
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Thu, 13 Jun 2024
Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the author of a new book titled "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence". Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Notion: https://notion.com/lex - Motific: https://motific.ai - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/sara-walker-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Sara's Book - Life as No One Knows It: https://amzn.to/3wVmOe1 Sara's X: https://x.com/Sara_Imari Sara's Instagram: https://instagram.com/alien_matter PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:40) - Definition of life (31:18) - Time and space (42:00) - Technosphere (46:25) - Theory of everything (55:06) - Origin of life (1:16:44) - Assembly theory (1:32:58) - Aliens (1:44:48) - Great Perceptual Filter (1:48:45) - Fashion (1:52:47) - Beauty (1:59:08) - Language (2:05:50) - Computation (2:15:37) - Consciousness (2:24:28) - Artificial life (2:48:21) - Free will (2:55:05) - Why anything exists
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker, her third time on this podcast. She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and in discovering alien life on other worlds. She has written an amazing new upcoming book titled Life As No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence. This book is coming out on August 6th, so please go pre-order it now.
It will blow your mind. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for notes, Motific for LLM deployment, Shopify for e-commerce, BetterHelp for mental health, and AG1 for delicious, delicious multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends.
Also, if you want to get in touch with me or to work with our amazing team, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
I've been using it recently for note-taking on academic papers, specifically machine learning papers, and there's a lot of machine learning papers. And it's straight up just a great note-taking tool. But beyond that, it's a great collaboration tool for the note-taking process and the whole project management life cycle.
So it combines note-taking, wikis, project management, and then there's an AI assistant that can summarize everything and anything, and you can ask it questions across all of those things. So it's not just for a single document across all the documents. And obviously people are collaborating on those documents so you can ask questions. What did this person do? What is the status of this project?
So on, so forth. It's just a really nice integration of LLMs. This is the fundamental question with LLMs. How do you leverage the obvious power that they possess to be useful? to whatever tasks that we do. Like what is the actual product here? And so Notion leverages them extremely well where the product is team collaboration on notes, wikis, and project management. So really well done.
Love to support people that do a great job of building a great software product. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Motific.
It's a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and, in general, generative AI that are customized with RAG, retrieval augmented generation, on organizational data sources. Obviously, these kinds of data sources are often super sensitive, and that's where Motific comes in. They help companies with security and compliance.
A little background here, since I had to do the deep dive myself a while back. Motific is created by Cisco, specifically Cisco's OutShift group. And OutShift is doing cutting-edge R&D stuff in Cisco. So, Cisco has... very, very, very long track record and reputation of working with giant businesses and helping them out and not messing stuff up.
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