Julian Gough — Arts — Then Do Better

Julian Gough is an award-winning writer and musician. We explore the breadth of his creative journey, from crafting the 'End Poem' in Minecraft to writing children's books and rock band experiences

We discuss his latest project 'The Egg and the Rock,' which investigates the universe's evolutionary complexity, paralleling biological evolution, and its implications on life, consciousness, and AI.

This conversation extends to a critical reflection on current scientific approaches, the importance of interdisciplinary thinking and writing in public and creative processes.

“…the universe does love us, and we are love, in a way. I think love is a kind of an interface with the universe. You can think of love as our interface with the universe. Love, if you are loving and loved, you're probably living correctly. The way in which you're aligned to the universe is good. It's a feedback mechanism."

Julian’s substack blog is here.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Video above or on YouTube.

00:33 The Creation and Impact of Minecraft's End Poem
03:58 Julian's Rock Band Days
07:14 Writing Children's Stories: Rabbit and Bear
12:35 Julian's Writing Process
16:34 The Goat Bubble: A Satirical Play
20:06 Exploring the Universe's Evolution
38:07 Building Complexity from Simplicity
38:43 The Eternal Existence of Matter and Time
41:21 The Fermi Paradox and Alien Life
42:30 Darwinian Evolution of Universes
43:53 The Role of Intelligent Life in the Universe
47:35 Predicting the Early Universe with James Webb
58:09 Writing in Public and Creative Processes
01:07:50 The Egg and the Rock: An Evolutionary Analogy
01:09:56 Advice for Future Thinkers and Creatives

Podcast links:

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

Transcript (part edited by AI so errors are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Julian Gough. Julian is an award winning writer and musician across many forms, including novels, children's stories, plays, and the like. He wrote the ending to Minecraft and is currently exploring ideas about how the universe has evolved on his sub stack, The Egg and the Rock, which you should check out.

Julian, welcome.

Julian: Thank you, Ben, for that fantastically professional introduction. I feel like a complete human being.

Ben: Which you are. So you wrote the end poem for the end of Minecraft. These lines have now been read by millions of people and include the line, And the universe said, I love you because you are love.

What do you make of so many fans taking these words to heart? What would you like people to take away? And maybe what does the poem mean to you today?

Julian: Okay, my relationship to the end poem is complicated in that I don't feel I should take full credit for it. It's one of those strange pieces of writing where about halfway through writing it, I wrote it longhand.

They were first draft, longhand. And about halfway through, it felt like wasn't writing it anymore and this is a common experience for writers and musicians. Keith Richards says half the Rolling Stones songs, he just woke up and something just came straight through and he recorded it and fell asleep and he has no idea where it came from.

So it's, I'm not claiming anything special here, but halfway through I found myself not knowing what the next line would be. And I was watching the lines appear on the page. With great interest, because I thought, I actually do not know what's happening here. I don't know what's coming next.

I got into a really beautiful flow state, which doesn't happen very often in my writing. It happens sometimes. But this is a really clean version of it. It's wow, I have no idea what's coming out until I read this. And that was one of the lines, that line you quoted is one of the lines. And I had this reaction to the line where I thought, I don't think that line's true.

That shouldn't be in there. And I was going to strike it out because I thought that's too much. That's too, my experience of life is a lot of suffering. There's a lot of unnecessary suffering. I wasn't sure, does the universe love you? Are you made of love? I felt it was that it didn't match my direct experience.

So I was going to strike the line out. And I had this very strong feeling that something bigger than me didn't want that line knocked out. I got this very strong resistance to knocking out that line. And I thought, okay, whatever just wrote this through me wants that line left it. So I left the line in.

And then it became people's favorite line. People get it tattooed on. Like I've seen a bunch of people with that tattooed on. And that line really lands with people. And I get a lot of, I get a lot of messages from people who say that the end poem, especially the second half of the end poem, it was read out at their brother's funeral or something like, things like that, like very, it has, it's really meaningful to a lot of people. I, and since then, that's, I wrote that in 2011, since then I've changed my mind. I think the universe does love us, and we are love, in a way. I think love is a kind of an interface with the universe. I think You can think of love as our interface with the universe. Love, if you're, if you are loving and loved, you're probably living correctly.

You're, the way in which you're aligned to the universe is good. It's a feedback mechanism. And you can say that in purely evolutionary biological terms. Love is a great sign that you're interacting correctly with the universe. That's wonderful.

Ben: And it strikes me also, we have this with a lot of creatives where one of your points is that sometimes the creative process, you're not quite sure where the inspiration is hitting you and it just comes out.

And like you say, a lot of artists have talked about that, but then also when it goes out into the world, it has a life of its own. So the audience and the readers actually bring maybe more importance to it and things that we didn't. Yeah. Initially think about the line and then it, it changes us.

It changes us back as well. Like you said, like the line actually resonated with so many people and you can realize that perhaps it was more important than you thought. You mentioned singing as well. And I know you were in a rock band like earlier, but what's most in this misunderstood about being in a rock band and singing and that part of your life?

Wow.

Julian: Yeah, I was the frontman with the band. Were we a rock band? Were we a pop band? We used to argue about this all the time. Is this rock? Is this pop? What is this? I end up calling it lit pop. It was literary pop music. Man, what's not understood about it? I, if you're the frontman of a band, that's another job where you're not entirely just yourself.

I think you're incarnating Dionysus, you are Dionysus when you're fronting a band and the gig is going well and the audience are really into it. And so you have to represent all of their desires. So I think that's, I think that's, I think when I was being the front man, I was I felt I should be available to the fantasies of everybody, that you shouldn't be narrowly straight or narrowly gay or whatever you are in your private life, you should be unbounded.

You should be you're representing Bacchus or Dionysus, that may not have come across on stage, but you do end up with this very Powerful moments where again, something's moving through you. That's bigger than you and it's bigger than the crowd. And it's and you can get quite, people can get quite carried away.

I remember doing a gig, but then you snap back into being yourself. So that can be embarrassing. If it happens halfway through the gig, like suddenly you're

Ben: Channeling a God, then you're mortal again. Yeah.

Julian: And then you're mortal again. This happened. I remember one gig we did in London at the powerhouse, I think in London, which is a fun venue.

And we had done a very barking. Performance, two of our friends were dressed up in togas with laurel wreaths, handing out grapes to the crowd and it was very over the top. And I was wearing a, I was wearing a one piece cat suit, very tight. I think it was a woman's catsuit that I bought a lot of clothes from second hand shops.

And I think halfway through the gig, it was going really well, a woman in the front row unzipped me and reached into my catsuit and pulled out my genitals. And we just looked at each other, and I was like, do what you've got to do, but, whatever. Carnage and Barker's here, but this is slightly embarrassing for both of us, isn't it?

And she was like, looking up at me and going, I think I've gone too far. And she put everything back and sent me back up and we went on with the gig. So it was, so yeah, you get these moments where it's am I a god of excess or am I just a guy singing in a band who likes books?

Ben: Yeah. Handling everything else which is going on.

It's almost like an emergent property of gigs or things like that. Emergent properties of a crowd. Something happens and it has to land on someone.

Julian: Yeah. No, there's definitely emergent properties in crowds and anyway, gigs that have a similarity all around the world, no matter what, there's a type of music that's rhythmic that leads to a kind of, ah, exaltation in the audience.

That's it's really primal and really important and it's very strange if you're just a normal nerdy guy to Find yourself incarnating that, yeah. I thoroughly recommend fronting a band.

Ben: I was reading part of an essay you've done, and it had the phrase, I am not nice, friendly, and perfect.

No one we know is nice, friendly, and perfect. And I thought that was also a perfect segue to speaking about children's stories and Rabbit and Bear, which supposedly are written for. Five to eight year olds, but I've now read them all and I think everyone should read them and you had a I think the latest one was out just a few months ago.

So everyone should check them out. But how have you found it different exploring the stories of rabbit and a bear as opposed to works, which are only for adults or anything? Is there something special about children's stories? I guess from my point of view, I think at the moment.

Children's stories, which I think are everyone's stories are almost in a golden age in the sense that we have more diverse, more special stories, as well as perhaps more boring ones. But there's a lot of them coming out. I was interested in your line of children's stories work.

Julian: Yeah I think we are probably in it, a golden age children's books, yeah. There's an awful lot of crap out there still, but there's a lot of very good stuff. I love writing children's. For children. I love it more than I probably expected to. I think It's incredibly difficult and enjoyable.

You've the constraints are really interesting. I love constraints because I'm a very chaotic person. I'm interested in everything. I like doing all kinds of different stuff. I very easily distracted. I really helps if I've got tight constraints to keep my. expression inside of a frame so that you end up with something that's useful and it just doesn't turn into 3, 000 unfinished things.

And there's huge constraints writing for five year olds, six year olds, seven year olds, because they've got a very limited vocabulary. And they've also got a very limited understanding of the world, but they're incredibly eager to learn new words and new concepts. They really want to know. They're hungry in a way that maybe adult audiences aren't. Adult audiences tend to be more jaded and also adult audiences are more set in their ways. They tend to, you're not really going to change the life of that many adult readers. You can really change the life of a child, especially if you solve one of their problems.

Like one of the, something I've done with the Rabbit and Bear books is I've tried with every book to solve a different problem that I might've had at that age that I wasn't able to solve at the time. It's a way of Writing these books is a way of sending a message back to me when I was like five or six or seven and saying This is how you maybe could how you can fix it But obviously I can't do that for me but I can do it for all these other kids that are the age I was then so it's a very nice process very Satisfying and especially when you get again messages from parents or from kids themselves because they'll dictate to their parents.

I'll get sent the email Saying the books really worked for them really landed with them and parents will often say like we use You Rabbit and bear to talk about, if my kid gets really angry we can, we know how, we have an angle on it now because we read this particular book or if my kid gets very upset by this particular kind of thing in the playground, like we have a, we go straight to rabbit and bear and we have a way of dealing with it now that we, cause, cause rabbit found a way to deal with it.

Yeah. I love it. It's very satisfying.

Ben: Wow. A letter back to your five year old self. So what problem did you want to solve at five or six, which initially you couldn't, you

Julian: You've got huge, you've got loads of problems when you're that age because it's better now. I think parents are better now at explaining the world to kids and explaining emotions to kids and things like that.

But you used to be just left to get on with it. Like when I was a kid, it's yeah, you've got problems. Everyone's got problems. I don't know. They wouldn't even necessarily notice you had problems. Yeah. A lot of it's emotional stuff and a lot of it's theory of mind stuff. A lot of it's explaining why other people do what they do because it's mysterious to you when you're a kid.

It's a parent or a teacher or someone in the playground is like really angry with you about something and you get into loads of trouble for something and you can't work out what you did. And it's really useful if you can have a story that explains sometimes it's not what you did.

It's sometimes it's something that's happening in their life or their head. Or their way of dealing with things, or they're overwhelmed, or whatever. So a lot of it's translating the kid's internal emotional life into something, into an explicit sort of story. The way they can see what's happening, played out, and then they can apply that to their own internal life.

Because the characters in the book really are aspects of ourselves. They're not, Rabbit and Bear are both aspects of me. Rabbit's knee on a normal day, bear's knee on a good day. But they're both aspects of me. So what you're doing is you're taking aspects of human psychology, putting them out as animals and watching them play it out in a forest.

And then you can take that story and put it right back into your own psychology, into your own life and go, Oh yeah, I'm being rabbit now. I really need bear to come in and give me a hand. Where's bear? I'm bear too, and it's, I think that's what's going on in those books a lot of the time.

There's a sort of Jungian, a bunch of archetypes fighting it out in the forest.

Ben: They say sometimes it helps to have a a character in your head who advises you the other way. Like you say, Oh, I need some bear now. Let's bring him. Let's bring him out. Do you, have you come to a particular type of writing process then?

So I picked up earlier that sometimes you write longhand. So maybe you go from longhand then to computer or that. And do you, have bursts in the morning or evening or you've got a thousand and one things like you said and it seems also you quite can call them constricting forms because that almost opens more freedom up to do things because you're knowing what you're doing, whether that's a poem, play, children's story or the like.

Yeah, so I'm just interested. It seems to be there's a thousand and one writing processes or more, but how have you arrived to yours and what do you think about it?

Julian: I am very chaotic, so I don't really have a set. process. I've, it's changed over the years. It used to involve a lot more writing longhand and then typing up.

Now I do a lot of editing longhand. Sometimes I write stuff longhand. I do still do a lot of stuff now though, straight onto the machine, which I actually don't think is the best way to do it. I've been experimenting lately with transcription with like dictating and talking. I'm always trying to find a new way to get.

First draft down, so I can, and then when the first draft is down, I often print out and edit by hand. I do a lot of hand editing. And if I'm really, if the structure's all over the place, I'll do a helicopter draft. I'll print out 30 pages and lay them out across the floor in a grid and just stand on a chair and look at it and mark bits in colored markers, like this character's here, this character's here, and then stand up and just try and get an overview of what the fuck's going on here.

Oh, I can see from here, now I can see the structure's rolling up. Shuffle the pages and cut bits out. And it's very messy. I'm a terribly messy writer. I think huge number of drafts.

Ben: And do you write in short bursts, long bursts, or just varies? It's constrained by having a five year old ?

Julian: whenever I can, a lot of the time I do my best work in the morning and I do my best work when I switch off the internet and I often don't switch off the internet and I just wrestle with that every single day. But if, my best work is if I get up in the morning, drop Arlo into kindergarten and then either into the office, I rent a little office or I come home. At the moment I'm working on the balcony at home because I get sunshine and it's nice. And I do a couple of hours in the morning with the internet off and that's ideal.

And then do slightly less taxing stuff in the afternoon and rewriting, catch up on notes. I'm not

Ben: a morning writer, but I definitely write. Best when I switch off the internet and actually I turn it off everything and all of that. And even actually have to make sure like phone or messages don't ping me as well.

So that's somewhere else because otherwise you get pinged.

Julian: I don’t have notifications on anything. I don't let anything ping. I don't think anything I own pings. And I use freedom as an internet blocker to switch it off. But then I'm constantly fiddling around with that.

And then sometimes I have to do something in the morning and I have to unblock all my internet blocks because they're, I can't, I need to go online for that period. And it's yeah, my first, the first novel I wrote I was such a procrastinator. I set myself a target of writing two hours a day, five days a week.

So all I have to do is 10 hours. Of actual writing. But if I, if I looked out the window for 10 minutes and wasn't even thinking about writing, I'd stop the clock. If I, went off and made coffee and had biscuits, I'd stop the clock. So it had to be actual to write. But I would relentlessly through writing that book, I would get to midnight and I hadn't started.

I was a student then, I was young then, I wasn't a student, but I was a young guy in a band and I was writing a novel in my spare time. And so at midnight I would go out to a cafe Java's in Galway and start writing, and I'd get two hours solid work done by 4am, because then, because I had baby breaks then as well, I'd be like done, and and then they closed at 4am and I'd go home and go to bed.

having got my two hours done, but I would put it off all day. I'm unbelievably bad at procrastinating. I'm just a terrible procrastinator and there's loads of resistance and yet I love writing. Go figure. I don't know. Yeah.

Ben: I see. It's probably helpful for marinating in your brain, but yeah, getting over that energy hump to actually write the thing.

Yeah, it's a, there's a technique and trial in itself. You've written a play about a goat and investment bubbles and investment hedge fund managers satire, so why a play and why tackle the financial crisis and all of the issues around it?

Julian: It, it started, that started as a short story.

Okay. That started as I was reading the newspaper and I saw an interview, it was an article in the independent many years ago. And it was an interview with The guy who was in charge of air traffic control for

Somaliland, which is part of the former Somalia, and he was in, I think, Ethiopia, running air traffic control because it was too dangerous to have the air traffic control run from Somaliland, and He was recounting a story during the interview of how the guy, the airport manager in Hargeisa, which is the capital of Somaliland, had contacted him to say a local guy his goat had been killed on the runway by one of the UN planes landing.

And and he was going to pay the guy twice the price of a goat in compensation because that was the tradition in, in, Somaliland. And the. Air traffic control guy said, you do not do that if you cannot do that. Because if you do, if you pay twice the price of a goat for a dead goat on your runway, you've created a market for dead goats on your runway, everyone's gonna be driving goats onto your runway because that's the quickest way to make the price of two goats.

So he didn't do it, but I read that article, I thought, oh my God, what if he did do it? How out of hand could this get, so in the story I wrote, he does pay out the price of two goats. But the guy I have with the dead goat at the start is a, I have in my story is an economist. He's an economist who's been displaced by civil war.

All he has left is one three legged goat. And he thinks, what can I do with this? He drives the goat onto the runway. It gets killed by a UN plane. He goes to the air, Airport manager gets the price of two goats, buys two goats in the market, comes back the next day, drives them onto the runway, they get killed.

He goes, gets the price of four goats, buys four goats. But then people start to notice what he's doing and they all start to drive their goats onto the runway. And so you get this goat bubble and then the price of goats starts to go up in the market. Because now there's more demand for goats, and then, and then the, they get they negotiate with the airport manager to index link the price the compensation price of the goats to the new price of the goat market.

And then eventually they're running out of, then eventually the UN has to start flying in goats to finance the goat compensation. So now the UN are in the circuit supplying goats to the goat market so that they, to make profit to pay the compensation. And it gets out of hand and eventually there's too many goats on the runway.

for this to work. So they start going to virtual goats and you end up with this virtual goat bubble and then the financial institutions start to realize that goats in Somaliland are the biggest, are the fastest rising asset price in the world. So they all get involved and you get this, all the big Western banking, private equity, everybody gets involved and it becomes this So it's a satire of of financial crisis, but it was I I gave it to my agent and she really, it was, at the time it was Pat Kavanagh, and she really liked it.

She said, where should we place this though? It's very technical, it's very esoteric. I was like, send it to the Financial Times. I said, try The Economist and The Financial Times. And she said, you know they don't publish short stories, Julian. I said, they'll publish this one. And she sent it to The Financial Times and they published it.

It was the first short story they'd ever published it. They published it in their Christmas issue.

Ben: Ah, excellent. Also your description of the complex system of goat bubbles. Although I guess it isn't that complex. This remind me of thinking about, Evolution and the like, and there's a good segue into your ideas about the universe.

You're writing about the universe and essentially how you think it may have evolved from lesser universes. So some ideas which are around, but you really picked up on this. So how did you come to that? And why do you think our current universe may well have evolved from lesser universes?

Julian: Okay. I think if you look at my entire career that I've thought about this recently, I think there's a sort of common thread, which is I want to see reality more clearly with the children's books. I'm trying to help children see reality more clearly so that they have a better understanding of their world so that they can navigate it better.

And I think it's been true for all of the art I've made. And the ultimate version of that is seeing the universe more clearly, I think. I've always been interested in the universe as a thing, and I've always been slightly dissatisfied with the way we talk about the universe, the language we use.

It's always described in this very, reductionist materialist way. The standard language about talking, when you talk about the universe is, you're going to it's very likely the language you use to talk about particle physics. It's as though you can explain the entire universe just using the terms out of particle physics.

And I don't think you, you can, you can't there's too many emergent things happening. There's too much, there's too much complexity emerging. And the way that complexity emerges, as I, thought about this and read about it and pondered over the years just seems seem to me after a while to be awfully like the kind of developmental process in an evolved organism.

It's very step by step. It's very, okay, let's describe the primal problem that interested me here. This universe starts out at the Big Bang as a, maybe a singularity, and it expands into a cloud of incredibly hot, dense gas. Completely undifferentiated. No structure. And over time, step by step, it builds out galaxies planetary systems, orbiting stars, those planetary systems that we know from our own direct experience can then complexify up into something that contains life, which can then generate a biosphere that is stable over tremendous periods of time that can then generate life.

Intelligent life forms like you and me, and then we can generate technological a sort of technosphere that, so we're supported from one side by a biosphere and the other side by a technosphere that we've actually built. And we're now talking to each other in abstract language, using technology in a biosphere that can maintain itself for billions of years.

supplied by energy from an external source that is homeostatic, dynamic, out of equilibrium. And we're made out of 90 something elements, stable elements, that have been in turn built and assembled over about three rounds of star formation and distributed out of the bottom of an incredible gravity well by supernova explosions to make the next round of stars, to make the next round of stars so that you can build complex planetary systems out of these 90 something elements.

That looks like a developmental process. That, that does not look like ran. Random, right? And if a universe has, the standard view of our universe is that it has random arbitrary characteristics. It's a one shot universe. We know there's one universe. It's a one shot universe. It's, all of its characteristics are random and arbitrary.

There's no meaning to any of them. And a random arbitrary one shot universe doesn't do what our universe does. It doesn't self complexify to this extraordinary extent. And it, it seemed to me like this looks like it's been fine tuned and the only mechanism we've ever heard of that can fine tune parameters to give you this kind of self complexifying developmental outcome is evolution.

And it seemed to me like the universe evolved and this is something I then at that point I googled and thought has anyone else been Discussing this thinking about this and discovered that like Lee Smolin, the theoretical physicist, had put forward a pretty excellent mechanism for how that might even happen, almost 30 years, 30, 30 years ago now. And I read up on that. And as I got into that, I realized, holy shit, the idea of an evolved universe has not been explored for purely sociological reasons, not scientific reasons. It's completely in the knowledge shadow. There isn't anyone to take responsibility for it. Like imagine you today, it was definitively proved, let's say that our universe.

was an, had evolved from earlier universes that have fine tuned the basic parameters of matter so that it self complexifies. Who's in charge of the research program on that? The cosmologists know nothing about evolutionary theory, so they don't, they're not going to feel qualified to deal with it. The evolutionary theorists don't even know about this theory, mostly, and they know nothing about cosmology, so they don't know how to apply there.

There's literally no faculty on earth qualified to explore this theory. So I ended up for the last decade, exploring the living shit out of this theory. And I've realized that for a while, you can actually make predictions with it. There's the implications of this theory have not been explored to an astonishing extent.

The guy that thought it up is brilliant. He's he's a theoretical physicist, but he's a theoretical physicist. He didn't even understand the implications of his own theory because they play out through evolutionary mechanisms that he had to. A simple basic understanding of, but not a profound understanding.

So a couple of years ago, the should I expand on what's like Smolin's theory is first?

Ben: We can get to the theory also, I think we'll cross black holes, aliens and the like, but I was going to maybe take one step back. What you said about the societal. Aspect there's a sort of almost history of ideas about why this has come to place because I think you make the point really well and you've written in one of your sub stacks essentially around how Galileo for really good reasons thought, you know what, I'm going to have to couch everything I do in the language of numbers because the church can't attack me with the language of numbers.

And I just saw, one of my mates. Get, doofed by trying to encroach on the church's and church's terms. And I thought also this echoed some of our history of writing in the novel or in the fiction. So today, not quite, but a majority of what we write is in this kind of style of where we think it's quite close to our reality, right?

You have a story that go around, you have a holiday romance and type like that. Yes. Yes. And if. If you're, if you throw in something which seems too fantastical, we go, Oh, that can't be true. We disregard that story. So stories actually, not all of them cause we have magic realism and the like, but quite a narrow amount.

We read now a lot of non fiction, because we go, oh my god, could that really have happened? And it turns out that life is now more fantastical than a lot of our novels, and our novels, there's an argument about the split of why the novel happened, (Tristram Shandy) versus or not, but there's quite a small amount exploring fantastical ideas, and we do have it.

Children's books, fantasy, science fiction, magic realism. But it's actually quite a narrow domain versus the classical novel today, which is a little bit like quote unquote, real life. And we're allowed just one fantastical thing to happen because if you do more than that, the reader suddenly thinks, Oh, that can't be like real life.

And I just thought thinking about that is like the novel has tried to do the same thing that Galileo did, which was like, Oh, we somehow think it's safer to conform to this for all of these societal reasons. So in the history of ideas, I thought when I thought about that, it's and that completely explains why these ideas are under explored and could potentially well, definitely underrated and could potentially be right.

And I thought that was a key insight for almost the human explanation. For why this hasn't been explored before we even get on to the fact that actually the ideas could well have strong merit on themselves. And is that, have I thought about it correctly in terms of your thinking about the history of ideas and why we've ended up in this place?

Julian: Yeah that's basically, I think, in the introductions of the book, I talk about how Galileo, his founding principle was the truth about the universe is mathematical and the language of science is mathematics, and I'm certain that it was partly because Bruno had just got burnt to death for speculating wildly about other stars being other suns and having other planets and other people on, living things on them that had souls and, that, that was one of the reasons, there were other reasons, but that was one of the main reasons he got burnt to death in the, in, in the public square after being tortured by the Inquisition in Rome.

And Bruno had applied for the same job that Galileo had nine years later, when after the years of trial, when he was, when Bruno was executed, they were, they overlapped, a lot. So Galileo did not want to extract the meaning from the data. He just wanted to stack up the data.

He was just going to do a mathematical science, purely mathematical descriptions of reality, nothing about the meaning, right? He's leaving all that to the church, but that leaves out huge areas of truth that are really important. There's, there are truths in, Carl Jung, there are truths in the Buddha, there are truths in transcendental direct experiences, there are truths in the way Aretha Franklin sings, that are not captured mathematically, and, but are nonetheless true and useful.

And we've had this weird flip over the last few centuries where What started out as a vow of humility, science is a limited construct that will just give you mathematical truths about reality. There are many other truths that are more important, that used to be left to the church has flipped to science is the church.

Mathematical descriptions of reality are the only real, valid, important descriptions of reality and everything else is underneath that in importance. And that's a complete reversal of what was like, intended at the birth of science,

Ben: What's your what's your reading then about this possible theory of the universe and I guess bringing in your humanities and view.

I had a really simplistic take when reading yours and skimming the small and with, you had black holes and a singularity and you have the big bang and a singularity and hey presto, that seems quite a big coincidence. And then let's see where we go from there. But there was a lot of things in that.

So how are you thinking about it? And maybe you can also roll in because from that you have got predictions like you've, Mention and we now have all of these structures and the things that we're seeing from the web telescope Which are going lo and behold they don't fit in our what is it called the standard model of the universe?

I think that's what physicists have said. Oh and physicists have always said the standard model does not explain everything It's just what we have and the web telescope is going. Yeah, and look at all of these structures which are not Explainable without that, but it seems that the theory you're exploring, seems to have some of that.

What's your view?

Julian: First little point though. I think they used, there was a long period of time where the artists extracted the meaning from the data that the scientists provided. I thought that was a very healthy ecosystem. The, galvanism was just, was it.

was demonstrated by a scientist who was putting electricity through frog's muscles and the dead frog's muscles and they were twitching it. And this was witnessed by, Mary Shelley probably saw it. If she didn't, her brother definitely did. And then she writes Frankenstein. Frankenstein is the artistic extraction of the meaning from the data of the early electrical experiments.

And you, and Jules Verne sends men to the moon and invents submarines and does all this stuff, extracting the meaning from a lot of the technological and scientific data around him at the time. You had people fly around the world in hot air balloons and you've got, he's doing, he's extracting the meaning from the data.

H. G. Wells was doing the same. Heinlein was doing the same in the golden age of science fiction in America. You had, Asimov and Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke was not just a science fiction writer, he predicted geostationary orbiting satellites, in a paper he wrote in 1849 or 40 something.

And I think we've, the, as science has got more and more specialized, Writers have retreated from trying to understand science and extract the meaning from it. And they have gone to where you're talking about, where they're doing a lot of gritty realism and a lot of realistic accounts of normal human lives and not really going big. Because it's hard to follow. It's really difficult to follow modern science. It's become a whole bunch of subs, subspecialities with privatized jargons that, and they don't even understand each other. That's one very interesting thing. And I definitely found that talking to a range of scientists about these theories.

They really don't even understand each other. So it's totally fragmented and there's no one synthesizing it because all of the most interesting truths tend to come from taking an idea from one field and applying it to another field where it has wonderful application that nobody's. And there's hardly anyone doing that.

So I think that's my role in this. So going back to the black holes thing John Wheeler had this great American physicist, had this interesting idea that there was, we had two problems in our universe that involves singularities and you described it well, that like one is black holes. Mass energy collapses to a point and vanishes from our universe, and one is the Big Bang.

It's a singularity where mass energy appears from nowhere and expands into a universe. And John Wheeler said, what if they're the same thing just seen from different sites? What if a black hole in a parent universe punches down to a singularity, bounces and forms a big bang in a child universe? Forms a child universe?

That gave you a me a way for universes to reproduce. He thought maybe the child universes have randomly different basic parameters of matter, randomly different laws of physics here. And that might be an explanation for why you have this crazy, complicated, strange universe that we're in, which seems bizarrely unlikely.

random. It's not a great explanation because you're just throwing lots of random universes at a problem trying to get something really sophisticated. But one of his students was Lee Smolin. And Lee Smolin realized, because he was reading some evolutionary theory at the time, he was reading Stephen Jay Gould and Lin Manuel Margulis he realized, wait a minute, if the child universe, If the basic parameters of matter in the child universe, which means like the mass of the electron, the speed of light, the the strong nuclear force, these various little things that make up the basics of our universe.

If they varied, not randomly and completely, Wheeler suggested, but if they just varied slightly, you would get inheritance. And you would get Darwinian evolution of the universes. It just, it's automatic, because if the child universe has its basic parameters of matter vary slightly, that will make it either more likely or less likely to produce more or less black holes.

Which means it will make it more or less reproductively successful. And so the ones that are more reproductively successful will have more offspring. They will be tending in that direction. So some of those will have even more offspring, some will have less, but you'll end up with a, you'll end up with a kind of branching, an evolutionary branching where the number of universes in existence gets dominated by highly reproductively successful universes.

You can get runaway reproductive success because the thing about universes is they're not. They're not in competition for resources. Each one is its own space time. Each one is it. Each one is both organism and environment. So You know, there are limits to biological offspring because they're born into a constrained environment as they, and they fight for resources and, hippopotamus that has 3 million baby hippopotami does not end up being reproductively successful because you can't feed 3 million.

Hypopotamite in that little bit of wherever it was, wherever they were born. But you can have three, three million offspring as a universe and they're all new universes. They're not in competition. You can do that. And universes are essentially flat. Like the mass energy and the gravitational energy in universe net out to zero in our universe.

So you can make them for free. It's not like they get smaller every time. It's not if you make a million babies, they're a million times smaller than the babies you would make if you only make one baby. They can all, because they net out to zero, they could all be full scale, full size universes.

So you can get runaway reproductive success. And our universe, if you count the number of black holes in it, and they've done a recent assessment of that, you have to guess slightly, because, but if you work out the number of stars, the right mass and how long they live and all that, you can work out the number of black holes.

And there's 40 quintillion black holes in our universe. So if black holes are reproductive success, we're pretty reproductively successful universe 40 quintillion already.

Ben: And does the net zero equilibrium explanation give a hint at the where the singularity comes from, because it strikes me you have potentially a chicken and egg problem around I could see how it starts off black hole singularity evolution and that explosion.

But do you still need the sublime to, to explain the origin of the singularity, even if it might be a net zero construct?

Julian: I think you don't. I think one of the reasons I really love an evolutionary theory is. You can just, you don't have a starting problem. You don't have a, where did it come from problem?

If you explain our complex universe like ours by invoking your God or something, now you've invoked an even more complex entity. Where did that come from? Cause you've got Gaul's law kicks in here. Gaul's law states that any complex working system evolved from a simple working system. You can't start with an incredibly complex system.

You can't start by building Concord. You have to. Build the Wright Brothers plane out of bicycle parts that flies a hundred yards. You start with that, and you iterate and iterate, and eventually you get Kongol, but you can't start with Kongol. You can't start with a human being. You can start with a protozoic, you can start with some kind of metabolic process happening in mud that eventually gets a membrane and turns into a protozoic, creature.

And prokaryotic bacterium or whatever, and then eventually you get eukaryotes and so on. And you can get your way to human beings. Which are complex working systems, but you have to start with a simple working system, and I think the same thing applies to universes. The, for me, one of the beauties of this is the starting point is there was always something.

There was always something, and it was unbelievably simple. It was as simple as it gets. There was ur matter, right? There weren't 96 elements doing all kinds of complicated things. There was just something that is, as simple as you can imagine, simpler than a hydrogen atom. And all it, all you needed to do is to split in two at some point, collapse into two things.

Some of, if you've got something. And time, and therefore change, eventually, because you've got an infinite amount of time, some it shuffles, it collapses, it falls to, to some point where it collapses into two things. And now you've got two things. And if one of them is more successful than the other at collapsing into things, you've got evolution, right?

And eventually you get to this more complicated version down the line.

Ben: So I can see from simple, we'll build more complex Your first one of your statements within that was essentially saying that you don't need, I don't think we quite have the language for it essentially, but we don't need a time before because you don't need this time before.

Yeah. The simple, whatever you want to call it Oh, Matt, because we don't have the language for it. It just probably the simplest thing you can imagine just was. And from that, everything can flow.

Julian: Yeah. There was always something existing in time. There was always something, and there was always time inside our space, time bubble.

Starts at zero for us because space time itself starts at the singularity, but it's emerging from the space time of the parent universe. There was space time in the parent universe as it collapses to a point and then bounces to form our space time. So there was space time in that universe. That universe was born from a point that came out of a parent universe.

There was space time in that universe. There's always time, there's always something. But it gets more complicated as it goes on. In the same way, there was always, at a different scale, there was always matter on Earth. There was always 96 elements in a puzzle. There's a worm puddle, a billion years ago, and you, as you start to get separation and differential reproductive success, you get evolution and it gets fucking complicated really fast.

And I think the same thing happens with universes. And we're in a pretty, relatively complicated universe. There are probably more complicated universes. And ours may well be. There are less complicated universes. And we're spawning more. Let's assume we're mediocre. Let's assume we're mediocre.

And we're spawning more. And we're spawning enormous numbers of universes that are related to ours, that will be variations on ours, yes. Yes. And

Ben: there's the fact that we don't seem to have detected any alien life as yet. Yeah. Does that have any, I guess some people call this the Fermi paradox, and I believe the scientists actually think that it is actually likely there is alien life out there.

But we lack the technology slash the scale slash haven't been around for long enough. There's a civilization that could detect this thing with like maybe a couple of decades and you need to go a billion years or so to do that. But is this a challenge or evidence for either way? Or actually it's just neutral because we simply don't know on the alien question.

You can make predictions based

Julian: on theory. So the if this is going to evolve, if our universe is, I should actually walk you through this. The version of the theory I've ended up with in more detail, it's the one that makes predictions. Yes. And it also plays into what we're talking about here.

So the short answer to your question is the theory says there should be a lot of life in this universe. Life should pop up again and again on multiple worlds, probably a lot on icy moons will also sometimes on exposed worlds like ours. Okay. Wherever there's a lot of water and an energy source, you're probably going to get some sort of life form eventually.

But okay, I'll walk you through the theory. So that Smollett, let's go back to Smollett. He predicted That you would get Darwinian evolution of universes and that would ultimately fine tune the basic parameters of matter to optimize for black hole production. That was his version of the theory, right? So our universe has a lot of black holes and that was where the theory stood when he started it out. One reason by the way that didn't get any traction at the time is it's not a full version of the theory. It's been expanded. But he published it in the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity, which is read by 200 people, all of whom are really interested in quantum gravity and have no interest in evolutionary theories. And don't know anything about them. So it was, and this was before the internet, so I rang the, I talked to the, I emailed the editors of that journal recently just to double check everything, and yeah, they said yeah, we didn't go online for another six years after that paper. So no one can access it, right?

It's in, on paper, in a few libraries. And it's being read by nobody outside of quantum, the quantum gravity fields. It, it got, it, so it, by the time people hear about it, they're not even reading the original paper, they're just hearing a cartoon version of it that a friend mentioned.

And it just didn't gain traction, and it was dismissed by other physicists. Using arguments that actually don't hold up, but Smolin didn't know that because he doesn't know enough about evolution. Okay but one question that comes out of this is, if the universe evolved, and this is a developmental process that's been fine tuned by evolution, why is there intelligent life in it?

Intelligent life is a very odd, complex, energy intensive thing to generate, and it clearly, this universe puts a lot of energy into doing this. Why? How does that benefit universes, reproductions? If the universe is the, the unit of selection is the thing that's reproducing, what's, why would it generate intelligent life?

What's happening there? And a few people Clement Vidal John Smart Louis Crane Michael E. Price, a few people have they're mathematicians and philosophers and so on, systems theorists dug into that. And they came up with an idea, which I think is definitely true. And. Smallin doesn't like, he thinks it's too science fictional, but okay.

Which is, intelligent lifeforms, they will, they use energy. And they're going to try and optimize their energy use, right? Everybody does. Every creature, no matter how great or small, will try to get the most energy out of the environment they can with the least effort. So we see with ourselves, we've, we used our muscles.

As a power first, then we used animal fossils. Then we used burning wood, burning coal, oil, gas. Now we're using nuclear fission. We're trying to unlock nuclear fusion, and what you're doing is you're pushing up the energy efficiency slope. All of those are more efficient than the previous ones. You're getting more energy for less, out of less matter each time.

The ultimate end of that in our universe is, The production of small black holes, because if you can, if you drop matter into small black holes, you can actually get, if you can extract up to 42 percent of the mass as energy, which is way more efficient than fusion. Fusion you can extract 0. 7%. Of the mass as energy.

Fission, fission reactions, you splitting atoms, you can get 0. 1 percent of the mass out as energy. So by far the most efficient thing is dropping energy into a black hole. And if you can make small black holes technologically, manufacture them as energy and use them as energy sources, that's gonna, you're gonna do that.

That's the ultimate, that's where technological species will end up automatically. It doesn't matter what they think they're here for, that's what they're going to end up doing. I think that was the most interesting thing. And that's About two and a half cuts, right? You need two and a half cats.

Yes, you do. The cat is the, sadly, the cat has become the unit of the unit of energy for, the battery to drop into black holes. But you can, I think you can power all of Norway for a year with, is it two and a half black cats? dropped into a black hole. Yeah. So any universe that just randomly exploring the possibility space of matter generated intelligent life, technological life, they would then be able to manipulate the matter of that universe into making small black holes in a way that nature couldn't.

Nature on its own can't make small black holes. It can make star sized ones. And we know it can make supermassive black holes. It can't make really small ones. But if intelligent life does that, then that universe is going to be colossally more reproductively successful than one that doesn't produce intelligent life.

So intelligent life will be conserved. Once it's popped up once, it will be conserved. It will be very successful. And then, as generations go by, the basic parameters of matter will fine tune to make it more and more easy for life to develop until you get this kind of universe we're in now, which where it pops up pretty easily on this planet and develops into complexity pretty easily.

Other predictions. Okay, so that's where the theory was at when I got involved. And I've met Clement and John and people since then they've emailed me smaller than that. But then the James Webb was coming up the James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's latest space telescope, and it's a really revolutionary breakthrough because It's super cooled down to very close to absolute zero so that it can detect really difficult to detect infrared light from the very early universe because if you after the Big Bang, the light from the first billion years after the Big Bang has been stretched so much by the expansion of the universe.

As it's passed through the expanding universe, that its wavelength has dropped right down into the infrared. All the visible light from there is now right down into the infrared. And that means we can't see it on earth because we did, we radiate in the infrared. Everything radiates in the infrared. Our telescopes radiate way more in the infrared.

You can't pick up the light. So we've got, had literally no data from the very beginning of the universe up until the James Webb Space Telescope. So I thought as this was coming up two years ago, I thought, hang on, if this theory is correct. And if this universe did evolve. I should be able to make predictions about what the James Webb Space Telescope will see that are better than what the mainstream are predicting.

I should be more, I should be able to get a more accurate picture of the early universe. And that would be fucking fantastic for the theory, if I was right, if I was wrong, it'd be incredibly hideously embarrassing. And I would have to slink away and abandon investigating this, but it was a great natural experiment.

So I thought through the implications of the theory from scratch. Okay. And to understand the successful prediction I make, you've got to, you've got to realize. Or you've got to know that every galaxy we look at, all the spiral galaxies we look at and so on they seem to have a supermassive black hole at their center.

They all have a supermassive black hole at their center. You can tell that because the stars near it are going whizzing around something invisible really fast that obviously has a tremendous amount of gravity. So we know there's a supermassive black hole there. And some of these supermassive black holes have masses that are millions of times the mass of our sun.

Some of them have masses that are. Billions of times the massive. So they're really huge. Now a black hole is a point where Mass, mass energy has collapsed to a density that even light can't escape from it. Nothing can escape from it. It's gone from our universe. No information can come back out of the black hole.

But these supermassive black holes are immense. And they're at the center of all the galaxies. Now, the classic theory for how they came to be was that lots of stellar mass black holes, lots of, because when a star gets to the end of its life and uses up all its fuel, there's no longer radiation pushing out against gravity.

It runs out of fuel, the radiation pushing out against gravity that stops it collapsing is gone. The star collapses under its own gravity. And if they're much bigger than if they're, Five times, eight times bigger than our sun. If they're much bigger than our sun, they will keep collapsing until they form a black hole.

They just, they'll collapse to the point where even light can't escape. So that's how most black holes are formed. That's the, those are the black holes that Lee Smolin was talking about. They're stellar mass black holes. They're the mass of a sun, a star. Several times the mass of our sun, but they're the mass of a star, big star.

The old theory was lots of those must somehow come together to eventually form a much bigger black hole that pulls in a lot more matter and gas and therefore it eventually grows to be a supermassive black hole. It was a bottom up process where they slowly assemble from very small star mass black holes. Here's a consequence, here's an implication of the evolutionary theory, which I've never, I never had, I, which nobody had, scene, because nobody's fucking thinking about this. Nobody's thinking. Ten people are thinking about this, and they're thinking about it from their own specialized areas, right? The earliest, most, the earliest, most primitive universes if they reproduce through black holes, would have pr reproduced through really big, simple, direct collapse black holes. direct collapsed supermassive black holes. The simple matter that they were made out of would crunch down to form a really big black hole, because they're not producing very many black holes, so a lot of mass will go into each one.

If you divide a universe by five, you end up with really big black Oh, supermassive black holes. If you divide it by trillions, the way we do in ours, because we form trillions of stars, you end up with lots of very small stardust black holes, right? So the early ones were direct collapse supermassive black holes.

We have supermassive black holes in this universe at the center of every galaxy. If it's inevitable, if it's an evolved universe the way that those direct supermassive black holes were, are produced will be conserved from the earliest universes. They will be direct collapse supermassive black holes, right?

They won't be put together from a complicated process involving stars going through a whole load of processes and then eventually they collapse and then they all stick together and eventually they make a supermassive black hole. No, if we have supermassive black holes, they're almost certainly the mechanism that produced them is going to be direct collapse and it's going to be conserved. My theory was, what we should see in the very early universe is a wave of direct collapse supermassive black hole formation. By direct collapse I mean they don't form stars first and then burn out and then collapse. They just go. You're going to see direct collapse, supermassive black hole formation.

And after that, you're going to see star formation and galaxy formation. And here the early universe is incredibly smooth. The gas is really smooth. Okay. It's actually hard for cosmologists to work out how you get star formation in the early universe because it's so smooth. What you need are density areas to nucleate out little, you need seeds of gravity to nucleate out stars.

And you don't really have that in the early universe. It's super, super smooth. It's not optimized for star formation. So my argument was, it's gonna be optimized for supermassive black hole formation because huge areas will collapse. And as huge areas collapse, they don't nucleate out into stars and form lots and lots of stars because it's too smooth.

They form a supermassive black hole. And that supermassive black hole then optimizes conditions for star formation. That supermassive black hole, matter will fall into it, gas will fall into it will heat up and give out. Absolutely tons of energy as it does. All the brightest things in our universe are matter falling into black holes, quasars, they're all matter falling into black holes.

That supermassive black hole, as the energy falls into it, they, what they, what happens is they get really hot and they generate huge relativistic jets of matter shooting charged particles shooting up at the north and south magnetic pole of the spinning supermassive black hole.

Supermassive black holes have enormous magnetic fields and they jet these. Particle jets at close to light speed. They accelerate and close to light speed north and south. We know this from looking at quasars in the more recent galaxy. In more recent universe, in closer galaxies, we know this happens.

Those radiat radiation jets, these, those jets are charged particles shock the surrounding gas. And those shock shockwaves nucleate out. They shockwaves are density waves. They nucleate out star formation. So what I predicted you would see is a super massive of black holes rapidly generating. Spiral galaxies and so forth around the supermassive black hole nucleating out tons of stars.

So you would see rapid early galaxy formation around an ex a pre a supermassive black hole which precedes the galaxy formation. And the galaxy forms around the supermassive black hole rapidly and early. That's what, so you can get compact early galaxies. Built around supermassive black holes, dominated by their supermassive black holes.

That's exactly what you're seeing with James Webb. And it wasn't predicted by anyone else. Now, I want to give credit to one group of scientists, Priya Natarajan in Yale, and a few other scientists had done work on direct collapse supermassive black holes, and they knew they were theoretically possible.

And I drew, when I was making my predictions, I referenced their work and drew on their work, because I knew that direct collapse supermassive black holes were theoretically possible in our universe. But I was saying, they're not just, they're not just theoretically possible, there's going to be almost a phase transition in the early universe where, pretty much all the supermassive black holes we see today will all pretty much form first and then generate the galaxies around themselves.

And it's what we're seeing.

Ben: That's amazing. I don't know enough to know if there might be alternative theories, but the fact that this theory, your interpretation of it, predicted this in advance, and then we saw it, seems pretty amazing. Pretty strong evidence for me, particularly at the very least that this is an underexplored idea that more people need to think about.

Julian: It’s always possible I'm wrong but it's always possible I'm wrong, but this is very strong evidence. There's something seriously worth exploring here.

Ben: And that actually more cross, Disciplinary thinking, probably from non mathematician quantum people, or mathematician quantum people need to go and think about evolutionary or other ideas around that complexity.

It does strike me, this might be completely left field, but I don't know whether there's our current thinking around consciousness, or the fact that we don't understand that much about consciousness, have anything to say about this.

Julian: Okay I'm leaving consciousness out of my book because it makes it a whole other book, a whole other book, a whole other ten books.

But yeah clearly an evolved universe that generates conscious entities like you and me. And the listeners, I assume the listeners are conscious of it if they fall asleep. You're gonna have some very weird dreams, you're gonna have some very weird dreams. Universe that generates, builds out through a very complex multi step process.

Conscious entities like us is a very weird universe and frankly I'm out of my depth when I, when it starts, when we start to think about what the implications are for consciousness in in, in evolved universes. I have my thoughts and theories, but they, but I'm, that, that's me. When I do those, I'm starting to move into a kind of a transcendent realm of direct personal experience of the universe that would freak out the the kind of materialist reductionist that I want to talk to in, in this book.

It does definitely have huge implications for consciousness in the universe. It does huge implications. I, again, there was consciousness in the previous universes that generated our universe.

Ben: I know. I would also say like we, humanity itself knows so little about this consciousness thing.

I spoken to some people who think have got to potentially some sort of enlightenment states, those who've taken sort of mushroom type stuff, or even neuroscientists who've just said, look, what we understand about consciousness. is very little. All of this stuff is really very weird, which is what you get.

So it's really interesting around that. But you're writing this work you're writing it in public on your sub stack and, it's coming through and there'll be there'll be a book as well. So I'm interested in how you're finding writing in public and also, you know that mixes up with personal story as well so how you're finding that and maybe how perhaps readers or listeners can interact and help evolve your theory or thinking but I guess this writing in public is a In some ways, there's a relatively new creative phenomena.

Obviously we've always had like serials and stuff, but the fact that people can comment in, with a newsletter format and then next week there might be another newsletter which interacts with it. I guess it's an offshoot of blogs.

There seems to be a creative a growing creative outlet for that and also explores ideas like this.

So I'd be interested in, in, in how you think, how you've been finding it and and how people can help.

Julian: Yeah I think new technologies always generate new art forms and I'm, one way of putting what I'm doing is, or phrasing what I'm doing is I'm writing the book in public. Another way of putting it is I'm, there's a, there's an art, I'm exploring an art form, which is.

Which you can call writing a book in public. So I use the Substack platform to do the, I've got a custom domain for it now because, for various reasons but I'm basically using Substack and it's, writing it in public is, has been fantastic. I you end up meeting people that you wouldn't meet otherwise, you end up in conversations you wouldn't have otherwise.

The Substack version of the book is re, is a really important version of the book. There will be a print book at the end of all this But I think they're both vitally important. The subsec isn't just a means to, to, to the end of the book. It's also a thing in its own right. And, there's a lot of material on the subsec that won't end up in the book, because, the book has to be tight and focused and go in this, beginning to end tell you the story.

Whereas I can ramble around the place and explore little various offshoots of the ideas.

Ben: Have you thought of making a kind of GPT version of the book? Tyler Cowen did one on greatest economist of all time or something like that, Goat which was a much more entertaining way of actually engaging with the book and actually exploring it deeper than simply reading the text I felt for that.

I am thinking about doing something like that. Yeah.

Julian: Cause also I have this, I use Roam and Scrivener to do my, I put all my rough stuff into Roam and then, which is a kind of a graph tool for connecting data and all kinds of. Texts in all kinds of interesting ways. I think and I, and then I bring stuff across into Scrivener and I make a more formal post or chapter in Scrivener over multiple drafts and then something goes up on the subset, but there's a huge amount of information left behind, it's also quite interesting.

So what I'd like to do is throw all of the material, all the Rome stuff, all the subset stuff into, yeah, into a bucket and to have a, Have an AI be able to answer questions from that huge bucket of information, which is way bigger than we'll end up in the book. Yeah. I would like that. Yeah. Yeah. I might talk to you about that if much about how best to do it.

Ben: I think the cost of doing it was going to drop dramatically and actually will be really interesting.

Julian: The number of tokens, yeah, it's dropped a huge amount.

Ben: That little thing about AI as we've entered into the conversation, also strikes me as hearing what you've said about being more efficient and energy and where evolutionary processes go.

And I guess some who speculate around AI think AI heads to its own singularity as well, but just reflecting what you've said, it seems to me that this could simply be an energy efficiency type thing, which you don't necessarily need to get to a singularity for. But have you had any speculations on how your thinking has been impacted by what we're talking about?

By the technology that we're seeing in AI agents.

Julian: I think, okay, in an evolutionary universe that there are implications I think for our future as humans and our future And are the future of our technologies. I think it's all one thing. It's all one thing like human beings. It's just in the design of a human being to feel that they're separate from the universe and they're separate from everything else because you need a an ego.

You need a sense of self. You're just you're this membrane bound isolated thing. To function and to survive, and that's fine. But we're not membrane bound isolated things. Oxygen is flowing through us. Carbon dioxide is flowing out of us where food is flowing through is flowing out. The cells are replacing themselves all the time.

We're completely social creatures and isolated human being dies. We are completely in social relationship to others, and we're completely in relationship to our technologies and we're all part, and the technologies are changing the biosphere and the biosphere is pushing back against the technologies and we need to find a kind of an equal.

Not a dynamic out of equilibrium balance as we move forward into the future that where we can maintain ourselves, the aspects of ourselves that we like. And so I think we are going to, we are going to merge with our technologies to a huge extent, and AI is going to be part of that.

But I don't think, I don't think AI's, in a way, I don't think AI's are as separate from us as we tend to think of them. AI's so far, large language models in particular, they're really the collective unconscious made manifest. They're only, all they have are the thoughts of millions of people encoded and then linked.

They're just the collective mind of humanity, they're not separate from us in, in a lot of ways. And I think as we move forward, we'll find that we're, our relationship to AIs will become very symbiotic over time. I don't think one has to annihilate the other or replace the other. I've clearly limits to biological development that we're constrained by the fact that we are this biological memory and there aren't similar constraints on aspects of AI because you can throw more compute at it.

You can do, you can change the software. You can, there's a lot more but ultimately I think we, we are both. It's part of the development of our universe, both the biological and the technological. And you're never going to just have a purely technological universe. It doesn't, I don't think it quite makes sense to have a purely technological universe.

I think there's a role for we're, I think we measure, I think we measure, I think we're important we're not going to have a purely biological future. It's going to be highly technologically mediated. What that does is expands out what we're going to be able to do then is explore the possibility space for this universe to explore the possibility space for matter in this universe.

There's a lot of rocks floating around the asteroid belt that were just. Be having a lot more fun if we were turning them into weird disco globes full of dancing semi human, offspring that, that are maximizing for techno happiness, that would be great. And there can be a monastic asteroid conversion somewhere else where people can just pray all day to their specific God and there's going to be another asteroid somewhere else where people just do maths.

Thanks. With their AI friends constantly, and we can massively expand the possibility space for consciousness and life and matter itself over the next, next few centuries. I've never heard that expressed by AI doing it.

Ben: I've never heard it expressed like that, but I think it's plausible.

I spoke to someone not podcast who essentially had grown up deaf and now can hear. And she has a very different relationship technology because the technology is part of her. I said, this is one way of doing it, which might be like a 3PO (Star Wars), but also how she interacts, how she speaks to technology.

Isn't quite like a person, but it's beyond is beyond the pet say. So I know it's a whole other, but it's like, why would you treat something where you can? It's completely, profoundly changed your interaction with the world. You're dependent on it and you have this sort of symbiotic relationship.

She jokes about the fact that, she is part cyborg and what does that mean? And it's actually completely plausible, completely great for all entities. Imaginable. Yeah.

Julian: Yeah. I think that is very plausible. Yeah. And she's a vision of the future and the future isn't scary when you meet it.

It's like someone who used to be deaf and now isn't, and it has a beautiful relationship with the technology that helps her become fully what she is capable of becoming. And we can be in that, we can be in a beautiful relationship to our technologies.

Ben: Yeah, great. So any couple couple of closing questions then would be any other current projects that you're working on?

It seems like you have a thousand and one things to do, but Substack is obviously an important one. You had the children's book this year. Anything else on your mind and you combining it or anything else you'd like to highlight?

Julian: My various publishers want me to write more children's books, but I want to finish the I want to finish The Egg and the Rock.

I want to do this book first. That's what I want to do next. And I want to do it on Substack in public and I want to talk to people about it and get ideas. Please, if you're listening to this and this interests you at all. Go to TheEggInTheRock. com subscribe to it and comment and answer the emails and I read everything, I don't necessarily answer everything because sometimes I'm overwhelmed, but I do read everything, and the feedback from readers has been unbelievably helpful to the book, unbelievably helpful, because I don't, I, and you don't have to be a, some kind of, expert in a particular domain here to be really helpful here, but it's wonderful to have someone say you haven't explained what a black hole is, and I don't really get it.

Or to have someone say, I literally can't tell the difference between a galaxy and an asteroid, please explain it. I don't know what people don't know until they tell me. So it's really improving the book to have people give you feedback, yeah.

Ben: And I didn't pick up, why is it called The Egg and the Rock?

Julian: It's the analogy I'm using at the beginning of the book, I'll send you chapter one and it will explain it, that the the, at the beginning, I talk about an egg, which the egg developed into my son, Arlo, the fertilized egg that developed into my son, Arlo. And I talk about a rock, which is the rock of Cashel, where my family were buried.

It's a big limestone rock sticking up out of the ground in in Tipperary. And I talk about the fact that they contain exactly the same atoms, they all contain, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, calcium. And yet they, you watch them over the next few years, that egg becomes my son Arlo, a very complicated little individual running around, and the rock just sits there and decays slightly over time.

And what's the difference? The difference is the egg has an evolutionary history. The egg has an evolutionary history that has fine tuned it so it undergoes a developmental process, the energy flowing through it is organizing it. But the rock does not have an evolutionary history. The energy that flows through it is disorganizing.

It's not organized. And my question is, when you look at our universe, going from the Big Bang and a hot ball of gas to this here now, Does it behave like an egg or a rock? And the answer seems pretty clear to me. It's behaving much more like an egg than a rock. It's getting more complex and there's more structured order emerging over time.

Energy is being, channeled so as to enable complexification over time in a way that is far more like an egg than a rock. And if that's the case, you have to explain why. And I think the only possible explanation is an evolutionary one. The only explanation we've ever come up with for entities that behave in that way is an evolutionary explanation that there were earlier, more primitive ones that couldn't complexify that much, but they've, They fine tuned and fine tuned iterated, and the feedback comes through reproductive success that the offspring that will, if the increased complexity leads to increased reproductive success, it's, it is conserved.

You get to this kind of universe and then, yeah, and that's why the egg and the rock. So which is it? Is this an egg or a rock? Are we living inside an egg or a rock?

Ben: Great. Okay. And then final question is, do you have any advice for people? Maybe this might be life advice, those who want to be creatives or explore this thing or we've talked a little bit about the importance of being creative.

Into, in, across disciplines, how to live a kind of a life well lived. But any closing thoughts on advice for listeners?

Julian: Wow. I don't I'm, you are all, everyone's on their own journey and their own path, and I've had a very idiosyncratic and strange life, so I'm not sure if my, the advice.

That I can think of would be generalizable but I do think there's a specialization across everything that has had tremendous benefits, but there haven't, there aren't enough people putting it all together again. So if you think you can, if you think that there's some field you're involved in has missed something really big, that everybody has missed it because you have some information from somewhere else.

You're probably right. It's what you might not be right, but you there's a better chance than you think that you're right. Whole fields go wrong and nobody notices. So I think, try and put things back together because at the moment we're in a very fragmented era, and there's wonderful ideas lying all over the place that are in the wrong box, and they need to just being taken over to here where they were doing even more good at that.

And I think that people are doing that. We have an unbelievable number of PhDs in hyper specialized subjects, and we've got hardly anyone step, standing back and putting it all together. All the real, all the interdisciplinary stuff that people actually do, it's mostly bullshit. Like they'll have three meetings a year and they'll talk to each other and go, that's weird.

There isn't nearly enough putting it all together again. That's not really probably useful to most people,

Ben: I don't know. I didn't hear about that. If you see an idea or a thing, which you think is in the wrong box or suspect it might be in the wrong box, go in, go and find it, drag it out into the light or put it into a different place.

That seems to me like a great idea.

Julian: Yeah. I think we're moving into a golden age where science can be more, I think science that we need, I really want to pin some theses to a door here. I think we need a reformation in science. Science needs a reformation. Science has hit the end of a reductionist, materialist road, and its wheels are really spinning in the mud at this point in a lot of areas.

And it really needs input from people that aren't just reductionist materialists. 'cause reductionism is a phenomenal tool. It's the best tool we've ever come up with for uncovering certain kinds of data, certain kinds of truth. But at the scale of the universe, it breaks down. Reductionism will not explain the universe to you and it will not explain an entire society to you, and it will not explain the entirety of a human heart to you.

And, we need a reformation in science and there's, I'm trying to do it. Adam Mostriani, who has a subset called experimental history is trying to do it. There's a bunch of people, Matt Clancy's trying to do it. There's a bunch of people out there trying to help science realize that it's reached the end of a particular kind of problem.

way of doing things and we thank it and we're very grateful and we will continue doing reductionist material science forever because it's an unbelievably great tool but it's not enough for some of the problems we're facing right now and some of the mysteries we're trying to solve. Yeah and it strikes me It's a reformation in science.

Ben:

If I listen to a lot of cutting edge scientists on neuroscience, physicists, Nobel Prize winning speeches Oh, neuroscience is a really bad case of this, yeah. They always talk about we, the frontier, we need something more like this. But it's but we don't understand it. Yeah, it's

Julian: unbelievable how many Nobel Prize winners in their speech will say, Reductionism isn't enough.

We are drowning in data, but we don't have knowledge. We're drowning in information, but we don't have wisdom. Some equivalent of that line has been said again and again by Nobel Prize winners. They all know there's a crisis. And they don't know how to get out of it, and it's, the trouble is the escape won't happen from inside the field, I think, at this point.

This is why I'm happily doing this from outside the field. I'm I think I have to disrupt it from outside. There's no point in me trying to get a paper into the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity that will be ignored for 30 years. That hasn't worked. It has to be disrupted from the outside.

And the problem there is most people who want to disrupt science and think they have a big idea that's better than the current idea are wrong. Most people are wrong. Most people, there is, the Dunning Kruger effect is real. A lot of people don't know what they don't know. But there are certain areas where the scientists themselves are not going to be able to find the solution to the problem because the problem crosses too many boundaries.

The boundaries of science are in the wrong place for understanding the universe. That's a big problem. That's a big problem.

Ben: That sounds excellent. My takeaway is Try and go beyond the data or sideways to the data to the meaning or to the something else. Go to the meaning,

Julian: But hang on to the data.

Don't deny the data to make your crazy theory true. Your crazy theory has to map onto the data. That's the difficult, that you've got to, you've got to just, you've got to hang on to the incredibly important data we do have. And then find the meaning in it. Yeah.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense.

So on that note, Julian, thank you very much.

Julian: Thanks. Thanks, man. That was a very enjoyable conversation.