Professor Brian Cox on doubt, the universe and the future of humanity (E217)

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. hi there i'm jay comfrey and you're listening to high performance on the high performance app this is the award-winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet alongside professor damian hughes we learn from the stories successes and struggles of our guests allowing us all to explore be challenged and to grow here's what's coming up did the universe have a beginning and we know that the universe was very hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago.

0:39That's good. We call that the Big Bang. But whether that was a beginning in time, whether the universe existed in some form before that, what it means to talk about the beginning of time, we don't even know what time is. If a big UFO came now, we walk outside and over Westminster, there's a spaceship hovering. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. The big problem at the moment is how to get along as a global society in a world where we have the means to destroy ourselves. How can humanity justify our existence when faced with the power and infinite scale of nature? Well, here we go then. Physicist Brian Cox joins us on the podcast today.

1:28He is a man who's on the TV, on the radio, he's in theatres right across the world. but this is difference. This is Brian talking and covering topics you haven't heard him talk about before. Many of us have got questions, haven't we, about who we are and what our role is in this life. Well, actually, in this fascinating conversation, which focuses around high performance, you'll feel humbled when you hear Brian talking about just how small we are in the vastness of the universe. And in some ways, that insignificance can be so powerful. Maybe it's the that stops us from obsessing about those tiny things that derail us so often you'll also hear brian talk about passion about hard work about deep focus about reinventing himself and of course his version of what high performance is and don't forget if you download the high performance app right now for free using the unique access code hp app then you can hear an extended version of this conversation but let's do it let's get you closer to your own version of high performance as we hear from Professor Brian Cox.

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4:20Brian, welcome to High Performance. Thank you. Pleasure to be here, to see you again after we talk about our history. I first met you in 2000, right? Yeah, I think it would have been 20 odd years ago. We always start this podcast with the question, what is high performance? I think for me, I mean, I've had three careers, really. You know, I started out actually music, as we'll probably talk about, then went into academia, which I still do, and then the television, radio, live shows. But I think across all of them, I think it's doing a good job, finding the way to do a good job. And for me, I find it's attention to detail.

5:00I found that in all those professions, nothing is easy. It requires practice and it requires attention to detail and it requires you to also, I think, for me, take responsibility for getting it right. Well, let's dive into a few of those then. We'll start with the first one you mentioned, which is kind of getting good at something. There's that great phrase, isn't there? how good you're willing to be at something depends how long you're happy to be bad for. Yeah. Does that make sense to you? Absolutely. And I think it's about practice, isn't it? I often say, because my exam results, I did well in physics, but I got a D in maths.

5:37And it's because I didn't practice hard enough. Very few people are naturally great at something. I'm certainly not. And I suspect most people you've had on this podcast you know there's the odd mozart or messy or something like that but most people i think have a maybe a bit of an aptitude for something but it's mainly about practice and i found that with maths definitely i found it with music and i found it with making tv programs as well now i've heard you interviewed before brian where you've said that that kind a message i imagine was being drummed into you by your parents and now you're the father of a 14 year old son how do you get kids to understand that that you've got to put the effort in to get good at it without having to go through that bitter experience of getting a day i'm not sure if you can i mean if you're lucky your kids will find something they like doing naturally my son is playing guitar so he he the moment he started playing guitar he's been practicing over and over again he picks it up and he practices and he's getting good at it and so he's he but he that wasn't me you know i think you know most parents will say you can't force your children to be interested in something it just doesn't work right very rarely but you can hopefully give them the encouragement when they find the thing that they're interested in and i hope then that he's learning a more general lesson which is actually you the more you practice and the more work you put in the more enjoyable it is the more you enjoy it the better you get at it the more you enjoy it and there's a virtuous circle and that and that i really think that applies to virtually everything that we do in life but i think you have to find it yourself would you tell us a little bit about how people listening to this can go and create a fertile environment where people can discover those interests and stay with it i mean when i was pressure i remember really vividly actually because i think my mom and dad probably thought i mean we went to the same school right yeah which is in oldham and uh they probably thought well i'd do okay and maybe i'd go to university no one had been to university they hadn't but thought i'd do well and i'd probably go to university and then when i when i was about 15 um 14 or 15 i discovered music i'd always been quite interested and and started a band with a friend of mine who lived just up the road and they they didn't stand in the way of that they probably were quite nervous about it you know because they they had no connection with music or and and they just thought you know what what is this thing but they enjoyed it and they didn't first of all they didn't stand in the way and and they encouraged it and tried to sort of facilitate it I suppose.

8:30And indeed, when I was 18, then I joined this band and we got a record deal. So I was essentially thinking it was a gap year, to be honest. That's the way I'd sold it. Anyway, in my memory, I'd said, you know, I'll just do a year. Right. And then I'd applied to go to university, but I hadn't actually got in to do physics because I got a D in maths. So I'd got in to do something else. I think it was engineering or something, which is great to do, but it wasn't exactly what i'd wanted to do and then that turned into five years of being a professional musician and then at that point i thought no actually i want to do astronomy i'd always just wanted to be an astronomer really right but when you go to the careers people at school and say i want to be an astronomer they at that time anyway in the 19 mid 1980s they're like no don't be silly just you're not gonna you can't do that when you're talking about astronomy so so that by that point I was lucky enough that I could go to the University of Manchester and say, I really want to do this.

9:30That's what I want to do. And they let me in. Could you explain your process then to people of how you go from that moment where you make a decision that you're going to change a career maybe to working out how you're going to not just be okay at it, but be great at it or be successful at it? What do you go through? Yeah. I mean, with the caveat that you can never, I don't think you can plan to be great and successful, can you? No, you can plan to do your best. You try and have a go, give it a go. And a good example, I think for me was with physics. So I'd been in music. So I was 23 years old, I think, when I went back to university.

10:06And of course, I was behind those people. Most of the people in my year were 18 and they'd just come through A-levels. And they'd done probably better than me in the exams initially because they'd all got better grades. But also they were fresh and they'd just come out of school. And I'd had five years being in a rock band. so i realized that i had to work really hard particularly in maths which i didn't have a and don't have a natural aptitude for if indeed anyone does right so i so so i i think the key thing for me is i realized and i still think it's very important that i had to take responsibility for my own success or failure and i say this i teach right the university of manchester and i say it to the first years you don't need to do an exam to know whether you understand something actually you know in your deep down yeah you know whether you understand something or not and if you don't then go and understand it and and you know we the lecturers everyone that teachers whoever it is we're here to help but it probably in my case usually if i don't get something it comes from reading about three different textbooks and sitting there and thinking and sometimes it can take a couple of days and sometimes it takes weeks and sometimes take months sometimes i never understand it right but it's it's going through that for me it's really important to take responsibility for your own in this case understanding something being able to understand some bit of physics but it could be running fast it could be playing football well it could be playing the keyboards well ultimately i don't think anyone can teach you to be great there's another interesting element to this though isn't there which is passion and i remember when we worked together you know all those 20 odd years ago watching you talk about the things you're now famous for talking about thinking this guy just has such a passion for it i'd love to get your thoughts on the importance of passion when it comes to high performance yeah i mean you're i don't think you'll ever get good at something that you're not passionate about and the thing that you're passionate about is it's completely unpredictable isn't it i think you get for some reason i got excited about stars and you know why i know i've no idea really it's just always as far back as i can remember i've liked space whatever it is apollo program stars anything right about space i've liked and that's just one of those things that must have captured my imagination when I was little.

12:38I don't remember why. When you go into the television business that we're in, having the, is it confidence? What is it? Just displaying your passion, just saying, well, I'm not trying to be professional. I'm not going to try and break these things down and try and deliver in any way that you would be taught to deliver things as a television presenter. I'm just going to say it how I see it. This is what I find exciting about that. And so I'll just talk about that. That's what I've always done that because I don't really see any other way to do it. Partly, actually, probably, because I've never seen myself.

13:20I've never been interested in being a television presenter or seen myself as having that as a job. I've always seen myself as a physicist who was fortunate enough to get offered a few of these television programs to present. So what's the passion there then? Is it sharing with other people what you know? Is it seeing other people get interested and excited? I think I know you well enough to know it isn't for the social media follows and the autographs, right? And the upgrades in restaurants and hotels. That's not what it's about, is it? Oh, that's nice. You've not denied that. Hold on, I've rumbled you.

13:52There's a lot from all of them. The serious answer is, so I grew up, one of the things I grew up watching was, was one of the people was Carl Sagan, who I don't know if anyone's old enough will remember, I think Carl Sagan's Cosmos. And it was on the BBC, 13 episodes, 13 weeks. And there was very little science on television at that point, three channels or something, I think at the time, but Cosmos was on. And Sagan presented astronomy. And he talks about astronomy in the solar system and the universe, but he put it in a context, the context of our civilization. and he was explicit that this way of thinking this way of interrogating nature trying to understand the natural world is vital for our survival as a species it's it's central to the it's one of the one of the necessary foundations of civilization so it was a polemic so i genuinely occasionally think that science has the thought process, the things we discover, and that way of thinking about the world, acquiring reliable knowledge about the world.

15:03It's the way we do it. That's important. So I do have an agenda when I talk about science on television or live shows or whatever it is, because I think that it's important. I said once, Someone asked me once, why do you want to present a program on BBC One, for example, about astronomy? And I said, I think science is too important not to be part of popular culture. So I really believe that. So if you believe it and you get a chance, look again, you get the chance, the platform to do it, then it would be ridiculous not to try and take that. right i do think that scientists if they want to and get the chance have in some sense a responsibility to talk about it because you know i mean and there are obvious things we could talk about one topically actually is oppenheimer so i don't know if anyone's seen the film i think it's a masterpiece oppenheimer and i was interested in oppenheimer i got interested in him as a character quite a long time ago because i i discovered that he gave the bbc wreath lectures in 1953 and they've almost been obliterated from history because they're really hard and so we don't tend to think of it but in those lectures when i found them i saw this this scientist who obviously famously played a role in developing the atomic bomb so in delivering the means by which we might destroy ourselves as a civilization and he obviously knew that and it tortured him And so what that made him do was think about how we might avoid doing that.

16:37So he started thinking about politics and society and civilization. And are there any lessons from this tremendously successful approach to acquiring reliable knowledge, which we call science? Are there any lessons that we could apply in wider society? Certainly wasn't saying that scientists should run the world, right? He clearly decided that was a bad idea. but yeah but and some of those lessons you might call them transferable skills which perhaps goes back to the heart of what we're talking about uh are important i think and one of them is not kidding yourself not not deluding yourself into thinking that you understand something not not so it's a really understanding that the world is very complicated and there are many ways of that it's difficult to understand a black hole right a collapsing star but it's also difficult to understand how to run a society it's really tricky so there aren't simple answers when i got the opportunity to talk about science in my mind that i enjoy talking about it i think it's wonderful i get excited about talking about these big ideas but also in my mind there was also the things that offenthal and sagan richard fyman and other of my heroes had also said which is that there should be there is a responsibility to talk about this way of thinking and the things we've discovered which leads us into one of the areas that i think you're masterful at if you want if you don't mind me saying is overcoming a common trait that you see with lots of intelligent people the curse of knowledge that you know an awful lot but your ability to translate that knowledge and make it accessible to seven-year-old children or to a mass audience on the BBC is a unique skill set in itself and I'm interested in exploring how do you go about being able to communicate these complex difficult ideas in a way that people can understand and start to get to grips with.

18:42you know in part it's about that we talked earlier about honesty being honest with yourself about how difficult it is to understand some of these concepts so if you've been through the process and i find this i'm quite slow quite often i just i don't understand i don't understand i don't understand oh yeah that's it then what i do in usually is just talk about the way that i understand something and it's quite often the way that a seven-year-old would understand something Because you've been, I find anyway, if you're honest with yourself, then if you really do understand, if you really deeply get something, you've been through that process.

19:24So you've seen how difficult it is. And it's almost always difficult. So you're not going to wave your hands around and obfuscate. When you see someone doing that, and you see it at university, I saw it with people who taught me. you can tell when they don't really understand something because they fall back on jargon and wave their hands around and go and usually that's because they don't they've not been through that process and they're just they're sort of not tricking you you know but there is probably that they're tricking themselves into thinking that they understand saying i don't know i don't know this is the basis of science it's fundamental i mean richard fineman we mentioned you know it's a Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, also worked on a Manhattan Project, actually.

20:12One of the greats, a great teacher as well. And he called science a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance. And it's a really deep point, actually, because he meant that all knowledge starts from you, one, the individual, accepting that they don't know. You start with, I don't know how that works. I don't know why the sky's blue. I don't know why the leaves are green. I don't know why the universe is the way that it is. You have to start from that point. And then you build, you try to build a reliable picture. It's a model of the world in your mind. But being a scientist, of course, it's about doing research.

20:51And that means that you're going to the edge of knowledge always, and being extremely comfortable standing on the edge of the known, the dividing line between the known and the unknown, and trying to find out a bit more. So you have to be delighted to not know in order to make any progress and so and i think that's a skill it's about jettisoning any fear of the unknown and i think a lot of time we get into a lot of arguments you know as a society about things that are pretty unknowable well unknowable at the moment we don't know so even basic things like did the universe have a beginning and we know that the universe was very hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago we that's good we call that the big bang but whether that was a beginning in time, whether the universe existed in some form before that, what it means to talk about the beginning of time.

21:42We don't even know what time is, right? We don't know. We've got some sense, by the way, that it might be built of smaller things, but we can leave that alone. But the thing is that it's key, isn't it? Because a lot of people talk with great confidence about, I know how the universe began. I know why the universe began. The answer is, nobody knows we don't know yet and that's interesting and exciting yeah we're all making it up and i think it's really powerful if we if you can sit here and say i don't know then that's great for everyone yeah and if you think about it so we do accept in certain professions that it's good to good to be to know what you're doing like for example flying a plane yeah so being an airline captain doing an operation the surgeon the the designer of a nuclear reactor you know there are things where knowledge you know an experience valued if you look at how our knowledge and i used a term before reliable knowledge how that knowledge was acquired it was acquired by people starting from the basis they didn't understand and then the moment this is critical in science The moment that some new data appears, some new evidence, some new observation comes in that conflicts with your picture of the world, then you start to be interested.

23:04You start to be excited. You go, well, if I'm wrong with my picture, then I'm delighted because I've learned something. I can rule that picture out and then I can go on to a new picture. so you you have to be delighted when you're shown to be wrong because you've learned something and that of course that that does apply i mean that's how we have reliable airline flights right that's what pilots do the airline industry knows this when someone makes a mistake failure the mistake is is analyzed and in detail you're not supposed to point the finger and thing in those industries you're supposed to find out how not to do it again it's like building a bridge right you don't there are certain things usually engineering or like you know surgical medical procedures you say where it's all about the success is about acquiring knowledge about doing it better next time it's not about everybody thinking that you were right that's and that we should just apply that it's pretty obvious really when you think about it isn't it well it is in terms of the outcome but you've mentioned a few things there that have sort of resonated with me brian that i think I'd be helpful just to unpick for anyone listening to this because we all want the best outcome we can whether that's improved knowledge of any topic but I'm interested in the ingredients that go into creating an environment or a culture where that can be embraced where people don't see it as fearful to be challenged and I'm interested is what would you see are the most key ingredients to do that i think i mean i think it's pretty simple it's it's it's almost rewarding people for being wrong but you know the sense in which i mean that it's yeah it's saying that it is part of the process of making this better it is for you to recognize when you're wrong find it a positive experience and learn and and there's some that there are this is not a new thought i mean there are industries i know there are safety critical industries where that's absolutely in the culture it's pretty obvious but i think what would be interesting is to move that culture into non-safety critical industries like politics for example it would require a big culture change amongst politicians and voters but the idea that goes back to oppenheimer the idea that if you talk about policy for let's say something you know really important climate policy for example the question of how you how do you reduce emissions which we know is a problem but how do you reduce it in a way that doesn't disadvantage a section of society that shouldn't be disadvantaged and so on.

25:45It's very, very, very complicated. So therefore, when you put policies in place, some of them are going to be wrong. Some of them are not going to work. And that idea that you have a culture in society that says, well, we understand that it's impossible to get the right policy all the time. But the positive thing, that progress comes from recognizing that didn't work and then trying another one. And I think that's really important. So we need to be better at asking questions rather than answering questions. Yeah, I think, yeah, we have to be less confident in our answers and better at asking. Let's take your world, for example, right?

26:26How much do you think we don't know about what's around us? I mean, we know a lot, but then almost nothing as well simultaneously. So, you know, as I said, it's interesting. There's a few stories the other week, for example, about the new space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. So this is the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was designed to see farther out into the universe than ever before. And looking far out into the universe means you're looking back in time. because, for example, the most distant thing you can see is the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye. You can just about see it on a dark night if you know where to look.

27:06You can see it with binoculars. And it's a wonderful thing to do. So I'd recommend anyone who's listening or watching, just find it. You'll see it in the sky tonight. If it's clear, it'll be there. What are we looking for? It's kind of a, if you know where to look, it's a misty patch in the sky. It's actually quite big. So you can get those phone apps, which are free, most of them. star walk kind of things and you you'll find it and then if you've got a pair of binoculars you'll search around you'll see this misty patch and it's wonderful because it's that's the most distant thing you can see without a telescope and it's two million light years away which means the light took two million years to reach your eye from that galaxy so that means it began its journey before we had evolved on earth right we the human homo sapiens are not that old right two million years and so you're looking back in time two million years you're seeing this thing as it was before there had been humans existed on the earth right two million years and you can see it in real time so what the web space telescope can do is look so far out to such distant galaxies that you're seeing the first galaxies form in the universe and that's what it was designed to do and the reason we want to do that is because we didn't understand we don't really understand how they form right how far away is that light well that's over 13 billion years of light travel time wow so we're talking and the universe is 13.8 billion years since the big bang right so it's so we're talking about seeing the first galaxies form in the universe and taking pictures of it and not surprisingly that it's not quite as we expected so and i saw some headlines that said you know crisis crisis in physics and it's not a crisis that's how you do science right the The reason we built this big thing and sent it out to make those observations is because we weren't sure that we had it right.

28:58We probably won't have it right because we hadn't seen it before. And there is indeed something interesting and it could be profound or it could be a little twiddle to our model and we're not quite sure yet. But that's how you do it. So we were never going to be right. I mean, I don't think we'll ever have the answers by any means. I mean, there are deep questions. Are we alone in the universe? i mean probably not you'd guess there are two two trillion galaxies in the observable universe right so you would expect not what we don't know of all the recent headlines about you know someone in the states saying he's seen evidence of alien life forms on earth something that was collected from the bottom of the sea those tiny ball bearings and they say this is this has been formed by a life form outside our our galaxy it's it's a theory that isn't it i mean he's so there's a theory there and so you can get the little things and we will analyze them and have a look i mean i wouldn't it's funny because on you mentioned social media i think i you know occasionally on social media i'll quite often i'll tweet something and and there'll be quite a few people who disagree reasonably strongly with what i said and one of them is is the the ufo thing you know that i mean there are people who really believe that there are ufos visiting the earth and i always say that you know i haven't seen any evidence of that that i think is strong evidence it's a huge claim that there are other civilizations out there that are visiting us but i wouldn't be surprised in a in a sense in a strict sense that if i said to someone the other day you know if a big ufo came now we walk outside and over westminster there's a spaceship hovering i wouldn't be the least bit surprised because i know that there are trillions of planets in the milky way galaxy alone and hundreds of billions of stars.

30:47And there's been a lot of time. And one of the great mysteries actually in physics is why we don't seem to see much out there, anything. There's strong evidence of nothing out there at all at the moment. We have no strong evidence of any life beyond earth. And that's a puzzle and a paradox. It's about with those claims, you don't rule them out. If someone says, well, I've got this, I found this thing at the bottom of the sea, and I think it's really weird then the correct thing to do is go okay we'll put it in a lab and get an electron microscope and prod it around and find out just how weird it is and nature Feynman again said the thing to remember is nature does not care at all what you think it doesn't matter who you are or how famous you are any letters you've got before or after your name whatever it doesn't matter nature just is so if indeed an alien spacecraft crashed into wherever it was that they found these things a billion years ago and left all the fragments there and we've dug them up then that's interesting isn't it but that's it oh very that's you know but but if it didn't then that's also interesting because then we get a profound problem puzzle about why why there don't seem to be many civilizations around our next partner you won't be surprised to hear is ag1 look we've been working with ag1 for months and months now and it is something that for me is a non-negotiable in my day.

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35:52a lot of what you're doing is teaching us how to think how to ask questions just through your own example so how frustrated do you get if you do that's again a supposition of my part of when you see people that do want to have an opinion rather than accepting that not having an opinion is also a stance it can take yeah i mean it's about um i mean it's about i think looking at the not only the evidence but our understanding by which i mean our culture our civilization's understanding of something and then trying to work out you sometimes you have to have an opinion that's what we talked about policy earlier so that it's difficult being a politician to be fair to them because someone has to make a decision you have to do something so you have to make decisions based on incomplete data so you can have an opinion and say well this is my best guess let's do that the key point is if it starts to look like that was the wrong best guess then as i said before you i mean maybe it's too much to ask people to be delighted when they're wrong but ultimately that's what i mean you say well that's good okay so that's not the way to do it let's try something else and so i think that's the point we all obviously you can't sit there and just have no opinion about anything because then nobody would still be in the cave then wouldn't we because no one would i think opinion is fine and knowledge is great but i love the grace and perry quote hold your beliefs lightly yeah so you can really believe like and really passionately believe you think you have the answer but hold that lightly and if someone comes along and offers a different opinion you'd be foolish to to ignore that well yeah and on that actually going back to Oppenheimer he gave this wonderful example in his wreath lectures about how nature can help you think like that and it was about an electron because he did this in the 50s and so quantum mechanics was really you know new then and really widely debated what does it mean We're still debating it now, right?

37:56But he said an electron. So sometimes it behaves like a point-like thing, like a grain of sand. And that's probably why I said particle to you. You think grain of sand, right? Thing, little thing. And sometimes it behaves like that. But sometimes it behaves like this wavy extended thing that fills the space that it's in. And sometimes that's a way to think about it. But he said, actually though, neither of those is right. they're both sort of an attempt to understand this very complicated thing that behaves in a very complicated way right so you need both pictures so you need to be capable of holding two ideas in your head at the same time that appear contradictory it's a way the extended thing it's a little point like thing but then he said so it is with a society so let's think about human society you know we all go to work and we we want to look after our family and we have a and keep some of our money in those things.

38:52And we're individualistic. We're individuals, right? So we care about our individual lives. But also, we all care about our society. And so we want to give some of our money back and pay our taxes and do things. And we understand that society is important. So you have the two things there. You have the needs of the collective, the society, and the needs of the individual. And of course, neither of those. He called them, actually, I think. And Cole won communism because he was in the 50s and he was having problems and McCarthy was going to go after him. He said communism and conservatism or libertarian, you know, it's left and right.

39:26And of course, his point is that these are necessary but not sufficient pictures, that humans and human societies are very complex. So there isn't a right way. Communism isn't right and conservatism isn't right and liberalism isn't right. These are not right. Marxism, whatever, you list them all. they're all different necessary views trying to understand how a society works and it's actually what he's saying is that centrism sometimes it's a nasty word centrism people don't like it they think it's a compromise we're compromising we're neither one nor the other it's not Oppenheimer was saying these are all you have to hold all these ideas in your head because it's really complicated so so this idea that you're trying to run a society bearing in mind that there are lots of contradictory views apparently and contradictory opinions and someone has one opinion someone has another opinion that's a feature yeah of society so we're not supposed to choose we're not supposed to say you're right so you're correct and you're not correct you're supposed to say how do i get a complete picture of this incredibly complicated system and the reason I think Oppenheimer thought about it obviously was because he thought if we don't do that if we don't find a way of not compromising but understanding that the world is very complicated so then it's not only a single country it's all the different countries with different cultures and different political histories and different views if we don't find a way of stopping arguing and trying to find a way to make that work I've just given everyone the means to destroy themselves so I personally have delivered the atom bomb which is now has kind of raised the stakes on these arguments you know this is the 50s it's the middle of the cold war and now we're talking about AI being the kind of modern version of that atom bomb every time I open a newspaper or read something on the internet it's like AI is going to end civilisation isn't it we're having the same conversation again all these years later yeah so there will be I mean whether that's the threat or you know there's obviously there are threats from all over the place i still think the threat is probably human stupidity the possibility that someone will just press the button still you know we grew up with that so it's interesting actually if you grew up in the 70s and 80s you grew up with the world's going to get destroyed by nuclear bombs they're all there they're still there and you still have the same kinds of problems and obviously international tensions and so i think you know for all the existential threats the big problem at the moment is how to get along as a global society in a world where we have the means to destroy ourselves so it's not just a fight in a pub it's exchanging nuclear weapons if we're not careful so what's been the biggest thing that you've changed your mind on then that for you personally that i got away from physics or your professional life in it's a good question that i mean in um in i think in politics so i've been through a a long learning process for something i didn't agree with so let's say brexit So let's be careful talking about Brexit, but it's something I didn't agree with.

42:56And so I've learned to try to understand why a majority of voters voted for it. It's not because they're wrong, right? Even though I don't agree with it. It's like, what is it that is wanted? Why would someone come to the opinion that doing something that I think is the wrong thing to do, is the right thing to do and perhaps i'm perhaps it is the right thing to do so what is the what is the data that might come in that would say to me well actually no i was wrong there i'm i'm i'd be again and i'd be doubly delighted to be wrong on that by the way because i i want the country to do well because i'm in it and it's my this is where i grew up so so that that's an example actually of where i am actually although some people listen to this if they watch me on twitter occasionally will go wherever it's called now we'll go we'll go this is just not it's not i'm looking for yeah for evidence that i'm not right and there's a route to a better future through you know outside of the european union that would be an example and we've talked in great detail about you know holding beliefs lightly looking to push the boundaries being humbled by what is around us being okay with failure because failure is growth and i hear you talk often on these kinds of subjects because this is your area of expertise and you're amazing at it but i don't hear you very often talk about how that informs your life as a father i'd love to hear what you say to your your boy about keeping him going in the right direction or the things that you share well i i say that it is so unlikely first of all it's unlikely that you exist which is a big point and it's kind of obvious but secondly it's quite unlikely that you exist in a time and in a place where you can actually in his case spend the time um learning how to play guitar if that's what you want to do it's astonishing and so it would be ridiculous if you just you just didn't find anything, didn't do anything, you know, just coasted through life, not noticing that you're fortunate.

45:12In a very profound sense, by the way, you're even fortunate to exist. And also, I think in scientific terms, actually, it seems to me that we live in this baffling, astonishing and beautiful universe. And it seems to me that not making any attempt to understand it in some way and it might be understanding it in different it doesn't have to be doing mathematics and doing physics but just notice something is is worth pursuing and being interested in i think that's the foundation actually just notice that there's something worth worth being excited about whatever it is i think that's why you you do so much of what you do you know many people would be successful and write a book and stop or do a bunch of tv shows and think i've done enough of that yet you don't stop and you know doing live experiences for people i know it's something that you're really passionate about i wonder whether it's that's if we talk about you know we've mentioned passion i wonder whether for you it really is just igniting fires inside people to go and explore yeah and also me actually so i like learning curves which i haven't really talked about actually so i like um like i i'm doing sorry about live shows so i've done these big live shows kind of on my own with my friend Robin Inson uh he's a comedian and but now I'm doing some live shows with a symphony orchestra we did Sydney in Sydney Opera House in December and uh it came up the opportunity and and there's a great conductor actually Ben Northey who's a conductor in Australia and New Zealand and he had said to me there's this music it's Strauss so the everyone knows the start of 2001 you know that thing the start well that's part of a 20 odd minute piece of music and no one ever listens to the rest of it but the music is based on a book by Nietzsche and Nietzsche's book is about the way Ben said it to me is is how can humanity justify our existence when faced with the power and infinite scale of nature how can we justify it and so this piece of music is an exploration of that thought it was written just a turn of the 20th century 100 years ago or more and but it's an exploration of that idea but musically based on this philosophy by work by Nietzsche famous book and and so I thought the the challenge of taking that music and weaving in a narrative of cosmology and astronomy and what we know about the size and scale of the universe which Nietzsche and Strauss didn't know that they wrote this it's astonishing is we're talking about the 20 let's say 1900 that that sort of area just before that we didn't even know there were any galaxies beyond our own we didn't know that till the 1920s it's unbelievable so that the context has changed completely in what we know about the size and scale of the universe so there's something more to be said there's a dialogue between those ideas and that music and the things we know today and the latest images of the universe something will come out of it there's something interesting that'll happen it's really exciting well let's so that's what i'm excited about this learning curve thing then so someone says to you look at this amazing piece of music have a listen to it how involved do you get helping to turn that into an event for thousands of people at the sydney opera house what's the process for you well so then i i sit there and i i sit and i listen to it again and again and again and it's another thing actually we could talk about have patience so don't think oh no I've sat here and I've listened to it twice and I don't know what I don't know what to do so I'm just confused so let's not do that I just keep going and at some point then something occurs to me and I say actually that this image that the James Webb Space Telescope took of a stellar nursery for example the stars being born and if you put it against that bit of music then it kind of says something else it says something about things being born and the life cycle of stars and that's a bit like the life cycle of a human and you can start to make connections and and that that's what i want out of that collaboration i want there to be something that emerges that wasn't really obvious in the music and wasn't obvious in the science but somewhere in a conversation between those different art forms may something may occur which will be interesting and it's and then you have to have patience to to say i'm not going to rush this i'm just going to find it the one thing i get impatient about actually is when when i have to do other stuff if i get really into something i don't want to do anything else so i just suddenly it's boring the other thing's boring now because i want to do i just want to sit there with strauss and nietzsche and the hubble space telescope and come up with that's what i'm now interested in that so i'm not really i can't be bothered doing the other stuff for me the lesson is it's about being confident that if you keep at it so it goes back to what we said earlier you keep at it and that can be when you need some creative spark yeah maybe keep going it'll come right so at some point you'll you'll have the idea yeah but let's explore that topic of patience because we do live in a world of super fast speeds quick opinions you know instant access to whatever we want so the idea of sometimes accepting that it's going to be slower than we want it to be or we have to be comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing what have you learned about patients that you could share with us well that you can't there's no magic formula to um to having an idea or indeed being good at something as we spoke about earlier there isn't a magic formula it is time and i think quite often you have to let your head become filled with ideas and then just trust that at some point something will come out of it.

51:09So I think, and I'm well aware, by the way, we talked about luck earlier. Also having the time to be patient is a luxury. Can I ask you about doubt? Because we did a UK tour and it was racked with doubt for the two of us. Would people come? Would people like it? Would we mess up our words? Would there be value in it? Would people laugh at us? Would they ask questions we can actually answer during the Q &A part of the show? like what's your relationship with that because a good example is the sydney opera house and some amazing music i'd immediately be thinking am i worthy am i going to deliver yeah well the first thing to say is that it goes back to what we said earlier about being not tricking yourself so only i will know whether when i walk out onto the stage i'm satisfied with what i've come up with what i'm going to say yeah only i will know if those images and the things that i've done they're going to be on the big screens the right images and it's it's up to me so i take responsibility so by the time i walk out on the stage i will have made sure that i am happy with what i'm going to do and that that's that's important i think but also that again fineman i remember this great quote at the end of he wrote a brilliant essay called the value of science which I recommend to everyone.

52:30It's about three pages. It's online. And at the end, there's a quote where he says, what we have to learn is how doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed. Right? So doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed, which I think is profoundly important, actually. How do you do that? By, I think, as I said, accepting that clearly everybody's taking risks all the time. but as long as if you're happy that you've done everything you can and you're happy with where you've got to then walking out onto a stage shouldn't be a shouldn't be an issue if you think there's nothing more i can do here right i've done it i think this is what i want to say i know what i want to say and then and then you're right if people don't get it then what you should do is learn okay and i'm always i don't know about your live shows but i i'm always learning you always do something in one night and it doesn't work and what's your attention to detail like on these shows how involved are you in the various elements oh completely i mean i because because of this process i would not i would not be confident walking and i can't actually say with tv shows actually i'm really bad at doing a piece to camera where on you know in the cliched world on top of the mountain right with a helicopter shot and i'm really bad at it if i'm trying to say something that someone else wrote for me but what i can do is if i know what i want to say and i say it then then i can say it yeah in in with with sufficient eloquence for it to be okay and work you know broadcastable as we always say we always say is that broadcast yeah it's all right well let's go to the pub broadcastable so so that's what uh the way that i work i have to i have to know what i'm going to say with a point i want to make yeah and then i i can say it in my own way uh what i can't do is is learn line i just can't do it i asked patrick stewart well name dropping but he'd been on our infinite monkey cage show yeah patrick sir patrick stewart you know and i asked him about shakespeare because i was interested in this but how do you you know king lear or something how do you know how are you confident that you walk out on stage and he said you have to learn the thing and it can be you know a huge shakespearean role and then you have to forget it but you have to be confident that if you think about the way you speak now so i'm speaking to you i don't know what i'm going to say next but i'm very confident that whatever it is it's going to make sense right otherwise i just shut up so and that's the way if you and now i'll start because if you start thinking for a moment you could do it at home now next time you have a conversation try and remember what you're going to say next and the whole thing collapses and he said so it is with acting if you say a line and then go right what's the next line then it will all fall to bits and so you have to be confident that the line will come and i thought that's an incredible that's confidence isn't it what a skill but it's also practice obviously that's his job and that's the way he does it it's actually interesting when i have direct because they'll sometimes go that's great but you could you just say it again with this different arrangement of words and i was like no i can't i it'll just it's not i'm not being difficult i just i can't because then i've got to think about it and then it'll fall to bits i'm not i can't do that i'm not good enough at that as a scientist that's always open to the possibility of new information new evidence challenging your view how do you get comfortable with just being good enough like where you leave you leave something and just walk away you're not constantly trying to refine it so like the show that you're doing in sydney it's a great question that because the the other thing which we haven't talked about in in uh let's say creative industries writing a book or piece of music being in a band writing a song is actually finishing it and it's the same in science it's that i often say to students who want to do a phd i think doing a phd is wonderful that you grow intellectually and as a person hugely because you have to produce a new piece of research but you've got to write a thesis and that's so you've got to stop and you've got to write this thing which is new knowledge a contribution to knowledge and you've got to know when to do it and you've got to finish it and that's the hardest bit of all and actually in the bands i've been in the great songwriters peter cunner from d ream for example the band i was in he was would say this he the craft some of it's inspiration right and so you have a little you write a great thing things can i get better right you get this great thing in your head but turning that into a four minute pop song is the professional bit it's the craft so you're right that you've got to you've got to stop and produce something at some point and that that's a judgment call i think i you know we'll all know in our lives you know that there are things where you just keep going that little projects and you never quite do it you never finish it so i agree that's a skill you've got it's discipline that you've got so what's your cutoff then like what do you have it's usually that we've sold the tickets for this gig right okay so it's happening tomorrow yeah is there any other methods that you use yeah i i don't like the pressure i i like a deadline but i don't like the pressure of the deadline so i tend to try and overwork on it early and i always did this actually doing exams at university as well i did i i wasn't one of those persons who liked it i didn't like to cram it all in i like to be relaxed yeah so i so i like the deadline deadline in three months time and then i will do most of the work in the first month actually that's the way that i work because because then it gets better then then you get the great ideas when the pressure's off when you've got the framework and you go okay right i've got it that'll work then it gets a lot better we're about to do our quick fire questions before we do um one of the common traits we found on this podcast is optimism high performers tend to be optimists no matter what's happened today yesterday they think tomorrow is going to be great um you know so much about the universe and as you've admitted you know so little about the universe as everybody does where are you regarding our future are you optimistic yes we obviously we've avoided destroying ourselves so far yeah i'm i'm worried about it because i'm worried that it seems to me that our i don't know political debate has become extremely polarized in a way that really matters particularly in the united states actually yeah um where it's very important that that country stays stable and uh so i'm worried about that and i and you see it here to an extent and so although actually i you know we seem to be handling it quite well in this country i mean we don't usually give credit to our political system but it seems to be dealing with a quite an upheaval particularly starting with with the Brexit referendum and those things, it seems to be dealing with it.

59:48So yeah, so I'm worried. And one of the reasons I'm worried, actually, I was asked to give a talk at the COP climate summit in Glasgow, just by video, one minute. And they just, it was a little project. And they said, if you could say anything to the world leaders there, what would you say? And I said, just very simply, that given what I know, and given to a lot of people I've spoken to, it's possible that we're the only civilization in the Milky Way galaxy at the moment. It's worth considering that might be the case. And there are reasons we can go into about why that may be the case, but it's possible.

1:00:23So if it's true, imagine it's true. I think that if we're talking about the meaning of it all, as we talked about earlier, what does it mean to be a human in this universe? well meaning is a property of intelligence i think so clearly the universe means something to us so meaning exists here but if there's no other intelligence out there in our galaxy and we destroy ourselves then we might eliminate meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion stars forever that's what we might do so consider that world leaders you have potentially a galactic size responsibility wow to maintain meaning in a galaxy that's why it bothers me because i think that's true so i think i think what we do here will have ramifications in that sense way beyond the shores of our own planet because the you know you look at to me a a lifeless world a lifeless galaxy is a meaningless galaxy there's something really powerful on that like we we were lucky enough to interview tim peak who spoke about the overview effect of that a lot of astronauts talk about being able to see the world from outside the atmosphere gives you a sense of both how small we are but also how magnificent life here is yeah on the planet you see with that i i i've been lucky to meet a lot of astronauts apollo astronauts as well who tended to be test pilots you know so they tended to be in those those guys from the 60s and 70s and they tended to be guys at the and the Apollo astronauts were really focused on flying those things, the aircraft.

1:02:16But yet, you're right, all of them, every single one that I've been lucky enough to meet said the same thing. The moment you're off the Earth and look at it against the blackness of space, you start to get a feeling that there's something really important here, way beyond everything else. I did say once that I thought it was when, I don't know which parameters, minister i think it was boris johnson i said i said i think he should be sent into space and i actually meant i didn't meet i meant he should come back as well but i think i would as a taxpayer i would i would pay i've gladly a bit of my taxes went to as soon as you became prime minister you went up on one of those even the little suborbital hop go up and have a look and I think it would be a very good use of money and then come back.

1:03:07What an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. We finished with this. The three non-negotiable behaviours that you would like you and the people around you to buy into. So what Feynman said, doubt is not to be feared but welcomed. Humility in your general life but also in the face of nature actually. And the absolutely delighted when you find out that you're wrong those would be my three what advice would you give to a teenage brian just starting out don't wear that check suit when you're first on top of the pups what is your biggest weakness what is your greatest strength that's a good question isn't it um because because i don't feel comfortable answering either of those questions because i haven't thought about it really um so what weakness i I mean, probably, I mean, I do get, I do find it hard to make decisions, which everyone who works with me professionally, especially people on the kind of more admin side of my world, say, God, can you just make your mind up?

1:04:18I do tend to, especially difficult decisions, I tend to push away. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to annoy people. so i don't you know i don't want to disappoint people so i do have this tendency to go actually i'm not going to do that but i'm going to tell them tomorrow i'm not going to do it and that's a that's a and strength i think it's it probably you mentioned optimism so i tend to be optimistic that um that there'll be there'll be something interesting to do yeah you know i'll find interesting things things that interest me learning new learning curves uh so i tend to be quite optimistic and again some people that know me say that it's a it's a flaw because it's a it's probably over maybe overly optimistic but uh you know i think it's a strength that nice sense of possibility what do you think people most commonly get wrong or misunderstand about you it was funny that i got asked and i'll be i don't want it to be identified it well but i was asked once once upon a time there's some a political thing that a government department asked me to go in and and have a chat with them about something and i think they're expected to have this this nice bloke off the telly who's just gonna go oh it's great the stars are nice aren't they you're robbing in to my friend is a great yeah look at that shiny light in the sky you know that's it that's me right big smile and of course you know i i kind of piled in on them on something about you know higher education policy whatever it was and i had some i had some facts which threw them somewhat you know some data to look at this look at this and it was about and then the and i didn't get asked back and they said uh that i got this years later actually someone said to me yeah there was this word went around that you're intellectually aggressive oh wow right so they didn't want me in the room you know and so i think sometimes people think that i'm very very very very nice like i just sit there and look at the sky and think nice thoughts but of course also you know i was trained you know as a as an academic that's what i did physics and it's it's a as we said earlier it's it's quite a brutal profession it's it's it's you're trying to get to the bottom of how nature works and so there's not a lot of room for just sort of floating around being being nice you're trying to understand stuff heavy so i think i think it takes people by surprise sometimes if someone's asking me in a private setting for example for some opinion on education policy or whatever it is then sometimes it takes them by surprise that i'm not quite as fluffy and nice as they thought i love that i don't believe it i think lovely um we have a high performance book club we've got tens of thousands of members they love discussing books on there what i mean obviously you've you can't mention your own because that's against the rules um but what would be the book that you would love to throw into the mix for the high performance book club um there's a great book um i mean there are a lot of books that recently there's a there's a book but there's a couple of books by a great physicist friend of mine called sean carroll that i really like on the origins of life meaning of the universe itself it's called the big picture big picture by sean carroll and it's a really great sort of wander through a lot of the things we've spoken about actually today.

1:07:43So I think that's a very good book. Lovely. He had another great book, which is a bit, but also it's called Something Deeply Hidden. And it's one of my favorite quotes. And I say, I do it in my live show, actually. It's an Einstein quote. And as Einstein said, that if you pay attention to nature, really, and pay attention and keep going and try to understand something and keep pulling the intellectual threads, everything we've spoken about today. If you do that and you're persistent and also lucky and fortunate, there's a chance that you can catch a glimpse of something deeply hidden which is the deep structure of nature but it flies across all disciplines something deeply hidden that's what everyone's looking for what's the best piece of advice you've ever received and why i think it probably was during my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate when um it was don't beat yourself up if you can't understand something but don't stop just keep going go at your own pace we've spoken about a few times actually it's got your own pace and just trust that if you keep going then at some point you'll understand it and i think that's that's very good advice i love that and the final message for the people who've listened to this conversation today which has been fascinating what would you love to leave ringing in their ears we term it your one golden rule for a high performance life i think it it's it's persistence i think given luck that we've spoken about spoken about where if you really want to get good at something then be be persistent love it thank you so much

1:09:28Damien Jake I think that you look at Brian from the outside and think this guy must have the answer to everything the magic of that conversation was he's someone who hasn't got the answer to well to anything really because he's constantly looking for new knowledge which I think is powerful Yeah the humility cycle of starting by assuming that we don't know the answers and being open to new information new evidences new perspectives is where all great learning happens from. And I think any of us, wherever we are, whatever we do, can take that and apply it to our advantage. And I love the conversation turning around to the size and scale of what's around us.

1:10:06And I actually find that really grounding because it's so easy for all of us to get caught up in the tiny little minutiae of our lives and the sort of little things every day that can derail us. But as soon as we realise actually that we are a tiny pinprick in the size and the scale of the universe, then I think it puts things in perspective to a certain extent. Yeah, and like we touched on at the end with him, the overview effect is it's a psychological description of what many astronauts go through there. But just the ability to put your life in perspective gives what many astronauts describe as a sense of calm and almost a transcendence to getting caught up in the little things.

1:10:47Is there a consequence of that? Now, we might not all be lucky enough to go into space, but we can all take that learning and try and apply it and just see that often when we give ourselves a sense of perspective, that's the best way and most effective way of overcoming any difficulties. And in terms of his broadcasting career, I mean, I love the fact that he can't share lines written by somebody else because being a broadcaster is about being authentic, right? So he is totally authentic, which is why he's been so successful as a broadcaster. But I think the other thing is we live in a world where people don't talk often enough about how hard you need to work to be at the top of your game.

1:11:25And he was very clear with us that he has incredible attention to detail. He looks at things really early on, gets them right, allows it to kind of fester in his brain for a while to make it even better. Like he doesn't stumble into high performance. He carefully plans and plots his way towards it. Yeah, but I'd encourage anyone listening to that to go to the start of it of being comfortable with discomfort. He's not rushing the process. He accepts that it is a process that takes time and we'll all go at our own speed and our own pace to get there. But you have to be comfortable with that. I really enjoyed it, mate.

1:12:02Thanks for your... Yeah, me too. Thanks for your coming. Thank you, Brian. I really hope you enjoyed that. Don't forget for an extended version, download the High Performance app right now. You'll hear Brian talking about even more topics. You can download the app for free from the App Store and you've got a unique access code. H-P-A-P-P will get you access. You can also watch these conversations on YouTube as well. Join the tens of millions of people who are absorbing the content there. But look, just huge thanks to you for growing and sharing this podcast among your community. please continue to spread the learnings wherever you are in the world.

1:12:36Remember, there is no secret. It is all there for you. So chase world class basics. Don't get high on your own supply. Remain humble, curious and empathetic. And we'll see you soon.

1:13:02Thank you.

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