Leonard Mlodinow On The Poetry, Power, And Beautiful Challenge Of Physics

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2:05Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:59Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. There's not a lot of people that I've wanted to put in my books that I haven't found an opportunity to, right? Like I get to read a lot and this is my job. I get to read a lot, fall in love with interesting figures or anecdotes or stories. And then I get to work them into the Daily Stoic emails. I get to work them in to my books. And the only person that I really am fascinated by that I've read quite a bit about that hasn't made as strong of an appearance or a showing in my books as I would have liked or even just had expected is Richard Feynman.

3:40I guess he's in the intro or the preface of Ego is the Enemy as this cool quote about how the first thing is that you don't fool yourself and the problem is that you're the easiest person to fool. Feynman's written a bunch of amazing books. I think we carry Shirley or Joking Mr. Feynman and The Painted Porch. It's awesome. It's just a great book of writing, period, and wisdom and insight, period. But that it's written by a physicist, it just makes it even more impressive because, at least for me, because I know nothing of physics or chemistry, my brain fogs over when I hear anyone talk about it.

4:24So recently I was trying to fix that and I went and I wanted to read some biographies of Feynman and I struggled. I bought a couple and I read the beginnings and then I got bored. And then I found this book, Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Millindo. And I just loved it. It's a short little book. It's about Leonard's time at Caltech. He has the office next to Feynman and he's trying to find out if he loves physics or doesn't, what research he should do. And it's kind of this beautiful little memoir that's also a biography of Feynman and a bunch of other great physicists, but I just loved it. We just started carrying it the painted porch.

5:09I liked it so much. and it's just it's really interesting and again I give it a lot of credit that I found it interesting given that I don't know or care that much about physics but Leonard is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician but like Feynman a man who wears many hats he's also a screenwriter and an author he wrote this book The Drunkard's Walk he wrote one called The Grand Design he wrote a book called The War of the Worldviews which he wrote with Deepak Chopra He wrote this cool book called Subliminal, and he's written for Star Trek and MacGyver. He created computer games.

5:45He wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Horizon. Just a fascinating guy. So I was really excited to have him on the podcast. I recorded this not from the studio in Bastrop, but remotely here in Los Angeles. We were probably not that far from each other, he and I. There was a little bit of technical difficulties. It kept glitching. So if you hear a little offness in the interview, that's what that was. But I think it was a great interview. There's lots in here about Feynman, lots in here about Leonard's work. And I hope to have him back on the podcast someday. And I hope you enjoy this interview.

6:21You can go to his website, leonardmillendo.com, or follow him on Twitter and Instagram, L-M-L-O-D-I-N-O-W. you, but I'll link to that because it's kind of a tricky spelling you'll see. Enjoy.

6:49So I have a strange question for you as we start. So I realize I'm not coming at this exactly like a Forrest Gump over here, but what does it feel like to be very, very smart? I know there's people who can read and there's people who are good at what they do, but there is a sort of a Caltech theoretical physicist level smart. And I'm just curious, what is that like? What is it like to go through the world like that? Well, first of all, I guess I've, you know, really don't go through thinking that I'm very smart. In fact, more often than not, I'm thinking that I'm dumb. And I think a lot of physicists are like that because in physics, you run into problem after problem after problem that you can't solve.

7:43And you spend most of your time trying to find some ways to find approximations or you're trying to solve a problem, you go down a blind alley, and you just keep thinking, nature is much smarter than I am. So, yeah, so I guess it's hard to answer that question, because I don't really feel that way. But I can say that I feel like the population in general could use a little more skepticism, a little more analytical thinking, just in treating the issues of the day. I'm not even talking about, I mean, those things that I'm saying can be annoying, I think, in your family life or in your relationships.

8:34But as you approach the issues of the day, I wish that people had a more scientific approach and scientific attitude to where they thought a little harder and deeper and more analytically about issues. The reason I ask is like, it's one thing, for instance, to know what it's like to have a nice amount of money, right? To have a nice salary, you're not starving, you're not wanting for anything necessarily. And then there's whatever it feels like to say, be a billionaire, to win the lottery, right? There's this sort of other level. And I've got to imagine a Richard Feynman or someone like that. I imagine it must be strange or there must be something somewhat ineffable about being in a brain like that or having a brain like that.

9:29Are you talking about my brain or Richard Feynman's brain? I'm talking about both. I mean, that's what's so interesting to me about your book is that you're sort of looking up at this person and you're kind of in awe of them. And at the same time, you are colleagues at the same, you know, rarefied university. It was sort of an interesting contrast. Yeah. And it was an amazing experience, both my stints on the faculty at Caltech, just to be in that environment surrounded by super brilliant people. But I think even more important for me was people who are all passionate about the same thing that I'm passionate about.

10:09Yeah. And I'd say that was, that is in that sense, a little bit like a paradise. And I look around me and look at how smart everyone is, but I don't look in the mirror and say that. Yeah. I've got to imagine that everyone has a little bit of an imposter syndrome there. Like no one is quite convinced that they deserve to be there. I think when you first, when you're young and when you first get there, I think that's, that's true. I think over the years, I've realized that I can hold my own. And so I, I mean, it's not that I feel super smart, but I feel like I know I can do this. Just like with the writing, I can write.

10:52And I understand that there are people who can't.

10:58but that doesn't, that contrast doesn't really play a role in my, in my thinking. I just, I mean, I don't, I can't have friends who are great at the piano. I have friends who are great at sports much better than me. And so this is my thing. That's their thing. That's all. Well, my favorite story in the book was, was actually kind of pertaining to that, where you're telling Richard Feynman about the monkey that uses a tool and sort of makes a discovery. And you're sort of thinking about this on this one level. And he kind of boils it down to a much more simple level, which is sort of illustrates the lesson that you just said, if you want to explain that.

11:33Yeah. Well, this was about an experiment done about a hundred years ago today. And the experimenter was investigating monkeys' thinking and problem-solving abilities. And so he put a banana out of reach of the monkey. So the monkey was used to reaching out through the bars and to get things. And the monkey also had a stick, which he was used to using for other purposes. And what the scientists wanted to know was, would he put two and two together and realize that if he reaches out with the stick, he can deploy the stick in a new novel way to pull the banana toward him. And sure enough, he did that.

12:15So that was a simple problem-solving experiment. And Feynman asked me what I learned from that. And I told him that I learned that a lot of discovery is about using things in different ways or putting things together in novel ways. And I went on and on about my intellectual journey of reading that story. And then he said, I don't think that's what you learned at all. You know what I think you learned? Or you know what I learned from that? it's that if a monkey can discover something so can you yes so I guess I should have prefaced that with I was being a little insecure about what I ever I had done a great PhD thesis that got me a lot of recognition got me the job at Caltech and I'm there thinking can I ever do that again you know and uh so that was the the background of that story and he was trying to give me encouragement It is sometimes helpful to realize like the dumbest people who have done what you've done.

13:15It kind of, I go like, who are some of the worst people ever to write a book, right? Or who are some of the dumbest people ever to successfully raise kids or go to this school or, you know, invest properly or whatever. And you realize that it's not rocket science. Most of it is not rocket science. and that people who are much less able than you have managed to figure it out. Yeah, it's always good to look at people and go, oh, well, right. I could beat her or beat him. So, yeah, so I'm not the worst. I may not be the best, but it's good to know you're not the worst. Well, you know, when I look at books, there's a lot of books out there that are published that are, I wonder how they got published.

14:04And there are physics papers out there that I wonder how they got published too. But then I think to myself, wait a minute, is it maybe this is self-delusion because those people are looking at mine and going to say, saying the same thing. Yeah, you do realize that a lack of self-consciousness can be a huge advantage in careers and in life. You realize that the fact that you're thinking about whether you're an imposter or not, whether you're qualified or not, whether you're good enough or not, is dragging you down. And some of these other people are perhaps not thinking about it at all. And, you know, they're just, it's not slowing them down in the same way that it's slowing you down.

14:47Yeah. Yeah. And I don't have that problem though. I mean, I look at it and I, you know, don't necessarily think I'm the smartest one or the dumbest one, or I just do what I do and I don't worry about it. But I do try to be self-aware of what my place is and look at my work as objectively as I can or look at how other people see it and learn from that. But if you are self-aware and are kicking yourself over it, then that's how writers get writer's block too, I think. Yes. I think that's a bad thing. Feynman told me once, if you're happy, don't think about it because you could realize you have no right to be and you could ruin it.

15:33But if you're not happy, that's when you need to analyze more. I'm not sure that's totally true, but definitely there's some truth in that. Well, there's kind of an ego on two ends of those spectrums, right? There's the egotistical person who's going around thinking about how they're the best and they're perfect and everything is about them. And then there's this kind of lower order egotism too, where you're just thinking about how worthless you are, how you're not good enough, how everyone is questioning you. Like there's a self-obsession on both ends that's probably not healthy. Yeah, that's true.

16:08And a lot of the best people in physics suffer from the first melody. They think about how great they are. Feynman was not one of those. I think he was pretty down to earth. And a lot of people, when they first start, I think they suffer from the second one, the imposter syndrome being the root of that. And it's, yeah, neither one is good. Anyway, it's better not to worry about it. You know, it's this podcast about stoicism, at least it's in the name. And I don't know that much about it. But what I do know is that it was, and what always attracted me to that philosophy was that it's about self-sufficiency.

16:51It's about living a life where you don't depend on externals, other people, other things for your happiness. It all comes from you. And if it comes from you inside being happy and satisfied with yourself and what you're doing, then no one can take that away from you. If it's external or it's other people, if you need people to clap and cheer when you walk into the room, then that's a big burden. But if only if you're satisfied with you clapping and cheering for yourself, then that's something you might achieve. And I think I try to live by that to really look internally for my satisfaction and try to inoculate myself from being dependent on other people, giving me approval or having material possessions.

17:48Not that I'm against material possessions, but it's just important not to make them too important in your life. Well, does that tie into an idea in physics, which you talk about a little bit in the book, which it seemed like it intimidated you early on, which is you have to work for years and years and years on an idea, and you might not be making any progress. People might think you're going down a blind alley, and you just have to enjoy doing it, and you have to be confident that you're going in the right direction. And you do have to be sort of self-sufficient and self-contained in that regard, or it'll eat you alive.

18:27Completely. So, so when I was doing my PhD thesis, I chose a problem. Didn't think that much about the problem. It just seemed, seemed interesting. I didn't strategize about how important or big or small, but it was, anyway, it was to solve a, it was to figure out the physics of a certain situation. I'll try to, outside of neutron stars, which were the very high magnetic field and made other methods difficult to apply. And I spent a whole year, my first year working on that problem, making no progress. I mean, I had some promising approaches and then they wouldn't work. Then I'd get another one and get all excited and it wouldn't work.

19:09And when I look back at it, it's amazing that I had that patience to spend a whole year and my advisor wasn't very interested in the problem or he wasn't anymore. So I was all on my own and just went in every day happily and beat my head against the wall. But so I think to be a physicist or to do a lot of, you know, great things in the world, you have to be happy beating your head against the wall. If that doesn't bring you enjoyment, you know, you might never get through the wall or you might never develop that headache that you're looking for. But, you know, that it takes the enjoyment of the trip.

19:44That's the cliche, right? Enjoy the journey. And so I had no real, I wasn't as that goal oriented as you have to be, let's say when you're on the faculty later, especially before you get tenure. And I did make a breakthrough after about a year and that launched my career. And I see that it happened, you know, there's different kinds of problems that people treat as scientists or as physicists. Some of the problems are things that you can get done in a month or a few months and they're a little bit easier to address. There's still no guarantee when you start that you're going to get it, but you can kind of crank them out and physics progresses incrementally.

20:30And then there's other problems that are super hard and are the equivalent of the problem I had as a student where you have to beat your head against the wall for maybe years. And that's why tenure is so important, for one thing, but it's also why just being really dogged and persistent is really important. And, you know, you might be writing other papers and exploring other problems along the way as you think about your big problem, but it really takes people thinking about those big problems for many years and not giving up to make some of the real breakthroughs that we made. Like for famously, Einstein worked 11 years on general relativity between special and general relativity.

21:10John Schwartz and Michael Green worked for, I don't know, 10, 12 years before the first what they call super string revolution brought string theory into popularity. I mean, whether or not that was a good thing or whether or not it pans out is another issue. But the point is that to make certain progress, you just have to you have to keep at it. And that's what Stephen Hawking told me was his greatest trait in his physics, which was stubbornness. You have to be really stubborn and passionate and not worry about whether you're going to get somewhere. And by the way, I think the same thing applies in writing when I'm working on my books.

21:53A lot of times I explore an idea for a chapter or a story that I'm writing or in a novel I'm writing now. I explore an idea that may not pan out, that may be dumb, and I'm not even sure. It's just a different original idea. And I write it out and then I might just throw it away. And so deadlines, I think, are really deadly in writing because if you have a deadline and you feel like you have to produce a certain number of usable pages, you're going to go with the things that come to your mind first, probably the cliches, the not so interesting stories or scenes. And if you demand more from yourself and just give yourself the freedom to have your mind wander and to go down blind alleys, you might make a great discovery.

22:39And that works on the large scale where Einstein works on the small scale if you're just writing the chapter of a book. Yeah, it's like when you're writing an article, you know, it's a small contained unit that you can kind of wrap your head around. But when you're working on a book, you know, you could spend days or weeks and make no measurable progress. And so it requires that ability to, I think, get totally lost in it, have a sense of where you're going, but also not be too attached to where you think you're going and to just just to keep chipping away at it and trust the process, so to speak.

23:14Yeah. I mean, it's easier when you have more experience and you know that you always find a solution. Yes. Although in physics, I don't always find a solution. Sometimes I just, you know, I've actually written papers where I was trying to prove one thing and ended up proving that that is impossible to prove. Right. Well, that might be interesting, right? Like, so if you're a physicist and you spend 10 years on a problem and then you come out the other side, is that almost a dangerous, like a wicked lesson? Because now, you know, you have some other idea. Does it take you 10 years to figure out that you're not going in the right direction?

23:49Right? Like, how do you know? It can. It can. And part of it, whether or not you make the right choices is luck. Part of it is your talent, your intuition. But one of the most important things in physics isn't just doing the calculations, doing the math and being able to solve problems. It's being able to choose the right problems. So another thing Feynman said was that he categorized the kinds of problems that you choose. You know, there's some problems. The problem is going to have some issues, some difficulty, some barrier, or it would have been solved already. Okay, so what causes them not to be solved?

24:31Well, there's two types that he classified two types of problems. One was the problem is no, maybe it's even obvious. but figuring out the answer is extremely tough. And the other one is the problem itself is not something that has occurred to anybody before because it's maybe a very important issue, question to ask, but no one's thought of asking it or thought of looking at it that way. So there's the scientific progress that comes from seeing the right problem and there's a kind that comes from being powerful at solving the problem that everyone already saw. And, um, and you know, everyone, you have to choose and sometimes you do one kind, sometimes you do the other, but there's no, never, there's never a guarantee.

25:15And it's, that's, um, um, part of your, um, part of the life of a physicist. And by the way, you, you might just say, you know, I've, I've done enough on this. I don't think I'm going to get anywhere and someone else will pick it up and get somewhere. That's why we publish papers. And, you know, something people maybe don't realize is that in science, the published articles are not necessarily not so much finalities as they are just part of a conversation. A lot of the papers go end up going nowhere. You write a paper, someone else finds it interesting, comments on hundreds, thousands of people refer to it and do their own papers and it goes nowhere.

25:55I mean, that happens to the community, too, not just to individuals. And in fact, string theory may be one of those situations where, okay, it's certainly spun off some intermediate results that are interesting. But the goal to find a unified theory of all forces and one that is somewhat demanded by certain fundamental principles does not seem to have gotten anywhere. And so that's the way it works.

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27:33That's better help.com slash daily stoic pod. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one stop shop.

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28:25I like that in the classics, they call it the great conversation, this idea that we've been having this conversation for 2000 plus years, and there really maybe aren't any actual answers. Well, that's not now if you want to get into the philosophy which i don't normally but and fineman would yell at me if i tried but but um yeah i mean that's a question what is is there truth in physics or is it just uh better theories we never know if i have a theory of um we have uh quantum theory for example or it's really quantum theory is it's a funny um it's a concept because it's it's in some ways not a theory as much as a principle that guides that other theories have to adhere to.

29:13But anyway, quantum theory, as far as we know, is, is, is, uh, you know, is correct and describes the nature and is the way nature is. But before we realized that quantum theory was, uh, was the way to do it, people thought classical Newton's laws, they thought classical theory was, was correct. They were equally convinced that classical theory was correct, as we are now, that quantum theory is correct. And if there's a new Schmantham theory that's coming in 10 years, we'll then say, all those people who believed in quantum theory, they didn't know Schmantham theory, and look at, you know, ha ha.

29:52But now we know that Schmantham theory is the way the world really is. And then 100 years later, there's a new theory, Xavier's choice theory. I don't know. Ryan's theory. I doubt that will be what it is. But yes, I get the point. what is what is what does that actually look like like i know as a writer you know you're working on a book you're sitting there you're reading you're thinking i kind of know what that beating your head against the wall looks like what does that look like for a physicist that's a good question and i'm sure it's different for for different people uh so you know if i'm for example tended to work by himself and not take students or not take many students other people like work in collaboration i always work with usually with one other person and i do a series of papers with people that i find i can work well with and because part of for me a big part of the process is shooting out ideas and beating the ideas back and forth and if i'm not doing that with somebody i'm sitting there doing that with myself and for me it's more you get interested in a problem so that's the first thing and to me i don't choose a problem strategically for as much for what i think is good for physics or for my career or anything like that i i just read i'm interested in the subject i read about it i get an idea and i go huh this is cool this this aspect of it is cool what i wonder what is this what about this?

31:24And I look up and all the, I do my research, you know, look in all the papers, oh, no one's answered that. No one's thought of that or no one's answered that question or, and so I started looking into it myself, which means looking into it means, you know, playing with the math. You look at the equations and then your idea probably translates into some other equations and can I solve them? Can I approximate them? Can I extract any, anything from them and you know in physics equations are connected to fit to the physical world so when i look at an equation it's not just the math it means something physically to me so and that helps you solve the equations too because you know what's going to happen physically and that can you just translate to math and you go okay this is what should happen mathematically but anyway it's it's it's like an adventure it's an exploration in my mind i'm i i learn about the landscape of this problem and I go in some direction and I, and I see how far I can go and what I run into, you know, and, uh, if it's fun and interesting and I'm driven to keep going, I do.

32:25And if I get bored with it or, or get frustrated, uh, uh, which is, doesn't happen easily to me, you know, I, I, I might give up. Or as I said, in some cases I turn around and go, maybe the thing that I'm trying to prove isn't true. And maybe I can prove that it isn't true. And sometimes you do that. And then sometimes you publish that because then it tells other people, don't try this direction. You know? You used a word there that you use in the book or that you got from Feynman, which is that you have to find the problem interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So Feynman was like a child.

33:01That's the great thing about, I mean, in Feynman's Rainbow, I talk a lot about Feynman, but also about Murray Gell-Mann and those are like, I call them the twin titans of Caltech and of physics. They were the leaders of physics in their generation and they, you know, didn't quite get along. They did and they didn't. And they were rivals and they had completely different philosophies of how to approach physics. And, um, you know, Murray was much more important and he wanted to have a big influence in the field and on the faculty, on the department. And he also thought in very mathematical, kind of abstract terms, very much looking for big, beautiful ways of looking at things, of ordering, classifying.

33:53And Feynman was the opposite. He just wanted, he had no interest in any of those political aspects. and he just wanted to solve problems that he found interesting and it didn't even matter it can be in this field that field there was a student once who wrote him a letter and said um you know i was your student and he was working then later at jpl doing some very applied practical things and he said he kind of apologized to feyman that he wasn't treating the big questions and and the fundamental physics revolutionary stuff like like feyman did and feyman wrote him back and said, you got me all wrong.

34:34I think the problem you're working on, I think it was on water waves or something. He said, the problem you're working on, is it fascinates you? Is it interesting? Then it's worth doing. It's wonderful to do. It's all about us finding problems that doesn't matter whether it has to do with fundamental physics of the universe or the way a book falls off a shelf. If that physical issue interests you and you can attack it, then that's a wonderful thing to do. And that's what physics is all about. And I know a friend of mine, Amnon Yariv, he's in his nineties now, a very, very famous Caltech physicist who worked on quantum optics.

35:15And I run into him at the cafe every now and then, and he's working on a problem that has to do with how showerheads spin when the water comes out of them. And he's totally fascinated by it. He thinks he found, he found some kind of new effect in the way the water flies off and i'm going that's what a physicist is it's not you know i'm gonna go and i have to study the four fundamental forces and and and unite them it's it's it's finding interesting phenomena around you mathematizing them and figuring out how they work and and when you do that you have a much deeper appreciation of the world and much more you can appreciate the beauty of nature i think much more than someone who's not a physicist people think that physics is dry, you know, unromantic pursuit.

36:02But it's quite the opposite. When a physicist looks at a bookshelf, you know, just knowing how the things stand there and how everything works and why the colors of the book cover are what they are and how they affect your eyes. I mean, you're seeing things on a deeper level and you can appreciate nature much more. It's one of the, I mean, if you really want to appreciate the artistic beauty of nature, become a physicist. Yeah, there's kind of a poetry in the way that, or a poet's eye that the physicist shares where you're fascinated by some strange natural phenomenon or the question of how something works or why it comes together the way that it does.

36:46And a wanting, if not to figure it out, then figuring out how to express it or capture what's happening, be it in an equation or a beautiful string of words. Yeah, that's where the name of the book comes from, Feynman's Rainbow, because we were walking and looking at a rainbow, and we started talking about how Descartes figured out, to explain the rainbow and why you see the colors that you do. and he asked me what he thought. I thought, you know, what inspired this brilliance of Descartes to be able to explain that, to figure it out? And I gave some technical answer. And he said, no, no, no. I think the inspiration was, it's beautiful.

37:33And I think that's very much a part of a physicist's life. There's a passage in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations where he's sort of marveling at what he calls nature's inadvertence. he's talking about how you put a loaf of bread in the oven and when it bakes, it cracks open at the top. And he's like, we don't know why this happens. It doesn't mean anything, but it kind of whets the appetite. And he's just kind of marveling at the strangeness of why things happen the way they do. And maybe we have figured out why bread does that now, but his point was, it's just weird and cool and beautiful and part of the world.

38:15Yeah. And understanding how it happens just adds to it because you understand on a certain level as to what causes it, but then there's also deeper levels that you still don't understand. And I mean, physics is never going to get to the bottom of it because whatever equations we say, this equation explains everything. And then you go, well, who created that equation? Why is that equation there? So now I got to do a whole other theory to explain where that equation came from. Isn't that the John Wheeler line about how as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. You're just constantly bumping into new questions with each one that you answer.

38:51Yeah. And that's, what's great and exciting about it. God forbid we should ever really come to the end and then it would be very boring just filling in the blanks. Right. Yeah. Well, no, I like that idea of being fascinated by it. Cause sometimes when I talk to people, they go like, oh, I'm thinking about writing a book about, you know, insert subject. And I go, if you're just thinking about it, you shouldn't. I say like, you have to, you can't not do it. That has to be the attitude that you have. Like it is literally painful for you to not explore what that means because the process itself is going to be really painful, right?

39:27And so if you're not driven or almost compelled to go down this road, you should probably save yourself and the world the trouble and just go in a different direction. Yeah, that's true. I had one of my students at Caltech came to me once and she was a PhD student in chemistry. And she said, I love chemistry. I'm doing well, but I'm having a little problem because everyone is working day and night, seven days a week, all the time on their problems. I just don't feel like doing that. I don't know how I can compete with them because I just don't see it that way. I want, you know, to me, it's more of a 40 hour or whatever, a normal job and I enjoy the job, but I don't feel like those people do.

40:20And what should I, you know, what does that mean for me? How can I compete with them? And I kind of, I don't remember the exact words and I tried to be diplomatic about it, But my answer was, well, if you're not completely, if you're not passionate, driven by this isn't the thing you really want and you can't think of anything else and you're not and you just have don't have to do it, go do something else. Yeah, because it's, you know, first of all, there is a competition of those who are that way. but it's not just that it's just that it's so hard um that if you don't if you don't really feel that way and have that push that drive and that that passion then you know you might it will impede you but also you probably won't be that happy because it you you won't have the you won't have the success or you won't, you'll, you'll see that you're not wanting to put in the time and the effort that it takes to really get somewhere.

41:24And I, that's how I feel both my writing and my physics. I, I've, I've done many things in my career and I've gone in and out of academia, but I've published papers constantly throughout that. I'm luckily that I'm a theoretical physicist and experimentalist, so I don't need a lab. So yeah, when I was making computer games or writing for Hollywood. I was also doing physics in my spare time and publishing papers. I've always published papers no matter what job I have. On a physics paper, an academic paper, under your name, it has your affiliation. I have papers that have my name and the affiliation is the Walt Disney Company because I was working on computer games there when I wrote the paper.

42:05And I thought, that's really cool. I'm not sure that it's the best marketing for the paper because as a physicist might read and go, oh, this couldn't be interesting. But anyway, yeah, so I think that that's really, it's really important in all the arts because, you know, it's not a nine to five job. It's not a, it's not a necessarily a job where you have a lot of job security and it has to be something that you just have to do. And then that's what it takes to get there. Well, isn't that kind of the proving what we were talking about earlier, which is you felt compelled or fascinated by these other fields, these other domains, which is writing or computer games or Hollywood.

42:49and you followed that interest, even though it took you away from the thing that the elite club that you had been, that people were killing themselves to get in, that probably seemed, it's probably seemed a little crazy to your peers or even your family, but you followed the interest and then ultimately it took you back around. But you have to have the kind of the courage and then also the self-sufficiency we were talking about to go, no, this is what I want to pursue. I don't really care what it looks like to other people. Yeah. I'm probably the only one who ever turned down a 10 year physics offer to start trying to write for Hollywood.

43:34And I don't know. I mean, one of the things that that book, the Feynman's rainbow was about was my grappling with the fact that I enjoy writing and other things and physics and how do I balance that and what do I do at any given time? And I wouldn't recommend what I did to other people. I mean, it's up to you, but it's not necessarily going to work. I was just lucky. I mean, at each point in my career, I did whatever I felt like doing. So I did physics. And when I got the itch, because I always used to write since I was in third grade, and I got my first job at Caltech, I got this idea on being in LA, I should try writing for film or TV.

44:14And eventually I left physics to, to move to Hollywood with$6 ,000 in the bank and, you know, and no real job prospects. And I thought like everyone else who does that, you know, instead of being a waiter, I was a physicist and you know, it worked and I wrote for, you know, Star Trek, the next generation MacGyver, I wrote for comedies because I used to be funny. I wrote for the night court and, you know, and it all, it worked out. And then at some point, I, the, the computer windows was being developed and computer games was a real frontier. And a lot of Hollywood people were doing that. I moved to that and everywhere, you know, each place when you move, what you lose is you have to pay your dues again.

44:53Right. So, so I got to where I was doing well in physics and then I'm a zero in Hollywood. Then I got to where I'm established a little bit in Hollywood and now I'm in computer games. And, and then I started writing books and I don't know. I mean, that's the one drawback is you have to be willing to pay the dues over and over again. But I'm lucky that each of the different steps I took didn't leave me, you know, didn't leave me on the street. And I always had a plan B of a way where maybe I could go back to something if it didn't work. But I felt that what's important to me in life and in being happy and being successful in what I'm doing is being passionate about what I'm doing at the time.

45:31And if that now is something else, go do that. you're losing some of the gains that you've accumulated in those industries and you're starting over, you're paying the dues, but aren't you also gaining a new way of thinking, a new set of skills, a new language that you end up speaking? Totally. Uh, it's, it's from a personal point of view, it's very rewarding. It, it, I can't imagine that if I had picked one career and done it for 40 years, that I would just be so stale and bored and, you know, but that's, that's me. Some people do that. And certainly all the advice I got was to do the, you know, to do the 40 year thing.

46:13Not only that, when I was a young physicist, I got the advice of don't even do problems in different fields. I had a tendency to do a problem in this field, a problem in that field. And they said, well, then, you know, the work that you did in, in, in, you know, atomic physics, people who do quantum optics, uh, won't know about that and won't care and vice versa. So you never, you know, at least when you're starting before you get tenure, that you should go in a kind of a narrow direction. And, and I didn't, I didn't do that either. And I went in such a broad direction that I wrote screenplays.

46:45So, um, but you know, that is a smart, you know, when I see what my kids are doing, I don't want them to do what I did because I'd be all nervous that it's not going to work. And I I was just too, I don't know what it was about me, but I was too, too dumb to be, to be nervous about it. I just did it and assumed things would work out. Not that I did it out of a, not that I didn't assume that out of some kind of arrogance that I can do anything. But that's what I did. Yeah. I, I, I think it was, I'm trying to look here. There's a quote, it's from a scientist, maybe it's Heinlein, but, but it's basically, he says, a specialization is for insects.

47:25Yeah, I love that. And, you know, there was a famous mathematician named Hilbert who lived a little over a hundred years ago. And he changed fields every five years, I think he said, because he didn't want to get stale. I think there's something to that. You know, you do give up a lot of the intuition that you've developed and the skill in that field. But the trade-off is you, at least for me, you can get approach it with new energy. Do you think, do you think it made you a better physicist ultimately or a worse one? Uh, I think it makes me a better physicist. I, I obviously the fact that I strayed and have done other things has made means that I don't have the output I would have had, had I, had I focused on it.

48:10And, um, it's also getting harder and harder for me since I do it part-time to follow the whole area of physics in my career, which has now been about 40 years. Things have, I mean, obviously things have changed, but one specific thing has changed, which is the number of papers, number of scientists, the number of papers, the speed at which we're making new discoveries. And it's been growing exponentially. And by that, I don't mean fast because exponentially doesn't mean fast. It's a certain shape of a curve. It's just, it means that more than fast, more, well, it can be slow at the beginning.

48:50So what it means is that the growth at this moment is proportional to the amount you have at this moment. So the more you have, the faster it grows and it feeds. And so it starts like that and then it goes. And so when I was young, it was like, it was like here, but now it's like under this part, right it's just it's just exploded because knowledge feeds on itself and i mean i don't remember now how many thousands of papers are published every month and so i find that i have to narrow so i like the last few years i've been working on a an interesting project which is on the connection between information and the laws of physics so right now uh quantum information is a big area in physics.

49:37And of course, over the last decades, information theory and computers and understanding that has been big. And people have found a connection between that and the physical world, the world of actual matter and electrons and quarks and everything that we are made of. And I found that fascinating that we found the connections between the laws, so to speak, of information and the laws of physics so that in a way the physical world arrives from arises from information and in some sense the world is a big quantum computer where the there are certain rules about how neighboring points can interact and trade information and those translate actually to to the laws of physics that we know the uh the laws of what we call let's say the durack equation or quantum electrodynamics.

50:27So I've been exploring that with my collaborator, Todd Brunn, for some years now. And so I've narrowed my focus to that and related things. And I can't follow everything that's happening in quantum information or quantum computing because I'm spending my other time where I would be doing that, writing books. But it is interesting how timeless that problem is, right? Like when you read Aristotle or something and you go, oh, this guy was a philosopher and a naturalist and a political theorist, right? There was so much less knowledge that one singular person could be world class in like 15 things and be breaking new ground in all these domains.

51:07And then, you know, then you get to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And like now you almost do have to specialize because it's impossible to be to wrap your head around one field, let alone 10 fields simultaneously. Yeah, very true. And we lose something from that. I wonder sometimes if there aren't, in physics at least, if there aren't pieces of knowledge in one realm of physics that could be well exploited in others but just hasn't been noticed. And there is cross-pollination for sure, so that does happen that people do notice. But I wonder how many hidden gems there are in, let's say, low-temperature physics theory that's something that people do in quantum field theory might, you know, don't know and should know or something like that.

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54:04Didn't Feynman kind of have a range of interests, right? I mean, he was obviously all in on physics, but then he's picking locks and he's drawing and he's playing music. He did seem like he was kind of eccentric and he followed these different passions. He did. Yeah. So he did do that. And he was very much broader than a lot of physicists are. He even, it's interesting, he had to see, well, the thing about physics is that we apply it to the, to the, to understand the laws of the world. But a physicist is really about curiosity. And so, for example, he he got curious about books. He said he was reading fairy tales and he thought he had a friend who was a novelist.

54:49And he started reading fairy tales and thinking about what his friend does. And he's reading the fairy tale. I said, oh, this is, you know, this is pretty, pretty easy stuff. I wonder how you come up with this. I mean, I think I could do that. It's just like like a lot of like you said, a lot of people said, oh, I have a I have a book on blah, blah, blah that I want to write. I just don't have time or whatever. I go, yeah, good. When you do it, let me see it. But Feynman actually said, let me see what it's actually like. Not that he wanted to write a book, but he wanted to see if he could really do it and what it was like and what are the issues that arise and what are the problems that arise as you try.

55:24And it was interesting because he was known for his imagination, but he said he finally didn't have the imagination to write that. He would start writing and he couldn't write anything other than what he had already read or things that are like he thinks he had already read, coming up with something new. he found was very hard. And so he, you know, dived into that because he was curious about how it works. And he realized that it's something you should, you know, that you should have some respect for because it's not as easy as it looks. Reading something is not as easy as writing something. Okay.

55:54But people don't always get that point. It is funny though, because he seemed to be so dismissive of the humanities and yet he is an amazing writer. Like I always wondered if that was more of an act because you couldn't be such a good writer if you didn't truly love the language and literature. You just, you just, nobody is naturally that good. Well, I think that he, I don't think he was dismissive generally of the, of the humanities. You know, for instance, in literature, I think he appreciated some literature, but he thought, I think other literature, like a beach novel was kind of like junk.

56:35He maybe was a little little snobby in that way. But I know that he didn't like philosophy in particular. He made a big thing about not, and that I think was part of his show. He, he was, he was kind of a showman. And, and I think that he, he didn't think philosophy was, was very useful for physicists. But I think he made more of a show about, about that because it was fun to, poke fun at philosophy. But as a writer, he was a really great scientific writer, right? He explained things very well because he thought extremely clearly. And if you're writing nonfiction, there's a couple elements that are important.

57:17But the most important one is to be able to think clearly because if you can't think clearly, then you can't explain it to people very clearly. I mean, I think there's other aspects if you really want to be successful that are important, such as storytelling, being able to make something interesting, compelling and so forth. But the bottom line is the clarity. And, you know, and he would write papers and he wrote physics books that were really amazingly beautiful and clear. And that's what inspired me, in fact, to get into physics were his books. and then his books of anecdotes, he could tell anecdotes and he worked with somebody who would write them into books.

58:01But I'm not aware that he ever wrote any short stories or any fiction other than that attempt I mentioned. Well, that's what I like so much about your book is I've read all of Feynman's books, or at least the ones for the sort of the lay audience. And then I read some of the biographies of him. And I found that he was better at writing than people were about writing about him and yours, I think by being so short and then personal, you managed to sort of cut through that problem. But the other biographies I've read about them, it sort of reminded me of Feynman's thing where like, if you can't, he said something like, if you can't explain it clearly, simply, and interestingly, then you don't really understand it.

58:44And I kind of wondered if some of his biographers never really understood him as a person. Well, thanks. I appreciate you saying that. And the one thing I could say about it, about that is that having worked in, you know, along near him, but also we did, we did have some discussions about a research problem that I was working on that he helped me with, that that gave me a certain, and being a physicist, it gives me a certain understanding of his essence that maybe it's hard to get if you're just a journalist. And in general, when journalists write books about science, I find that there's often a certain, you know, something that they're missing because they haven't done it themselves.

59:30So it's hard to, it's like if I was to write about Thailand without ever going there. I can study about it. Yeah, there's a lifelessness. Yeah, yeah, to some degree, yeah. Yeah. And he's such a character, obviously, that maybe that's what... Someone who was a biographer of Churchill was saying that the problem of writing about Churchill is that anything you could say about Churchill, he said better about himself. And so you're up against that. I like that. Yeah, yeah, that's true. um so in in Feynman's rainbow i i i didn't i didn't feel the the uh perhaps one advantage was i didn't feel the um compelling need to um be encyclopedic about his life and i tried to give his essence and and and how it affected me so that was a modest uh goal which made it easier I heard one anecdote about Feynman that I've been trying to track down, and I wondered if you'd heard about it.

1:00:36There was something about when he went to accept the Nobel Prize, it was something about he was reluctant to do it because you had to bow when you accepted it. Had you heard this? No, I hadn't heard that. But I'd heard that he didn't want to have to bow to a king. And so he was reluctant to accept it. But it's one of those things. Maybe you get this sometimes as a writer. You hear something or you read something and then you forget where you got it. And then you're trying to desperately find like work your way back to it. But you can't and you don't know whether you just made it up. Yeah. Well, then you start looking on the Internet and sometimes you find it, but then you're not sure if you can trust that source.

1:01:18and you try and find it from that happens actually a lot with quotes yes and um i i wrote a book with deepak chopra where we were really debating each other about our views of the world and the universe and um he would give me he would quote people and and they were often quotes that i had heard before but i would go always and and and and kick the tires and see if that was legit and a lot lot of times I found that, you know, no criticism to Deepak, uh, they were close to people accepted, but I, when I, when I would dig into them, uh, I would find that no, uh, this person didn't, didn't say that there's a lot of, uh, a lot of that, uh, goes on.

1:02:03I know. I just found this. I I'm just, I'm kicking myself because in one of my books, I found a quote that I was swore was real and I remember where I got it. And then it turned out It wasn't, and it made it all the way into print. And I'm so, I hate doing that. Like, it drives me nuts. But yeah, the provenance of the information is such a, it's a constant struggle. Yeah. And, you know, soon, I think we will be seeing people, videos of current and past figures saying phony quotes. Yes. that they never said, but we'll see them on video and we won't be able to tell whether they're real or not. And then now we're going to go, oh, I did say that.

1:02:45Here's a little film of him. And he'll be, but it's not even true, but it'll be even worse. It's going to get harder and harder. No, and we'll have to have AI checking the AI to see if that was actually real or not, because no person can keep it all in their head. And AI number one is going to say real and AI number two is going to say not real. And then AI3 will be the, yeah, I don't know. I actually did. I was reading something about that, that some of the AI stuff is getting worse because AI has already produced so much garbage that it's now absorbing some of its own mediocre art. Yeah, yeah.

1:03:28That's funny. Well. No, that's crazy. Well, the last thing I wanted to mention to you, I'm just curious. obviously writing and talking a lot about the Stoics, the sort of intersection between rationality and emotions. That's what I think about all the time. I haven't read your new book, which I'm excited to read. But there is this idea that these things are enemies, but then also the idea of just suppressing the emotions to be the rational robot, something gets lost in there too, it feels like. yeah well that's what the whole point of the book emotional is to is that the this idea that well the the the general idea or the the classical idea that people have about emotions is is all wrong so there there's no separation between emotion and rationality there's no part of the brain that's the emotional center versus the rational center and emotions are not counterproductive They're, in fact, generally, I mean, there are times where they are just like your eyes have optical illusions as well.

1:04:37So but but but but they play, in fact, a key role in your thinking, in your analysis of everything and in your thoughts and your actions. So the whole point of the book is to talk about that and how emotions are really a functional state of your brain that cause you to process information, depending on the emotion, in this way or that way, suited to a certain circumstance. So we evolve that we're in this circumstance, we go into this mode of thinking, let's call it fear or love or whatever it is. And then as information comes in, that affects the way we process it. It affects even our rational processing of it.

1:05:18And then that helps to guide the conclusion. And so it's really fascinating. And it's something that's just come up in science that has been discovered in the last 10, 20 years. And so I thought it was a great book for me to write. Like, you know, when you're writing, when I'm writing one of my nonfiction books, it takes about a year and a half. And so I'm careful what to pick because I want something that I find fascinating enough that I can work for a year and a half on it and keep my interest. So that was definitely a good choice. Boy, and I try to make this distinction because I think, again, people think stoicism means has no emotions.

1:06:00I try to make this sort of, yeah, which is certainly not what it actually has objectively was in reality. But I try to make this distinction between having the emotion and taking the action and that those are two different things. Right. And in fact, I talk about stoicism a little bit in the book. And it's not that it's not that you shouldn't have emotion. You know, that's what we I guess that's what we associate with being stoic. It's just that you shouldn't be a slave to your emotion, just as you shouldn't be a slave to materials or to what other people think.

1:06:38But emotion, again, what it really is is a mode of thought. You know, like your phone has low power mode and regular mode. So low power mode has its certain reason that you want to do that. And your phone will act differently when it's in low power mode. And your brain acts differently when it's in fear mode or happiness mode or anger mode. And I think it's important, I think, for people to understand how their mind works and what those emotions do and how they're important in their thinking, how they guide their thinking and their decision making, and then how they can regulate them if that's necessary.

1:07:21if they're becoming too strong or too much of a problem sometimes. So that's all very important for people to understand about themselves. Yeah, and I feel like Eastern thought is so interesting, the practice of meditation and such, the ability to sort of recognize that one is having a feeling or a thought and to be able to see it as this thing that is both you and not you, and you can let it pass or you can pick it up and examine it or you can wait on it. You know, the idea that's just like, you're not having, you are not the emotion, you are having the emotion and you can sort of decide whether you take the lead or not.

1:08:06Yeah. And I think that I talk about that too. And mindfulness is very important. The understanding what's really going on with yourself and then being able to therefore take control of it. And it's something that, so when I wrote the book with Deepak, we, even though we're like this, you know, debating each other, we became friends and I have to give him credit for, I mean, when he started his career, meditation was considered some kind of like, you know, weird old thing. And now we have papers, scientific publications in neuroscience that talk about how it's good and what it does and how it works in your brain.

1:08:42Yes, totally. Well, it's a reminder of why you should follow what's interesting or effective for you because you never know where it will go for you and who you might bring along with you on that ride. Yeah, very true. And yeah, it wouldn't be a shame to go, well, I had this idea, but I didn't do it because I wanted to do things that were, you know, more likely to work or that people accepted more. And then it turns out that that thing you passed off would have been the discovery of your life. Yes. Well, Emerson said that something about you see your own rejected thoughts with a kind of alienated majesty.

1:09:20honesty when, when, when you go, Oh, I, I, I thought that before, but I was too much of a coward or too intimidated to, to, to, to, to take it up. Yeah. So you just, anyway, you, you, you trust your yourself. That's the best thing you can do. I love that. That was the message that I took from your book. And, uh, I'm, I really appreciate you having this conversation with me. Well, thanks, try and it's been a lot of fun and it's been very interesting.

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