Stuff To Blow Your MindThe Dawn of a Mindful Universe, with Marcelo Gleiser
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Templeton Award-winning author and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser about his new book “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future.”
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name's Robert Lamb. On today's episode, I chat with distinguished theoretical physicist and a professor of natural philosophy, physics, and astronomy at Dartmouth College, Marcello Gliser, the first Latin American recipient of the Templeton Prize. His new book is The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, out now in all formats, and it's just a tremendous read to kick off a new year with optimism and determination about our relationship to the planet. So without further Ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Marcello, Welcome to the show.
My pleasure. Thanks Rob.
The new book is The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, out now in all formats. You stress that this is not an doom book about the dire trajectory of human civilization. You point out that, particularly with the existential crisis of climate change, scare tactics don't seem to work. What is it about humans that make us so resistant to change? When confronted with problems like climate change?
Yeah.
So I think what makes climate change different is that you don't see the eminent danger in front of your face.
You know.
It's not sort of like the Japanese just bald pearl harbor, we got to mobilize and five back kind of thing.
You know. It's sort of like.
This slow, slowly encroaching thing, and we tend to not push back whenever we don't feel this kind of oh my god, you know, the world is about to end kind of thing. And so there is a disconnect between what people keep saying, Look, global warming, it's real, it's happening. You know, it's affecting all of us. For example, I live in northern New England.
And it's late December here and there is no snow right then.
There should be two feet of snow out there, and it's like, oh, it's al Nino. It's normal. It's not really normal.
You know.
This is the hottest year ever recorded apparently in the planet. So I'm talking about twenty twenty three. And so that means that I think the problem, the challenge that people have is convincing people of two things. First of all, that yes, it's not happening right now, but it's happening slowly, and when it starts unfolding, it's going to just get worse and more challenging.
So it's like the slow approach to the danger.
And the other one is that most people say that, you know, I'm just one person.
What am I going to do?
You know, if I stop eating meat right now, it's not going to make a difference, And if I buy an electric car, it's not going to make a difference, because I'm just a little little person in this giant eight billion people world controlled by corporations and governments. So my actions are useless.
And the point is that that is only true to a certain degree, because what you do is a statement of who you are and why you believe in right, and the way you position yourself in the world.
Really is a mirror of your attitudes and your value system. And so if you are a person that is bothered by global arming, by the fact that the big oil companies are polluting the world because we need the fuel and that's the only way mostly that we can use it, you can do something about it, not so much to stop global arming by yourself, but to make a statement.
And I am an optimist. That's why when you talk about doom.
You know, like, I'm an optimist and I think that the alternative, you know, to be a pessimist is a total disaster, right, because you know, I grew up in Brazil, and as you know, Brazil, we love soccer, and so I'm using a soccer metaphor, which is this, right, So if you are pessimists, you're the kind of guy that is going to go to a game and even before the ball is kicked for the first time, you sit down on the ground and say, oh, there's no way I can win this game.
I'm giving up, you know. And what kind of game is that? Right? What kind of life is that? So you have to try to.
Make a difference and make a statement because you will influence people around you. And I think that I'm a believer in the chain reaction of social forces, and so that as more and more people engage with this way of thinking about preservation sustainability, the more difference you know, we are going to feel in a society as a whole. It's a big, big challenge, but I think it's possible.
In the book, you propose a transformation of the collective mindset, particularly the adoption of a post Copernican worldview. Can can you walk us through this beginning with just a reminder of who Nicholas Copernicus was and how he helped transform an established worldview.
Absolutely, So this is a very long story. This is sort of the core kind of aspect of the whole book.
And the idea is this that even before Copernicus's starting, really from the beginning, if you think about our species, right, so we are Homo sapiens, and we've been here on this planet for about three hundred thousand years. Just give perspective to people, if you look at the history of the world, right, the planet Earth, Right, planet Earth has been around for four and a half billion years. So if you take three hundred thousand of four and a half billion years, you're talking. And if you take four and a half billionaires and compress it into twenty four hours in one day, right, we basically arrived a few seconds before midnight. So we are the newcomers on the planet, right, that's for sure. But on the other hand, we have changed the planet dramatically. And it's not three hundred thousand years of Homo SAPIs that did it is about ten thousand years of agrarian and industrial civilization. That they did it so in about ten thousand years, which changed everything. So if we look at our history sort of like in what we call deep time, right, so we start from the beginning. For most of the time that we existed in this planet, we were organized socially.
In a completely different way. Were what we call hunter gatherers, right, So people organize themselves into small bands.
They all helped one another. The idea that we're savage caveman is kind of silly and it's old fashioned. You know, all the anthropology studies now mentioned that actually those bands of hunter gatherers they'd stuck together, but they also collaborated, interbred, you know, with.
Each other, and they had a relationship to the planet.
And this is the essential point, which is very very different from the one we have now. And nowadays, the only cultures that still relate to the planet.
In a similar way other indigenous cultures. And what do they say. They say the planet is sacred, right, that the.
Mountains, the rivers, the forests, the animals, everyone is interconnected in a very fundamental way. And you have to respect this chain of being because if you don't, you're going to pay a very high price. So there was this notion of everything had an enchanted kind of reality about it. There were spirits everywhere. The ancestors were there too, and there was really no separation between the reality that we see with our eyes right now and this kind of fantastic other world of spirits and forces beyond their control. So there was a way of dealing with the planet which was in a sense deeply respectful.
Right.
So with a grand civilization, many wonderful things happened. For example, we started to plant and we could feed more people, and of course of that, the population started to grow, and we started to condense more and more into small areas which became city states.
And you know, life expectancy didn't grow much for that because once we start putting a lot of people together, there all sorts of issues like sewage and diseases. And so for most of the history of our species, the life expectancy was between thirty and forty years old. This is including Victoria and England in nineteenth century. We never lived very long.
But the point back to your question is that what changed with their ground civilization was the notion that now we can control the planet, we can control nature. Look, we are planting, we are making things grow, we can domesticate animals, and more and more.
We felt like we are the owners of the place.
Right, And it is no coincidence when you look look at monotoistic religions which came at about the same time, you know, Judaism and then Christianity, they all talk about us as being above the world. You know, God created the land to serve you. You take ownership of the animals, et cetera. That's in Genesis in the Bible. Right to say, all right, this is our place, this is our world. We control it, and we are above nature. And this notion, you know, that we are above nature kind of pervaded all of what happened in the last two thousand years that we are going to be creating technologies that we can't use to basically protect us from the forces of the world. Right, So we build our homes, we warm them up, we create clothes, they are warm, we eat and cook our food, etc.
So we tried to really control the forces of nature. But then comes a storm.
There comes about panic eruption, or an earthquake or a tidal wave. And to teachers that you know what folks is not that simple, right. We are not really above nature. We are really very much part of the natural world, right. But we kept on going and became very successful developing technologies.
And this is our story, right. We are a species that tells stories about who we are and the place we have been. Now back to Copernicus. So Copernicus showed up in the early fifteen hundreds, and in fifteen forty three he wrote a book.
He published the book which is sort of like the big book of his life, okay, And the book was called on the Revolution of.
The Celestial Spheres. And what the story was with that book is that up to his time, everyone believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
That there was the Earth in the middle, and then you had the moon and had Mercury and Venus around it, and the Sun and all the other planets up to Saturn, because that's all.
They could see. In the fifteen hundreds, everything revolved around us, and so the Earth was the center of everything.
And of course we, according to religion, were created in the image of God. So we were like, you know, even though we were being kicked out of paradise, we were sort of the God emissaries in this planet, right, and so we had this value system where we were the best, right, our planet was the center. When Copernicus comes in, he basically changes this story and he says, sorry, folks, it turns out that from what we can say from astronomy.
That is not the story. The story is that the Sun really is the center of our solar system, and the Earth is just a planet, just like Mercury and Venus and Jupiter, which means that it just goes around the Sun.
And at that point something very profound happens, because if Earth is just a planet like any other planet, it does not have the value that people believed it had. So all of the philosophy and the cosmology, you know, the way we thought about the universe at the time was based on the Aristotelian So Aristotle, this Greek philosopher about three hundred years BCE, built a whole system, a whole worldview, you know, based on the fact that the Earth is the center.
Everything falls to it.
Everything changes here by the heavens, the planets, and the moon and the stars are all eternal and changing. So the Earth was the place whereas everything was changing, the skies were eternal.
There was some hierarchy. There was vertico, you know, from the center of the earth changing all the way up to the sky. And the Catholic Church bought that and said, that is exactly how the world should be if God created it. And God is not on earth anymore like he was for our ancestors. God is way up there in the skies. And it's a very abstract idea, you know.
The more the idea of the monotheistic God advanced in time, the more remote God became. You know, in the Old Testament it was around a lot, you know, it was like burning bush with Moses and doing all sorts.
Of other things.
And then in the Christian times, you know, it became sort of like this idea in the skies.
It sent a sun, you know. But and so the point.
Is that as religion left the planet, the planet became an object, became not sacred anymore, a place where you could exploit as you wanted. And that attached to the notion from astronomy from Copernicas, Hey, the Earth is just a planet. Meant that the combination of the science of the time and this religion of the time meant that, yes, you can do to the planet whatever we want. It's just another world. It's not that important. If there is life here, there will be life and other planets too.
So it's really cool.
Actually, if you look at the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, all these guys, like very famous scientists were speculating about life and another world, like, you know, like is it going to be just like here or not? And if it's just like humans, would they be sinners? And if there is a sinner there, well you need another Jesus, you know, And are there many Jesuses and.
All these different planets to save people. It was like this wild conversation about this other life. And the end result of this, right as the centuries advanced, is that the Earth was objectified and became a place where you could do as we wanted to. And so that's the impact of the Copernican idea, which was not really his.
I mean, all he said is that, look, the Earth is planet, but the whole everything else that followed, and this has been the narrative of modern astronomy and cosmology, which is what I do for a living, you know, as a researcher, which is essentially this and you must have heard this before. It's like, man, these are scientists keep telling us that the more we know about the universe, the less important we become. You know, if the Earth is just a.
Planet, and then the Sun was the center of everything.
But then, sorry, folks, know, the Sun is just a star and this star they are in this galaxy in the Milky Way where we live, there are about two hundred billion stars, you know, and the Sun, the kind of star that the Sun belongs to, which is it's called g star, is only about three percent.
Of all the stars.
And then the galaxy that we thought until one hundred years ago, everybody thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe. And then this American astronomer called Hubbo said, nope, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, and these galaxies, furthermore, are moving away from one another. The universe is expanding, and so like, we're really becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, right, And then to top it.
All, in the last forty years or so, we discovered.
That the matter that we are made of, the atoms in your body are just about five percent.
Of the stuff that fills up the universe.
So all the stars and the planets and the gas clouds and the people.
All this stuff is only about five percent of what's out there. So now even the stuff we are made of is important, right, and then to finish the whole thing, right, to less nail on the coffin. In the last twenty years or so, even our universe may not be the only universe. That may be part of what's called a multiverse, which is like a bubbling soup of.
Different universes, and each universe has a different set of proper And so the narrative that I'm trying to build here is that we went from a species that thought of this world as their mother, as the sole responsible for our existence, to a species where the development of industrial technologies and this way of looking at the universe as this very very big place, which is all true scientifically, you know, took the value of our planet and objectified it, and it created this mindset where we don't have to worry about the world. That's the story, you know, that comes into this book. And then the point is, okay, now that story needs.
To change because if we keep telling this story to ourselves, we are not going to be here telling the story for much longer. So The question is how can we build a different argument to explain who we are now?
Some might, you know, criticize this notion as something radical that could never captivate the mainstream, but you rightfully point out that the major shifts in worldview and cultural narrative occur throughout human history. So it's it's not an unreasonable hope.
Right, I hope not. You know.
For example, the shift to Copernicanism, the shift from an Earth centered cosmos to a Sun centered cosmos was like profoundly changing, right. I mean, there was the whole issue with Galileo and the Inquisition because he was, you know, about one hundred years not quiet eighty years after Copernicus. He was saying, folks, Copernicus is right, you know, and if you keep insisting that the Earth is the center, you're going to embarrass yourselves, you know. And only in the nineteen eighties the Church forgave Galileo.
You know.
And so changes of mindset they do happen, right when there's enough evidence for them to happen, either moved by fear or moved by scientific evidence. You don't have to believe, because science is exactly what tells you you don't need to believe in this. You need to look at the data, interpret it properly, and understand what's going on. Right, So where does the fun new story comes in?
Right?
The story that comes in is that you can rescue this notion of belonging to the natural world that ancient cultures have had for a long time and couch it in a scientific narrative. And that's what I tried to do in this book.
Right, And how do you do that? Well? First of all, there is the story that everybody knows already that we are made of star dost right, you know. So you have.
Johnny Mitchell and you have Carl Sagan, all of us saying these things, and people have to internalize that this is really true.
Right.
And I love to talk about this because it is so beautiful. You know, it's kind of at the same time lyrical and scientifically accurate.
That you know, the iron in.
Your blood, and the calcium in your bones, and the carbon in your cells, all of these chemical elements, they all came from stars that blew up over five billion years ago. So if you stop to think about this, for instance, so what you know, so because the stars are what are the great alchemists. So what a star does essentially is that it grabs hydrogen. A star is a giant ball of flaming hydrogen. Hydrogen, you guys don't remember, is the simplest chemical element that exists in nature. It has one proton and one electron in the one proton in the nucleus and one electron moving about it. So that is the simplest thing that exists chemically speaking. And what a star does it grabs hydrogen, pushes it together, compresses it really hard, and this compression transforms hydrogen in all the other chemical elements that exists.
That's called nuclear fusion.
So a star is essentially a giant nu clear fusion device that transforms hydrogen into helium, carbon, oxygen all the way to iron. And then when it gets to iron, big stars tend to explode in what we call super and over explosions, and when that happens, the heavy elements all the way to uranium.
Are forged in different ways.
So and then when the stars explode, they spell all that stuff out into interstellar space, and all these gas clouds filled with all these chemical elements travel around hit all the floating clouds of hydrogen sprinkle them with the heavy chemical elements. And when this star is born and the planets are born, they carry with them all the chemistry that will become part of life. So that's who we are, you know. So the star do story is really true. So that's connecting us to the history of the universe as a whole, right, So we connect ourselves to billions and billions of years of cosmic history.
So that's one point.
There's this Buddhist monk that I like a lot called ticknot Hunt, who talked about this thing called interveing.
The notion of intervening is really cool, he says. You know, pick up a book and read a poem, and you look at that page in that book and you say, wow, this page is made of paper. So that means that as I'm reading this book and I'm looking at this page of paper, there is a cloud that made this paper possible, you know, because this paper is made of wood. Wood is tree.
Tree needs water. Water comes from rain, rain comes some clouds, and the planet made that happen. But it only made that happen because there is a sun giving it energy to make it happen and to drive its climate. And so you're already connected to the Sun, so when you're reading a page of a book, you're really already.
Connected to this.
But the Son, of course, is a star that belongs to a galaxy that belongs to the universe. So in this page of paper that you're reading, you have the whole history of the universe, and that's the notion of intervening.
So this vision that this guy had.
It really is completely supported by scientific research.
So that's all good. Now comes the second part.
That's where it becomes a little provocative from my end, which is this, In the last fifteen or twenty years, this new branch of astronomy called astrobiology came out, and what is astrobiology. Astrobiology is essentially the study of life in the universe. Right, So now it's kind of awesome. You can actually get grants from NASA and National Science Foundation to study aliens or the possibility of alien life in the universe. You know, twenty years ago that was not possible at all. And what we have been doing with the Hubble Space Telescope and now the James we have space Telescope, which is this spectacular machine that allows us to look at planets going around other stars, to search for chemical elements, look at these chemical elements in their atmospheres to see if the atmosphere stell is about life in that world or not. So, to make this a little more concrete, if a native astronomer looked at Earth from far away, from like ten light years away, you would say, oh, look at that blue planet over there. It has a very thick atmosphere. It has water, it has carbon dioxide, it has methane, it has ozone. That planet is alive just because of the combinations of possible chemicals in their atmosphere. So to find life elsewhere, you don't really need to take a spaceship and go interstellar, which would.
Be awesome, but it's not possible yet. But you can look those planets thirty their atmospherees S thirty the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and say, yep, it really indicates the presence of biological activity there.
So we're doing that now, and we have found so far over five thousand, five hundred exoplanets we call them, that is, planets rotating orbiting around other stars far away, and we have been able to study the atmospheres of a small amount of them. But we have also found what kind of planet is that? Is it like an Earth like rocky solid guy, or is it more like Jupiter, which is this big, giant, buffy ball of gas. And what we have found out is that the vast majority of worlds I have nothing to do with Earth, a much more like Jupiter on neptunes of big gas planets. Only about three percent of the planets that we have found so far have a similar look to Earth. But of those, very few of them orbit a star like the Sun. Some of them orbit stars which are much colder. Most of them, in fact, orbit stars which are much colder. And so as you start looking at this in more detail, you realize that even from an astronomical perspective, even though there are trillions, and I'm not joking, trillion is one, trillion is a one with twelve zeros, there are trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, okay, but very few are going to be similar to this planet.
So what we're beginning to learn is that despite you have this gigantic diversity of worlds out there which is really spectacular, and they are all magically amazing, right, I mean, you have moons in our Solar system, not just the planets. You have the moons too, like Enceladus and Europa, which is this moon of Jupiter that has a crust, and the underneath the ice crust there's a nocean of salt water that carries four times more water than all the oceans of our planet together. So like damn.
You know, if there is that, then maybe hey, salt water, right, that may be life there, So there'll be there are planned missions that will go there, hopefully at some point land drill a hole, try to get some of the water to analyze if there are any little create creatures out there. But even if there are, they're not going to be as complex as life here. See, the thing about Earth is not that it's just a living planet as a whole, but it's a living planet with very complex life, and that makes all the difference. So Avatar, you know, that's that that movie was made for a very good reason, you know, which is there will be very few planets like was similar to there will let me be the more more bombastic here I do this.
There will never be another Earth in the whole of the universe.
You can have planets similar to Earth maybe, and even if they have life, life on those planets, even if it's kind of like our life, like carbon based water bays, that life is going to be completely different from life here, which means which I think is really cool, and it's part of the fundamental soul of the book that we are the only humans in the universe. There will be no other humans. There could be other humanoid like things.
With like a left right symmetry like you have, you know, left right eye and stuff, but there will be no other human species in the whole of the universe. And that puts us back in the center of the universe, but in a completely different way from before Copernicus, because now we become the species that is self aware and is able to tell its own story.
And the biggest story that we tell is the story of how we belong to the universe as a whole. So we are in a sense, telling the story of the universe. We are the voice and the mind of the universe telling its own story.
And so is this this basic idea, this this idea of the Earth is this precious gem and it being vitally connected with us. This gets into this idea of the secular sacredness of the planet.
Correct exactly so in this so I propose this thing called biocentrism, which is not a word I invented. Other people have used it, but I used it in a somewhat different context. I think the context that I use is similar to the people.
That we're doing this logical theology.
I guess in the seventies and eighties, you know, they said, you know, religion abandoned the world, then we need to go back to that. And what I'm saying is that, yes, religion abandoned the world, so did science, because you know, science also sort of like took the world as a big laboratory without really respecting it for what it is. And now we have this new science coming out and we can bring this notion of what I would call a secular spirituality, the idea that you can relate to the world. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or not. This has nothing to do directly with God. If you do, that's great, bring God back to the planet. But if you don't, you can relate to the awesomeness of being part of this deep connection to the history of the universe in this planet that allows us to be able to tell this story.
Right. It's not just that we exist here.
But this planet has had even though it has had wild climate changes, you know, there was this planet has been an ice ball completely. It has been a tropical forest. You know, it has gone through all these different phases in these four billion years of existence, but it always allowed a certain amount of stability in the climate for life to persist. Right, And life has been around here. So I told you that the planet's fare and a half billion years old. Life has been around for three and a half billion years in here, and it became incredibly complex. And once you start to look at nature with these eyes, you know, with the eyes of awesomeness, like, be grateful for what you have, because this is a jam.
Look at look what happens to us when we try to get out of the atmosphere. Right, the universe is profoundly hostile to life. When I read things like life physubiquitous.
In the universe, that the universe is filled with life, and like, I find that almost offensive because first of all, we have zero evidence of that. Okay, so there's zero evidence that we have been certainly visited by aliens. Right, there's another whole conversation. And I have lots of friends writing books about that, but more than that, we have zero evidence that there is life in other places, which doesn't mean there isn't. See, this is where you have to be very careful with scientific statements. We cannot prove that there is no life in an other world. That's impossible. I'll tell you why. It's because we simply cannot go and visit every other world in the universe to find out if there is life there or not. So we may say life is rare, or life in our bubble like cosmic bubble like within a big distance from our planet here is rare, but we cannot.
Rule it out.
But what we can rule it out, as I said before, is that definitely there will be no other.
Human species in the universe, and even.
If there would be, they'll be so far away and so remote that for all.
Purposes, all practical purposes, we really are alone telling our own story of what's going on. Now.
You talk about this a little bit in the book. I was wondering if you might feel this question. Do you believe that various sci fi, futurists and transhumanist ideas such as the digitization of consciousness and even things like interplanetary colonization no matter how far fetch some of the concepts may be, or you know, just outside of immediate grasp. Have they played a negative role in moving sort of the public imagination away from more life centric and earth centric worldviews.
I think absolutely yes, because you know, just it's a matter of focus, right, you say, look, we are going to mess this planet up, and we're just going to move somewhere else, so it doesn't matter, you know, let's just keep doing it. Let's just keeping it up, and we're just basically eating its entrails, right, that's what fossil fuels, they come from underground, right, So we're sort of feeding from the entrails of the planet to sustain this big civilization on the surface. And hey, if there are other worlds out there for us to colonize, just like we did here. So this whole notion of colonizing other planets is a repetition of what we have.
Done to this planet if you think about this, right, I mean, what happened.
Here is that there were native populations around the planet. But then you had the Europeans that had the technology to explore and go across vast distances and in the oceans, and that's what they did, and they moved on to these other places. And what did they do? They plundered, right, I mean I grew up in Brazil. Brazil was colony of Portugal that in the fifteen hundreds was the most powerful country or you know, kingdom in that case in the world. And they you know, you look at all the gold in the churches in Europe and cathedrals, where did that come from?
Well a lot of it came from South America? Right, And so are we going to just repeat that model as we move on? So let's go to the moon, and let's go mind the moon, and then we make a base on the Moon, and then we colonize, so we tear a four Mars, which basically means we make Mars into our earth thing, which is completely ridiculous. It just doesn't work and it will not work.
You can make an igloo like life, a biosphere kind of thing in another world and recreate the earth conditions in that world locally, but at.
A global level that is so far away, as you said, so far Thatch, that it is at this point, given the problems we have in this planet right now, we should be focusing everything.
That we've got here and not and can I go to Mars and you know, colonize Mars or whatever. So that's the planetary aspect of things.
And then the other one the transhumanist idea that we can and I write a lot about that, not in this book so much, but in other places, that we.
Can't actually.
Create some sort of scientific based immortality.
Right, is a.
Very very old idea, right, I mean, at least you can go back to Frankenstein. So you know eighteen nineteen where Mary Shelley she used the cutting edge science of her time, which was look, electricity can make muscles twitch. Right, that was like Galvani, you know, Volta had discovered this stuff in Italy and people are like amaze by this, right, They're like wow. So basically the secret of motion is electricity growing through your nerves and your muscles. So that means that if you could recreate a dead person and pass electricity to that person, science would conquer death.
Right.
Transhumanism is exactly the same notion, but now using our cutting.
Edge technology, which is digital technology.
So the sense the essence being if we could capture the essence of who you are, right, so essentially look into your brain and somehow can download your memories and the circuitry in your brain, and you can recreate all of that complexity in a it's.
Called the connectome. You know, how all the synapses of your neurons connect to one another. It's like a map, right, so this would be the map to yourself, right, and each one of us.
Even though we have brains which are very similar, they're also very different because I'm not Rob, and Rob it's not me. Even though we share so much of what we are, right, there is a difference there. So the idea is if you could capture the assence and create a giant simulation, then that simulation will be you.
Or an approximation of you. And I find that very disturbing and also very kind of like, uh, far fetched is not even a word for this, because we have zero idea of what it means to capture ourselves, you know, the essence of who we are from a digital perspective or any kind of perspective, because we don't know what consciousness is of how it works. But as you said, the way you phrase the question, which is very clever, it is like those things, even though they are very far fetched, can they be taking us away from our task? Right now, which is to really celebrate the life that we.
Have and the planet that gives us the possibility of having this life, as opposed to spending so much energy and fantasy and money and resources in dreaming up a future which is not going to help us in the next few decades, which is when we really need the help.
And the answer is absolutely that's why we should be focusing. And the hope of this book is to help people maybe refocus a little bit on the beauty and the tremendous miracle in a sense that life in this planet really is and.
What a place that we have, that we should be thinking about it very differently than we are.
Now. Part of the hopefulness of the book is that it's not just big ideas. You also discuss concrete steps that individuals and society can take. So what can we do, what can link listeners to the show do to help adopt these principles and drive positive change as individuals?
Right So, so the subtitle of the book is a Manifesto for Humanity's future. Right So, manifest is kind of like a little bit of a pretentious thing to say.
There are lots of people writing manifesto about this or that.
But so what I did is I went back to something I read but I was a teenager, which was a communist manifesto about Marx and angels, you know, said to say, Okay, what the heck is a manifester and how do you write one?
Right? And so basically the manifesto has two parts.
Right, he has this is the argument of why the world needs to change, Right, So you bring that argument forward and you say, look, in their case was about capitalism and the bourgeoisie and we need to you know, save the workers, et cetera. So that was their story.
Our story is we are making a planet sick, and we can be healthy as humans in a sick planet. So we have to change the way we relate to the planet. It's that simple, right. I Mean, it's a little.
More sophisticated that in the book, but the bare bones is this, you know, a sick planet cannot support a healthy life or any kind of life, human or otherwise. So then the second part of the manifesto is, okay, what do you do about this?
What are the action items? Right? And in their case was you know, workers of the world unite and you know, let's throw out the kings and all that, and that's what happened with Itzar in Russia.
But in our case is about what can we do as individuals and as a society in order to actually start really making a difference, right, And I suggest several different things. Okay, So at the individual level, and not just at individual I also at the corporate level. Is the notion of I call it the doctrine of less what. Well, you don't need to become vegan overnight, because you know that doesn't work. But if you cut your meat consumption in half, if everybody cut the meat consumption in half, a fifty percent solution, you will make a tremendous impact on the amount of not just the methane and the carbon dioxide, but the water pollution and soil pollution, the cattle grazing and cutting the forest to have area for the cattle to graze would make Okay.
So the notion that it is possible to make personal choices, that's the real challenge. There are personal choices that you can.
Make that may not be ideal for you, that may involve a certain level of self sacrifice that will impact people. And some people are man, I don't care, you know, I don't want to do that.
Well, if we don't care, we're going to be a price.
Like if we didn't care about the Japanese invasion of the Nazis in Europe, we would have lost Second World War and the world will have been a very very different place right now.
So we care, and when we care, we.
Make change happens. Right The Manhattan Project is a great example that. You know, if people watched Openheimer, they know what I'm talking about. That was an incredibly difficult technical challenge, very expensive. But you put a bunch of great minds together and give them the resources, and we can solve problems to a certain point.
I'm going to get to that in a second.
So less meat, less energy, less water, less garbage. These are the four lessons that we can all work on together. Shorter showers, more coposting, et cetera. So all these things can be done. And then there is the doctrine of the more more, what more? Engaging with the natural world. What does that mean? It means go out look at nature once now, I look up at the sky. If you live in the city, find a darker corner, go to a park, look at the park, pay attention to what's going on.
Walk by the.
Ocean front, you know, engage with the natural world, because, as I was saying earlier, you know, for most of our existence, we were beings in the natural world.
That's what we vote for. That's why we.
Sweat and we run distances. You know, I'm a long distance runner. I love that and because that connects me with really the essence of what.
We have volved here.
For we were like hunting antelopes and gazelles, you know, two hundred thousand years ago, and we got them even though they're much faster than we are, because we could do this for a long time. So we have all those senses of very good vision, very good resistance, and ways of moving which are designed to be in the world. But what we have done since Sagra Sation is we created cities which are the anti nature.
Think about that, right. A city is a ball of concrete surrounded by nature on all sides.
And the idea is that we can engage with nature much more. And once we do that, you feel better about yourself. Even if it's just a walk in the park. You know, people have been talking about forest bathing and all these things. Just walk and look at the trees, you know, and the clouds in the sky and stuff like that. He has measured physiological benefits. You know, lots of studies, a few of them at Stanford have already demonstrated that we feel.
Better when we engage with the world.
So that's the more connection to the world, more respect for animal life, right, because that story I was telling in the beginning where I said, we have basically deemed ourselves the owners of the planets, and we can do too everything like we can kill them, we can eat them, or we can have them as pats, which is you know, think of this this. It's kind of uncomfortable to say this, but I'm going to say it because why not look at the cognitive dissonance here. We love our pats, We love our dogs and our cats and our bunny rabbits or even our fish, you know.
But then we go out and we eat a calf. How does that work exactly? And you go visit the farm and you go, oh, look, how cute, you know, like when you have little kids.
You go and you go look at the beautiful cow, and then we go eat them.
So what is going on here? You know? And you love your dog like yourself, like the.
Dog dies or like in the deep depression, it's just an animal.
I love my dog deeply. It's just the best dog in the world. But so, what is going on here? How do we get to be that way? You know? So, and that's an uncalled conversation.
You know, they're like, look, there's a story that can be told from the farm to the junk of meeting a supermarket, but it's so far removed that we just go to the market and we buy that, and we we just you know, we don't care.
But we should be caring more. That's the point. You know. It's because we didn't care for thousands of years that we are.
In a difficult situation now. So it's a hard conversation to have. But the more engagement of the natural world is essential. And the other thing I suggest is two more things, just because you know, the Eyasa could talk for too long.
One is the notion of education.
Every school, at any level, from elementary school to pach d level, should tell the story of who we are in the universe. This whole conversation that we had about where we come from from stars, how we evolved in this planet, how connected we are to all forms of.
Life and to this world in particular. This is a story that should be told at all levels, you know, and we hardly have a talk about this, and that's why we don't know who we are. That's why we think we are the owners of the place, because we forgot to tell this story, which is.
The most important story. And finally, as a consumer, you have choices too, you know. If you think that that certain corporation does not align with your ethical values about the environment and about how they treat animals, don't buy from that business. Buy from another business. And that has more power and more pressure than any think. Consumers have power when they unite and boycott a certain company because they don't align with their values, you know. And so there's this Being an optimist, I have to say, there is this thing called bi corporations now, which are corporations that have an ethos, have a way of dealing with the world which is much more alignment sustainability and circular economics, etc. And so this is happening already, and I have tremendous fate that all this work is going to kind of crystallize into a different way of thinking about who we are in the next decade or so.
And you also point out that there's a responsibility for the scientific community as well.
Correct, there is because and that's the hard one because as a scientist, I know how my peers think, and the scientific community should be telling the story I believe as it is, which is not like, oh, there are lots of Earth like you know, you know, people talk about other earths out there. Now there are no other earths out there. There may be Earth analogus, but there's only one Earth. So it's just a way of telling the story. As you know, the way you tell a story makes a huge difference. You could be telling the same story and completely change the meaning of that story. And so I think we should be very careful about telling the story of our planet and our species in this planet in a much more environmentally aware way. And with this notion, and you know, when you use the word sacred, you know most scientists scringe, right because they associated that with other kinds of sacred. No, but I'm talking about the sacredness of life that that perhaps is the most fundamental universal moral value, which is life is sacred right and our life of another human, but other life forms do.
And so if you relate to that in a more concrete way, not just as you're just saying that. As a scientist, you have a role to play.
You are a role model for this way of thinking about the world because you are the one bringing all this information to the public. Right, so the people that are writing books about science should be thinking a little more carefully about what are they saying of the power of science, and science, for example, solve all the problems. I probably always going to go back to that, and I can go back to that right now, and the answer is absolutely not. You know, science not all problems have a scientific solution. You know, some problems have a complicated solution that also uses science, but it uses philosophy. He uses anthropology to anthropological ways of thinking about who we are in a culture, and native ways of thinking about who we are and how we relate to certain values.
So I would believe that now we are.
At this point where the science that we are using to describe the planet, you know, it's called systems science, is telling us a story that we have to bring together different ways of knowing in order to tell people what really matters in this world. Not just we are going to sequest the carbon with our machines, and that's.
Going to solve oup all as well.
Will not because guess what science historically, and that's a hard thing to say, but it's true. Historically science always has served those in power because science needs money to operate, and this alligance between science and state and science and.
Industry is what has pushed science forward.
So unless you have an industry that has a certain way of thinking about the world, or powers in state they have a certain way of thinking about the world, the science that is going to be mostly funded is not going to be the science that is going to bring us out of our mindset unless we have a different mindset, which is what I'm proposing.
So again it falls to us. It falls to society to really be the major movement here.
It falls to society. It falls to families, communities, schools. You know, it's a rest roots thing. You know, it goes from every In my opinion and of course, you know, is that every family should be sitting down together and talking about this problem because if you have kids, hey, this is the world they're going to be living in, you know, and and it's our responsibility to kind of make them aware of what's going on and what the possible choices we have for a future that is going to be a great future, not just a horrible dystopic future, which is what so.
Many people are talking about, right. I mean, it's you talk about doomscrolling for a reason.
Lots of public intellectuals are talking about a world with a horrible future ahead, right, like digital doom and you know you name it, like none of technology taking over, you know, like noneobots and all sorts of existential risks, and very few people are talking about Okay, these are.
The risks, what are the solutions? How can we revert that? And that's a much harder job because it's so easy to point fingers and say this is happening. So this is going to happen, But what about what can we do even though it costs? That's the thing, you know, every choice we make involves a little level of self sacrifice because you cannot leave the other choice. So you're always losing something when you make a choice. But some choices are for the common good, and it's time for us to be thinking about us and this planet in terms of the common good. Ours and everybody else is in it.
So thank you so much. For writing such an inspirational book and for coming on the show to discuss it. I recommend it to all our listeners. It's a great read. It's a very consumable read. You just end up reading the entire book in a single session, And I think it's a great read to kick off the new year, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely? Twenty twenty four, folks, you know this is the year where if things don't change radically, you know, we are going to be paying more and more of a price every year. And we don't want that. We want a better place. We don't want a worse place. So let's wake up and work together to make this happen.
Well said. Where can our listeners follow you and learn more about your work?
Oh, I'm all over at social media. You know. There is a Marcella Glizer dot com. I am on x and Instagram, and I have a ton of followers on YouTube and so and also LinkedIn because I'm starting a new think tank in Tuscany actually, which is precisely to help corporate leaders rethink about their roles in the world. You know. So I'm thinking that one way we could affect change is by going straight to the power source and making them see other ways of thinking about the world and then implement them in their business. So, in a sense, even though I don't like trickle down economics, this would be a trickle down worldview change, and that's what we're trying to do. So I'm all over. I just look for my name and you'll find.
Me excellent, and we'll have our social media accounts tag you where we can as well.
Awesome, Rob, Thank you so much for your time and fight invitation.
Thank you for chatting with us, Thank you, thank you. Thanks again to Marcello Glizer for taking time out of his holiday to chat with me here. The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, is out now. Grab a copy. I highly recommend it. A reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. Also a reminder to everyone to please rate and review the show wherever you have the power to do so, and hey, if you listen to us on an Apple device. Maybe check in and make sure that you're still subscribed and receiving downloads. It helps us out. Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. If you want to get in touch with us, email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
