not
have invented a whole new complicated way of making them it would have conserved the original way of making them which was direct collapse no intervening bunch of stars or galaxies needed super massive blacks 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 in occurrred to
um was okay that means that all the super massive 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 you know or you know millions of 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 there'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 localized nucleation into little stars the whole area can collapse and form a by direct collapse of super massive black hole interestingly enough the mathematics on that had already been done about 18 years ago by uh Prieta ran of Yale uh astronomy department and a
few other people I think B uh vulker Blom and even ay lobe a few like heavy Heavy Hitters were involved in in realizing that you could actually technically in our universe get by direct collapse super massive black super massive black hols but it was a theoretical Oddity nobody expected to find lots of them it was just like under very difficult to you very precise
conditions it might might be possible my prediction was the conditions that allow for that are going to 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 because you can't nucleate out Stars when it's that smooth right but you can do direct collapse super massive black holes so I predicted what you're going to see what the James web will ultimately see when it sees back far enough is a a huge wave very early on in the first 50 million years 100 million years definitely inside the first 100
million probably inside almost certainly inside the first 50 million you're going to get a wave of direct collapse super massive black holes a trillion of them the the number you see in our current Universe they all form then and you and they are then going to generate the conditions for Star formation conditions are optimized for super massive 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 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 super massive black holes so as they form they gas Falls in it's ionized so it's turbulent it falls closer you get a hot bling Hot Donut of
gas called in thetion disc around the super massive black hole and those generate then intense magnetic fields they dynamos they're incredibly powerful dynamos and they generate uh Jets of charge particles that go north and south out of the magnetic poles and they shock the surrounding gas and nucle those shock waves 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 drift 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 that's not what
you're going to see you're going to see early rapid Galaxy formation dominated by super massive 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 super massive black holes and I I don't think anybody
else predicted that I have not been able to find anyone else who predicted uh precisely that but that's what we're seeing okay and so for my much more simpleminded 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 that's
what creates St star yes and then the Stars 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 for 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 super mive black holes some of them would have left some matter over that matter would have explored the possibilities space you 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 you would have had supermassive 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 super massive black holes so that's a
big revolutionary breakthrough in The evolutionary history of universes more reproductive success they explore the possibility space they get more efficient at making Stars smaller therefore making more Super more more Stellar Mass black holes star size black holes uh interestingly one of the things that you uh have in stars that makes them so efficient and you can therefore
make smaller ones and they can build out uh more matter 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 and
then technologically made black holes but you can see what's happening here you have a you have 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 uh and it forms it it performs a function that couldn't have 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 the the classic example in biology is um uh swimbladders swimbladders are the are the air sacks in fish that help them go up and down keep their buoyancy keep their level in the water we goes in air goes out and they they they stay at the
height they want to in the water because it's otherwise otherwise they have to swim very hard so a swimbladder of there helps the fish do that swimbladders were what 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 swimbladders to form the lung the basis for the lungs
likewise the CNO cycle in in Stars with you know carbon nitrogen oxygen they they evolved um to help make stars better at making little star black holes star size black holes but the next breakthrough came on top of that using carbon nitrogen 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 helan breakthrough um you can build on the on the previous complexification the previous more complex uh structures that were developed 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 is a is an evolutionary breakthrough
that happened at a different era each has been conserved each builds H because it's built on by the next one right so our universe you see super massive black holes they Evolved first 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 siiz black holes of which there are hundreds of millions more than there are supermassive black holes because there's hundreds of millions of stars in in the average Galaxy which only has one supermassive black hole and hundreds 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 and be re even more reproductively successful at the level for the for the universe that we're part of and and I'm saying that the developmental process you see in our universe 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 sure it would also posit literally trillions of exoplanet 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 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 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 life is going to need liquid water more than it needs anything else liquid water seems to be the the the the the most necessary chemical uh you know there's liquid water on the surface of the Earth great uh 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 icy 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 go a bit
fur they're a bit further out at this 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 every time it goes closer and further away it's tugged 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 10 20 30 40 m of ice you then get to a a liquid water ocean
that gets warmer and warmer the further closer to the core you get and that has nutrients coming up into it from the from the from the mol molten Rocky core right so it's got the nutrients for Life coming up H it's got a massive liquid water ocean it's protected by an incredibly thick shell of ice that's like and ice at that temperature is like steel it's harder than steel right 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 that that St 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 siiz planets have moons icy 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 is on the europ is 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 horrendous environment Venus got cooked by uh Greenhouse gases and it's you know it's raining sulfuric acid Earth is doing fine kind of 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 oceans
have evaporated and and its entire uh uh atmosphere has blown away there's only one out of four have been able to hold on to life of the four rocky plets and have been able to hold on to liquid water all of the icy moons are hanging onto 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 uh way of generating life but I it looks to me like evolution is optimizing for liquid water oceans on icy moons and that that brings us right back to the well-known fmy Parx right uh which is yes H for those who don't know and I would guess that virtually all of our listeners and viewers know about the
FY Paradox but if you don't it's like okay if this is all true where is everybody come I'll come 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 what what
what are you going on about here Nick and then he makes the point that he posits 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 fery where where where do they figure into this Theory it's a really good question uh because I am predicting lots of life in this universe so where is it I think this what I've just describe 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 100 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 there there would they ever dig through the ice 100 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 they're not I can't see space fairing 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 but 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 and the other factor is the the the chemistry is just colder it's G to 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 in a huge number of uh uh you know galaxies I don't know I don't 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 lives that could be underneath those uh 100 miles of ice are are like the people in many respects I'm calling them people God knows what they
are uh but but sensient beings let's put it that way yeah that the censed beings in these uh environments where they have no start they have no rocks hitting them they're under a 100 miles of ice they're essentially not gonna ever get the idea hey should you think we should kind of like drill see yeah keep digging the trouble is that that they're
digging up it's there right it's harder for them like if Direction the the natural direction for them to dig in is down like work with gravity but that's towards the core of their Rocky uh you know that's the mol towards the mol core they could I'm sure I'm not saying they're not going to do it I just I'm just trying to work out what's the logic it's it's G to be such a different
reality I don't know how they're gonna navigate it what's in I also don't know 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 what's the mass if if they're using small black holes energy sources this is another thing small black holes anchor you like nothing else like if you're Maj
your energy source is a small black hole you ain't accelerating anywhere it's you everything your parasaur has the has the mass of Mount Everest you're not accelerating it so it really slows down space trap like 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 accelerat yeah 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 we're early and lucky yeah yeah so so what would that imply about because the third type of black hole
that you you uh infer is those that are created by technology right yeah and would you under the theory that you're developing would you expect to see an anomalous enough black hole through James web for example that could be wow that looks like it was not created naturally if we saw a lot of little ones yeah it's can you see a lot of little ones like that are they big enough to do
any kind of gravitational lensing effect that you would would that you would be able to pick up on like if if it's an Ever siiz black hole it's really not bending that many photons it's really it's small um like Lou Kane has uh Lou Kane 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 pretty small they're kind
of you know down sized Mass shrunk to something ludicrously tiny it's just hard to see uh an effect that would be detectable at the moment that's not to say it's not possible I mean down the line you know technology gets better and better but yeah I don't know I wonder too uh because we haven't even touched on uh where Consciousness enters and that's that's been an obsession of
mine for decades right I think I'm going to have to do that in a second book that's that that because that that complicates that complicates everything so much what I want to do with this what I want to do with the egg in the Rock what I'm doing with the egg and the rock is I am I'm laying out an explanation inside all the rules of contemporary science for the material
reality we experience and I'm just just explaining material reality you know a self- complexifying universe that seems seems to develop upward into complexity over time that EES out its energy uh so as to do that that channels its energy so us to do that to get to living creatures uh and that contain super massive black holes and Stellar massive
black holes and intelligent life and I'm trying to explain all those things Sheely 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 a unbelievably different book and I would happily write that one after I've written this one 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 we know Consciousness is part of this universe if this universe evolved from a line of other universes there are also other evolutionary lines Minds that may be far more advanced than us we don't know if our universe is uh a gazelle or
a whale or an amoeba or a bacterium you know it could be a procaryotic bacterium we don't know we're on the Evol evolutionary line but there could be universes far more complex than our and if there if Consciousness is part of being a Universe imagine what their Consciousness is like but can universes in any way uh like 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 I don't know but that's a whole other book and and it's too big for this book I totally agree with you though that these are 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 some what do what do you think well I I'm the relationship between Consciousness and matter and Consciousness in the universe is is so profound and again so badly explored by science that's you've just summarized my view um the idea that they're trying to
set Consciousness aside calling it the hard problem right yeah well yeah it's a hard problem but 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 around yeah we're we're we're lost yeah yeah yeah and so I I am
absolutely uh enamored of it and have been trying to figure it out that talk about a rabbit ho man like yeah oh 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 and but it's such a but it's B into reductionist materialist science you can't put Consciousness into the picture even though Consciousness is almost oh is is always part of the
[ __ ] picture so it's 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 ra it it absolutely does and I became 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 F 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 a Madman right oh that's crazy what do you mean right yeah 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 that they're they are also positing
retrocausality 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 kind of 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 [ __ ] and we we we need to time is 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 second book you will have me as your very first reader I'll 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 put You can disagree with this and still like a lot of what I'm saying
about material reality but you know uh entanglement go back to Bell yeah good belf fast man um 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 knowledge of itself that the Universe could have that 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 they meditated for a few years the insights that the Buddha
had the insights that you see in the bhat Gita uh that there is a Transcendent Consciousness that underlies it all the connected all and that we are just floating nodes knots of localized Consciousness but we're attached to the the great web could have completely explainable material roots in quantum entanglement it's quite possible that we're just we're just we're just
knots in the Consciousness field which is an entangled state of all the all the atoms in in the universe because they were all they were they were all hyperentangled at the singularity of the big of the big bag and what's interesting that's the one but you talk about that and you treated like you're a nut because like even though nobody's got a better better
take on it you know because you're not allow mix Consciousness and and you know what's what what's interesting to me though is you know Schrodinger uh highly regard in physics 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 shoener says is uh all minds are one essentially
right right and and then you learn well wait a minute he's just quoting heraclitus a presocratic uh Greek uh philosopher and what the other thing I find really interesting thing is is that you look into the lives of many of what even the the the least scientifically informed uh people would know who these folks were right Einstein Oppenheimer schroden Jer uh fman uh Etc
what's really interesting to me is that they all became devotees of esoteric and Eastern Traditions like when Einstein yeah yeah right when when Einstein died he had a copy of Isis un bailed by his bedside and binan binan was in no was in no way religious uh but he loved Lily tanks which I also love uh isolation sensory deprivation tanks because yes he
did yes yeah yeah and he believed that you could gain all sorts of insights that way so these Oppenheimer he's quoting the ga when when he's [ __ ] I become death the G is the ga is pretty good I'm reading it again at the moment yeah yeah I documentary it's like if you had like profound psychedelic experiences you read the GJ and you go oh my god there like this is just a
documentary realism yes that shocking it's like whoa someone was here before me and they took notes but what's really interesting to me is how getting back to kind of the fearful kind of authoritarian view of modern science right now 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 you it's and they should they should actually fam's interesting I had a I I I stumbled on something recently he did his great uh documentary back in 1973 or something 75 uh on Yorkshire television because I think his wife was from Yorkshire or something he 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 Hil the astronomer Fred Hy who came up with the theory of 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 fman kind of riffs 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 there's this evolutionary history and every science has it evolutionary history and and he's saying physics is the only one that says this is 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 70s fman was thinking yeah you you got to 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 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 odds 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 think I am the Great and Powerful Oz what what what we need is Toto to pull back that little curtain pull back
the curtain yeah where did 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 mechanism you know 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
our laws don't work anymore so you know 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 what the [ __ ] is wrong with these people like do you really want to spend the rest of your life doing another failed big tank of Zenon Dark Matter experiment you know have you looked at the history of some of those experiments like the one under the mountain in Italy
that that experiment where they started off with like one and a half liters of liquid Zenon and it only cost a million dollars and they didn't find any dark matter so they they buried you know 300 liters of liquid Z on and it only cost you know $15 million and they didn't discover anything and the the result of not discovering anything was they were given another $50 million to bury 3,000
gallons of Z on and there's no level of failure will get your experiment cancelled if it's if it's a officially sanctioned by the church but there's no level of success that will get your experiment funded if 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 nutrino fog they have now they are now picking up 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 going to find what they're looking for because their
their instruments are going to 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 and they've burned through you know 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 you know 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 going to be a Reformation a storm is coming you know cosmology is going to get turned upside down by this
when they finally realize it's an evolved Universe all of their you what's happening here is they are looking at 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 evolved right and if you're looking at the same sodium and carbonate 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 [ __ ] 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 the dog so right it reminds me of have you read any of Howard Bloom's stuff not the the literary no no no this is yeah yeah the other guy I think I think I think you will love some of his his stuff I think I've read a tiny bit
but I definitely haven't read the the the the main stuff no 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 so I will right now invite you I will invite you back on for a furtherance 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 if you've listened or watch the podcast in the past you 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 reeducation camp but what we're going to 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 going to incept the ire population they're going to wake up the next day whenever their next day is and they're GNA say you know what I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the
other times I'm not going to ignore them I'm gonna act on them and I'm G to see where that leads what what two things are you going to incept I actually have a very clean simple answer to this question because when I was a 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 when I was a young man I I meditated a
certain amount and and I had one meditation session where I somehow even though I was a very uh irresponsible silly young man who 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 I Heard a Voice I Heard a Voice and the voice said accept everything and I would like to incept
that to everyone because except everything I've applied it as much as I can and it's a 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 it's com I was like it almost Lifted Me Out of the experience and I was greedy so I said there
anything else I should know and the voice added something which I will make the second part of my Inception uh The Voice added do not ration your love oh I love that yeah so that's what I'm going to tell everybody if if I were the emperor of the Universe I would say accept everything and do not Russian Your Love wow those are fabulous kind of reminds me of Amore fat right uh that
that falls in line very nicely with accept everything Julia this has been this is actually surpassed my expectations which were very high coming in oh that's great to hear well 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 just like why are more people
playing with this it's unbel 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 this is too much gold for one guy take it and tell our listeners and viewers how they can get in touch and play with you oh yeah well I'm writing the book in public on uh a
subst on a website called uh the egg and The Rock uh the egg egg and The Rock uh is our universe behaving like 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.com so come and join me 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
paid help me do it which is nice uh but uh you don't have to it's all free I want the ideas to spread And subscribe but also comment you can you can just comment on the site you can email me it's my name at gmail like.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 I'm 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 to explore and nobody's exploring it and people from outside the mainstream field can make actually make real contributions it's it's it's this unbelievably Rich Frontier um and that if you're if you're a deep domain expert in any of these areas like please
talking as well I'm talking to a uh U 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 data on how the their the overs simplistic 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 clusters and superclusters uh and there's you know oh my God there's so many so many things are being missed in cosmology because they they they've used dark matter as 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 it we can't keep trying to simplifying it back to 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 the the great membranebound 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 of complexity that we are completely failing to understand 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 going to do next it's an amazing moment to be alive and to have a dead matter cosmology with a One-Shot universe that means nothing at the core of our belief system it's a
catastrophy For Humanity that that's the case okay that's the that 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 someone who gets 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 for