When people talk about AI, and they say AI is going to kill us, let's ask ourselves for a second what do we mean by AI and life and stuff. Life is matter that tries to perpetuate itself into the future by active acts of replication and evolution. Matter that solves problems to ensure its own survival is unique to living systems. So we have origin of life, instinct, consciousness, abstraction, and the ability to be intelligent. So for me, they're all connected together on one lineage. Now, human beings have created technology, and technology is another lineage in evolution—technological evolution. The ability to imagine things in your head and go, "Oh, I'm going to make that car," or "make that car," or "do this experiment," or "that experiment," really makes evolution very rapid.

So when we start to talk about AI becoming sentient, that's actually not correct because the AI has not evolved on that lineage. It's kind of taken a side sweat. AIs cannot exist without humans. This is where the AI doomers are just making stuff up. I mean, you mentioned earlier you walk us through, you know, the big bang, and they eventually get to Earth—it's 4.2 billion years old, approximately life forms—but like, do you believe in God? Do you think there's something above it that we can't scientifically explain at this time?

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You don't have a lot of opinions; you've only been here like a half hour. You seem like a very unopinionated kind of guy.

Never thought about anything, just going with the flow on all of it.

Exactly as I say. I have no opinions, no views.

What was that line you said though? I like that you said you have strong opinions, but they're loosely held. Is that right?

Strong opinions, very weakly held. It confuses the hell out of everyone. Where I'm saying we're going to do this, it's really great. I've thought about this; this is the thing we're going to do, particularly with my research group, and everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, Lee said it; we're going to do it." And then the next day, I'm like, "No, that was loopy." They're like, "What?" So, well, I got some new evidence; I got some new data. So I like to have a strong conviction, go for something, and as soon as someone explains to you why it can't work and convinces you, gives you the information, then rather than resist, right, flip as quickly as possible and try the new thing. I think, as I've noticed, a lot of smart people get stuck. Yes, they get stuck in this kind of hysteresis where they are unwilling to change their mind. And that's my other Winston Churchill quote I was going to tell you was like, you know, someone who hasn't changed their mind, doesn't change anything, has never changed anything, right? So you have to be willing to change your mind.

Um, it's very strange though, because we're kind of living in a world where people try to hold you to a tweet that you put out 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Where everything is so literalized, and yet, you know, forget science for a minute, we'll get there, but with everything, I think it should be exactly what you said, which is that you get new evidence on things, and then you should be willing—it's not to say like, "Oh, let's be a flip-flopper on everything"—but you should be willing to be like, "Well, that's better evidence, so I've changed my mind," and people shouldn't be able to say, "Well…" For that, I totally agree. I think the internet has really hyped that up, and I mean, I try to be consistent, you know. People get me, particularly the creationists who love me.

I was on… they love you. They just love me. I'm obviously their new Messiah, right? Probably shouldn't say that, but who cares? Um, they're probably offended now. It's like, "No, no, you're not creationist enough for us." I, I, I gave a TED Talk, TED Global, and I was presenting work on inorganic biology, and Chris Anderson asked me at the end, right, this is like years ago, like 13, 14 years ago, and I said, "Well, I'm going to make inorganic life; we're going to prove that aliens exist," and all this stuff. And he said, "Well, how long do you think it will take you to do it?" And I said, "Oh, it'll take about two years," right? Two years, two, two years. I mean, but what I, what I say is, once I understand the mechanism, and the fact is, I still don't understand the mechanism. So everyone says, "You said you would, you would solve the origin of life in two years," and I was like… and that's not exactly what I said, but okay, fine. Um, you know, and of course, I don't know. If you asked me the question now, I'd give you a different answer, but I think um, what you could take from that answer was incredible enthusiasm and motivation to want to solve it. And I think one of the things I want to be trying to do is not have pretend problems—that are—choose a problem that's so hard that it's always 10 years away, and you can never make progress on. I want to solve the problem, and I think to do that, you have to be willing to change your mind, and and uh, this idea that you make a statement and that statement is infallible is… it doesn't work. And so this whole idea that we have on social media—say you said this, and and or you, you uh, but you now change your mind—um, and therefore you're a bad person, or we can't take you seriously—that doesn't make any sense. Like, people need to change their mind in the light of evidence. In fact, we need to praise people who are willing to take new information and shift their position. That's the only way that humanity is going to get better—by this kind of trial and error—"Does that work? Oh, that doesn't work; I'll try that one." Yes. And so, and I worry that the internet has actually slowed down our cultural evolution because we're basically going back and saying, "You said this; therefore, it's invalid; you're an invalid individual; we need to cancel you now because you said you had this opinion." I mean, how many opinions are you going to have right now that in 30 years' time our culture is going to deem absolutely unacceptable and retro, you know, and and cancel you in the present for something that was, was normal in the past?

Sure, makes no sense. Yeah, hopefully we'll get through that.

I hope we do too, because like I was saying, it's a society-wide problem that's kind of infecting everything. It's interesting that you say the internet is making it kind of anti-evolutionary in the sense that we're going backwards with this because it should be a tool to where we have open-source data and we can evaluate way more, but this seems to be a problem where—I, you know, I always cite this in so many contexts, on all different podcasts, with all different people—but like in the physics law of life, for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction, which is supposed to create what? Equilibrium. And you know, the way you can create equilibrium could be an action that has a pendulum like that, or it could be like that, and society feels way more out here—for people listening, watching, I'm holding my hands way wider—society feels way more out here. So what happens is, forget even changing opinions when new evidence is presented, people kind of find their meaning in the groups of people who will join them around maybe one idea, and then they'll start to introduce a bunch of new ideas as well that say, "Because we think this, therefore we all think this," and God forbid you disagree with that, well, now you're not a part of the community.

I think that's really funny. That's a good analysis. I'm, I'm arguing with some people, um, you know, some of the theories we're developing are leading to new conclusions, and there is a certain community that, say, loves David Deutsch, right? David Deutsch is a fantastic scientist and philosopher, and he has these—let's not call them teachings—but his fans are teachings, right? And so one of his teachings is on critical thinking, um, and then there's these doctrines, there are these statements that he has made that the fans adhere to, and then when you question those, those statements, the fans go crazy and troll you, and they're not critically thinking. And I think it's quite funny. I mean, I shouldn't pick on David; he's brilliant, but I think it's a good example where you've got people pretending to be scientific and pretending to think, but actually, there's as much of being in the in-crowd as possible. And I think that um, it's hard, right? Because people try and build their brand on social media, so they've got to build their brand for a particular thing, and they can't back down.

Yes, I think that's hard, right? I mean, the problem, you know, like say with one of my favorite theories, assembly theory, it's quite possibly wrong; in fact, it's almost certainly wrong, but it's probably less wrong than a lot of other things. And so people are like, "Are you worried if it's going to be wrong?" I'm like, "No, no, no, I'm worried if it's right," ah, right. As a scientist, the default, of course, it's wrong, but it seems to be less wrong than everything else, and it helps us go further. But if it's right, holy sh… like, like it explains how chemistry invents biology. Yeah, I want to get, I want to get there because I want to really go through that theory today, but I kind of want to build up to that to give some, some groundwork, but on, on that point of you even making the theory, which we'll talk about later, you know, that's interesting that you say you hope it's wrong because as someone who is very much not a scientist, I always look at science in particular as the battle to eliminate things, right? So we look at someone really famous like Albert Einstein, you know, modern, more modern famous scientist, he was so smart, and he introduced all kinds of new ideas to the world that, that some of which have been disproven to this point already, and others are going to be disproven. It's like, "Oh, you know, 300 years from now they're going to be like, 'Einstein was wrong about all this stuff,'" but him—like the weird part about science to me is that him bringing those things to the forefront so that other smart people to come after him could look at it and and crowdsource it and analyze it, critique it, and come up with new ideas—is where we get closer and closer and closer over time to what, you know, the meaning of this whole thing is, which is what science seeks to, seeks to solve.

I think the process of—I mean, it's like, "I hope it's going to be wrong," right? What I mean is, I want to, I want to know how the universe works, and for me, there are—what I've been taught was correct—doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and therefore I want to then say, "Well, what, what is going on? And what is that, that doesn't stand up?" Oh, I mean, the, the, the fact that we live in a timeless, un… there's lots of things like, we live in a timeless universe, that physics is deterministic and explains the entire… I don't have any free will because of superdeterminism, right? There's all these things we can get into. And so there is this thing where my everyday experience and what I'm taught, um, or what I was taught, those few occasions where I was actually in a class being taught, um, didn't, didn't seem correct to me. So I just used to basically just act out and say, "That's clearly false. Why are you telling me that?"

Why did it seem incorrect to you? Like it sounds like you were thinking that when you were really young.

Yeah, I mean, like I think most people only have one idea, right? So I mean… but I have one idea, but no one's realized that I've only ever had one idea, and and so this one idea is kind of along the lines of, um, understanding the—we'll get to it in assembly theory—but understanding that the universe is, is a process of a history becoming the future via the present, and and so, and and and that is a like a continuous stream, and it's you can't opt out of it, right? You can't opt out of time; you are in time. And so ever since I can remember, like, you know, first walking and talking, I was fascinated by the fact there was stuff going on around me, and I wanted to understand why that was. Um, but but going back to this kind of being wrong and having opinions that you shift, the only way you can interrogate reality is by looking at the reality and asking questions and trying to solve a problem, or or or have an outrageous idea that clearly is going to be incorrect, but maybe it's not going to be as wrong as you think. You know, I was speaking to my research group last week. I talked to a student who wanted to talk to me, you know, via some organization called the foresight nanotechnology. Sounds cool. And yeah, they were cool, and I, I talked to the guy, and he was saying, "You know, I've started a research group in the US." I'm like, "Oh, that's great. What are you going to do?" It's like, "Well, I don't know. I kind of like people." I was like, "I hate people." He's like, "What?" I like, "Well, no, I don't hate people; it's just like…" What I mean is, it's really hard to do science, um, um, on your own, but also with a team it can be fantastic, but you've got to line people, and you've got to kind of get them, um, onside and motivate them, and also they have to believe—you have to have some shared values. And I was talking to him; we cooked up this amazing project, and uh, he was telling me his interest in a thing called non-covalent interactions. So this is non-covalent interaction, exactly. So this is where molecules don't bond, but they rub off each other, so they, they have different solvents in water, in alcohol, whatever. So I was brainstorming with him; I said, "Look, why don't we just take all the different Chinese tea and extract them, like using dry-cleaning fluids—that's, we like chlorinated solvents—and just extract all the natural products and and then hack around with them and see what's there." I thought was a cool idea, anyway. Told my research group this the next day excitedly; they were like, "That's a really rubbish idea." And I was like, "Why?" He said, "Well, it's not going to work." I'm like, "Of course it's not going to work; that's why we should do it."

Why should we only be doing experiments we know they're going to work? If, if we only do experiments are going to work, then in your head you've already done it. Pick things that aren't going to work, as long as they're not dangerous or stupid, and try them, and then I think we'll, I think we'll have a lot of fun extracting Chinese tea. There's so much Chinese tea in the world, and maybe you figure out something along the way you never thought… I thought we might… you… I don't know; I just made up… I sound, sounded good fun for me for the day, and my team were like, "No, what are you talking about?" Yeah, it's… you know what it is, it's, it's funny—maybe, maybe I'm making a little stretch here—but it's kind of similar to the, the Ed Sheeran creation theory. You ever hear him explain that, like how he makes music? He shows two faucets, and the first faucet on, you know, the left side of the screen has a bunch of coming out of it, it's brown water, right? And the second faucet looks sparkling clean, beautiful water, and he explains how you've got to do hours of this when you go to sit down to create, to get to this over here, to get from dirty to clean. And I think when we… it's something we run into in, in the, in the back here too, when we're, when we're afraid to try certain things and we're like, "Oh, that's not going to work," but you kind of have to… you can't worry always about what the instant results going to be or if people are going to laugh at you because if you're not… like the old quote, if, if the all the shots you don't take you miss, you know what I mean? So, you know, even if you're doing something there that's like a little bit of a joke, sounds like rubbish to use your word—that's British, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Sounds like rubbish and everything, like… maybe you get something from that, and maybe it leads to… you know, the 10 people working on your team, one of them then is inspired to think about something else, and and now you get somewhere you didn't think you were going to get.

Yeah, I agree. I think being a, being willing to go to a place where you are personally vulnerable, intellectually vulnerable maybe, and just try it is a lot of fun. And I think a lot of people, you know, they say, "It's okay for you, Lee, you can do this." I'm like, "What kind of magic?" Well, you're a professor now. I'm like, "Sure, but I didn't just wake up one day," um, I've, you know, and changed, right? I've always been this person where I basically just done random and go, "Why does that work? Let's try…" You know, I remember when I had my first train set, and um, my mother wasn't, didn't, couldn't really, didn't really cope with, with my, me and my brother very well when younger because she, she was, I think, depressed or something, so we used to get kind of put to bed really early, like at 4 p.m. something. And I remember in my bedroom I had my train set, and I was like, "Got this train set; what's this box here?" So I yanked the wires out, bypassed the transformer, and connected the train set directly to the, uh, to the mains.

How old were you?

I think I must have been about eight.

Wow. Seven or eight. And I just like… I've got a screwdriver. I smuggled the screwdriver 'cause when they locked the door, so I was in my bedroom, my brother and we're like, "We're going to take this apart." So I took out, so took out the transformer, connect the DC correctly in there, and then what happened was the train… it had this big bang, and the train literally leapt into the air and hit the roof. So I think it must have been a huge kick on the motor 'cause AC had 240 volts AC into a motor that probably was a 12 or 24-volt DC motor, smacked into the ceiling, made a dent in the ceiling, and tripped all the, tripped all the fuses.

How did you know to do that at eight?

Well, no, but I, I was told I had to use, I was told I had to use the train in this configuration. A… I was like, "There's wires here; what is this thing for?" And I was like, "I'll just remove it and see what happens." So that's a kind of… that's, that explains me. I'm like, "Why does this thing here… what is the principle this needs?" And now, now obviously I understand there's this thing called alternating current, and you need to transfer into direct current, but like when I was seven years old, like, "What's this? Take it out. Boom!" And that was my modus operandi, and it's been my modus operandi ever since. The fact that I made it into academia, um, I think I try and encourage everybody to basically ask random questions—"You know, what would happen if I did this? What would happen if I did that?" And then when people dismiss it and say, "Well, it ain't going to work," I'm like, "That's a great reason to do it!" Yeah, right? Because then how does science make progress? I mean, science makes progress if you try things playfully, if you try and solve problems, and if you try and ask questions. I don't know of anything else you can do, right? And maybe it fits into the Ed Sheeran, um, kind of creativity thing.

Sure. It's interesting though that you kind of come at it in some ways from both ends, like you're a longtime academic and very much in that world, very much believe in that world, but you've also witnessed within that world—even including on some of your own stuff—where people do… there is a, a bit of a groupthink that comes in among smart people who seem to decide that like you can't ask certain questions, or "This is stupid; we shouldn't pull on that thread more." Was that something that you saw early on in your career as a growing problem, or is that something that's more of a modern phenomenon to you?

No, I think it's been there all the time. And also, one of the things that disappoints me occasionally with my own research team—I've got a brilliant team of researchers who work with me—and of course, I have… they don't… I don't think they really believe it when I say, "You have strong views, and they're weakly held." And then the people come to me and say, "Oh, I want to do this thing, but I know… and you told me that it wasn't a very good idea." And I'm like, "So…" And they're like, "What?" Like, "Well, did I tell you you were not allowed to do it legally?" They said, "No, I just said I didn't think that was a very good idea." But I'm not doing the work. Yeah. And they were like, "What?" I was like, "Go for it! Go and do it." They're like, "But you said…" No, I said no. If I'm saying no, you'll know about it. I, you know, I'm paying you; I'm the line manager; I've got to make sure you're safe and everything is legal. If I'm not saying no, and if I'm just saying, "I don't think that's a good idea," that should inspire you to go, "[ __ ] I'm going to try it; I'm going to prove you wrong."

So you're one of those guys who like, you want to be tough, but you expect people to be tough back to you and and kind of be the same way?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I always encourage people when they're like a bit sheepish, going, "I need to convince you." I'm like, "Why do you need to convince me? Did I say you could not do it? Did I say there was no money to do it? Did I say that that was…" And they're like, "No, no, no." It's like, "Why have you not done it already?" They're like, "Because you wouldn't like it." I'm like, "Sure, I don't like broccoli some days, but I'm not telling you you have to make me eat it, right?" And they're like, "All right." So I think there is a challenge, right, that I have to be able to tell people I have strong views, yeah, but then there's a challenge for me—how do I make sure that people that are culturally impaired by those strong views—they've maybe come from a background where they were absolutely punished, and maybe bad things emotionally and physically happen to them if they disobeyed the rules—whereas it's a complete opposite where if you kind of disobey—whatever that means—as long as it's an intellectual disagreement, dis… dis, you know, disobedience—not a, um, professional disobedience—like don't commit murder, don't set bombs off in the lab, don't make methamphetamine—like that, just don't do that, right? But everything else you should be able to do. And so I'm, I'm working very hard actually because I think it's a failing of mine that um, perhaps I don't understand how conformist people are because I have been an absolute anarchist since I was five years old. If you would tell me not to do something, I would do it instantly.

Since you were five? Yeah. What was the event that catalyzed that?

I, I can't… I think comprehension. I mean, when people said no, I was like, "Ah, you look angry, and you're saying no, so therefore I'm going to do it." Yeah. So just a, just a rebel without a cause, early. And now you've got a cause. Um, I think that um… I, yeah, I mean, the problem is trying to understand how… I, I, I've spent some time with, maybe in mainly in conversations like this—people say, "Well, how, what the hell are you doing? How did you do this?" I'm like, "Well, we can post-analyze it, but…" Yeah, I, I, I think that getting people's attention by making them…

Not a yeah, angry or making them worried is probably quite an interesting thing to do. Because then you're looking at what are your constraints, what are you concerned about? Why can't I do this? Why can't I connect my train set to the mains? If they all went well, because your train set requires direct current and there's AC current, and there's a very strong chance you're going to give yourself a very nasty electric shock. I like, oh yeah, I don't want to do that. Now you got a reason. Yeah, yeah. Then, then obviously I'm not like kind of trying to be an anarchist as in a, you know, B, literally burning things down, but I'm an intellectual anarchist because how can I build first principles in my head if I'm not allowed to interact with the world in a free, playful way? And that's what I've always done, and it kind of disappoints me my kids don't want to do that. My kids are like, nah, I'm just going to, I've got this like Workshop where I've got oscilloscopes, I've got electron guns, I have I, I can 3D; it's safe. I got I got they could like they no, they're not interested. So all I just build random in there, and they're like that. So they're not into science at all. No. How old are they? 18 and S go going 18 and 16. Oh, so they yeah, this isn't like they're like five and they might grow, they've decided no, they, they were serious individuals. What do they want to do? Um, I don't I so I, I they're incredibly incredibly interesting watching them. Um, they're incredibly so I think my my eldest son's going to be some kind of entrepreneur, I guess. I don't know, he's got a talent for spotting um uh kind of things in the market, and also he's very critical. He quite good; they're both very critical, but I think they just kind of I think they think it's that yeah, probably I shouldn't even been talking about them on the podcast because they're going to get upset. No, it's all good. That's cool. He so they got they got aspirations, and it's just it, it sounds like they're using some of the some of the skills you have just in a different medium.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I never I never, you know, I think I wasn't one of those parents that basically wanted said you have to become a a chemist or a physicist or whatever. I was like, just be interested in something, please. The people that are interested in things in the world have nicer lives in general, I think. So simple, but so true. So true. And what, what about you mentioned your mom was like a little distant, but like did your parents did either of your parents kind of encourage you with science at all, or was it really born out of that one event with the train?

They didn't. My mother was just very, I mean, my mother's great, but she was she was she's a um she was fearful that I was, you know, I kept bu I bought I remember I bought a soldering iron, a soldiering iron. Yeah, yeah. You know, like for for taking up electronic components out of old pcbs. Sure. Um, and I and I bought one from a second for a second hand St I think I was like maybe nine, and she was like, you're going to burn the house down. I'm like, I'm not going to burn that; it's a freaking sold IR. What am I going to do? Like, she leave it on and burn it down, and she used to keep hiding all the tools out a mess. So so it was kind of funny. Um, but I've just incredibly curious, and I would take everything apart, like any everything. They have the sad thing is I would take things apart, and they would never work again. It's only in my later years suddenly I can actually put things back together. I was like, oh, it worked. You know, I fixed so many of my kids iPhones over the years. I'm like, now we'll just buy a new one, but I used to be out completely restrip and you would do it. Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. Um, but so I think um they didn't. My father obviously s not obvious. My father was encouraged my curiosity. My mother worried about my curiosity. Um, and I would just but my parents were separated were divorced actually got separated divorced when I was like 9 years old. Um, and I live with my mother. Um, so but she wasn't she didn't do anything bad. She was just like scared that I was going to kind of injure myself or burn the house down. I mean, I did burn the house no the G the garage down. Oh, that's nice. How'd you do that? I I was I was trying to um uh I wanted to manufacture some CO2, like you do. Sounds like a normal childhood, and it got out of control. I wanted to make a laser, a freaking laser beam. I wanted to make a CO2 laser. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, and so I just set a fire, tried to filter the S out of the fire and set fire to the filter, then set fire to various other things. It caused quite a lot of damage, but I put it out. It was fine. It was just like anyway, it's was pretty stupid. How old were you when you did that again? It was all like when I was between seven and like 11 years old. And your mom let you keep it was a [ __ ] catastrophe, right? That's probably why she locked me in my bedroom because otherwise, well, that's where you have the train set so you can still do some work. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Oh my God. Were you were you good in school too? Like, did you gravitate towards professors in school and teachers in school who in school science?

I was um put in the remedial class, really. Yep, because Y and I was in the learning difficulties class until I was 18. Till you were 18? Wait, wait. All right, this doesn't add up. Well, I mean, I whenever the well it does like a teachers used to tell me to do stuff, and I would say [ __ ] you and do something completely different. Okay, so it was more of a punishment to put you in those classes? No, no, no. I think that I think they had legitimate concerns. Um, I can't remember really. I I I always felt so I was I was determined to be a low IQ um when I was I don't know, maybe seven. I couldn't read or write, according to the teachers. My handwriting was bad and all this stuff, but I could read fine. I was reading books like I just didn't want to read their stupid books, right? So so you had to go towards your interest. So the nice thing is I got put in classes because I was um, you know, low IQ, and so they were like, well, we need to get you to read and we need to get to do some basic math and nothing else needed. You didn't need to do anything else, right? So then that obviously meant I had all this free time. So I used to go to the library. I used to Bunk off school. It was what do you say in America, bunk off? Like um like truant. Oh, hookie. Hookie. All right, because I I get yes, I play hookie all the time and then just go secondhand shops and Buy electronics goods and and go and go the chemist, the pharmacist where there was this great pharmacist I Used to Know used to give me um chemicals which I used to set fire to. That's cool. So yeah, so I had a so basically probably not legal. No, I think it was fine, a pharmacist giving a kid a bunch of chemicals to set fire. I was building survival kits. He gave me Condes crystals, Condes potassium perate for water purification, but also it's quite good; they're quite good oxidant so you can set fire to glycerol with them quite nicely. Okay, so yeah, so I used so I think that's what happened at school, and then and I just I didn't really realize that I had to do well at school to get to University, and then when so you still wanted to go to university? I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but then when the teachers were like, what you're going to be a scientist, you're not going to get any qualifications, you're going to you're going to you're need to do apprenticeship and you're going to need to, you know, so that was that was a that was a long time ago. I thought it was quite amusing. That's interesting though that you were open about wanting to be a scientist, and you clearly had interests at home that would point to you're on to some things that your mom could certainly talk to your teachers about, but they it's almost like I don't know, I'm reading this from the outside, but they didn't take enough of a curiosity in you to kind of put two and two together and maybe help you on that path earlier than they did.

Yeah, I think the the UK has got a fantastic educational system and a terrible one at the same time. It's fantastic in that you can fail at school and still get to University, right? Because I mean, if it was in China or in Japan or Singapore, I'd be like, you know, I don't know, cleaning to although there's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. I'm sure there is a happy Japanese man who cleans toilets, right? There's a good documentary about this guy. But um, I think I would have been pretty screwed. Um, but um yeah, I don't know. I mean, it was I was kind of embarrassed because I was like um told I wasn't very smart, and and they said, look, being interested in science is not the same thing as being good at science. Oh, wow. And I was like, oh yeah, [ __ ] and then same with mathematics, right? Because I wouldn't do mathematics their way, and I was like, but that's that's a stupid way to do math. I've got a much better way to do math. I I don't like that quote. I don't like that what they told you at all. That's like saying it's cool to Love Your Heroes but you're never going to be one. Yeah, yeah. But that's but that was I think that they were like so confused, right? I I remember, you know, that was probably one of the most profoundly disturbing events in my life, actually my entire life affects me every day still, but in a good way, cuz like, you know, when I went into Academia and everyone and you're not your your your your experiments are [ __ ] your paper [ __ ] your theory [ __ ] and I'm like, yeah, I know been hearing it for like the last 40 years. Yeah, and they're like, but is it less [ __ ]? So I I so I think for me the preparation for at school um for Academia was quite good. Yeah, and and also I could do what I want. I did it from first principles. I remember trying to like measure the charge on electron, and I was like, I kind of didn't in the end. I gave up, but I kind of got somewhere towards toward that aim, and I like to do first principles thinking, and I was like, well, I want to measure these things. I want to understand how they work, and the int to understand how it works in my own mind. Because when you're teaching someone, you're giving them a bunch of facts, you need them to build a mental architecture, and so that mental architecture like it's a bit like if we talked about gravity, you know, gravity is a really interesting thing because Newton didn't suddenly invent gravity. Newton is like, huh, well, there's this, you know, maybe that Apple did fall on his head, but it clearly didn't, but just say did. So there's his thing, so everyone knows that things on earth, right? It's and he suddenly was able to make a generalization. Galileo was busy looking at moons of of in the solar system, and so these moons moved around each other and have played the same law that Newton kind of come up with, and suddenly everyone's like, huh, well, there's this thing that's going on locally on Earth, and this things seems to be going on far away from Earth, and then suddenly bit by bit the mental architectures people built, and this is why I think it's very interesting in science to be good at being wrong because Einstein of course is wrong, but he he's the best at being wrong so far, like, you know, general relativity and relativity is like fantastically been has has, you know, I think um it hasn't failed any hurdle. Okay, and so but of course it's not the final story because the the the problem we have in quantum mechanics and gravity, right? But both quantum mechanics and relativity aren't reconcilable at the moment. They have to be adjusted in some way. So somebody has to come up with another mental architecture. Yes, and so I think so what I really enjoy doing is uh when I was at school and then when I was also um um just playing with things it's like why why do things work? How do they work? Yes, so I spend all my time taking things apart and then never working again or taking bits out and seeing what would happen and you know whether it's a mechanical device or piece of electronics or trying to think about how electrons and things worked. I was obsessed with physics. I wanted to be a I wanted to be a physicist. Then I wanted to be a mathematician, and then I realized I was in the stupid class.

So you're saying you got the chemistry because the other two were off the table? Yeah, basically. How did you get into if if if you were in the remedial classes all the way to 18, everything like you said it's at least possible in the UK to get into University, but did were there hurdles you had to do to? So I think in the in the UK you have examinations when you're 16, and I did reasonably well, and though I I I hadn't been I did those exams, and I did much better than everyone thought because um um because I was interested in it. So uh and there was like there was some complicated kind of course requirements, but I passed them, and then I went to the um another, you know, the next stage which called a levels, and then I was in the kind of bottom stream at a levels as well, and so they were like, you we don't really think you're going to pass your A Levels either, and I was like, you know, so they wouldn't let me do a level maths, which I still think was hilarious, but in the end, I convinced them, and I did chemistry, physics um and design and Technology where I basically the guys that ran the design and Technology a level were like, we have no clue what the [ __ ] you're building, but it looks cool. So that's how I got the guy scool because I built a wind tunnel. Um, a wind tunnel. How'd you do that? Well, I wanted to I was interested in aerodynamics at the time, and I was interested in turbulence, so and I could set fire to smoke bombs and put them in a con container and watch the air go over an eror foil. So I built a wind tunnel to do that, and I wanted to look at different eror foils next to one another, you know, how they could adjust how when you produce turbulence at one Leading Edge and it goes onto another one, how can you then convert that turbulence into smooth air and vice versa? It's almost like the three dot body problem, and it never worked properly, like everything I built, but I got an A. Oh, you got an A. And so and and then I passed chemistry and physics and which meant I could go and do chemistry at University, but not physics. I would because I needed mathematics. Oh, you needed that? I needed if I wanted to do mathematics or physics, I would need them, and they were like, what you're so bad; there's no way you're barely going to go to chemistry. But chemistry, I mean, to me, maybe it's just a Layman on the outside, like physics, chemistry, and biology are all so important, and they and they all explain everything that's around us, so it almost never made sense to me that like one would be harder to get into than the other because they're all complex in their own ways, you know?

So I think that's right, and but I think the issue with with the schooling system of course I'm if you don't have a b basic, it's a bit like um being able to read and then write in mathematics. If you're not able to write down and solve um problems in algebra and geometry and maybe complex logic and set theory like you would probably do an a level, um then how are you even going to do this at University? Whereas I wanted to go to university and say uh I don't think numbers exist, and they were like, what? I was like, well, all right, Terrence Howard. No, let's not do that. I know. And so obviously abstract numbers exist, but what I mean is what is a physical instantiation? Like, where do you see integers in the natural world? And of course, humans built this system, and then we can have one of something and two of something, and actually the concept of zero. Hey, I was just super interested in understanding because I wanted to understand why we were here. Yeah, and how what is it about our reality that basically makes life work? I figured that being a mathematical physicist was probably the root to understanding the universe. Sure. However, I think I I got off lightly because I probably would have been a very frustrated physicist or mathematician. Why'd you say that? Because they're completely trapped by um the current ontology of physics and Mathematics, like string theory kind of stuff. Well, string theory is kind of an aside, but I would say no. I would say that since Newton um and llas so Newton basically you had these nice Laws of Motion MH and L LL went, huh, if I was like a superb brain, it's a Super Brain; it's like some bit anyway, we'll come to that if you want. Um, if I was God and I knew the position and and velocity of every particle in the universe, I would know what was going to happen for all time. This deterministic view of the universe, well, that is wrong, like it's provably wrong, right? Right now, even though some hardcore physicists will say no. Why is that provably wrong? Well, I can I can take a system, a biological system or sorry, I can take some chemicals, and those chemicals whether they are so a cell is still chemicals. I could take some chemicals, some sand, and I could take some really simple stuff, and I could show that the simple things I could in principle simulate what was going to happen in time, but then when I get to a certain level of complexity that I could not simulate what the damn thing was going to do next, and that biology seems to be able to mine a novelty from the future, mine a novelty from the future. That's a very very pretentious way of saying biology seems to be capable of creativity. What is creativity? It basically is able to do things that you were not were not in your priors. Yes, and are not expected from your priors, and you're like, holy [ __ ] where did that come from? Yeah, right? Like Mak sense. Like, you can see this in art and culture all the time, you know. Wasn't there a guy who went to the Guggenheim who basically ate the banana that someone strapped to the wall? Yeah, there's worse ones than that. I like that's kind of interesting, right? It's like, who would think of doing that? I'm going to go into an I'm going to go into a museum. I'm actually going to eat the exhibit that I mean, okay, people will say that's not an Act of Creation; that's an act of vandalism, but I would I would disagree actually, or maybe it's both, but what I'm saying is coming back to the point is that biology seems to be the only place where that shows that the universe is open-ended, and that open-endedness doesn't work with Newtonian physics; it doesn't it doesn't, and that I would think had I become a mathematical physicist, I would have been trapped in that ontology in Academia, and I wouldn't be to say because then I would have sounded like Terrence Howard. Now, of course, Terrence Howard is an Extreme example of him just saying things that are, you know, are demonstrably incorrect with ontology, and what I mean is we have this ontology of mathematics, or if I'm hopefully I'm using the word in the correct term, we have the axioms of mathematics, so we can can know we can quite confidently say that we all agree that 1 plus 1 is 2. Yes, right? And one and and and so on and so forth where Terrence was like, no, no, they've been lying to it; it's actually this. I'm like, yeah, I think it was like one times one can't be one. Yeah, action; it's like an action times another action cannot not create. I'm not going to speak for Terren, but but all I'm going to say is like I in in the way we do science and technology and we communicate with each other, we we like definitions are quite important because if we hold those definitions clear then we can then then we can have a reasoned argument, whereas I think that what Terrence was doing was just generally making [ __ ] up, and it's okay; it's all right; he's allowed to do that, but then but then by saying, oh, Academia is like, you know, ignoring me; it's like, no, no, we're just you're just it's gibberish. You can't take the this is this is where I'll take Academia side. You can't take one Leap that is demonstrably provably completely false and then maybe have 10 great leaps after that that have some evidence behind them and pretend that the 11th level got somewhere when the first level means that the building was never built. You know what I mean? I think that I mean, Academia is quite good. I mean, Academia side doesn't matter, right? Inside there are people all the time that do great things in their lives, and then they do crazy thing. I mean, like, you know, take I don't know, Rudolph Giuliani was a great was a great I know I didn't think I was going to mention his name, little blow here in New York, but he was a great mayor at the time. Yeah, he was a great may; he was a great May, right? And I mean, certainly I was inspired by him, right? 9911, corruption, and all this stuff, but then the end of his career was outside outside that that that porn shop with his with his faked hand coming off his head, something like that, and I was like, you know, so people are people, but going back to the point um physics and mathematical physics is like um and I'm clearly an outsider, and I'm I don't think I have any necessarily of shattering to add to physics, but I am not going to be disallowed by asking the question if I answer the question in a reasonable principl way and I listen to criticism and get take that back. We should have a lot of fun in science because you can have people coming from the outside to say, look, physics doesn't explain biology; isn't that weird? Should we not adapt physics so explains biology? For sure, I would think the three have to ex physics, biology, and chemistry have to coexist exactly. And so and right now all that the laws that we have the universe that we know does we can predict a lot of interesting things from the formation of St Stars, galaxies, and heavy elements, but we can't explain the formation of a cell. Now income the creationist and say ha, you know, God did it. You sure? But let's let let's assume our universe does have some regularities, and let's assume let's just take God from inside the universe and let's say let's position God relegate God to setting up the universe. Let's try and understand how the actual Universe works, and I think that's something that we, you know, I try to as a scientist if you see what I mean. Just ask questions consistently within that. So that's a lot of fun, and I think that becoming a chemist for me was the best best thing that ever happened. I had a lot of fun at University. I met a lot of interesting people. I I realized I wasn't as dumb as I thought, but I wasn't that smart either, so I, you know, I really had to kind of work hard. Um, but for me, first principal thinking got me through my chemistry degree and then got me to my PhD, and I had a lot of fun, and I'm having a lot of fun right now. I'm you seem like it; it's good fun being stupid.

Is good fun. You see yourself as stupid, the [ __ ]? Well, I mean, so-so, probably not. That's not—I mean, maybe that's a bit too pro-self-priority, but I I understand that I don't understand, and that's exciting. Because if I can just make a step where I can understand a little bit more tomorrow than I did today, that's that's cool. That's the reason to live, right? Yeah, see, that's not stupid though; that's that—that, to me, is actually the opposite; that's smart, because you're W—you're will—you're open to the possibilities.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably more productive talking to people. My own insecurities are are some are re-irrelevant to some things and relevant to others, right? Because everyone—people feel insecure in science and in their positions and things, so it's good to talk about that. But actually, if that becomes like—if that kind of stops you from acting because you're fearful—one of the things I'm not afraid of—right, this—when people say like, "Lee, you can get away with it," sure, I I—but it's not that I'm—I'm not breaking the law; I'm not running around naked; I'm not, you know, not being offensive culturally, um, you know, inciting hate or anything like that. I'm just making you feel uncomfortable because I'm asking questions that you are asking in your head, but you are not brave enough to ask them, and maybe you should be braver. Maybe society needs people in science, in academia, to be asking these edge questions—not all the time, because if we're all like just asking like that, you know, I have to do—um—what I would say normal science a lot of time, and that doesn't mean that normal science is bad.

What do—yeah, what do you mean, normal science? Normal science is like, I just need to do bookkeeping; I need—I know that that experiment is probably going to work, but I need to get the data; I need to get the data to make sure it's safe, right? I need to make sure I got made my molecule; I need to make sure that it's not giving out too much energy—textbook stuff. I just need to—I need to do some of that because it's just good housekeeping, right? And and occasionally I can then go off on one and like, go, "Okay, I'm going to do this other EXP, and I think is super interesting, but I don't know what's going to happen." Yeah, and I think you have to be willing to move between those modes. I think some people in academia look down on the crazies, and some people who are being more creative look down on the tech—more technical side, and I think that that is not the right way to do it. Good technical work allows you to build a foundation where you give—you—you buy yourself some time if you like to try the new thing. CU—that's how we make advances, and and in science, advances are often in plain sight, right? I used to say to my students when they're pouring something down the drains, like, "How many Nobel prizes are in that you're throwing away?" And they're, "What?" I was like, "Well, you've got this failed experiment; you're washing everything away—how many Nobel prizes in there?" Like, "What are you talking about?" It's like, "Well, what question can you ask that's going to change the way we think of looking at the system?" Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button; it's a huge huge help. Thank you.

See, the way that you behave experimentally, internally with your team is awesome, but you guys still take everything you work on there, and then you have to put it into the peer review process and into the academia process, and it's fair to say that a lot of people in academia, unfortunately, don't think the way you do; they're not willing to try these things. This comes back to the kind of the original point we got off on this on maybe a half hour ago, but like, how do you—how do we get—and we can apply this to society too, but let's focus on science with academia—how do we get academia back to a place where curiosity leads the way and not—and not, I guess, like their own form of decorum, if you will? Um, so I think academia is like—anyway, it's a bit like if you look at people who in the music business, right? You got some people that are pretty good at producing stuff that you know it's not going to—it's not going to change the the culture; it's not going to change the vibe, but it's kind of okay, right? And you need it; you need—you need some notes, right? You need some sound. Um, in academia is a bit like that. I don't think academia is fundamentally broken; I do think there's some problems, right? In that—um—so the question is how do you—the question you ask is how do we get people to be more curious, fundamentally?

Right, basically yes. Well, now I think good mentorship—one of the things I try to do with my team is I try and reassure them that what we got to do is just ask questions and reward each other for asking really interesting questions. Of course, when you're doing a PhD, you need to publish some papers—excuse me—um—and then—and a postdoc, you want to get a job, and we kind of have this strange system where you've—this produ—this need to produce content at an ever-increasing rate sometimes kind of dos down, and the—and—and also, you know, you've got these teams where they have these ideas and they're almost—um—perpetuate like viruses, so you have a one field that basically just perpetuates itself, and it overtakes all of one sub-area of chemistry or something like this, and I just say in my team like, "You know, that's great—they'll burn out; you have to all get money, right? From the area, and so what you should try and do is you want to become a deep thinker and a deep specialist," right? So there's three—three things I like to ask of a scientist to do: be good at something deep, just so people know you—you can do your—you can be good at something; be a good collaborator so you can work with a team and do cool stuff; but then allow yourself to be batshit crazy. The perfect researchers for me are deep thinkers, willing to do deep work, willing to collaborate, and willing to have a crazy day. And what I try and do is get them to—you can't—but you can't do all three of those at once, right? You can't just be a collaborator because they don't have no content, yeah? And you can't just generate content and not ever tell anyone, and you can't be bat [ __ ] crazy because you won't get anything done. Yeah, right, right. So you need those three things—kind of—for me, that's my formula, if you like.

Um, the incentives in science are a bit odd. We're living in a really interesting time in human uh—uh—human advancement, that arguably our ability to do science and increase the amount of information in the universe in humanity is absolutely vital for the future, and we are in a perilous place.

Um, perilous place? Yes, because we're basically demonizing academia. Academia failed, and there's all this waste of money and what's going on in the US and cuts in the UK, and I'd say, "Hang on, whoa—let's—let the fact that human beings are allowed to think and do experiments and generate knowledge is the thing we must support more than anything. Knowledge generation is going to create and has created a future that is wealthier, safer, happier, more fun," right? And so we've got this problem right now where we have this culture whereby we've got this culture of not understanding post the second world war and COVID and the crash in 2008 and where we are right now, where you know the US has kind of gone inward, Europe is kind of defending—where we should be saying, "All these smart people—no, no, we—we—we want you to—we want you to—" in the same way being a teacher or working the healthcare system is a fantastic thing to do; you want people to want to generate knowledge, and so we're kind of messing that up just now, and that really annoys me. And not everyone has to be publishing in Science and Nature and getting Nobel prizes, right? We need to allow people to do their thing, and we want to allow people to work close to industry and far away from industry; you need it all. And okay, academia isn't perfect, but actually there's a lot of cool stuff that's going on. I don't know what's going on with the cultural stuff in the US just now; it kind of scares me that the administration appears to be—um—weaponizing the cultural shifts in, you know, liberalism and whatever it is, right? The—yeah—where we got this—you know—where academia—in academia, you want a bunch of anarchists—intellectual anarchists—to do crazy stuff and to not break the law of course, right? And and to do things that you might find intellectually offensive, right? Okay, and I like to intellectually offend people. When you're offended—you—you would never do that when you're—if you're intellectually offended, that's fantastic. Now your response could be, "You're just wasting my time because you're talking garbage, and I don't want to do that." I don't want to waste people's time; I want to provoke them into thinking. It's like, "Tell me why I'm wrong." If you can get someone who is smarter than you to tell you why you're wrong and give you their time, that's a very precious thing to be able to do. But so I try and do that. But going back to academia, academia it is—is—has its problems, but they will be resolved as—as all—if the world came together, you know, China, the US, Europe, wherever—everyone—Africa, India, the South America—everywhere came along and said, "Look, you know what? We're going to agree that we're going to put our knowledge into a big database in the sky; let's call it the internet, and we'll peer review each other's work because it's quite good to actually not put junk out there. And then what we'll do is we'll take that work and layer on that, and then we might publish it in more higher impact journals because that's interesting, and then funders will say, 'Oh yeah, I want to build a quantum computer or a fusion engine or this or I want to cure cancer; I want to make something or bind to RNA to stop um mutations are getting as you get older to cause dis-cellular dysfunction—that would be cool,' right? These things will happen. But I think right now we risk losing a great deal of time because we have some weird stuff going on in technology—weird stuff—the AI Bros—the AI gods that we have right.

Like, who are the AI Bros? I mean, like you've got the people that are saying that we're all going to be killed by AI, like, "Y user," and exactly, and you—other people saying that AI is going to literally become the super greatest intelligence ever and solve everything. Both those things are wrong; they're just—they're both wrong; they're just demonstrably wrong. Let's take—well, because so—um—AI is not what you think it is. AI is literally a process of taking data and finding correlations in that data; it's nothing more than that, right? And so the fact that people kind of think that that is somehow going to become sentient and therefore nefarious is a gross mischaracterization and and exposes a critical thing that we don't really understand what biology is doing. And and and I hope you're right, by the way, and I'm—I—I—I like hearing this, but can we dig into this a little more? Like, what evidence you—you see for that? So so—which—show—it's a very long conversation to have, so let me—let's do—so—um—it will probably need us to go back to the origin of life and define intelligence.

Took the words out of my mouth. Let's go. Okay, let's do it. So I think there—so this is one of the reasons why I—I kind of—I guess I—I—I—I guess it's a good way to set the stall out to say, "Actually, I could be wrong, but let's think about it." Let's just go back to the beginning. So back to the beginning, there was a big bang.

Mhm. Big Bang produced a load of stuff; that stuff turned into—PL—turned into stars; those stars aggregated into galaxies; stars started to explode, produced heavy elements; those heavy elements form planets; those planets orbited stars; and at least in one instance in the universe, if not many more, one planet got life. And how long ago was this? So life on Earth started—pro—the universe is about 14 billion years old, if I can do my math correctly. Um, Earth is about 4.7 billion years old, I think, or maybe a little bit less, but let's say four—between 4.5 and 4.8 billion years old, and life started on Earth about more than 4 billion years ago, and probably life got going as quickly as it could—you turn at like a cellular level. Yeah, so the last universal common—or so you got origin—universe—origin of Earth—origin of life. Now then life goes on and goes through a series of evolutionary processes, terraforms the Earth, produces oxygen, we have multicellularity, and then suddenly you have—um—animals, and the—the—the—the ability for these animals—these animals—let's do it correctly—the animals developed have sensors, so they're able to, you know, as soon as uh—the animal had sensors, they could see what's going on. So as soon as you started to see, then you can start to then kind of—um—create—um—you—a conscious experience whereby you can anticipate what's going to happen next. So let's pause for a second. First assumption—because I like to list the assumptions because then allow people to attack those assumptions—biology is a process of matter wanting to survive. So this is kind of interesting—bi—all—because everyone has really not understood the driving force—the meaning of life is existence, in my view. So second assumption—how does—but existence of Co [ __ ] cool [ __ ] meaning—like the ability to want to not die—yeah—complex objects basically don't try and keep—get their information preserved in some way, whether it's copying—replication—whatever. So biology seems to be a process of taking inorganic chemistry and producing cells that replicate. So the very simple level you have cellular replication. So that's what happened on Earth for billions of years—cells copying themselves, copying themselves, copying themselves. Then it got a bit more funky where you had cells kind of starting to collaborate, so you could have mitochondria—so these are these little energy-producing cells in your cells—sudden you have complex cells—ukari—Nots—these ukari then go, "Oh, I can—I've got more energy; I can now start to move; I can take energy and move—what could that allow me to do? Acquire more resources to be more me, but then I have to argue with the environment; have to fight to survive because there's other people do other objects doing that as well." So now as these cells and develop senses and they need to compete in the environment, those senses then necessitate you to be able to understand the present by remembering the past. So that was the—that's where suddenly animals and life had got the thing called instinct.

Ah, okay. Now instinct is kind of level one, yeah? Now the—in the animals are like, "Huh, I've got this thing called instinct; I know—I know—" I mean, like there's this joke like when human—when you see someone down the street, you're like, "Can I—can I fight it [ __ ] it or eat it?" Right? I—you know, I—me—you can see the wrong person say all three when you look at—you know—go down the street—someone's looking at you—you're like, "I wonder what they're doing—they thinking—they [ __ ] me—fight me or eat me?" You know, they're probably not thinking anything else, right? That's their instinct, because that's their instinct, right? That's how you—evolution produced it. But however, going a bit more—because instinct wasn't enough—as you were able to move further in space, suddenly instinct wasn't enough, right? Um, because you move—instinct allows you to move really fast, but now if you're able to see far away and you can see the thing you're going to fight [ __ ] or—or you know—or—or eat come towards you, you can plan, and for—so planning then allows you to have some kind of—to build some cognitive capacity. So now you've gone all the way from origin of life to cognition. And then what—then—quick question—sorry to cut you off; I just want to make sure I understand—when you're talking about instinct and you're saying like it's the ability to take action by remembering the past—are you—are you now saying that that's infected—infected is the wrong word—but it's—it's built in at a genetic level—meaning instinct is based on what your ancestors of your species were doing—ants and termites—all these things—it's inct—built in, right? It's like it might be a little bit of nurture as well as nature, but but there is this—the instinct is almost like preconsciousness, right? If you like—like you understand why you—you know—you understand as a human—like you literally do—like, "Am I going to fight [ __ ] or eat you?" Right? And you're like, "That's a bit weird." Yeah, I mean, I don't want—I mean, my higher-level cognition is like, "Should I talk to you about poetry?" All this other stuff, right? But these layers are coming down—but [ __ ] them afterwards. Anyway, we should probably—but what I think is important is you've got instinct, but this is really important for the AI discussion. So those that are like, "What the hell?" It is really important because selection is what's happening; selection—Darwinian evolution—is—is what's happening, and Darwinian—the evolution is happening in the environment all the time. You've got to—survival of the fittest—or—survival—like—this—just—you want to survive, and you are fit—not necessarily just by fighting everyone—there's a bit of cooperation going on. So anyway, so the movement—the movement from instinct to higher level requires consciousness to come in. Now with consciousness, instinct really didn't need you to remember the past in a—"Oh, I can remember seeing this thing, and now I can do that"—that requires active kind of learning, whereas instinct is like, "I see this—see this—do that." It's like it's a bit like a—you know—my cat—it's like it knows what—look for mouse—it doesn't—my cats are hilarious; they'll go out; they get mice; they bring the mice in the house; they [ __ ] lose the mice and they can't see them. Cats are really good at looking at change, so this is why they—if you can see—they small things moving—if the mouse is just standing, they can't see it. So like they're just like—they're completely stupid; it's their instinct doing everything; there's not much higher-level cognition going on. Instinct is doing that—all—but sudden—suddenly as your senses developed in—you know—the senses of sight and T and smell and hearing all came in—suddenly you've got all this other repertoire for problem-solving—to—to survive—then consciousness comes in, and consciousness evolves very slowly. Um, and it appears that consciousness—at the same time—language and consciousness kind of evolve together because you have to be able to label things, right? And describe to other people because you're—are—it almost like you had instinct—initial consciousness—a bit of problem-solving—then language—and language then kicked your consciousness up another level—and you're talking about humans right now—humans now. But I think all animals do it to some degree, right? It's just that we're able to communicate one—one another, and we've got tool-making skills, and then suddenly we have—so we have origin of life—instinct—consciousness—abstraction—and the ability to kind of—to—to—um—to be intelligent, right? So so for me, they're all connected together on one lineage, right? So no origin of life—no origin of ab—no instinct—no instinct—no abstraction—no abstraction—no consciousness—no language. So they're connected together. So when people talk about AI and they say AI is going to kill us, let's—let's ask ourselves for a second—what do we mean by AI and life and stuff? Life is a th—is a matter that tries to perpetuate its s into the future by rep—active acts of replication and evolution. That is one definition of life—that is kind of—I'm trying to—I will define life in terms of assembly theory later, but for now that's a good working definition—and matter that solves problems to ensure its own survival, right? Is unique to living systems. Now human beings have created technology, and technology is another lineage in evolution—technological evolution—the ability to imagine things in your head and go, "Oh, I'm not going to make that car—or make that car—or I'll do this experiment or that experiment"—really makes evolution very rapid because evolution in the good old days was like—like a lemming—dead—dead—now I can think about that and go, "That's stupid; I won't do that; I won't die so quickly." So now the human brain is able to basically think about how to maximize its survival undergoing selection in the environment by thinking. So when we start to talk about AI and becoming senan, that's actually not correct because the AI has no—in—has not evolved on that lineage; it's kind of taken a sid—swep. AI cannot exist without humans. This is where the the AI doomers are just making stuff up. AI as a technology is dangerous, sure, in the same way the nuclear weapons are—are a dangerous technology. Nuclear weapons—we could choose to detonate them now. How would an AI be dangerous? Well, there's all sorts of mundane ways of being dangerous, but the paper clips—hypothe—paperclip hypothesis of—it's—of yard, right? And it's just nonsense, right? It—it is—it is poor scholarly—um—behavior, and they're pulling on people's doom and and fear, and they're using it and they're making things up that don't exist. And here is this one statement I want to make, which is very important, and of course this is just my flawed opinion, right? I could be talking complete nonsense, but I think that intelligence is—we do not understand—understand what intelligence is outside of biology, but I can tell you what intelligence has done for humans: it's allowed us to survive in hostile environments; it allowed us to send men to the moon, and hopefully everyone else soon will be going, right? And intelligence allows us to be fitter in our environment and build technologies to keep us warm when it's cold—yes—get us food when food is scarce. And so because we are not defining intelligence in a rigorous way, it is possible for us to then kind of bastardize that and use it to manipulate people into being scared. So there are the AI doomers, right? AI doom is nonsense because it's not correctly defined because you think that that original chain that you talked about hasn't happened with AI and therefore you can't have—well, humans are in the loop—like, where does the agency come from? The a—what they—what they're saying is that AI can think—that is nonsense. AI does not think because AI itself does not have an imperative—survive—it doesn't have 4 billion years of evolution programmed into it; doesn't have the instinct; it doesn't want to fight; it doesn't want to [ __ ]; it doesn't want to eat; it has none of those things built in. AI is a product of our technological evolution, and of course with us—integrated with us—it wants to fight—[ __ ]—eat—but it—not on its own—there—not on its own—but we build it and then potentially it wants those things because we build it and gets out of control. I don't want to—like—it too simple—make—but the mechanism for that is—no—it's just made up. So I've used this term before—I can make up a term—say, "I'm really scared of ag—ag is going to kill us all." What's AG? It's like anti-gravity—it's like I wake up one day and suddenly anti-gravity occurs and I float away and there's no air and I die. Okay, please tell me the mechanism for anti-gravity. Oh, no—no—I'm just going to use the phrase. So the problem is—the problem with the AI doomers is they are not able to make a reasoned hypothesis that is grounded in—um—experimental and conceptual framework; they keep basically making stuff up. There is no mechanism to get there; there's a mechanism for nuclear disaster—we build a nuclear weapon—we—H—the button—we hit the button and it goes—it—people need to sketch out the scenarios rigorously, and this is where—

I think that the AI doomers All Fall Down. And I don't want to elaborate on that because, of course, AI can be used to do bad things. We have humans in the loop. Like, what can you define what that would look like from your world?

Yeah, I mean, like, you like right now, right? We use, we, we um, use AI to generate false, false um, um, um videos, and people, yeah. And we, and we create hysteria, or we use it to control people. So the thing is, it's not clear to me the problem is people think solving intelligence is basically about solving a, a uh, inference problem. And intelligence is so much more than that. Intelligence is about how does matter survive? And I'll tell you something that is super interesting. I think the humans, the, the fact that human individuals and biological cells can die, is that death, that ceasing to exist as a finite entity, is what you need for intelligence. And the fact that, oh, the knowledge that you're going to die, yeah, well, not just knowledge, a physical process as well. It's not clear to me that AI can be bounded in any way. Right, we're talking about AI as a very abstract thing on a data center.

Now I want to go on the record and say one thing super important: it will be possible in the future to evolve AIs that will be sentient in some way. I don't know how, but for people out there who aren't familiar, can you just define what you mean by sentient?

Yeah, so the, so we, we're sentient beings in that we have our own set desires. We have our own internal decision making. And I won't be able to predict, in principle, what you're going to do next. Right, I might be able to predict a little bit from you, but you will be creative. Right? Sentient individuals have, are, are have opinions; they have a self; they have a personality. Right? This is, this is human sentience. Right? There are animals that are sentient as well. Yeah, so I think there is this like, this internal experience. Right now, the AI architectures we build, and, and the technology is not capable of an internal experience. When people like Jeffrey Hinton are saying, "Oh, it does, you just don't get it," it's really weird in a neural network. I'm sorry, that's just not correct. What's his evidence for that? It doesn't have any. He's using anthropomorphism; anthropomorphism. He's like, pretending; is projecting his own personality in there.

Let me again go back to this: in where does our internal agency come from? It comes from 4.2 billion years of evolution, the fact they're facing, facing death all the time. The fact that with countless of our, uh, progeny, or sorry, our countless potential, um, other entities have been selected out of existence. You're the winner; you are the current winner. Yeah, my kids are the next winners. And so I think that that agency comes from survival. An evolution built agency. Now, now something interesting has happened: technology is a result of evolution indirectly, but it is not because human beings build language as an abstraction, but it's, but it's not evolution itself, exactly. Yeah, and so, and I think that is the problem, right? What I want to get to, and I'm sorry I've been really inarticulate, but I'm getting there, with going. I think it's like, and so I think, and I'm not saying we should dismiss the doomers; that's not right. But there's this kind of, this weird argument going, "What's the percentage chance of Doom?" And I'm like, that's like such an ill-posed question. Like, why don't we instead think about what intelligence is and why we've misunderstood it? Because right now, AI has got, it's like, it's like the new religion. Right? So there are people that are basically saying—and I get a lot of flack from this; I get a lot of smart people who, who are telling me that I'm just, you know, I shouldn't be saying these things; it's just, you know, I'm just, I'm just, I'm dangerous—because there go those, those gatekeepers; they're just, they're dogmatists. They, you know, you need to think from first principles. If, and I think, and this is probably the best statement I can make on this, that we don't really yet understand what life is, and one of my, and why it's here, and what the mechanisms are. We're getting close, and my work, my kind of, my, I only have one job: it's like, "Why the [ __ ] am I here?" Like, it's a really interesting job, right? People pay me, and obviously I'm a CEO of a company, which is, you know, doing, making chemical robots, but really the main, casually, yeah. But, but that's a day job; that's my day job. But one of the reasons why do I have that day job? Well, I am building this chemical internet, not just to solve cancer, cardiovascular, whatever diseases, build new kind of, um, advanced materials and batteries, that technology I'm going to use to solve what the hell life is. And so all I would say at the moment is the doomers, because they don't know what intelligence is yet, it's very hard to start to make stuff up about the danger. I'm not saying there isn't. So I, I think, um, some Yan Le Cun puts that very well, talks about jet engines.

Now let's go on the positive side: AI superintelligence; AI is going to outthink us; AI is going to solve everything. That's just again nonsense made up by people who don't understand what we've used AI to do. Right now, it's literally distill human knowledge into a very compact format. And humans are really good at getting knowledge. And so when people say, "Oh, look, and AI, um, solved, looked at my, um, X-rays and diagnosed what was wrong with me much better than this individual," they don't understand the AI is not just, hasn't done anything magic; it's just crowdsourced all the best individuals.

But that's the thing though, too, and this is what I keep thinking about while you're saying this. I love your point about how evolution—and you explained it way better than I could even rephrase it—but how evolution basically formed us into this point where we have this 4.2 billion years of intelligence. That said, my question would be: do you think that our system, our brain, and whatever gives us life and that whole thing, is essentially then a computer comprised of zero and one code?

No, you don't think it's that? No. And I think I'm very close to proving why life is not computable, and that's going to drive everyone so back. Okay, before I want you to expand on that, before we do that though, then my push back on, as a total layman on AI, not being able to, I guess, circumvent some of the things that we've had the, the benefit of time to form throughout evolution, would be the AI is run on basically supercomputer code that will only get stronger and stronger, and so it can do things and take the element of what you would take time and reduce it potentially to no time, and then could therefore evolve in and of itself to do things that we didn't intend it to do. And as a kind of [ __ ] example, but it's, it's one I think about a lot, would be the—I think it was at Facebook, I want to say in like 2015, 2016—they invented, they invented, you know, some, a couple AIs, and the AIs invented their own language to talk to each other. And Facebook very quietly pulled the plug because you could pull the plug on this one. You know, when I see something like that, I'm like, well, that's like a first-generation creation; what is the fifth generation? I think that was [ __ ], and I think the way they put it out there was [ __ ], and it's quite funny how they do so. This is about crowd control; crowd control. If you go back, if you go back, I'm, I'm fascinated with a philosopher called Henri Bergson, French philosopher. Can we pull that up? Henri Bergson, H-E-N-R-I, and Hry, um, wrote, um, was a fant—he was a brilliant mathematician; he didn't go into mathematics; he went into philosophy—and he wrote some books on time and Free Will. Yeah, Henri Bergson. Yeah, say the age Dar it. And he wrote Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. And this guy, I'm kind of like, he, it's, you know, kind of, you know, it doesn't annoy me; I think it makes me even more humble than I am on average, to like, I'm just this stupid human being. So let's not say stupid; I'm this curious human being who likes asking questions. But I'm not the first, and it's always interesting to say how you can improve on, on it. And, um, and I think that Hry kind of, um, was a very like, the one of the best philosophers of the day, and a guy called Bertrand Russell, who's a bit—Bertrand Russell, I shouldn't say this, but kind of fun. So one of my favorite physicists, who is kind of always right, a bit boring, is a—no, I won't say, but he's, he—so Bertrand Russell kind of reminds me of this boring physicist, was always right, doesn't like any creativity, and HRI was like, "No, no, no, I'm just thinking ahead." They're going back to the point about, um, the, that rational people can do great things; they can be deluded. So HRI started going to séances and say aners and looking at psychic phenomena, and you know, people were there were poist, and tables were getting lifted, and all this stuff. And it's very funny that curious people and creative people are always on the edge. Right, in the AI space right now, where people are just making stuff up, they're doing it to control, right? That, you know, like I could, if I want to control, is like there's a conspiracy; you know, the government is hiding the, the EV, EV, the evidence of extraterrestrials. God damn right they are. I mean, like, if the government, if the government was competent to do that, I would be so impressed, but of course they're not, right? But then people like, "Oh, there is," and they're convinced, and they, and they have this, and I was like, "Sure, I'm very happy that you have this belief. Beliefs are good things. Now let's turn that belief into more than the belief by interrogating with critical reasoning. Now let's ask the right question." So well, the AI stuff is about critical reasoning. We don't know what intelligence is; we have an idea. Intelligence emerges on Earth with autonomous things called cells that can collaborate, interact over billions of years, and suddenly we have this technology. Now what is AI really? You know, let's say I build a, I invent a weapon, um, and I can use that weapon to kill people; that weapon is dangerous, but I, the intention for that weapon comes from me. All the AIs are programmed by programmers; the data has come from human beings; the intention when one says, "Oh, this AI was racist or woke or this," I'm like, "No, the programmer was liberal or sure," right? And that's all where it comes in. Now what we should be saying is like, we're basically arguing about the wrong thing. The AI aren't sentient. Jeffrey Hinton, I don't care; he got a Nobel Prize; I don't care; he's just making [ __ ] up, right? And because he basically wants to, he has a God complex, right? He, this is not a principled argument. So what you have to say is like, what is your, what do you mean by sentient? What do you mean by autonomy? What do you mean by agency? Let's get all these things defined so we can understand. You have a legal status; you have a bank account; you have a National Insurance—I don't know what the, the equivalent—but you have a Social Security number, right? You're an, you have legal status. Yes, right? Corporations have legal status as well; they're a bit different, but human beings have legal status. Will an AI have a legal status? No, not right now, because it can't act on its own volition. Now people go, "Oh, no, but you were programmed by your society, by your evolution, and look at this, and therefore the AI is the same." Like, well, let's go back to our definitions and be really clear about what we mean. All I want to point out at this moment in time is that we are kind of being, we are not critically reasoning when it comes to intelligence. We don't know what it is; we don't know how the, we don't yet understand how life produced intelligence; we have an idea. So let's hold our horses.

Now let's go to superintelligence. Um, before we do that, I should pause and say one thing: um, the AI is a tool, a bit like a test tube is a tool. Right? Use test tubes in chemistry all the time; they're really important, but it doesn't mean the test tube should get the Nobel Prize for the experiment I did, right? Because it was like, when everyone says, "Oh, should the AI get the Nobel Prize?" I'm like, "No, I programmed the AI; I used it. Why, why do people not accept that AI is just a really good tool?" Whether it's playing a game, okay? Because there are some people in charge of these companies who want to make money, who want to make you believe something different, and that's not very good critical thinking. Now when it, when we're now looking at a calculator, on my calculator, on my computer, I can write a program that could factorize numbers; I could get it to search for primes; I could faster than I could search for primes; they can do things really fast, fast. It can also come up with correlations I wouldn't be able to do, um, um. In fact, if I have a pencil on paper, the pencil on paper, I can do things that pencil on paper I cannot do in my brain. Does that mean that the pencil on paper is a superintelligence? No, it's just an piece of technology. So now we've got from the AI Doom to the AI will solve everything to the superintelligence. But I'll go back to one thing I start to say about the, the AI medic, the AI medic, yeah, the X-ray, the a—we look at my X-ray and solve that one physician couldn't do. Of course, one physician could get things wrong because they're a human being, and they're not using, they're not crowdsourcing everything; they haven't seen everything. But most doctors are pretty damn good. Will the AI be better, and the human go like, "I just found the instance why it's intelligent?" No, it has all the data across the human race, and that data it allows you to say, "Oh, well, you're not, you know, you fit into this category, and therefore I can diagnose you and give you more information." So what's going to happen in health is AI will change the way we diagnose diseases, the way we anticipate. That this is all fine, right? It's not magic; it's a new tool; it's a, like MRI. Now we can use an MRI and see inside you because we use a big magnet to jangle the water around, and we can get images, right? And so I think we just need to put it in its place and be principled.

Now let's go to superintelligence. There's lots of people peddling this stuff: Max Tegmark, the were, and Elon, that right? And they don't know what they're talking about. It's really funny; it's like, um, you know, it's just, "What do you mean superintelligence? What, what?" Now, now if you mean it's going to be faster than me, sure, I buy that; I, I'll buy that AI, but that's not super intelligent. What they're trying to say is these systems will have access to reasoning and magic that you don't have. I'm like, "No, no, define the magic," you know? And I, I think that human beings have shown that they are very good universal explainers. This is one thing where I agree with David Deutsch's philosophy and the mathematicians so far, that although there are things that are really hard to explain, humans are pretty damn good at solving problems and building technologies to get r that problem. Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence book was a great book, but had lot [ __ ] out of me; had lots of flaws. It's nonsense.

What, what are some of the flaws there? Well, he's saying, he says we will have superintelligence. Like, okay, define it; explain how it works; give me the mechanism. Again, anti-gravity? Oh, I'm floating. Uh, we shouldn't be scared; we should basically have a commission on anti-gravity tomorrow; we should worry about it. Come on, yard! Come on, come on, Nick! No. So unless they can explain a proper concrete mechanism, I could worry about lots of things, right? I could worry about, you know, when I'm going to get cancer and die, if I'm get heart failure, when an asteroid can hit the world, where I'm going to get, you know, get caught in a storm, or whatever, right? So these are things I have to worry about; all I need to do is put them in some time of order and think and use my resources accordingly. People making stuff up like this to control resources is what's happening. And of course, so you think all the doomers, all the really smart people, including people you're mentioning, who in some cases are billionaires or brilliant minds within academia, who are all on a similar page of like, "This could surpass us, become sentient, and [ __ ] us over," you think that it is all tied back to, knowingly for some of them, and then even unknowingly for maybe some of the others who go along with it, that that it's going to be a use to, to generate fear to control society?

Well, I don't, I mean, I think that, um, not they're not doing it in a benevolent way; it's just a way, right? They want to, they're trying to, great, they're trying to create, get clicks, get following, get people scared, get people excited, get people fearful, you know, "Buy my product!" Like, it's literally, it's just like the same thing again and again and again. The tech, AI is a fantastic technology. What I want to worry about, what I worry about AI, it's number one: authenticated data. I want real data from the universe, not made-up data, because otherwise, would it just go [ __ ] really quickly, meaning theories, because people, people are generating synthetic data; it's not real data. And, and, and this is kind of like, this is scary because if you're just generating synthetic data, you're not getting any creativity. Creativity comes, comes from real data in the environment. That's another point. Second point is authenticated users. I want real people, right? I'm not one of these people want to talk to an AI and be bullshitted by some kind of random thing; I want to talk to real people. I'm sorry, the fact that some people out there like AI therapists, great, if it actually helps you do a thing or feel better, awesome. I'm sure the AI therapist might actually reduce the suicide rate dramatically; wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if that happened? Sure, you know. So I'm not saying that, um, it's all, they're all talking nonsense. What I'm saying is, why are you making stuff up about Doom, or the fact that AI is going to solve everything? AI is a way of taking data and compressing that data into a high-dimensional space and getting out connections from that data. It's what humans do, right? That's what human intelligence does through the act of survival, right? But it does it on its own; it does it on its own. And so, so you don't have a fear that that could—I, I don't see the mechanism for it. We will—I, I mean, if I'm, if I am successful in my life's work to understand the origin of Life, create a new life form, you know, why stop there? Why not create a life form that's also conscious? That would be great. But then people would be scared because, "What about that conscious?" That if I created a life form that was conscious, like an alien, and it wanted resources, of course it would fight us for the resource, and then we should be scared, and we should go, "Are we, are you sure you want to do that?" But you're saying AI can't become that alien? No, because AI is connected to us through Luca and our technology. But AI could, with us, do bad things. AI and humans together; AI with humans together can do bad things. Okay, right?

Can we go back to the original point we touched on the front end of this, which was when I brought up human beings being considered a computer versus AI, and you said you have evidence that we're not? Can you explain that?

Yeah, so there was this really interesting problem that we have right now in that, um, and so what I'm going to say is controversial, probably a bit wrong, probably a lot wrong, but if it's not, it's quite interesting, let's put it that way. You've never said anything controversial before, so this is very off-brand. So, and what I mean by that is like, so people are making metaphors between what the, how the brain works and how the brain has done its thing over billion, millions of years, um, because in, we don't know, you know, how instinct works, right? Very well. Instinct is evolved; it kind of, it gets unpacked mechanically. If you think about it, you think about the zygote, right? The, the, the, the, you when you were, when you were a single fertilized cell, you divide it into two, and then into four, and you kept going. Suddenly, the, so you got all the, in that cell, you've got all this genetic information, and you have feedback from the environment in the womb, where the implant, and you get signals, and those signals in the environment, the mechanical feedback, helped you with the genes produce your arms and your legs, your kidneys, and everything. So you have this interaction in time that unfolds. So gene, genes don't just provide, um, information; they kind of provide coordinates where you should roll the, the stone down the hill, so it bounces in the right trajectory to get the thing happening. So this, all this other stuff going on, right? And so that's really interesting about how biology works, um, and how we can kind of get really complicated entities, um, coming together. So how, how we then start to think about, you know, how life kind of turns into intelligence, we've got to make sure that causal chain is all connected together, right? And so I think that we have to keep understanding that. So I guess that's one of the starting points. Right now, the brain, how the brain works, we know that neurons have a, we know about a lot about neurophysiology; we know about firing neurons; we know there's an action potential, and we know that, you know, that there seems to be some connection between how our neurons fire and learn and make connections, and there, and we think that we can perhaps simulate that. Let's say that's a given. So I'm going to give you two or three different alternatives, and then, and they're all going to be interesting. The first one is like, let's just assume that the brain doesn't work the way we think it is, with firing neurons, one and zero, that there are network effects, and there's kind of the, the brain is like an analog, um, entity with some error correction, some digital error correction, right? Um, and that's kind of one way of looking at it. Let's assume the brain is how everyone's projecting right now, like a neural, like the way we see neural networks on computers, where we can, we can simulate them with ones and zeros, um, and then there's another way that the brain is doing something magical that we don't understand, right? There's quantum phenomena and so on. I don't really mind which of these, but because my explanation of what, why the brain isn't computable is actually quite mundane, but it's really interesting. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button; it's a huge, huge help. Thank you. So now, and it's locked with creativity. So the hint here is, isn't it interesting that human brains can come up with new things all the time that you can't write programs to do? We can't write programs that'll come up with creativity. Now I want to make my position clear: I'm not a duelist; I, what a duelist, where I think that there's separation between mind, mind and matter. Okay, right? That there's some kind of spirit. I believe that, I believe, I think I can prove, but I have to have some belief, right? I believe that I'm the, the, the material stuff is all we have, right? So in principle, it should be possible to make an artificial brain, has an artificial consciousness. Now, is the brain a computer? Is a really hard question because it goes back to everything in this conversation is about definitions, right? Yes. What is a computer? Now a computer is a thing where I can put data in, and I have a program, and I get that data out, and it's reliable, right? I get a mapping; I run an algorithm; I don't think the brain is running an algorithm. Then one goes, "Oh,"

My God, you've just broken the church cheering thesis, and I'm like, no, the brain is not an algorithm; the brain is doing something. And this is where I disagree with a guy—um, very nice philosopher, sadly died recently—a guy called Dan Dennett.

Oh yeah, yeah. He was on the Brian Keating show, I think. Yeah, Dan Dennett wrote a very nice book called *Darwin's Dangerous Idea*. It's a fantastic book; it's one of his best books. I recommend everyone to read it. But there's one thing in the book he says: that evolution is an algorithm. It's not. Evolution can be approximated using algorithms, but it's not; it's doing something else. So let—wait, wait—evolution can be approximated using algorithms. You can simulate evolution in a computer. Okay, right. So what am I saying? So I'm saying the brain is not computable. Now, why is that? Now, one super—one really important thing is about—and and I think I'm going to put this as simply as I can—um, so what I—what did I say? I think the argument is like—um—the the brain is not in principle computable. Now, why is that? Well, a computer has a memory; it has a CPU; it has a program; it has an architecture. The problem—the human brain—a human brain—um—is creating new—um—let's say, the metadata constructs in time. And the basically the brain's capacity to work at the boundary between infinity and finiteness is what we find difficult to compute.

Now, what do I mean by that—capacity between infinity and finiteness? Yeah, basically human brains—or brain—biological brains—are able to mine creativity from the future, instantiate it in the present. Like, what the [ __ ] does that mean? Yes. All it means is there's more time in the future, which means you have a bigger state space—a bigger number—larger number of boxes for you to pull on, and you pull those into the present. Think about your imagination. What is an imagination, right? The imagination is for you to be able to take all the—all the experience that you've had in your life and re—and using inputs you got from a day—maybe you might get inspired; you might have stubbed your toe—like something go ouch, didn't like that—and then, oh, I got this idea for this thing that came from this—you mining the environment in the present. Yes. So here's how it works: that your brain is able to process information in a non-deterministic way because there's infinite re—there's infinite amounts of data coming at you through your sensors—your sensor approximates it—and that—and you have this ability to imagine. And I'm explaining really poorly, but all I'm basically saying is computers don't have enough memory, and they don't have enough potential to basically get all the data from the environment. And it's that data from the environment and that huge memory is what makes it non-computable. And that's a very nice practical point.

No, that's interesting. That's really interesting because, in principle, I cannot compute what a seller is going to do next. It does weird stuff. So, and the thing is we become totally—we're fantasizing about control with neural networks. If it's in distribution, we can predict it. It's our distribution; we can't. I love to be out of distribution; that's what I do. I like to do weird [ __ ] on a day—I mean, not weird [ __ ], but I don't judge; it's okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, who—you know, who knew that, like, I don't know, 10 years ago I would suddenly decide at some point I would just wear pink and have pink shoelaces. Yeah, the shoelaces really threw me off. I was like, where does that come from? Yeah. Why? I don't know. You wearing it to investor meetings before—ballsy. I like that. I got to have—I've got to have a uniform.

Um, so I think the fact that—so the very mundane reason why biology is not computable is the number of states you're trying to get access to is just huge, and the—and the information—the environment is not noise. And so—and I'm getting close to it; I can reveal—I've revealed part of it—but there's also things about the fact that—um—people think that natural selection comes through random mutation and random processes, right? And there is some of that, but I'm—I'm beginning to see evidence of contingency everywhere. My one contribution to reality is like, huh, the past counts. Like, if—like, you know, you say to me, you know what one thing would you like to tell people that is the most important thing in science? Is that phrase: the past counts. Yeah. Can we—can we go back on what you just said though about natural selection with random things happening? Yeah, I don't—are you saying like random things the way they're defining it, or—you know—let me make one up right now: a bird at the Galapagos, where Darwin was—first, obviously—like, coming up with this theory. He realized that the beak changed in size on the top over a 200-year period or something so they could catch this fish instead of that one. What about that as random though? Because to me that says the environment said there's this type of fish that's the one they need to survive, so it's not random that then it corrected for that.

No, no. The way that biology—it works—I mean, I go back and forth on this—in that the way—what happens is—sure, that's not random—the the environment says, hey, I'm here. What happens—the way the—the way that natural selection did that is that mutations would generate—generate a large number of birds with different beaks, and through trial and error—um—that mutation which would randomly occur—helped you—it would—just the beak—because then that random mutation caused the bird to then be—get the fish, and it's—it—it was able to—to procreate, right—more effectively—got more energy—that was selected for. And that actually is—I'm okay with that. I mean, I'm okay that—that—that that kind of process is randomish, but there is contingency in the processes—in the environment, right? And I—I don't know that—um—what I'm saying is materially significant yet because there's a huge body of evolution that says, look, the Neo-Darwinian thesis is like, look, if it's all survival of the fittest by natural selection—natural selection occurs by random mutation of the genome—the random mutation in the genome just—lot—gives you a lot of trial and error, and the environment selects. So in a way—from that point of view—that's how it works, right? And that's fine, but I'm saying in biology it's not just random; there are other things in the environment that give you information that you can use. And so I think there's a little bit of refining there. For most people, it doesn't make a difference, but for science—right—one of the reasons why people got really upset with the assembly theory paper is it basically said something really obvious that is probably correct, but they didn't like it because it—it really didn't—it was just not—it just cut across so many paradigms. We can come to that in a moment. So I—I think that biological evolution is very good at creating novelty because novelty is what you need to survive. You think about the music industry—like, I mean, I—I used to compose electronic music—think I had some time—but now I'm—

Ass—you were an EDM guy? I—I did loads of—loads of crazy stuff. All right, we're going to play some afterwards—just—like, I would love to do—find the time to do it. But you think about it—in any competitive environment—you can do the boring thing where you can say, well, the—the culture likes this music; I can just—fam—family that—and just do a variation on the theme, and I'll be quite good, and I sell some stuff. But occasionally—how do you compete in the environment? Well, you have to be—you have to be—logic—you have to do things that you think that people—or—that people would just know that—and it won't work—and because what else can you do if you've got a completely rational environment and everyone's deterministic and doing the same thing? The only way you can actually compete with anyone else is actually be illogical.

Yeah, yeah. And so it's a bit like—why—maybe—you know—why the current manifestation of the American experiment is really interesting because the politicians like, well, yeah, we're kind of boring having this tit-for-tat of two parties, but let's have a crazy thing happen—or a non-deterministic thing happen—and this is just evolution playing at the macro scale, but that's way above my pay grade. But I think there is—biology is capable of creativity—that creativity does not seem to be computable. And again, people are faking it using LLMs and go, look at this—it's really creative. I'm like, sure, it's a good tool, but you selected it—you selected it. I'm not saying you can't use LLMs to be creative, but you have to interact with them. And you're saying, therefore, because your point on imagination is based on our past and everything come together to that we know of to then form this new idea—we get—I'm taking it to—to that next level. You believe ideas are a faction of the past?

Yeah, that's why they come to us. I mean, so the really weird thing is—the past—the future is not in principle predictable, right? Let me say that again: the future is not in principle—principle predictable, right? That's a very strong statement for me to make. Why is it not in principle predictable? Because the universe is expanding in time, and because you just don't have enough resource. And this is what the computationalists don't like, right? The computation—like, no, no, no, I'm God; I'm going to learn it all; I'm—it's like, no, that—that you've got time—time is—that doesn't mean you can't do useful things with computation, but the—the—computation is the base of the universe is kind of—without—without any evidence. Here's an interesting thing—here's why we're not in a simulation. Oh, taking the words—you've done this like three times today—taking the words out of my mouth—or—I got to get R next—why—or why—why biology is not computable. Let's just imagine that our—let's just—let's just assume that biology is pretty good at putting memories in our—in our brains, and our—the memories are pretty much at molecular resolution—that means there's individual atoms in my brain that—you know—I access—I remember—when I remember—you know—when I blew up my train set—and things like that—are—my—have memories—brain are—my—now—a time I replay that memory, it destroys—remake it again. So maybe the train is a bit changed in color and shape and [ __ ], right? But I did connect it to the mains—that thing—that thing—as long as that's true—if it's not, you're out of here. Yeah. How do we—how do we validate that? Um—uh—I think my mother would still—we use AI and find a way—but anyway—so—um—but let's say my brain is storing stuff at molecular resolution—like atomic resolution—to build a computer that can be at atomic resolution—I don't know any physics that can do that. So my brain is already beating what lithography can do—number one—and I am sensing the environment in an analog way. Yes, I'm using quantum mechanics—there are—there are digital-like things happening—but I'm—sampling the environment—I've got an infinite amount of data I can get—I've got this almost—this infinite memory capacity—or I've got molecular-level memory capacity—and I've got all this data I can get—I can't build a computer big enough—that's one problem—and because I'm then moving in time, and each time I'm getting more and more data because I'm not just—like—I'm—it's not my memories aren't just isolated in one layer—I'm rebuilding them on my neural network—I'm compressing them—I'm constantly compressing. So yes, I'm doing what LLMs are doing, if you want to—some degree—yes, I'm doing all this stuff, but it's hyper—like—I'm—I'm able to do this across all modes, right? Language is not intelligence; it's not—no—language is—language is just a small subset—like—instinct is the—oh—on its own—you're—you know—like instinct. Yes, you know when people think that they kind of—like—they don't want to fight or [ __ ] or you know—or eat—right—the thing—the instinct isn't playing because—what—Buron said—actually I like it a lot—because instinct going into cognition gives you intuition. Intuition is the thing that you can't yet put into language very well—you haven't got there—but you've got this thing, right? It's like this—again, if you're making music or you're doing art or you're doing math—I—one of the reasons I was in the—in the stupid class of math is I never wrote any math down. I could do—I was quite good at combinatorial math; I was quite good at algebra, but I did it all in my head, and I knew when it was right because I got emotional.

You got emotional when I do—when I do math—now I'm—know—I—it's very emotional—so like—it's kind of weird—like everyone's like, you're sad. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm just working on something. They're like, what? I was like, I think—so—it could be different emotions you're saying? Yeah, yeah. So basically when I'm pretty—uh—I mean, I'm not—I—I feel my mathematics emotionally. So when I'm solving a problem, I get quite—it's quite—it's almost like a depression episode, but I'm like, ah, I'm solving the problem, and then I have to wait for my subconscious to give me the problem. I—it makes sense—it's like a musician writing a great song, bit—right? It's batshit, and it's annoying because I look like a complete idiot to everybody because they're like, Le doesn't know what he's talking about. You know what—oh, there's the equation—okay—huh—you know—and I mean that's—that's just kind of a little—so your brain is very good at doing things in your subconscious. So you have this molecular-level memory—you've got all this data coming at you through your senses—you have emotions which tell you—which tell you when—emotions help you understand your expectation values when things that you weren't expecting happen and they're good—you have positive emotions—when things you weren't expecting are bad, you have negative emotions—you know—and it's about your environment—the information. So this is why the brain is not simulatable on a computer, and this is also why reality is not simulatable—in a—on a computer either—because the resource required—so there's two problems: the first of all, the resource required is enormous, and the second problem is like, well, what is the—what is the layer on which the—the—the—um—simulation is instantiated upon? Where is the simulation for the simulation? And then it becomes an infinite regression—or infinite regress. But they could—and Riz talked about this—like the computing power you would need—they could go to new layers—that nonsense—because it's not falsifiable, and if it's not falsifiable, it's not science—we're into religion. The simulation hypothesis is a religious hypothesis.

Well, wouldn't it be falsifiable if there were proof that the Multiverse exists? If we could—if we could develop proof of that, couldn't it now become hypothetical? I don't even know how that—why that segue is in there—but—no, no, no, no. Here's how—all right—so like Brian Keating was spending his life trying to find whether or not the universe was inflationary—famously—it was not something that he thought he was actually looking at—it turned out to be like universal dust—but if he had proven that the universe was inflationary, he could therefore most likely prove that there is a Multiverse that exists. So when I say, no, no, I don't—that doesn't follow—that's just—he's just making that up to sound good. I mean, like—like that Brian—where does that come from? Sorry, Brian. I mean, like, please do tell. Yeah, yeah. It's like—so look—so I think David Deutsch gives a really good reason for why the Multiverse can't—can exist, right? David Deutsch—so for me—I—I have one argument with David—it's the same argument—like—the problem is David's disciples don't really understand it. David does—basically—the universe either has time or it has the Multiverse. If you have time—time—if time is fundamental, you don't need the Multiverse. Okay, all right. Why? Well, because basically the Multiverse is like everything present everywhere all at once, and you just take a line through that Multiverse, right? It's like—right now there could be a dinosaur walking through this room on a different transition—but—but you—the reason for the whole—the ontology that created the Multiverse was this requirement that you have the Schrödinger equation. Yes—the wave function describes a universe; it doesn't describe universes; it is the universe, right? So that's what—what—that's what the hard quantum mechanics say—it doesn't describe the universe; it is the univ—it is the universe—is a bit—so—so what I'm saying is like quantum mechanics at the base descri—it isn't—doesn't just describe everything; it is, right? It's like the branches of the wave function are how reality works—whatever—okay, something like this—but it's just a—it's non—it's a construct without—you know—it's—there is no real experimental evidence for it beyond some of the things that David says, which are quite nice, which allow it to be falsifiable. I don't know what Brian's saying—Brian might be adopting some of that—but—but the thing is, you know, there's a deeper explanation of that. By the way, I'm taking the more simplistic—I know what Brian says—I like Brian a lot—it's great—and I think he likes to play on the mystery, right? And it's great—but at the end of the day, we need to encourage people to think. All—I've said a lot of things to you which—which I will happily argue with people—I have strong opinions on—I'll bet you will—but they're weakly held. Yes. And when someone says, no, you're wrong because of this, I'm like, ah, yeah, thanks—because—by—one of the reasons I like to say what I think—right—openly and honestly and hopefully in with a degree of professionalism is like, you know—maybe Jeffrey Hinton here is that—I say—he's just making stuff up—said, no, I'm not making stuff up, and here's why I think it—and I'm like, okay—but then why are you traumatizing this and saying, oh, I left Google because it was—it was too scary and they weren't doing this—I'm like, no, you were just being sassy—it's cool—you know, being sassy is fine—we're all sassy occasionally—but I think we have to be principled about—we have to—you—what I really want to happen to humanity is I want the IQ of humanity to go up and up and up—the critical IQ of humanity—what I mean by that is people are willing and able—and congratulated—for questioning—with in a principled way—why something works and not being fed nonsensical stuff and then being exploited on their woo-woos—right—them—you know—which is easy to happen these days—is—and we'll know it's like anything—like when the printing press—I'm so excited about AI and the internet and all the technologies we have because in a 100 years when we've ironed out this cultural shift, we're going to be able to do great—even greater things with it than we can now. I think when the printing press started—I just imagine what it was like—we had the printing press, and every—we did is we printed the Bible—we just gave everyone the Bible—it's like—but can we not write Bibles? It's like, okay, thanks for that—this greatest technology—Bible—so that's what we're doing right now with the internet and AI—it's like we can have this—you know—nonsense—and so I think that's interesting—you know—that's where we are—it's a fascinating time to be alive—you know—if you take—well—a lot of people—the the problem I see is that we want people to think critically—people that are rich have got rich through technology are perpetuating—are propagating this stuff—like, you know, when OpenAI's Sam Altman says, you know, that OpenAI is going to create an AGI—like, you're saying [ __ ]—I'm—I'm not just saying [ __ ]—I'm saying fraud—I mean, that's—that's just a fraudulent statement—right—to make—he says it so confidently—he's building a bunker too, has he? Yeah. I mean, like, he's—look, the problem is like—I don't know—Sam should just have had a real job before—you know—real job requires actually to do work and stuff and actually build something—and you know—you think he does work? I—I—I happily debate him and talk to him about it, but I think the problem is—I think it's really hard to be a CEO—I'm a CEO—and I get told off—you know—all the time—by being—you know—too realistic and like calling BS on everything. Yeah. And so I think it's really hard—so I think Sam is like—OpenAI is doing great things, right? Ideally, it's producing products that people are buying—will people continue to buy those products? Well, time will tell. Will it be another—uh—you know—I don't know—what's—some MySpace or whatever—you know—will it die? I think if OpenAI doesn't actually create products that are going to increase—functionality for humans and allow humans to be more cre—and do things—then it will just die on the hype cycle, right? ChatGPT is a pretty good start though, right?

Um, I don't know where I stand on ChatGPT. I've used it, right? And I used it a lot—I've—I've used it to help me—um—synthesize information and code and stuff—and I've used—Pro—it's quite good. Will I continue to use it? Would—would see—will I—am I happy with the fact that it is literally brute-forcing the compression of our data? You know, assembly theory is a principled way to compress data—right—with causation—what they're doing with neuron nets is just brute force. Yeah, it's incredibly expensive—incredibly energy intensive—yes—and incredibly disruptive—and—get—hooking people on—hallucinations—not quite good—like—why you say hallucinations? Well, because the way the LLMs work is they—they don't—if OpenAI or any of them could create a tool that would say, here's the answer to your prompt and here is—um—a—a score about how likely it is to be correct—that would be fantastic. Have you tried—write—you know—chatbot—and say—when a chat—when you say a chatbot—you know—tell me about—um—I don't know—a thing—and it doesn't know anything—it just makes it up. Yeah, it's a probabilistic return. Yes. So people don't—probabilistic—yes. So what people don't understand is these systems are probabilistic—um—generators—and—of—of course—they give you some plausible stuff—in fact, they give you some correct stuff—so you—it's actually removing humanity's ability to think critically because you get bombarded with so much information—like ChatGPT—or the—the model that was used to—GPT has read more words than you're ever going to read—but it hasn't read them—it has compressed them—comp—ah, I see—and so the meaning comes from you reading the words and building that fundamental idea. I want to measure a charge on an electron—what's an electron? Ah, electron is—you know—you know—I want to basically understand how to build a CO2 laser—what's a laser? Well, you get this amplification process, and you're able to pump in energy, and then you get this coherence, and then you get more CO—you know—and the—and you're in this exponential growth—and so this—in a—and this is what I'm saying the entire time in this conversation—when it comes to doomers or positiv—or AI positivists—I'm saying it's easy to get worried about the scale at which this data is being crunched—I get that—I'm sympathetic—but don't need to make stuff up. I'll just use anti-gravity. Oh my God, we're really good at flying—look at the planes—we can fly anywhere. Well, DARPA has anti-gravity weapons—I don't know if you heard about that. Of course it does—they were talking to dolphins telepathically in 1992. Yeah, and I am—I—in the dimensional portal—I've got—I didn't actually have to fly to get here—I just asked—you know—Morty to give me—absolutely right—I—I know—I was gonna—you know—there are cameras—people can't hear this—just a reminder—but I—I—I want to go back to where we—where we went on this weave with what I was starting to introduce—the idea of like a Multiverse—or—

Something. When we were talking about the simulation itself, so let me just finish that point. I hear you on the Multiverse and how it's not falsifiable, but I want to go—well, no, let me—yeah, sorry. I, I think it might be, and I think I, I am—I don't think what Brian says sounds right, but I could be wrong, and Brian can come back to me and tell me about it. But I think that what I'm saying is David, and maybe Brian by extension, have made some assumptions that then say, "Oh, it predicts this," and but it's indirect and quite weavy. And I would use Occam's razor and say the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one. But so I think, okay, I think that, you know, seeing an interference pattern, David would say is evidence of the Multiverse. I'm like, "No, no, that's just evidence of loss of contingency," which is what it is—a loss of information. Quantum mechanics is not magic; this is the problem. It just looks like it to us. No, it's—yes, it looks like it to me. Photosynthesis is some wild [ __ ] bro. No, it's all simple. It's really, it's really simple. Yes, like quantum mechanics in the plants and growing and [ __ ] that seems complex and cool to me.

Yeah, yeah, it is. It is complex; it is cool, but it's not complicated, right?

Yeah. You're twisting around some syllables right there.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I can explain your photosynthesis; there's nothing magic in it, I think. But, but with a Multiverse thing, I think there are problems of labeling and ontology, and I, you, and the um, the framework in which we build our scientific abstractions, and it's fascinating, right? Because there is some—there's a there—there's something very wrong with physics, with the fundamentals of physics, like wrong. And there's me, a chemist, who's gone, "Oh, I think I've exposed what—why like the last 500 years of physics is actually wrong." I mean, how am I not going to get fired for that statement, right? It's like, "Well, I am the reg's professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and I also run a company that is basically digitizing chemistry. I'm not just making [ __ ] up in my basement."

Yeah, I don't have a basement. Um, but you know, you don't—no, but I do have a—I do have a lab at home. Right? Make stuff. I feel like every scientist needs a basement though. You got to be a—next time, bunker basement. I'll talk to—get his specs.

Yeah, that's right. Maybe he can pay as well; that would be good, cuz I feel like his is really expensive.

Yeah, that would be cool. I mean, but, but so coming back to, to the Multiverse, yeah, I'm, you know, I, I think there is a—I love talking to David. I'm talking to him; I've been talking to him on several occasions. We're narrowing—sh—I'm narrowing in on what I think our disagreement is, um, but it's, it's hard, right? Because, you know, I'm trying to get David into a position where he will actually—he will have to change his mind. He's fairly wiy, but it's okay, like he's a fantastic scientist—once in a—in a know—generation scientist.

It's good that you guys have dialogue on that; that gives me hope when I hear stuff like that. I like that; that means—that means he's willing to talk it out. He may defend it vigorously; he may not like your evidence, but he's discussing it. We both share the same problem, which is fascinating. I'm like, "Oh, that's so cool." Your problem with symmetry breaking in the Multiverse is my problem with symmetry breaking in the universe with time—H—and, and so the same problem.

All right, well, I want to come to time, but I want to—I want to go through that simulation thing to—to get there. So what I was saying with—we, if we had a Multiverse or something, there could be a simulation. The reason I was saying that is because if you did have like these infinite universes, there be—there could be some evidence that says the—computing—the—for that to happen, there would have to be some master, for lack of a better complex term here, you know, computer system overseeing that—almost like a video game simulation. And then you'd be able to say that, okay, maybe we do have the—the concept of free will, the concept of evolution, the concept of all these things that may be true in our universe, but really they're actually controlled experiments by whatever else is out there.

What's the mechanism? What do you mean, what's the mechanism? I—me—you said this like—so the—the multiv—so I—it—my guess is that quantum mechanics isn't what it—isn't what it is people think it is, right? We need to—we need to revise quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is actually a collection of things, right? It's a um—and so the problem with the Multiverse and comp—quantum computers, right? You think that literally you got your computation occurring over the Multiverse. I don't really know what that means mechanistically, right? I can't—am I getting data from the Multiverse? No, I can't. I'm not allowed to interact with the universe directly. So when people put on these layers, what they're doing is they're taking pieces of Truth—or truth—not truth—consistent theoretical analysis and layering them on and basically making some kind of Patchwork of—and when you dig down, you say, "No, please give me the mechanism. Explain how that works," and it falls over. It doesn't—it doesn't fall—it doesn't scr—it doesn't um—it doesn't survive scrutiny. Again, I'll say again, and David Deutsch is right behind this; his principal argument, which I agree for the record, against the Multiverse—is it's not—sorry, not the Multiverse—correct—the simulation argument—is it's not falsifiable. It's an infinite regress because you have this—well, if I—let's assume the simulation—I'm in a simulation, but where's the simulation occurring? And where's that occurring? And where's that occurring? Where's that occurring? Where, you know, how do—and how do we know we're at the base—when we're at the base layer? And I think there is very—there is a very good reasoning process he has. And this other argument—I haven't heard of this—the mul—the quantum computing one—it seems to be just like, "Let's just take a load of cool things, add them together, and say—" Just because it—I mean, there could be an argument made for that for sure, and it'd be way better if RZ was sitting in my seat to explain his life work to you—not to say it's correct or incorrect. I don't know; it's interesting though. But with the logic you just said for anything—I don't know if maybe I'm interpreting this the wrong way—but that would mean that there's—there's almost like a very limited ceiling to which we can reach to actually ask questions because you're saying we can't—we can't try to find a new floor and find a regressive explanation for that. You could use some of it, but look—um, the—I—I am not an expert in the simulation hypothesis, right? First of all, right? I'm—I'm—I'm—I'm not a computer science—yeah, I want to be all these things when I grow up. I'm still working on what to do, um, but all I'm saying is I need to figure out an experiment. I would do a thought experiment in my head: What would be the benefit of being in a simulation? Of—I'm—thing in the ground—trop—I've got reality, and I've got the simulation. Okay? And then—and then I'm really interested in resource requirements and how that would play out, and also the representation of things in the simulation versus reality. And all I'm saying is I haven't seen any evidence that simulation hypothesis is even meaningful, feasible, or falsifiable. And if—and maybe that's because I haven't paid attention, and I find something in there, and I can revise that. But there is—I think a—I think it's uh—you have to be careful—things that infinite regress—a bit like panspermia—like the origin of Life—say, "Oh, the life—didn't—Life—original life didn't occur on Earth; it occurred in space." I'm like, "Well, where then?" Oh, and if you—any—any explanation that kicks the can down the road doesn't really help you because you've still got to say, "Well, where did the simulator come from?" So—or I guess what I'm saying is, "Great, well done for making simulation, but who created the simulation? And how could I work that out?" And if it's simulations all the way down, then it loses meaning, right? Because then it doesn't—it doesn't allow you philosophically, in terms of your definitions, to start with anywhere. You're like, "We're all in simulation. Where do you think it all started?"

I mean, you mentioned earlier you walked us through, you know, the Big Bang—ang—and, you know, to eventually get to Earth—it's 4.2 billion years old approximately—life forms. But like, do you—do you believe in God? Do you think there's something above it that we can't scientifically explain at this time?

Um, I don't believe in God, but I believe in wonder. I like the fact that I'm—like, sometimes I'm like, you know, I have lots of different wonders in my life. Occasionally I'll do an experiment, and—and I do the—this is really boring actually—I do the experiment; I know it's going to—I hope it's going to work. I had this idea, and if this idea is correct, the experiment would just—just beautifully work, and everyone else would go—"No, it's—" I do that, and the experiment works. I'm like, "Wow, that's wonder." Then I see things that um—I think are—I don't understand, and I'm able to work them out for me; that gives me another amount of wonder. And then also I'm able to talk to people from all sorts of areas of life—philosophy, you know, science—wanting to do science, and um—they're pursuing new things through creativity and curiosity. And the universe itself is an incredibly creative place, and for me, I don't think the universe needs any more than itself. And one of the things I'm trying to explain is like, if I could help ground or explain the transition from the UN—physics to biology via chemistry, not only will that help humans understand how cool it all is, but we might be—anticipate—what can we do in the present to affect the future—future—like I admire people who are trying to build stuff. One of the reasons why I'm trying to build a company is I'm trying to literally grab the future and make it happen in the present.

Yes, right. That's what I do. I want to grab that stuff and actually act and do something. And if I can create like—Co—like programmable computers that will make molecules and cure diseases—I—build the railway tracks or the—or the computational paradigm for making molecules forever, and Humanity will benefit from it, right? And I made that happen with my team, with the funding, with the universe. We created new stuff. So I think that I don't worry about too much because there's an event horizon. I can't go back—looks like the Big Bang was an Event Horizon that we can't really look beyond right now. We might be able to—right? I think some very good—theses have thought about this, and Brian as well might have thought about the limits of that, um, but I—I think—think that there's enough cool stuff happening within our universe that we don't need to evoke external stuff. What I think is important is on our lineage of—by—of life in the universe—where we are—we have created some incredibly interesting things—from cultural artifacts to technology to the—the things that we are able to manipulate in our surroundings. For me, um—I share a desire of some people that we want to make sure that the consciousness—Evolution—biology—our technology could live on as long as possible, right? Um, I don't want to say I necessarily agree with Elon because I don't know what Elon's going to be saying next week, but—but you know, I think it—the—and I don't necessarily think that making Humanity multiplanetary—I think making technology multiplanetary is probably a good way to get there. But if we can make—origin of life—if we can make origin of Life bombs and just infect the universe with life, I think that would be cool.

Oh, I see what we're saying. Yeah, so I think there's other things, you know, I'm not a creationist, but I want to be one. All right, wait, why? I want to create life. Okay? If I create life, because I—when the creationist say like—"Not—I'm not a creationist; I don't believe in God," but I want to be God. But—but hold on—remove for a second God as a construct of any organized religion or how it's talked about among humans, and instead focus on God is one thing, which is that it's the all-being—knowledge—and whatever the mechanism of God—I mean, that's again—"What's the mechanis—" But hold on—like it's the one thing that had the knowledge to make this happen, and maybe the Big Bang is [ __ ] a billion layers below what was started before that, and we can't even conceive that. Maybe it's not—just assume for a second the Big Bang was the start—like, do you—you have this thing you talk about where you have wonder—so you have emotion, you have feeling, you have—you have joy, you have sadness, you have all these things that are so innately human to our Consciousness. Do you think that something—and again, you may not have the direct evidence to be able to support this—but do you think, as someone who said like, "I don't believe in God"—removing how you construct God from organized religion—do you think that something that is like a god or is—or is some form of Creator—that's a better word to use—could have started this process, wherever that start may—

No, I don't see the need.

So do you think—are you in the Lawrence Krauss camp that something came from nothing?

No.

So how—but how can—I mean, I—I don't know, right? I—I have lots of friends who are religious; I don't look down on them. I think Lawrence Krauss takes a rather extreme view, right? I mean, everyone has beliefs, right?

Yes.

Um, and—and but I don't believe in a creator with knowledge. I do believe that the universe is creating knowledge, and I want to know why. But where does it start exactly? That's why I'm asking where the origin of life is.

Isn't that cool?

Yes. But like, for the origin of life to have not had some form of Creator—it's so—you know, the—the—the god you're looking for is actually emerg—the God—God was a—is a meme created by human culture, and that's kind of cool, right? God is kind of a catch-all term for helping us understand that we don't understand everything. Yeah, and I think the pursuit of knowledge is not an Act of Killing God but an act of replacing that—that ghost that we've been given. Because humans have got more control, but we might get cancer and die—that we can't—but in the future we might be able to say, "Oh, actually, I can intervene on that, and you will no longer die."

Why do we have death then, if there's not something that is creating all bi—not—not all biological entities die. I mean, I mean the bacteria in your guts, they're 4.2 billion years old, if you think about it. The first bacteria divided into—this two, and they divided into two—they div—enter sperm—no, no, no—they just keep dividing, dividing, dividing. So there's a link to the BAC—the bacteria in your gut are billions of years old, right? But it's not literally billions of years old.

Yes, it's literally billions of years old.

So they are in our sperm—what—what you mean? Cuz for me to be created, there had to be a sperm—or—when it comes to sex—so sex requires death—so—but I'm saying whe—but some life forms on Earth—some life forms on Earth—because the bacteria is spontaneously dividing, right? That spontaneous dividing—because I say to people, right, "How old are the bacteria in your G—" They'll say, "Oh, about 20 minutes," because they divide every 20 minutes. But now like—"No, 4.2 billion years old." They're like, "What?" Like—"Oh, there's a lineage," because that bacteria came from previous bacteria, and they're physically connected—obviously they're diluted now because if you know the methas come in—yes—and come in for you—obviously human beings under—are procreate by sexual reproduction—so two parents give you Offspring; the parents can then die; they don't need to keep going. You know, the fact—why do we need to die? I mean, death—you don't die if you have children, you know, and those children carry on making children—you keep going—your lineage will carry on. The fact that you see yourself as an entity—it's just the ego is generated by Evolution to stop you killing yourself long enough to have kids.

Ego is generated by Evolution to stop you killing yourself long enough to have kids.

Yeah, like the—I actually agree with that. I mean, it's just an illusion, right? I want to create—I want to put as many Easter eggs in the future as I possibly can. I have maximum autonomy right now; I can control my arms and legs and—I think—and so on, you know, and I can do stuff. But that doesn't mean that the causal chains that I set up with KFI, with my research—assembly Theory—won't live on way longer than me, right? If they're useful, they're not—so ideas are—are living forms of you, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so—agree with that too. So I think that God is a kind of—you know, I don't need God, but I need to know—or I want to know what it is about the universe that allows us to turn inanimate matter into biology. And I'm going to say the—me—for me, the Meaning of Life is persistence. If you can persist as long as you can, right? And yes, humans may hack away—we may not need to die in the end—a—we should be a—to fix aging to some degree—I don't know when—that's what Brian Johnson's trying to do—I'm sure—maybe Brian Johnson—through with chifi—will cure aging. There you go. Shameless uh—uh—uh—self-plug—but—or whatever—but so we have solved a lot of things through technology; it's amazing what we've done, um, but yeah, there's no need for God, but we don't need to tell people—"Believe in God; they're stupid," because that's not helpful and also not true. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest—you know, I—I guess like—like the greatest trick ever pulled on mankind is that science and religion are in opposition to each other, because even—it—like let's go with the definition we've laid out of science all day, which is that we're constantly finding new ways to think we're right about something—later to be proved wrong—on the road to eventually be proven right—simple way of putting it—could be the same thing with religion though too. And both—the reason I say it—it's interesting that like they're put against each other is because both are seeking the—the same answer—"What's the origin of it all? What is our meaning? And why are we here?" I—I don't—so I don't know if that's true. I think they should—so I think religion is basically a meme used by pe—it was a technology to control—same like what people using right now, right?—technology to control. I think there's arguments for that, and I do think that the fact that people have kind of falsely—or maybe inappropriately—taken their wonder and put it into religion is a—is a failing on Humanity—it's failing—and that there is an opportunity for us to say—I mean, we—religion is—religion is actually a really bad thing, right? Religion—that puts cultures in conflict and that it can be used to be a bad thing.

Yeah, yeah. So the idea—so the idea that we have these religious factions, and they have different cultural standards, and not all humans are equal in these religions, right? It's just—for me, I, you know, I want all humans to have equal rights absolutely irrespective of um—any—any physical attributes, right?

Yes.

All—so—so I think that's a really good thing, and religion—where religion kind of pits people against themselves on that is bad. Now the fact that maybe in science that we are not very good at allowing people to ask the wonder questions—yes—hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button; it's a huge—huge help—thank you—gives space for religion, but we should—you know, in Eastern philosophy certainly a lot of that is—big—is quite good. So I think that um—that if you replace religion with—I don't know—me—my religion is curiosity—like, "Why does that happen? Why does it work? What's the question?" I want to keep asking questions. I don't think religion asks questions; they give you dogma; they give you labels and things. Yeah, so I don't think religion is asking the why question; it's just telling you. So I think religion is anti-curiosity, and I—that's why I have sympathy for Krauss and for Dawkins because they find religion a kind of a way of—another way of stopping you from being critical—being a critical thinker. It's also how you behave with it though. I always say this—the majority of people I know who are involved in organized religion use it for peace and good in their life and are good people because of it, which I think is awesome. I'm going to call them the—we'll even be like liberal with our terms here—I'm going to call them the 90%.

Yeah.

What human history's proved to us though is that maybe it's less than 10—but just for the sake of numbers—that 10% that uses it for power, for control, for absolutely sticking to dogma and saying, "No, no, no, you can't ask any questions about how this is written because that's the way it is"—yeah, that's where we have all the problems. And by the way, that's where all the wars—the [ __ ] fake fights for power happen—that—that cause—that cause terrible things in the world, and that's why I also have some huge problems with organized religions, like you. I just find it sad that like something that could be used—even if it weren't right—could be used for goodness—for someone to live out a good life while they're here—could be taken advantage of by a powerful few who then ruin it for everybody. Well, same with what we see in social media so on right now. And the other thing I'd say um—quickly—is that the interesting thing about—there are people who are spiritual and curious, and science hasn't given them the answer, and they go to religion or—or have that type of dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with that, right? There's nothing wrong with thinking about bigger things and what is there beyond our material reality. What I would like—what I personally think—is there's nothing beyond our material reality, but there are really interesting things that happened in our material reality which are amazing. You know, I think um—I like a quote of Roger Penrose where he says, "I'm a materialist, but I don't understand what the material does," right? So Roger thinks that—that—that the brain is—also the Consciousness isn't computable, but he's kind of pulling all kind of weird mechanistic stuff because he lives in the universe where time doesn't exist—when a universe where time doesn't exist, you have to make—you have to bring—invoke collapse of the wave function or some other thing. I think it's much simpler than that, but the fact—the universe has produced objects that can ask—that—the fact the universe can itself think through us is mind-blowing—that's for me, you know—"How did that happen? I want to know why, and I want to answer that question, or I want to contribute to a body of thought—help that happen. Because if humans can help position themselves into where they exist in the universe—what our culture is doing—and we can understand how technology um—and philosophy and Science in it relate—we're going to basically have an incredibly interesting future, yeah? Because you know, we're going to understand how Evolution Works; we're going to understand why we want to go to war occasionally—why we want to do these things—and how we can replace those things, right? You know, human suffering does not need to be a necessary future for us; we do not need to have wars in the future.

Agreed. You know, the fact we have wars right now, and we have—you know, we have in—in inadequate—in—inequitable—equitable distribution of resources—it's kind of weird given that we can make so much stuff. You know, there's not a shortage of f—food on planet Earth; there's not—

A shortage of fuel. It's not a shortage of anything really, but who gets a hold of it? There's, there's, as you said, a distribution that currently is not sustainable. If it continues as it goes, but that the beautiful thing about that lack of sustainability is it creates problems to be solved, which allow us to build new technologies that make us more sustainable.

Have this hierarchy of things like the fact that machine learning right now uses these horrible data centers just chugging out and heating up the planet. And everyone's like, "We need to spend three trillion dollars on energy." It's like, "No, no, should we actually just develop a new architecture?" Because the human brain is pretty good at being intelligent and it uses less than 20 watts. Right, right. And so we'll get there. And I think that what we shouldn't do is demonize people for burning fossil fuels and do it for progress. Right? I really don't understand our job, my job as a scientist, as a technologist, as an entrepreneur: take knowledge and create cool stuff that's going to help humanity and create value.

Absolutely, that's a good way to look at it. Y, yeah. I think it's also like a problem of people wanting the answer to be the extreme on everything, and that's what the internet's done to us, right? So it's not enough that like, "Okay, maybe we're doing X, Y, and Z wrong with fossil fuels." No, we've got to ban all of them, you know. And something has to change in our society, that evolutionary process of how we use the internet has to change.

Like I look at it this way, and maybe this is an oversimplified way of looking at it, but you know, when it comes to the internet, whether you're an 18-year-old or an 80-year-old, we're all just teenagers. Like Internet 2.0 really started with Facebook—you could say Myspace, but let's say it's like that 2005, 2006, 2007 area. That means that here in 2025, people who were zero years old using it—which was all of us, whether it was your grandma or a kid—we are all 18 years old now. Yeah, so we have not matured in how we use this tool and how we work things out. And I think as we mature, people will start to, will start to see some of the errors and patterns.

Like I've seen a step back in just outright cancellation of people, because people got very, very sick of just automatically canceling everyone the minute they say something wrong. Not to say it still doesn't happen, but like it's not like it was five years ago when we were 12 and 13 and just saying, "But [ __ ] this," you know what I mean? So maybe there will be a change there that could be for the good. Yeah, I look again, it was—we talked earlier about the printing press. Initially, what was printing press? Print Bibles. You know, what's the internet used for? Manipulate people. Right? P, doam me. I think that some—um, so I think we'll all agree that nicotine smoking is bad for you.

Right? Yep. And smoking, you know, gives you lung cancer, it gives you heart problems, right? All sorts of problems. So I think that we're going to see, we're going to find in maybe 20, 30 years' time that the way that we use social—that's our social media consumption, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it—is going to be found as to be so bad for our psychological well-being that it will actually, will probably actually ban it.

Ban it? Well, like, in the UK we banned smoking in public places, and now we're banned smoking for—I think there's like—my son will never be, never be legal for him to buy cigarettes because they've, they've made the, they've changed the age, so you phase it out, right? That's a product you use, though, that is detrimental for your health. Not to say your point about social media being detrimental for our health is bad, but like it involves speech, so don't you think that's an issue?

Well, this is the thing: we're going to have to evolve it. So like the way that—so is nicotine bad for you? Well, nicotine's toxic, but you can, you can deliver it in different forms which are safer and people like it, right? So I don't think vaping is *M* safer, but it might be better. I don't know, but but anyway, so the problem what we have with social media is the way it hacks our, our kind of our different systems, right? Our, our kind of our, our kind of uh, our instinct systems for reward, right? And attention. These, these things you can show that they're hacking and they're affecting people's psychological abilities, right? If you—so there will be people will start to say, "Well, do we want our kids to be hacked? Do we want to be manipulated by social media? How do we create an environment where we have access to these tools, to the, to the fun things?"

Like I bought YouTube Premium because I got fed up with my kids just watching all the adverts. There's so much content, so much content on YouTube. It's like, if I want to fix anything, yeah, I could read a manual, I could just type it to YouTube. YouTube, yeah, it's like, it's fantastic. Like it is a revolutionary tool. Yes, right? So, um, not to say there's a lot of dark stuff on there, but I'm not, and I'm not saying YouTube is perfect, but it's quite good. Yes. Um, X has become horrible to use because basically it's completely unfiltered, but you can, if you pay attention to your, "Like, no, I don't want to see people getting shot all the time, please remove that," right? If you can. So there's things you can do and self-select. And so I think the question is how do we help people have a much nicer psychological environment because these tools are, are doing real harm. But again, I'm not an, a—um, a psychologist, I'm not an educational psychologist, I'm not a psychotherapist. I'm a chemist trying to find the origin of Life. Yeah, but I do agree, but I am fascinated with the emergence of new technologies and how they affect our society. And I think that we will deal with that.

I think right now we've got a power struggle going on between, you know, regulation, um, like, you know, "I don't want to feel bad about burning fossil fuels." If you're going to regulate and say, "Well, don't burn fossil fuels and make it illegal," then fine, I'll comply. I want to obey the law. Um, but until you make it illegal, I'm going to burn as much fossil fuel as I can. And why am I going to burn it? Because I'm going to generate knowledge. And if you allow me to generate knowledge by burning fossil fuel, I might just help generate the next technology that allows us to leave fossil fuels behind. So that's what I'm saying. So then ban it. That's an argument against the regulation of banning it.

No, exactly. You don't want to regulate against it; what you want to do is you want to basically, you want to manage risk, right? The risk of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing the temperature on the planet so such that you're going to have mass migration. Look, the good news about CO2 increase is we're going to have more—the planet is going to get greener, there's going to be more life on Earth, not less. Bad news is we probably have to all move to Northern Siberia. And I'm like, you know, that's—there's a lot of people, right? And there's people going to—there's going to be water shortages. And you know, we just need to think sensibly about how we're going to clean up the planet. Right now we don't have enough energy to remove the CO2 from planet Earth, but when we get to fusion, we'll be able to fix all that CO2 because we'll have enough energy to do it. And then we'll be able to think about where to place it. So there's all these different structures, like, you know, Victorian England was a horrible place in terms of coal and air pollution, but we cleaned it up. Yes, we got there; there were new technologies. So again, we have to build new technologies as fast as we can. Like what I'm doing, chemy, just building more molecular technologies, cleaner ways to make molecules faster. Great. So I just think innovation wins.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's a lot to be done there, but um, you know, I have, I have so many day jobs, right? One of them is probably not being a—I like to not being a, I suppose a, an arbiter of how our culture should evolve, but I am part of the culture, and I am thinking. And what I am just saying to everyone is, "Please, let's enable each other to think critically." The gift we can give each other is the ability to think critically and not just make stuff up because it sounds good. Yes. And I think, again, I think to your point, as we, as we mature with these tools we've been given, there will get to a point where people who—people will eventually see the chickens come home to roost on those who just throw around things that make no sense. And eventually you'll have enough movement where people break with that later and say, "Wait a minute, they said all this stuff was true, and it's verifiably not." That you will form people who are like, "Maybe I shouldn't just look at 280 characters and make a determination of what someone thinks." Not to say I'm going to go suddenly be some expert reading all the peer-reviewed papers that are written sometimes in another language, but there's a middle ground there. I mean, I have so many people like use my X account as a—argue with me, say, "Oh, I thought you're a horrible person." I'm like, "I just tweet random things to make it—to offend you into thinking," right? I'm like, "I just tweet random things to offend you into thinking."

That's a bio you should make that your X. Yeah, I mean, I try not to so much now because like, I mean, X is pretty noisy at the moment. It's very noisy, um, so and also, you know, people—I think when, through the pandemic when we, we went through quite an interesting shock during the pandemic, but um, I don't know, it's, it's fascinating to watch. I think that we need to stop overgeneralizing on some things and, and let humans generate new technologies and, you know, and, and take it from there. But yeah, I, I don't know. Maybe I should make a new type of quantum teleporting computing.

Computing. You'll get there. Multiverse after this raise, you'll get there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What we, we, we put a pin a little earlier in time you started to talk about that, and then, and then we didn't get into it—to it—how people have some, especially like scientists, they, they have some interesting theories on this. You mentioned Sir Roger Penrose, and like I think you said like, "It doesn't exist." Like, what is your theory on time and what it is? I mean, I guess I can answer that if you want. We can go to assembly theory, because if you want, if it's a part of it, then yes. I mean, assembly theory is kind of like, for me, helped me get where I am. And I mean, I've always, since I was a kid, felt that I'm existing in a flux of time, right? And I always, and for me, time is non-negotiable. It's just, it's not a, it's not a coordinate, it's an action, right? It's, it's the process of change. And I think in physics, the way we label things—again, we lose something—like the way we label things and language, but I—it's probably better to come at it from assembly theory, um, because I think it naturally leads to a new conceptualization that anyone can understand and actually kind of, um, you know, go—it opens up a new way of looking at the world.

Okay, when, when did—when did—trying to think the order we should do this in—the two questions would be, obviously, can you define assembly theory as best as possible for the layman to understand? And secondly, whether you want to answer this first or, or after you answered the first one: when did you—how did you come up with this? Was this like a long time thinking about it? It kind of morphed into, "Oh, [ __ ]", or was this like a, a kind of moment?

I think both. I mean, like I say, I've only ever had one idea; it's just no one's noticed. Um, I was always fascinated by the spirit in the object, you know, this kind of, "Oh, things have a," they have a—and, and I didn't realize I was solely poorly educated and also didn't read enough philosophy, right? I think, you know, Li Nets and, and Hry Bergon and a few others kind of basically saw the ghost in the machine, um, but I'll tell you a story about when I was younger. I became obsessed with survival kits, a bit like Sam or one, a ultman building his bunker. I wanted to go one step further and say, "Look, what is the minimum amount of stuff I would need to reproduce my technology," so that I could comfortably—now let's not think about microprocessors and ChatGPT and all that stuff, but what I mean—how could I produce my own pharmaceuticals, clean water, food, tools, shelter, you know, what would I need? And so like, basically, I could have a list of things that I would need, and then critically, I'd also want to make sure that they would self—be self—um—uh—uh—perpetuating. Like I need machines that would allow me to make the machines that make the machines. So like, so what is the minimum I need, right? The minimum amount of stuff I would need to basically have a self-sustaining society for Lee. And then I saw, "Okay, that's cool. I can think of—imagine that. I like, now what—how could I compress that down?" Because that's quite a lot of stuff. Yes. And so, you know, and I, and I, and I remember I had this survival book on how to survive, and then I thought, "Oh, I could have this massive, you know, farm and food and equipment and, you know, you know, forest and all this stuff and water and, like, you know," and I was like, "Well, why can I—can I compact this down into what I can put on the back of a truck? And then can I get it into a briefcase? And then I go smaller into a case, and then how could it get into a matchbox?" And that was really the invention of assembly theory, because in the matchbox—in—I guess looking at it is why I became obsessed—in the matchbox, I was like, "What is the minimum set of tools I could use to make other tools to make other tools to make other tools to make other tools to recreate my way of life?" Now, so what is the minimum I would need that would interact with the environment as given pretty much anywhere so I could just survive, and you know, it was a razor blade, a mirror, uh, maybe some, some cable, you know, just all these things I could get together. So that was kind of really, in a way, if you—assembly theory is just a way of saying, "What is the minimum amount of stuff I need," amount of knowledge or things or objects I need, when I combine them together, I can generate other things that will act back on the chain to generate other things. So this is recursion within a line. So it's a bit—so, um, so the assembly theory in one line just basically says, "The past matters." But I'm like, "Okay, we probably need a little bit more information than that." So what I mean is like every event that is occurring has some function of the events that have happened in the past. I call them contingency, right? So, um, and then things that happened before that, and so on. And if you could map that and put it on a line on a graph and, and count the information required at each step to make the next step happen, you would be able to kind of explain the mechanism where you could go from something to a quite complex object. So that's kind of assembly theory in a nutshell.

Now, how I got to it was I flipped the problem around, and the problem was this: that I was—I'm obviously wanting to know why we're here—with that, me, to origin of life, that led me to understand how did life get started? And then, but then people started kind of getting trapped in defining life, like, you know, "Life needs to be this; it needs to replicate; it needs to have a metabolism; it needs to have error correction," and you got all this list of requirements for life, and I was like, "Gee whiz, um, that's a really long list," and everyone was arguing about what the requirements are, and I was like, "Is there one thing that life does that non-life doesn't do that would allow you to tell that a system was alive or not?" And, and it's—and then another one line that unpacks—which I think was a guy, a guy I met at a conference, a guy called Adam Savage, I think.

Okay, MythBusters guy. Yeah. And, and I was telling him about assembly theory for an afternoon. He's like, "Ah, what you mean is that, um, life is this thing that creates complex [ __ ] at scale." That's, that's actually not—that's kind of along the lines how I was picturing.

Yeah, yeah. So, so what I was doing, I said, "Oh, you've got all these things you call bit of life, right? What life does," and I'm a chemist, and I ask myself this one question: "How complex does a molecule need to be before you go, 'That molecule could not have formed randomly in the environment without any process of evolution or technology'?" Meaning you're not going to the low level; you're going to the lowest level of what we can define. Yes, I'm defining like the, the molecule as a complex enough object. Now, the beginning that really confused people because the physicist went, "No, hang on. In a finite universe—so I have to get this right—I'm probably wrong—in a finite universe where you have infinite time, every state is searchable." In a finite universe where you have infinite time, you can go to every single possible combination. That's what the physicists say. Okay. And I say, for me, my intuition, it's like, "No, [ __ ] way, that's impossible. You can't do that." The physicists are like, "What are you talking about? Why are you saying it's impossible? Of course you can. You have a finite universe, finite, and you have infinite time, infinite." Look. And I'm like, "H, yeah, okay, but that doesn't actually happen, right?" So then when I realized, um, if I then qualified it and said, "Look, as a chemist, the reason I viscerally felt this—I really had to do this over a number of years—I realized that when chemists measure molecules, they don't measure one molecule; they measure a large number of identical molecules. They have to; that's how the technique works." It's like, "Ah, so what I mean is if I have a complex molecule that I have a lot of copies, and I know I've got a lot of copies, there's going to be a threshold at which I have so many copies and I—so complicated—it can't possibly have assembled itself by chance." And like the example you could use would be an iPhone. Like if you go to Mars and you find a thousand iPhones, or if you find 30,000 Teslas, or you find, you know, um, uh, like all of Van Gogh's paintings or something like this, there's going to be a threshold. You go, "Huh, this did not randomly occur." And that was the birth of assembly theory. So then what I did is I then suddenly said—I then—I took this stuff and I said, "Well, how can I measure complexity in molecules?" And I found a way to do it using chemistry, using spectroscopy. So spectroscopy is a process of shining light on things, and you can then—basically, the molecule absorbs the light, and the more parts the molecule has, the more colors it absorbs because of, of the rules of quantum mechanics. And so that's where assembly theory came out, and basically, and we came up with the assembly equation and worked out that suddenly if I can take a sample and I can find a molecule that has more than, say, 15 parts in it and I can measure it in the lab, I know the biology produced it.

Are you saying that this is—but this would be going towards explaining creation itself, because you're going to the molecular level and saying there's—there are unique molecules that we can prove in a lab that, because there's now a bigger supply of them, we know it had to come from that, meaning like it's selected for that molecule and exp—

Yeah. And then we'll basically look at the—what is a minimum configuration where you literally put atoms in—individual atoms or a lot of atoms—aren't many bonds—just simple stuff—and you get complex stuff out, like—like the cell is literally a complexity generator; it just builds stuff, right? It doesn't infinitely build stuff because you don't need it, or it's just enough for the combinatorial space, but there's a lot of features on this, right? It's so deep in that, but, but I had to start somewhere. So, and remember I was kind of doing this, um, a lot on my own, and then a lot in collaboration with Sarah Walker and her team.

When did she come in? Um, like how many years into the process? I think we—I—I kind of materialized the—you know, so I say I went back to my childhood building survival kits, so it was always in my head. And then when I was going into the origin of life stuff and artificial life stuff, and everyone was arguing about defining life, and NASA wanted to define life so you could go measure it, I was like, "H, there's something else we need to do here." And I think I started to do that about 2014. I met Sarah before then, and we did a—we—she organized a conference on reconceptualizing origins of life, but I met her before at a NASA meeting where she was talking about information and Li and life, and she's incredibly—interesting speaker in that she's very—she speaks very fast; she's incredibly articulate, but she abstracts in a way that, you know, that you're being told something interesting, but you don't really understand [ __ ] it is.

No, no, no. It's much more elegant than that; it's really interesting. And then I, when I met her, I was like, "I have no clue what you're talking about, but it sounds good." And she was like, "What?" And I'm quite a, you know, I'm quite a critical character, so so people, I think knowing our collaboration, think it's quite funny because like, "How can you guys possibly work together?" Because she is really nice and very articulate, and you're just super critical. And I'm like, "But that's not exactly how it worked," right? I knew that Sarah—from listening to Sarah—she understood there's something missing in physics; the physics we have right now isn't sufficient to explain the origin of life and how life works. And I knew that the origin of life people were trapped in series of dogmas. And then so we started talking, and then, um, and I was—we—we got—we—we wrote some grants together that were funded, and our team started working together. Assembly theory was coming through at that time; I kind of invented it with, with one of—with my—I actually invented assembly theory with my—with an administrator in my group.

An administrator? Yeah. Not even one of the scientists? No. In you saying invented the name or invented the actual—

No, it did the work. Like, so I was like, you know, almost a sucker—from the smartest secretary I've ever seen. Um, so this is the guy was—is my financial admin guy. I hired him, and I was talking to him one day, and he was telling me—I'm not sure if he wants me to say, but probably it's okay, he probably won't mind—but he had a—it turned out he had had a degree—has a degree in physics and math. Convenient. And I was like, "Why are you just doing that? Come on, let's talk about science." And he was like, "What?" And so, so anyway, I was building the concept for assembly theory, um, and you know, from a chemistry experiment, like chopping up molecules and building the algorithms, and he had a go at writing the first algorithm with me, and he actually got the algorithm wrong; it didn't—it was the—but the—I—it was pretty much there, and we were arguing backwards and forwards, and then we, we got the algorithm a bit better, and then, um, he actually started a PhD.

I guess a year or two later, he got his PhD. Not oh, okay. So he, me, the shift. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's still doing Financial Administration in the group, helping me, the but he also does research now as a postdoc. Yeah, yeah. He's a great guy. And then, and but then in that um, then Sarah's, Sarah became involved because I realized actually, although I invented it, I mean, what does that mean? I'm like, well, probably Sarah also invented something similar, if not the same thing. MH. But, but I guess who, who cares who invented what? We both saw that there was a problem that needed to be solved. And science is about problems. Sarah saw there was a problem in physics with information, and I saw the problem in the origin of Life of dogma and defining life. And that's how we started working together, and our teams have been working together ever since on that. And it's kind of interesting because, again, our teams are slightly different cultures and slightly different interactions, so but that's good. You need that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Sarah's team are beginning to realize that I have strong views weakly held. So, so it's because they're like, oh, you know, Sarah says, well, I think my team will want to do this, and they're worried about what you think. I'm like [ __ ] that, who cares? I mean, as long as you could, they could explain to me what the, the what they're doing theory-wise. And there's some, you know, there's lots of things in assembly theory which are kind of very, I have a very strong intuition for, but I wasn't able to explain. So, like, for instance, I know what you mean. Yeah. So, so let me give you one thing which is kind of mind-blowing even now. So when you have a molecule, um, and you chop the molecule up, the molecule, um, there's a shortest path to make that molecule. So that means if you have all the parts, let's say you make the molecule and it has, you know, I don't know, all these different bits, you can chop it up, um, but then there is a really convenient way to make the molecule on the shortest path. And for me, the shortest path was really important, and my team were like, no, it's the average path. I'm like, no, no, no, it's not the average path, that's nonsense, it's the shortest path. And the reason why the shortest path is important is you can measure the shortest path; it's not possible to measure an average path very easily, right, with molecules, because you don't know all the, all the construction ways. But there is a threshold where you can have no shorts, you can't go below a shorts path, that's there's. So that kind of was really interesting. So I guess the, the assembly theory says, hey, complexity doesn't arise by chance. When you have it in abundance, you have the assembly equation, which explains that there's this thing called the assembly index, which is the, the number of steps you take on a graph, the shortest number of steps using the building blocks to make the object. So whether the objects made out of Lego or letters or molecules or atoms and bonds, you can do that. So, and that's how, how we've been working on assembly theory. But where time comes in, yeah, that's the fourth time that I did it. Yeah, time comes in is like we realize that if I've got a molecule, and, and the molecule is quite complicated, and obviously we know the molecule was made by evolution, let's say, take a molecule like Taxol, which is a natural product, a secondary metabolite made in the Pacific Yew tree, in the bark, just happens to be quite a good anti-cancer drug. It's devilishly complicated; it has lots of chiral centers, which mean it has handedness, right, has left-handed and right-handed things in it, and has this very complicated kind of structure. It would take a while for chemists to make it; the enzymes in the Pacific Yew tree can make it. It's great, right? It's, but it's one of those molecules that can't form by chance in a random universe in any abundance; it would take too long, right? Okay, even if you have it, you know, finite universe and infinite time, having Taxol together in one small volume is just not feasible, right? Good. And, um, and so you know, I then I'm kind of imagine that that, um, then now we just take that molecule out and just imagine it can exist without life. You can then the assembly index tells you how unlikely it is. So now what that means is like, if I do all these combinations together, it also gives you a fundamental limit on the amount of time that needs to have passed to make the object. And then I say, ah, okay, now I've got this, the Taxol is proof that there was a history, causal structures, enzymes and evolution, and it puts a time limit on how long it took for that to be made, right? And so what I suddenly realized is that, um, evolution requires time in biology, duh, of course. But if you go to physics and say, evolution requires time because there's contingency in history, the physicists are like, what? Well, there's no contingency in the universe. Why did they say that? You have to talk to the physicist about this because they say that it's emergent, and they use all these words because in a universe in physics there is no time, right? See, that's never made sense to me. It's like, how do you explain then? I could see if you were getting to some of the stuff that you say is not falsifiable, like if you got to some of the multiverse and interdimensional stuff, okay, maybe then there's an argument that time is just like a constantly shifting thing. But if we're dealing with what we can falsify and with what we can see in this universe, I'm talking right now, in a second you're going to respond and talk, that is categorically after, no, will say in the block universe. So Bertrand Russell, you might want to get Bertrand Russell up and try Bertrand Russell and causation. Bertrand Russell had a made a fun, had a, he looks like a, a famous, uh, a famous phrase where he said, um, causation is like the monarchy, um, looks good but isn't needed, right? Looks good, interesting, right? Because Bertrand Russell was a logician, actually was a really good mathematician, logician, log, it basically used logic and mathematics, and he wrote Principia Mathematica, right? And that was going to be the book that explains all the universe of math, and then, and then Gödel came along, in, no, and what Gödel showed is that you can't, that mathematics isn't a closed system. It's very complicated and very nuanced, and it's basically about, as you mean, closed system, it's about understanding how to prove something and if something is true or not, and they you can, and it, it basically explains the way that layers in language work. It's quite interesting. But if we go back to causation, physicists think that time is a coordinate, that you have this thing called the block universe, and you can go forward in time and you go back in time, meaning we could time travel. They, that's what they hypothetically, yeah, that's what they say, right? So what physicists say, if the universe, if physics is deterministic, then basically our conversation right now was pre-ordained by the Big Bang. Yes, right. So we're not creating anything new. What physics cannot deal with is creativity, and this is why computation based on physics, using LLMs and all that stuff to mine, get, create, to distill out creativity, there is this, this is why this argument is kind of come, come circle quite large right now, right? Because, of course, if you have, if you know the history, you can machine learn on it, you can milk the history, but you still can't produce, produce, predict the future. So now this is why you have this interplay of different things. So assembly theory says, hey, complicated things can't just, in, in any abundance, don't just happen; they needed a history. That history is captured in what we call causation, right? And we make an assembly space, right? And in assembly theory we have four universes: the first universe is like the universe of everything, like all everything is possible in this universe; you have infinite universe, infinite time, infinite space, so all possible configurations can exist, but we don't see that, that's a combinatorial universe, right? Even the laws of physics in the assembly universe, that can have all different laws of physics. Then you have the assembly possible, and that is like, okay, given the laws of physics that we have, what objects are allowed, right? So assembly possible says like, you know, the quantum mechanics, these energies, there's all this stuff, right? You can carbon can have a certain number of bonds, blah, blah, blah. So you can have combinatorial access to the universe. This is like, now, no time is in, there's no time in this universe; you can just literally pull on every object in the universe and put it together. Then you have the, so that's, that's. So you've got assembly universe everything, assembly possible, then you've got assembly contingent, which is like, oh, no, you can't just have objects that were made way at the end of the universe at the beginning; that's cheating. You've got to do the work; you've got to do the time. So assembly contingent says, not all objects are available at each point in time; you have to make them. So the first time you make an object, you have to go through the steps to make the object. And then you have the final universe, which is the universe that we live in, which is OBS, assembly observed. So that means you can make observations and go, all these complicated objects, they required a certain amount of time to get made. So if you take, say, like some of your technology here, if I was to reproduce the technology, how much time would it take? What is this shortest path to go from sand to a microprocessor? So what assembly theory basically says is like, complex things in abundance aren't spontaneous; they require evolution to make them, selection or technology. And technology is connected to evolution, selection. Number one, it says that also complex objects have an amount of time you have to go through, number of things you have to do, that's non-negotiable. Now you can have different buds of time where they're not interacting, right? Just like different, you just want processes to occur. And then, um, assembly theory is these assembly spaces where you can imagine these objects, what they're going to do next. Now the assembly possible, or sorry, the assembly possible to the assembly contingent is very interesting. The assembly possible, actually, by the way, is the same as David Deutsch's Constructor Theory. It is the assembly possible basically says all transformations in that universe are allowed to act on things, and you can make stuff. But that assembly possible is a universe with no time. And Constructor Theory, which is a way of instantiating quantum information actually in the universe and making computation fundamental, says that you don't need any time. But again, if you need time then, if, because you don't have access to the future, you don't have infinite resource, it says that the, that the universe itself is not computable. Wait a second, it, access to the future, meaning you can't go there right now, but that doesn't mean that the future is not going to happen. The future is dependent critically on the past, right? Yes. But, and if the universe is expanding in time, the only way you can get to the future is actually by doing the operation, by going to the future, by allowing it to happen, whereas the computationalists say, no, no, I can simulate it. And physicists, yeah, yeah, say, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why they say it's infinite, yeah. So you have this interesting, the argument we're having is that, you know, time doesn't exist on one hand because you've got, you think about it, the Big Bang, what the four things that physics need, they need, um, they need order at the beginning, so somehow the Big Bang was magically ordered, and all the things were going to happen in the future were encoded in the Big Bang. So this is God, if you're a classical physicist today, you are religious, I would argue, right? They, I could see that, yeah. You, you're saying that all of the future is encoded in the past, therefore God did it, because God had to give you all the knowledge, yeah, right? If you're a super determinist, right? So you, so basically, number one, you're saying God Did It, number two, you're saying time is emergent, causation is emergent, right? And, and so, and, and you have to have this order. Now you could replace those four things with one thing, to say time is real, and hey presto, you explain physical reality. There is no time travel; it's in that, that's a nonsense term, right? Because time is time. You believe that's not possible? No, it's not possible; it's just, it's not possible. You can, well, you can travel into the future; you can use time dilation; you can use relativity, right? You can use rules. You don't think we can go into the past and manipulate, because you believe time is actually on a scale unlike, that's just like, it's, yeah, it's not, it's just not possible. Time is not a thing that you can, it's not a coordinate; it is a, in, um, a non-negotiable process we are all involved in. Yeah, CH. That's where I really love the, you essentially believe in time the way a normal human does, rather than what the physicist may try to tell you. Exactly. And I remember in my A-level physics, arguing with my physics teacher about time. She said, no, no, you don't understand time, time, time is just about measuring change. I'm like, but no, no, no, evolution says, and we just taught this, and I think that the fundamentals of physics and quantum mechanics have a problem. As a chemist, though, publishing this, this is your theory, you came up with, obviously, like, I think anytime anyone introduces a new theory, they label it controversial, so that's kind of part for the course. But you got a lot of [ __ ] for this, for bringing out this idea. Do you think a big part of that was because it was that almost like religious inclusion thing where they're like, well, we're physicists, he's a chemist, what the [ __ ] does he know? The paper that we wrote, and so the paper, I must say, right, is a, and I'm not just saying because I'm not saying it's not just my fault, but actually that paper, I'm very proud of that paper, and I collaborated very, um, with Sarah on that. We created that with our teams together, with Abhishek Shah from my team, and then Daniel Seidl from, from her team, worked together. It was a brilliant paper. And when that paper, um, that paper was built on the experiment, so that I guess the exper, the paper went beforehand, like Stew, actually the administrator who became a researcher was on the paper which did the measurement for, we kind of measured the assembly theory worked; we had experimental data that showed it worked. We published that paper a few years before, so that gave us the confidence to build the theory, and we then built the theory, or cemented the theory, and then when we published it, kind of, and what happened is the computer scientist said no, the physicist said no, the chemist said no, the biologist said, we, we, we don't like it, and the creationist went, no, it's not creationist enough. We said no. So basically, you had five different disciplines, angles, yeah. But, and they all said it was really badly written. Now Sarah, she's written a fantastic book called *Life as No One Knows It*, and everyone should buy a copy. There you go. Hope, yeah, yeah, I hope you don't mind. Um, not at all. Very good book. I'd love to have her in here. Uh, um, uh, and, um, she, one of the reasons I love working with Sarah is, and her team is, they have a different perspective from a different discipline, and her way of framing things, because we're stuck, right? We think we've invented a new thing, so then do you, then invent a word and annoy everyone that you've invented the word, or then do you try and describe the new thing using current words? Yes. So you broke, whatever you do. So Sarah and I, we, we, we collaborated quite a lot on writing the paper, and we really painstakingly went over it. So when the paper got published and people went, this is the worst written paper ever, I was, was like, and the people were quite rude, right? They were quite vitriolic; they would never do that. Come on, people aren't rude about this, but they were just like, they were like, they were like, it was, they were like angry, and I was like, and that made me, that tickled me pink. I was like, that's so funny, you're so angry by a new idea, get a life. I mean, come on, get out, get out. I know. Did any of it offend you though? Did, was, was there any of it that was surprising that you felt like went beyond the pale? I was, I am, and I still am terrified it's all wrong, like in an embarrassing way, that we made a really stupid mistake. But you said that's what you want it to be, sure. I want, but, but so I've now got so far that, of course, I'm, I'm a human being, right? I have an ego as well, right? I'm not, even though I know my ego is an illusion, it doesn't mean I don't suffer; I don't suffer from it. So, of course, the scientist in me is like, that's awesome, people can attack it, right? Um, but also you've got the, the, the, is stupid, been told he's stupid since he was like five, six, seven, eight years old, right? So I'm not sure, right? I want to do new things, and so it's kind of hard to do new things sometimes. But I'm like, I don't have anything to lose, right? I'm already labeled as stupid anyway, so that's fine. Um, and so, of course, assembly theory is wrong, but it's not, it's, it's actually the, it's probably not wrong; it, you know, it's a, the paradigm which is shifting needs to be shifted, and it is a good tool to do it. So I guess what I'm saying to you is like, I think very strongly the paradigm at shifting is correct, but I'm terrified that I might have misread it all, right, about the wrong, exactly. Um, and of course, assembly theory isn't the end of the story; it's just the beginning. But assembly theory says time is fundamental, contingency happens, and all it does really is it says, hey, everyone, there was, was evolution before biology, because contingency in chemistry gives you a combinatorial space that expands, and lots of things are possible, and that combinatorial space interacting with the environment invented biology, and all the biologists went, no, it didn't. It's like, why? I mean, you're all creationists as well. So you've got the creationist, which are the physicists, you got the creationist biologists; they're all going to hate me for saying this. But what else are they saying? Because if, if assembly theory is wrong, then how did the first cell form? Magic, right? And if assembly theory is wrong, how did the initial conditions have the construction of this and this all encoded? Magic. So come on, guys, you rational, critical thinkers, put up a better theory or shut up. The point, yeah, shut up. And so that's why it's quite good fun. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button; it's a huge, huge help. Thank you. Yeah, you seem to be, you seem to be taking it in stride. Well, I want to be, because I will learn something. That's why my strong views are weakly held, because, says, ah, even with a theory you've spent over a decade on, yeah, there's many more theories, but that's, I'm sure there's many more theories we can build. But the nice thing about it is, humans, well, it's certainly making a, um, an impact. And I think, you know, we went through the initial storm, everyone went, we don't like it, it's written badly. I'm like, all right, fine, we can do better. Sarah and I have just finished the introduction to assembly theory that we're going to preprint, put out there. Oh, very cool. I mean, assembly theory, if you think about it, explains all sorts of things; it explains how memes evolve; it explains how capitalism is efficiency; the shortest path in capitalism is like, what is the most efficiency I can grind out of a system so I can beat my competitor? Yes, right? Like what I'm trying to do in chemistry is like, I don't want to do manual labor for all the chemistry; what can I automate to make it easier to make complex molecules using repeating code? Because human beings follow the code of the universe, or at the base molecular level, and all the actions that we take, regardless of the context, yeah. That's fascinating. So, I mean, like, assembly theory is not that complicated; it's like saying there's a history, and once the universe has invented a mechanism for something, if it can reuse that, that's more efficient than inventing it again. Is there anywhere in assembly theory that accounts for where intelligent life exists, meaning like, is it beyond here too, are there aliens out there? Yeah, I think you will be able to measure, um, intelligence using assembly theory. I think one of the reasons why I'm having a lot of fun with AI right now, because the AI people are like, they don't know, they don't understand intelligence; they cannot measure it. Think about it, I'm going to make a statement, I'm going to make a series of statements from now, which, which are just completely hilarious, but I think you're right, and I think, um, and I've been debating this with Sarah as well. Let's just imagine a, and also it's going to sound really grandiose, and everyone's got like, Lee's got such an ego, he's going to compare himself to Einstein, how dare he? But I'm like, sure, you know, Einstein invented relativity; Einstein took a leap; his leap was the speed of light is constant, right? MH. From that we got all of relativity. Now, thanks to that, when we started to put satellites into space, namely GPS satellites, we put atomic clocks on them, and then we knew wherever they were, they would actually, lo, they would not say this, we'd have to correct the time, yes, because they're frame dragging, right? So we knew that relativity basically, um, change, we have to account for the where they are in distance and in the gravitational well, and relativity helps us sort that out, so we can keep track of our atomic clocks for our GPS, and we can work out where we are on Earth. LLMs, we just mine data from them, yes, and we just basically think that there, we just see there's this magical intelligence because we don't understand the principle that is allowing this to work so well. So we're seeing frame dragging, but we don't know what it is. Assembly theory, if you applied it to LLMs, would say, no, there is a way you can take all the information in the universe and compress it on the shortest path. What is the shortest way to generate, Sam I Am, Sam I Am, do you like Green Eggs and Ham, right? It's quite good; I think there's only, you know, like a finite number of words that Dr. Seuss, who's now canceled, but we can bring it back. Oh yeah, Jesus Christ. But, um, he wrote that book, but it's great because you can work out the shortest path to generate that book, right? And you can highly compress it. Some of the computational, uh, people that were arguing with me, in fact, there's just one troll who trolls and trolls and trolls and trolls, and I don't know what's wrong, he needs to get a life a bit, um, and it's saying assembly theory is plagiarized; you plag, you just plagiarized it, the, so basically, have one troll that says assembly theory is both wrong and is plagiarized, and he invented it already, and I'm like, hang on, but if you invented it already and it's wrong, are you not saying you invented something that was wrong? Yeah. So we have all this stuff, so it's kind of funny. But basically, they're saying the mathematics of assembly theory is like, um, not new, and, uh, and it's a bit like saying, you know, um, I can, the mathematical representation of assembly theory exists in other things, and some elements of it do, but the actual shortest path, the graph is new, and that's kind of what, and, and for me, my leap, my leap is to realize, number one, that complexity in abundance doesn't happen by chance, and my second leap is that there is a shortest path, and it can be measured, and the fact we could measure it in the lab, when, oh, I'm not entirely wrong, this is not a bad, some things in physics that we can't measure, I can, I gave it some grounding, and I was like, hallelujah. Now, now intelligence, what is intelligence? Do intelligence builds on evolution; intelligence creates a huge amount of complexity at scale.

If we can find that, I think there's a way we will be able to make an assembly meter for life, how complex it is, and we'll be able to make an assembly meter for creativity, which will also tell us about intelligence. So, hold on, let's go back to the first one. So you can make an assembly meter for life, like how complex it is. Meaning you can count molecules—making this up—but you can count molecules by shooting your laser beam of life into the atmosphere, not literally but figuratively, to be like, “Oh, there’s a foreign planet in a galaxy over there, and there’s aliens living there.” Yeah, I think so. I think we’ll be able to do it pretty, um, quickly and unambiguously.

How quick are we talking? When we… I’m not going to fall into that trap again. But I think that once we have verified it and people got used to the statistical aspects, because assembly theory actually is able to give you a lot more certainty than you get from statistical analysis. So that’s kind of cool. So you have this feature. Um, so you’ve got… so you can measure life, obviously. What comes from life? You get a kick in complexity. Like if I’m just finishing a paper, it’s on the pre-print archive right now, what I applied assembly theory to inorganic matter, to materials, and there are minerals out there. Um, but actually the most complex minerals known are microprocessors. You take silicon, you etch them, right? You have all these different parts; they have a high copy number. The assembly equation is basically a function of… you can get the assembly equation up if you want. If you put it into… it’s quite an interesting, it’s a very simple equation. Um, if you just type “assembly equation” into Google, it should immediately come up, although Bertrand is looking very… if you go to images, you’ll probably… it’ll probably put up one of the equations. Yeah, there you go, the first one. So there you go, so simple as well. So the assembly… assembly A is just a function of the, um, the object complexity, AI. So that’s the assembly index of the object I, right? And then it’s a function of its concentration, the number of those objects, Ni – 1 over NT. The –1? Why do you come up with this –1 there? A – 1? I mean, it may not stay in the future, but it’s just like, if you only have one really complicated thing, one-off, it can randomly occur, right? So I thought, let’s not count that in the amount of assembly. As soon as you got two, then it’s meaningful. So basically, just remove that off because random… because you can’t… assembly theory allows you to tell the difference between randomness and design and evolution, which is another thing that blows the mind. And it might be that actually you can in the equation to make it what’s called intensive; you remove the –1 and just say I has to be greater than one. You know, it’s just me, you know, mathematical idiot as I am, right? Like, but… but the assembly equation works very nicely; allows you to quantify the amount of assembly, the amount of evolution. Assembly counts the amount of evolution, um, that has been put into a system that produces the object, and you can apply this to things that are not from Earth.

You’re saying, yeah, for sure, because it again, we go back to this argument about finite… finite universe, infinite time. But again, the copy number: if aliens are creating artifacts that have a high assembly index and high copy number, they cannot have formed by chance. What’s the mechanism? Meaning they’d have to have created… yeah, yeah. So you can… so I think assembly theory will help us understand intelligence as well.

So you think aliens do exist? You think we’re not alone in the universe? I… so let me be… yes, that’s the short answer. But I also think that selection is a fundamental process in the universe, and selection is the thing that creates life, intelligence, and consciousness. Because selection, through, you know, whether Darwinian evolution or technological evolution, allows us to survive and win, right? And it’s that process that… um… is really super important. So selection exists everywhere in the universe, and where there’s selection, there’s complexification, and when there’s complexification, there has to be some life, and when there’s some life, inevitably some life becomes intelligent life. Now everyone says, “Well, Earth took ages to become intelligent,” well, we don’t know that for sure, and we don’t know if intelligence… what we’ve got now… there’s a phase transition, cognition of… you know, bacteria undergo cognition; it’s just they don’t remember very much of the past. What is intelligence? Yes, exactly. And so it comes back to this quantification. I like measuring stuff. Yes, if I can measure it, then I don’t have to… you know, I can falsify it, and then, you know, I get out of this kind of stupid argument where people going, you know… I’m going to make it an LLM, and it’s intelligent, and look, it really has feelings. No, don’t be a [ __ ]! All the people that wrote the text have feelings; the LLM has distilled that and makes you… and has inspired the same emotion. So all LLMs are… LLMs are evidence of life and intelligence and consciousness, because conscious entities needed to make them. And that’s my final word on the subject. Like, no, the LLM is not conscious, but the people that generated the data were, and look, you’re measuring that, isn’t it beautiful? That would be beautiful, provided you’re right about that. I hope you’re right, because it… it… it paints a picture… there’s no mechanism for consciousness in the silicon chip, right? You know, churning… churning… everyone is obsessed with Turing computability and… and the… well, no, not just churning, just Turing machines and computers. The computation… computer scientists, sadly, are not scientists; they’re not taught in how the methods of scientific method. And I’m not trying to be superior or obnoxious; I’m just saying computer scientists seem to be telling us… they seem to be the new philosophers, the new Gods, the new scientists, and the new everything, and I’m like, “Guys, you… you… you’re quite good at producing some software, and it’s quite interesting, but look, we have TikTok and LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is actually quite good, right? It’s quite good for getting…” and TikTok’s probably quite good as well, right? But I mean, there’s cases for sure, but you know… but it doesn’t… it doesn’t mean you understand the fundamentals of the universe. No, it doesn’t. And I would imagine… and that’s more for the scientific community to fight among yourselves rather than me get into it, but you know, you guys do want some sort of standard to exist across every discipline, and… and I get that. Yeah, I mean, look again, I… I’m… I’m not… I think there’s a culture war going on, right? And… and also there’s a war of critical thinking. My job… my job, I think, um… I am being paid to build a company to make molecules at scale. I’m also thinking about science and trying to educate people and trying to get people to be critical thinkers. Critical thinking is the most important skill that humanity has.

I agree. And… and… and that’s why I need to be openly wrong, or willing to be openly wrong, because if you get punished, as you said earlier, like for being wrong, or being cancelled for basically having an opinion that is now unfashionable, is like… like the whole thing… like slavery, right, in the UK, right? Maybe shouldn’t talk about slavery; I’ll get told off. But like the fact that the UK got rid of slavery because when we realized… well, that’s probably a bad idea. And then we got the Rhodes scholar in Oxford… like he’s… all the Oxford colleges say, “Well, we wanted to take the… the… the statue down, but we legally can’t.” I’m like, “No, why?” You rewrite the past. Assembly theory says the contingency in the path was important to get here. You know, for me it’s like… colonialism is understanding the past. Why? How can you… how do you get to the present if you don’t understand the past? Yes. So you… assembly wash… I just made up a new phrase, “assembly wash.” See, that’s scary, yeah? I don’t even like how that sounds. You… you’re… you’re washing away history and your ability to learn from it. Yeah. And people say, “Oh, no, we should have the minority view,” sure, but the… the minority of you did not win. Yeah, they didn’t win. That’s right. Darwin… it’s like when I saw that… um… with… on Planet Earth or whatever, the new one, and my… you know, there are all these seals going up a thing and all falling in the ocean because of climate change, and he’s going, “Oh, look at poor… poor seal.” I like… no… I was like, “No, look at them completely stupid evolution at work.” Look at the seals in the ocean; they’re not going up the cliff and falling off and dying. They have the gene… they have the mutation that’s quite good. Environmental change causes evolution; evolution causes survival. Now we can argue about… we probably shouldn’t turn our planet into a trash can. Yes, but we’re not a middle ground. Yeah, we’re trying to actually… so I think this… this kind of radical kind of… we want to rewrite history for power, because power… the… we don’t like the power that won in the past. I find it quite comical, but I want… don’t want to say too much because I’m probably going to get… well, I don’t know… how can you cancel me for saying the history…? I can cancel it. I like your attitude. You’re… you’re a gunslinger. You put it out there; you say what it is. This is what it is, [ __ ] you, if you don’t like it. I think it’s important that we are respectful of one another’s views, but at the same time… and also we are… we do… we have propaganda, and you know… how do you know what’s right? Okay? And but literally… evolution was… evolutionary propaganda is like, “Well, I’m going to out-compete you.” That’s a fact, right? It’s a fact of the universe that we see. And the fact that assembly theory is like, “Well, we have to understand the past.” Here’s something that’s super interesting though: what assembly theory says is like, “Look, you’ve got this event horizon where you’ve got the past where you’ve got all this contingency.” So take molecules; you have certain molecules that have been evolved, and they’ve got bonds in a… in a certain place, a certain shape. Actually, that shape, when they evolve in the future, they can’t just become anything; they are contingent upon their past. But there’s still such a wide space of possibilities that even… not… um… events from the environment will… random or highly continual otherwise can basically direct those molecules into a different chemical space. And so it’s really interesting that the future is not predictable by the past, because there is something else that happens from the environment injecting new information. And this is what’s so exciting about assembly theory, is a… as a new… kind of way of understanding time and how to predict things in science, in that it accepts… the entire… the future is not precisely predictable, but you can actually tell coarse-grained, or probably say something relatively concrete about what the future’s going to look like based on simulating the past. Exactly. Look, if you take the poppy plant, the poppy plant has produced the opiates, right? And the opiates… like… um… say if you take morphine, morphine is a really special molecule; it hits a certain receptor in the brain; it mimics some peptides. And morphine was created by the plant to hack the animals who… I’m getting high, I’m eating this stuff, right? It then… it then basically shits out the… the… the genetic material, the seeds, and suddenly it gets distributed everywhere. Yeah. So morphine… so the opiates co-evolved with the brain receptors in the animal. Wow, that’s how it works, right? Now what I’m doing is… the NIH a few years ago gave me a prize for… I want to cure addiction to opiates. I think if I could do one thing that would be useful for society, so what I did is I said, “Okay, rather than making cheap [ __ ] fentanyl type stuff, we need to basically encode the steps to make morphine.” This is one of the things that Chemy is doing, encoding that chemical space. So when we do drug discovery, we have a small… we have a large number of molecules we can make; we’ve gone into that chemical space and we’re going to make new variations because we can guess how evolution will change morphine a billion years… oh my God! Because it co-evolves with the brain and the animal.

And you think this is realistic to be able to do this? Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. That’s what Chemy is going to do, right? Solve the whole problem… not the entire problem, but it’s drug discovery is a big space. Yeah, so you have to go… a lot of… there’s a lot of molecules to make. In fact, in chemical space, there are allegedly 10 to the 60 possible molecules you could… 10 to the 60 potential drug molecules at the right molecular weight. There’s only 10 to the 80 atoms in the universe; we’d have to turn the entire universe into a chemistry lab to make all the possible drugs. How do you cut that down? What you look at the lineage… you look at assembly theory; you go to the base case. And so… wow! So actually, Chemy is doing evolution of molecules. It’s a bit of a secret, but you know… well, not anymore. Now you just told everyone… to… basically guess what drugs are going to come next because we can truncate that chemical space… get to that complexity… that’s going to be super cool when we manage to solve those problems, because complexity cures disease. One of the problems we have in drug discovery right now is people are making molecules; they’re too simple, so they basically nuke everything. But when they get to the later stage in the clinic, they die because they… they cause side effects. If you can make the most exquisite, complicated drug that has all the bits… the perfect key for your lock… and it only hits that lock and nothing else… it gets through the clinic, and you discover drugs. So that’s my number one thesis; that’s why I went to… that’s really cool effort of… you know… encoding chemical space. And to do that, I had to build this thing… the computer, which is a programmable computer… [ __ ] man, we’re going to be here all day if we… if we go on that.

I told you I would be able to get you out of here for your meeting, though. It’s like almost 4:30. We’ve got… we can go for another half an hour; it’s fine. We can… yeah, all right, let’s… let’s keep that going then. Maybe actually we’ll… we’ll put this part on Patreon and… and go beyond this… get an extra episode. So subscribe if you haven’t already subscribed. We did do a Patreon episode right after this; it’s about 20–25 minutes… got deeper into what Lee was just talking about as well as his work at DARPA. So if you’d like to join Patreon, that link is in the description below. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven’t already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video; they’re both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.

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DARPA Scientist on Intelligent Life, The Universe, God & AI | Lee Cronin • 289

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