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I'm Christa Tippett. Up next, my unedited conversation with physicist Carlo Rovelli.

There is a shorter, produced version of this wherever you found this podcast.

Unless you want to tell me where you want to go or before, but as you wish.

Okay. No, I mean, I'm going to... I'm going to ask you to speak about things you are thinking

and writing about all the time. So I think I'll just guide the conversation as we move through it.

Perfect. Yes, sorry I'm doing. Okay. Okay. Okay, we'll do.

Christa, do you need it? Do we need a sound check? Are we okay? Okay.

Carlo, could you tell me something, Benal, like what you had for lunch?

Yes. I just so I can get a sound check. Sure, of course. So I'm Italian, so I had the

very small breakfast, just a little bit of milk and stuff. And for lunch, I had to have a super

fast lunch because of the meeting, physics meeting, and we were discussing doing lunch, and it was

my turn to talk. So the other people were literally having lunch and I was talking. But I survived.

Okay. Okay. All right, Ben, I think we can just plunge in.

Perfect. You know, I think something, a quality that runs through all of your writing,

seems to be this kind of intertwined, interactive curiosity about

and commitment to both, well, physics as well as philosophy and history.

And I'm just wondering, I'm curious as we start, if you trace the roots of these passions and the

connection you see between them in your earliest life, like how do you think this was sparked by

...