Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And today is one of those episodes that brings you a guest who people have been hoping and

expecting to get on the podcast for a long time. That would be Max Tagmark, cosmologist

and physicist, professor at MIT. I've known Max for a long time in addition to being a

physicist. He's also one of the co-founders of the Foundational Questions Institute, which

we talked a little bit about with its other co-founder, Anthony Geare, a few podcasts

back, and also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, as well as a well-known author

and public speaker. Max sort of made his bones, physics-wise, by studying the large-scale

structure of the universe and the cosmic microwave background. He's worked with some of the

largest and most important experimental projects as an analyst, as a theorist, taking the data

from these projects and asking what we can learn about the universe. But his interests are

very broad. He's worked in the foundations of quantum mechanics, and most recently, he's

been interested in artificial intelligence. His most recent book is called Life 3.0,

being human in the age of artificial intelligence. And we will talk a little bit about his most

recent work in creating artificial intelligence that acts like a physicist. But his previous

book was called Our Mathematical Universe, and that put forward a theory of a very, very

big multiverse, bigger multiverse than most cosmologists ever think about, one in which

all mathematical structures are somehow real. So that will be the focus of most of today's

conversation, working up to from our universe to the multiverse, why you would think that,

what it all means, the big cosmic questions that we'd like to dig our teeth into here

at the Minescape Podcast. Remember, for those of you who don't know, there is a web page,

preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast, and there you can get show notes for all the

...