Is there life after death? What happens when we die, with Brian Cox

Hello, a massive welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that tries to make sense of what it means to be human. Today, I'm chatting to Professor Brian Cox. I went to a film set. I was talking to the actor. He's a very famous actor. And it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time. And he said to me, what would you think if you saw the aliens? They landed like outside here now. What do you think? And I said, I'd just be relieved.

And he was, like, really confused. But, like, you're scared. No, because the responsibility, I'd feel the weight of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns lifted off my shoulders. And then he looked so confused. I thought, I wonder if I've ruined the scene. So I learned some good lessons this week. One of them was to remember to have fun. Now, like you, I'm sure.

We adults get very bogged down with the serious, the nitty gritty and also just the mundane of life because we're busy. We got no time to do anything for ourselves. It's just relentless. But I took my kids to a theme park. the weekend. And part of me was like, oh God, it's going to be so hectic. It's going to be people everywhere. The kids are going to be all hyped up. It wasn't as if I was looking forward to it, put it that way, but I had.

The best day out I have had in so long. I bloody loved it. My kids wanted to go on this one roller coaster three times in a row. And I was thinking, I can't be bothered. As soon as I got on it. I was screaming like a kid. I forgot about all my worries. When this bloody roller coaster started going backwards, I properly shit myself, but it was just the most

Do you know what it was? It was a nostalgic sensation I'd forgotten about because I used to love going to theme parks as a kid myself and I literally haven't been to one since childhood. And it was just that sort of like being out of control, letting go, screaming because you're allowed to. Honestly. I had the best time ever. So this is your reminder and my reminder to have a little fun where we can, because otherwise you could go...

like weeks can go by and you're like, God, I've just been so serious for like three weeks about having a laugh or doing something a bit silly or doing something for the sake of it. Everything's got to have a purpose and meaning. No, it hasn't. No, it hasn't. Just have some fun. And I'm saying that for me as much as I am you.

You lovely lot. Now, let's talk about Brian. Brian is a physicist and he's one of the best communicators about science, cosmology and astronomy in the world. You might be one of the many people who listen to his incredibly popular podcast. The Infinite Monkey Cage. And he's recently launched a new one called A Question of Science. And he's about to get significantly more busy because he's embarking on a huge world tour called Emergence in 2026.

I wanted to speak to him for many reasons. Like all of you lot, I've got big questions and big things that I think about. Not all the time, as Brian does. But I like to think big. I like to remind myself constantly that we are on a floating ball in infinite space, just so I forget about the minutiae of day to day and the little worries that can really bog me down. And also I wanted to interview...

Brian, because I had done so once before, but it was on radio for about eight minutes. And I thought, God, if I do near enough to an hour with Brian Cox, it's going to really push me. I mean, like IQ wise, it's going to really push me and my level of intelligence and understanding about things. I got a D in science. Do you know what? I would have actually got more than a D, but...

I was already filming Disney Club during my GCSE, so I actually missed physics. Shame, because that's what we'll be talking about today. So if I'd gone to physics, because I did do biology and chemistry, I definitely would have got a C. Come on. Come on. Anyway, I'm not naturally scientifically minded. So I knew it would be a push. And hopefully I've done this chat justice. You know, I'm...

I'm never aiming for the perfect episode, but I do leave each week thinking I could have done better. I could have done better. And I only see that as a good thing. Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never looked so good. You look the same. But with this camera, everything looks better, especially me. You haven't changed your hair in 15 years. Selfies? Check, please.

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Professor Brian Cox, lovely to see you. Good to be here. Last time I interviewed you, it was actually on Radio 2. And I think I had all of about eight minutes to talk to you, which is an impossible task. About the universe. About the universe. Tell me what the universe means in eight minutes. But today we can take our sweet time. So it's really great to see you. You are next year embarking on a whole massive world tour for quite literally...

12 months, you're off. Well, more than that, actually. Really? The last one, in the end, went on for about four years. Oh, my God. You're like Coldplay. Yeah, you just keep adding on to it. Actually, the Boston Globe said that... My tour was the Taylor Swift eras of science. Yes. And I thought, I'll take that. Yeah, put that on your poster. I think it is on the poster. You're absolutely right. I love it. So this one at the moment is about 18 months, I think. Wow.

And here in the UK, the big shows are in October and November next year. So, you know, the O2 and the arenas in Manchester and Birmingham, Nottingham, Nottingham, all that. So amazing. wonderful that it's basically cosmology you know it's astronomy and cosmology but it's kind of like prog rock as well in the sense you know because we've got the biggest possible screens that you can fit in those

which is at the moment. So we've got things like the James Webb Space Telescope, which wasn't active last time that I toured. And almost every day you see beautiful images, like ultra high resolution, magnificent images of sort of exploding stars and colliding galaxies, just beautiful stuff. And so putting those. on those screens is really exciting to me because the screens are massive as big as we can fit into those arenas it's so beautiful you know I think a lot of the time we

Just think, oh God, everything's so doom and gloom out there and everyone's feeling rubbish and a bit down. And then you filling venues of that size, like huge arenas. There are so many people out there that want to feel awe and wonder and have big questions to ask. And I think we forget that. Yeah, I think, I mean...

Almost everybody, I would say everybody that I meet is interested in the questions that are raised by astronomy and cosmology, but also biology, just science in general. It's how you phrase the questions. Because the questions, you know, are we alone? in the universe is a question that people think about even are we alone in the solar system are there microbes on mars but also these bigger questions about how did the universe begin why is there a universe at all how come

There are things like us in the universe, which are just little patterns of atoms that can have a conversation. You know, there's an observation a few weeks ago from the James Webb Space Telescope of the galaxy. from which the light had been traveling for 13.5 billion years to reach us. So the universe is 13.8 billion years old. So you're seeing this thing. as it was just after the universe began wow and so you can see that so you say well how did the universe go from that

which is these early galaxies. And even before that, just a load of hydrogen and helium, nothing else. How did it go from that to us? Which is really part of what the show's about. One of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said that... said that a physicist a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about hydrogen atoms and you go that's what a beautiful way of putting what a human being is we started off as just a load of hydrogen yeah a couple of minutes after the big bang yeah and now we're

these things yeah and that story is quite majestic so I think everybody's interested in that yeah and I think we are desperately wanting to land on that because we get so bogged down with the minutiae of our everyday lives and our worries and our idiosyncrasies and the issues that we've got going on that actually when we pull focus and we go oh my god like we ask big questions like that

how the hell did we end up in this civilized world with AI and all of these technological advances. I think we want to constantly pull focus, but we get dragged back to the minutiae again and again on a daily basis. Do you think... Because this is such a huge part of how you operate in the world, who you are, how you think. Do you think having that greater perspective impacts your happiness levels and helps you?

maybe distract from the everyday stresses? I think it does for several reasons. And one is... A bit more abstract, as you said, the perspective. I mean, it is a remarkable thing to be a human being. And we don't know how far you'd have to go out into the universe to find anything remotely as complicated or wonderful as us. It might be beyond our galaxy.

have to go so that but that's as you rightly say that's a it's a very wide perspective and it's kind of a luxurious thing to be able to think like that when you're busy every day and you and you've got real things to do but i also think that It's almost meditative in a way. So learning about nature, which is what we're talking about, and nature is not just leaves and plants, it's stars.

the universe beyond, is kind of quite a diverting experience. And it's full of, it's quite a joyful, pleasurable thing to, you know, and ask very simple questions about, you know, for example, why is the grass green?

is a good question so you can sit there and look at the grass and maybe you don't think about it too much we say why is it green and it's green because it does photosynthesis and so it takes energy from the sun and you say why does it do that and why does it reflect the green light so we see it as green

And in the end, actually, you will end up going on a journey that takes you back through the whole history of life on Earth. And so suddenly you start asking questions about, you know, how did the plants come to be on the land? And it was 500 million years ago or something like that. So it's actually, I think it's a joyful, distracting experience as well as, so it's just like doing a crossword really or something else, whatever your people do. But it also has this profound quality.

that ultimately by asking those little questions, you end up going on journeys in your mind that span billions of years and billions of light years. And so, yeah, I think that, I mean, obviously I would recommend it, is what I'm saying. And also I think it forces you to be open-minded because with science, things change constantly. And although we can maybe get...

We can land on a theory or land on something that we know to be true. In 100 years, that can all change. So it's really important to remain open-minded. It's a really important point in that because there was... In 1955, actually, one of the great physicists, Richard Feynman, wrote an essay called The Value of Science. And so what is the value of this? So it's obvious that...

We wouldn't have an iPhone. You wouldn't have modern medicine. You wouldn't have all those things, right? That's obvious stuff. But actually, he said what you said, which is it's because you're trying to understand nature. And the amount of knowledge we have is changing all the time. And so the picture we have of how things work and the theories and our understanding changes all the time. You get used to the fact that you're often wrong.

So as a scientist, you're almost always wrong, actually. If you're doing a PhD or something like that, you go, I think he works like this. And nature will say no. And you go, okay. So you learn to be delighted, actually. when your opinion turns out to be incorrect. And that is a skill that I think we can all agree that many people in public life and elsewhere have lost. Gone.

But of course, if you're not comfortable with uncertainty and comfortable with being on the edge of the known, then you never learn. And Feynman actually, in this beautiful essay, I strongly recommend it. You can download it from anywhere. It's Richard Feynman, The Value of Science. It's about four pages. And he says in there that even if you think about what democracy is, democracy is the admission.

fundamentally that you don't know how to run a country because you have you accept that you change the government every four or five years and that's a positive thing so the moment you see someone saying this is the way to do it then you know that is not the right person for the job. They're not actually a Democrat.

Because democracy requires you to think that you're flawed and your understanding improves and you get most things wrong, but sometimes you get something right. And that's how we make progress. Yeah. And that's what science is. So there would be no.

modern medicine without that process you need to almost be egoless because i think you know ego is the thing that is you know if we look at all the biggest problems in the world right now it's because of everything you just said that people are so certain this is how the world should run this is who should be in power this is who should control this part of the world and that's where why we're seeing so much conflict and divisiveness and these huge canyon

between different people's sets of ideas. And actually we need more uncertainty to create a level of... which is maybe sort of a bit of a general sweeping statement, but it seems like uncertainty is so undervalued. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting that Feynman also, he works on the atom bomb. He works on the Manhattan Project.

So it's not surprising that in the 50s he was thinking about this stuff because he thought he delivered the power to destroy ourselves. He had delivered us the power to destroy ourselves. And the other, more famously, Robert Oppenheimer. So everybody knows Oppenheimer, especially because of the brilliant film recently. So Oppenheimer wrote about the same things in the 50s. And again, he was writing about this idea that you have to embrace doubt and not fear doubt.

But embrace it. And also, actually, Oppenheimer, he gave the BBC Wreath lectures, you know, really famous lectures in the 50s. I think it was 53. And he spoke about this stuff. And he said, there's a wonderful thing I remember where he said that. Everyone, to be a person of integrity, a thoughtful person, you'll have an anchor. So you'll have beliefs and you'll have a framework, a moral framework.

And you believe things. And that's really important. To be a person of substance, you have to have a position. But the trick, the key is to realize other people have different anchors. And so we all have our different anchors. And the challenge on this planet...

is to make sure that we work together in the interests of the planet as a whole and the civilization. And that sounds like a bit hippie, maybe, and whatever. But actually, if you think about it, if you're the person who built the atom bomb... and you saw two of them dropped on Japan. And so you know what the power of those weapons is. one of the things you might think about is how to not do that. Yeah. And they're worth reading, these people, because I think in some ways we've forgotten it.

Well, we massively have. I mean, I had this episode of the podcast quite a few years ago now, but it's one that I always come back to. We had this amazing, sadly, late... Ex-Buddhist monk. He had sort of finished his molastic lifestyle and was living in Sweden. And he wrote a book called I May Be Wrong. And that was the mantra constantly was in any conversation or conflict to have that in the back of his mind. I may be wrong, which.

immediately sort of like takes the heat and the anger out of certain situations and it's really interesting because in the lead up to this talk I listened to a bunch of podcasts where you've been the guest just to see Because obviously your subject matters are widely spanning and you could go on any different path of conversation. So it's really interesting hearing you talk. But one common theme was that you use the word argue a lot, but in a way that we don't...

normally use it I think you know if you were just to say I was arguing with or I argue in an everyday setting you imagine it's kind of heated and people are pissed off and they're butting heads but actually within the context of science you use it in a much gentler way, perhaps in like the truest way that it should be spoken, that you're bringing another idea to the forefront of the conversation. Yeah, that's really, I didn't know that I used that word a lot. So thank you for that analysis.

But yeah, it's right. In the context of science, you make an argument. I think in other disciplines as well, you talk about making an argument, not having an argument, but making one, which is laying out a position. Yeah. And that's what science is, you know. What is a theory, a scientific theory? It's basically a guess. So you guess Einstein guessed about the nature of gravity in 1915.

And it looks like he was pretty close because, and that theory ended up suggesting there may be an origin to the universe. So it's quite a good guess there. But we still don't think it's complete and completely right. So that's the process. So you make a guess and then you'd make an argument in that sense. And then you'd test it. And so you do some experiments and you'd see. And really...

what you're doing is not looking for confirmation of your guess. You're looking for the thing where it's frayed, where it starts to not give the right answer because there's the place to go next to learn some more. And you're right, what you said earlier, it was interesting about... Because I think if you really are, if you're a scientist and you really are a good scientist. What you're interested in is finding out how nature works. You're not interested in being seen to be right.

Yeah. And that's the difference, I think. And of course, I'm not naive enough and I'm not suggesting that scientists don't have egos because they do. There's all sorts of politics. I mean, the Nobel Prizes were awarded today. Everyone wants a Nobel Prize and people feel really good about it.

But ultimately, most scientists I've met are pure in the sense they just want to find out how things work. Yeah. And also curiosity is such a brilliant, again, underrated quality because you can never be bored.

There's no chance of being bored if you're relentlessly curious about things. And that's probably something we all have as children. We're curious about the world around us. And then it sort of gets beaten out of us a bit and we kind of stop wondering and stop thinking. And that's why I guess, again, your shows are so popular. because people are naturally deeply curious. Yeah. Yeah, actually, it reminds me of this. One of my heroes is Carl Sagan.

So he did a great series called Cosmos when I was growing up. But he wrote a book called The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark. And I strongly recommend it. And beautiful. But right at the start, he tells this story of getting in a taxi in New York. And the taxi driver was like, you're the astronomer off TV, aren't you? And he's like, yeah. And so he said, what about aliens? Do you think UFOs have landed? And so Sagan said, no.

I don't. He said, what about Atlantis? Do you think there used to be a city under the sea? And Sagan said no and whatever. And what about horoscopes and things? No. But Sagan, he was really wise, I think, because he said he didn't think. he is a person who's just asking silly questions. He thought he is a curious person who's really interested and really he just hasn't been served well.

by society, by education, because there are answers to some of these questions. And the real universe is infinitely more wonderful than imagined. civilizations beneath the waves and things. It's far more interesting than that. But he hadn't had access to the information. And I think that's a really important thing to remember that you said at the start, I think.

There are no there aren't silly questions. There are just people being curious. Yeah. And if they don't know the answer, you know, how did the universe begin is a very good question. And actually, we don't know. We don't even know the beginning. Right. We know it was very hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago, but we don't know what happened before that, if there was a before. So I think that it's really important to, as you said, the curiosity is the important bit. And then it comes down to...

It's part of the responsibility of a society to give people the tools to satisfy their curiosity and investigate their questions. Yeah, I think people are nervous to ask questions because we hate feeling like we're a bit stupid. You know, we hate thinking. Is that such a basic question? Or I think the thing we hate the most is saying, I don't know. You know, even if someone goes over, have you read that book and you're like,

Yeah. And you know you're lying. You don't want to admit that you don't have that knowledge. And actually, I think, again, science seems to be constantly humbling because although we know a hell of a lot, we know there's like so much we don't. know. So much we don't know. I'll get it slightly wrong. There's a great scientist called John Wheeler, who's one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century. And he said that we live on this little island of knowledge.

surrounded by an ocean of ignorance but as the size of our island of knowledge increases so do the shores of our ignorance which was brilliant it's a lovely way of putting it yeah yeah

And actually, the live show that I'm doing now, it starts with a story about a scientist called Johannes Kepler. So Kepler was working in the early 1600s. And he's famous for the laws of planetary motion. So in a way that I cannot conceive how he did it.

just from watching the planets like Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, which some other astronomers had catalogued where they are in the sky, you know, which we'd known for thousands of years. It's astrology, right? You know, where the planets are against the stars. So he took that data and figured out that planets go in ellipses around the sun.

and they and he figured out a relationship between how how long their year is and how far away from the sun they are it's remarkable just from this data but he was really clever and in 1609

There's a beautiful story that he wrote about where he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. And it was snowing and it was New Year's Eve, as he tells it. And he was going to his... a benefactor's house to a party so he's going over the new year's eve party to the guy that pays him and he realized he hadn't brought him a present and so you notice the snowflakes landed on his arm

And he looked at them and he said, why are they all six sided? They're all different and really beautiful, but they're all six sided. So what is it about that? So he wrote this book going, why? And he said, well, they come from water. So maybe there's something in the water. Maybe it's what the water is made of that makes the snowflake, which is right.

He didn't know. It was 1600. And maybe so something to do with that. Maybe he didn't know about molecules, but he makes all this progress and he talks about beehives and pomegranate seeds and everything that's. got these geometric shapes and he's on the right track. We now know it's the water molecule and we know about that. There's a 20th century discovery.

But right at the end, after he's written this wonderful book, which you can just buy, I recommend it. It's called The Six-Cornered Snowflake. We need like a whole book list of this episode in the notes. Yeah, The Six-Cornered Snowflake. Right at the end, he says... He just says, I can't go any further with what I know. And he says, I leave it to you, dear reader. Wow. To the people of the future. And he says in the translation I have, he says, I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry.

But we didn't have chemistry. We didn't know anything. But you see this brilliant mind. asking all these questions and then almost being happy at the end going, it's great, it's something for the people of the future. I think also because I watched the trailer for your show and heard that story and I was again sort of bowled over by the simplicity of a question.

that you know that many of us probably haven't wondered why does a snowflake look like that and actually our appreciation for the natural world and the fact that we know we're not really looking after it probably does boil down to the fact that we've lost that simple curiosity about why a snowflake has six sides. We sort of don't give a shit. We're like, oh, well...

How, you know, can we go to space? And I know we'll get onto that. But, you know, we've lost that sort of simplicity, that curiosity about the real simple aspects of the natural world around us. And this is one of the greatest minds, I would say. I mean, he was a genius. But you're right, he's asking this really childlike question, which is a very deep question. And actually, someone wrote recently...

It was a Nobel Prize winner. I've forgotten who it was, but he was asked, if you were to go to kids' school and say, everything's made of atoms, things are made of atoms. Is there anything you can do as an experiment in a school to show that? It's very difficult. You know, this is a 20th century discovery. And you say that's probably the shapes of things like snowflakes, because if you see something.

And Kepler said, you know, I cannot believe that this beautiful shape exists at random. There's some reason why this thing is like that. And the reason is the water molecule. And you have to know quantum mechanics and all sorts of things to understand why the water molecule is the way that it is. But that idea that crystals, a crystal structure like a snowflake is telling you something about a deeper...

picture yeah it's a really modern way of looking at it and it's right it's correct so it's probably snowflakes snowflakes are probably the example of something that's telling you there's something else going on how does that play into just like our human lives do you personally believe that life is a random string of events that happen or is there some sort of destiny fate preordained something about how we're living as humans

No, I think it's a random series of events. We are not snowflakes. Well, the snowflakes, the snowflakes, so they're all six-sided, but then you say, why are they all different then? which kepler also noticed they're all different but they're all kind of similar they're all different because they have different formation histories

So it's the path they take through the clouds when they form that gives them their shape. That's true of human. Yeah. That's true of us. Yes, very much so. So we're shaped by the path we take through life. Oh, I like that. So in that sense, we are the same as snowflakes. We're frozen history, in a way, which is what a snowflake is. But in terms of the thing about destiny, so it has a name in science called teleology, which is the idea that there's a final.

The cause is in the future. So you're evolving towards something. And that's not the way that we think of the universe scientifically. So evolution, for example, why are we the way that we are? It's all about our evolutionary history. We're not evolving to become smarter or something like that. You evolve to fit your environment, but it's...

So it's not that we're not some kind of ascent to some grander form. So that's not the way that we think in science. Well, because I guess also if you look at... the human race, we are undoubtedly getting smarter, but in some ways getting so much more stupid. I'm not sure if we're getting smarter. I mean, when you look at...

Even recently, people like Kepler, if you read that book, you see a modern mind, a very, very clever person. So I don't think we've got smarter in the last few hundred years. Past few thousand years, no one's got smarter. The really interesting question is what happened to civilization and society that allowed us in about 1600 to suddenly start basically doing science.

which has led to the modern world. But if you think about it, without being dismissive to everyone who lived before that, we didn't really do, we didn't make much progress, right? Just walking around with horses. Yeah, someone from ancient Greece. went back 2 000 years to ancient egypt they wouldn't really notice a lot different yeah but they'd you know it'd be a bit different they'd have pyramids rather than temples

But basically, the knowledge they had about the world hadn't changed. So it didn't change ever, basically. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And then around 1500, 1600, suddenly we start accumulating knowledge. And in only 400 years from Kepler, thinking about these points of light, we've visited them all. 400 years.

We've been to every planet that Kepler saw and discovered some that he didn't know about. And now we have a spacecraft that Voyager 1. It's 50 years since it was launched. It's on the edge of the solar system. It's on the way to the stars. And that happened in 400 years. So I find it really interesting that it's that. It's not people have got smarter. It's that our society got.

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How important is space travel in terms of our longevity as a human race? Is it essential? Yeah, it is. So, I mean, you could say, well, it's going to be essential eventually, but it's essential now, actually. So if you look at the way our civilization works. a large amount of the things we take for granted are delivered from space. So there's a number. I think there was a report from the Royal Society, which is the UK's big...

oldest scientific society about a year ago. And I think the number is 16% of UK GDP requires space-based infrastructure. It's a very big number. And because if you think about it, we use it for all our communications. We use it for the timing of our computer networks, financial transactions.

Weather forecasting, understanding climate and all that. So the list goes on and on and on. Also how they're making certain medicines kind of essential that they're... In the future. Yeah. So already we're talking about there's experiments to manufacture drugs. drugs and medicines, as you say, on the space station. Some things are better manufactured in zero G and so on. But even now, it's so integrated with our society that if we lost that infrastructure, we...

it would literally, the civilization would grind to a halt. Yeah. So we're already completely entwined with it. And I think, so we make a mistake when we think of space as science fiction. It's really not. It's part of that. I did a discussion with someone the other day. I was going to say argument, but it was a discussion about and they said you shouldn't think of the we talk about the space economy.

which is growing. And we're thinking about things like mining asteroids and putting power stations in space and so on. And then the Earth economy. But they said, no, it's just the economy. It's all the same. We're expanding outwards. We're all ready. Near Earth orbit is completely entwined with everything that we do. So it's becoming very important, actually, to manage it as well and to regulate it, to make sure it's not the Wild West up there, because it's essential to all our lives.

Yeah, well, exactly. And I guess also like looking at how meddling with asteroids, for instance, putting power stations on certain other planets is going to impact everything. It's going to impact. I mean, yeah. I mean, asteroids. So there's the resources. There's an argument which a lot of the people, the early sort of evangelists for space. There's a guy called Gerard O'Neill.

Later, a guy called Robert Zubrin, who influenced Elon Musk quite heavily. And they all had this view that we're putting too much pressure on the planet. Obviously, which I think everyone agrees upon, but resource extraction and so on. But the thing is that there are resources, an infinite amount of resources up there above our heads. Yeah. If we can access them. And a lot of the early pioneers and thinkers felt that that would relieve the pressure on Earth. And it would in principle.

If you can do it, you relieve the pressure on Earth because you're not fighting over resources on Earth. Yeah. You've realized that you can just go to that asteroid, that asteroid, that asteroid, the moon, Mars and so on. And it often sounds like, as I said before, it sounds like science fiction and naive. And it maybe was in the 70s. You know, maybe it was rather sort of wishful thinking. But it sort of isn't now. Yeah. It's coming.

And so I think there are great benefits to be had from moving into space. And it gets a bad name sometimes because, you know, we all know about the controversies around some of the people who go there and space tourism and all those things, which... would be fun i'd quite like to do it but obviously it's a you know whatever but actually the the real potential there

is to allow us to expand as a civilization without damaging the planet. Yeah. That's the potential. It seems like it needs to rally alongside us actually just taking care of the planet as well. Because I think... Yes, you know, absolutely. We can see how that could be the future of us and not annihilating the planet that we're living on. But equally.

will that make people even more apathetic? Like, oh, we don't need to worry about Earth because we can just go up there and go to an asteroid and nick something off of that. And that's definitely not true. No. So the thing to say... And this always has to be said, you're right, at the same time, it's talking about the potential of space, is that this planet is the only one that we can live on in large numbers in the way that we do. It's perfect for us.

because we evolved on it. So it is the best place in the universe by far to be a human. Yeah. And that's just a statement of fact. That's the way that it is. So yes, we can build colonies on Mars. and the moon first probably and there'll be a few hundred people and maybe a few thousand people but it'll be horrible it's not a nice place no and it never will be a nice place no you might have some nice greenhouses

And some big sort of buildings. But imagine living your life confined to a building. There are not going to be rivers on the surface of Mars anytime soon. No. Even if you can terraform the planet in hundreds of years' time. It's just not nice. So we have to remember that as a human being, this is the best planet in the universe because we evolved on it.

and there will not be a replacement no i mean you started a global um summit with all of the world leaders giving this quite punchy statement that like this is it and and you were saying you know even they were kind of perhaps assuming you would turn up and go like have a great time chatting about leadership guys and actually you delivered some extremely punchy facts that they needed to hear what i said to them was that so we could ask the question

how many civilizations are there in a galaxy like the Milky Way, or specifically in the Milky Way galaxy? And the answer is we don't know. So it's a big galaxy, 400 billion stars. Most of them have planets, so there'll be trillions of planets. There's an estimate that there might be over 10 billion potentially Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way galaxy. So there's a lot of places where life could begin and evolve.

But on this planet, it took four billion years, roughly, to go from the origin of life to us. And four billion years is a third of the age of the universe. And so many people I speak to make the argument that that might be unusual. It might be microbes on Mars and all over the place. But if that's what it usually takes, which is what it took here to get things like us, there's probably very few planets which have been stable enough to allow life to live on them for four billion years.

So what I said at that climate summit to the world leaders was, let's imagine that we're the only civilization in the Milky Way galaxy. Just a working hypothesis. Might not be, but might be. So let's imagine that we are. And let's imagine that you, being the leaders, through deliberate action, which would be something like nuclear war, or inaction, like failing to address the climate crisis or whatever it is, you...

cause this civilization to be damaged or even removed from the Earth. If you do that, then each of you may be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns, potentially forever. have a nice meeting was my message which is true you know the thing is i think we don't know if it's correct then but it's possible yeah

So I think it's just, just let's work on the basis that there's nobody else. Does that terrify you? That terrifies me, that thought. It sort of does. There's a very famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, you know, who wrote 2001, amongst many other things, who said that... Either we are alone in the universe or we're not. And both of those are terrifying. Yeah. So, I mean, I agree with you. I wish I could talk about it.

But I can't because I went to a film set and I won't even say when it was because you'll never. Well, it was a science fiction film and I signed an NDA and everything. So I can't. But it was that I was talking to the actor. He's a very famous actor. And it was a scene that he was playing when he saw some aliens for the first time or saw his alien spaceship. And it was before he did it. And he said to me...

What would you kind of feel? What would be your reaction if you saw it? And I know that you've interviewed actors, right? You know what they do. They watch you and they ask you questions and then they nick them. Cillian Murphy, as an aside, Cillian Murphy.

I worked on a film called Sunshine years ago with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland wrote it. Killian was to play the physicist. And we spent a lot of time together on that film. And I took him to CERN, right, where I worked at the time. And we had a great fun and went out for a few drinks.

got to know each other in the film he does this thing where he's sending a message back to earth and he knows they're going to the sun and he knows that his family won't receive it he'll never see them again really And he does this thing like that with his like, and he's kind of nervous and does this thing. And I said to him, why did you do that? And he said, because you do it.

He said, when I ask you difficult questions deliberately, then if it's a personal thing and you're not really comfortable, you do this thing. I love it. and so he does it so he just basically yeah and he said we did a thing recently and he said he said yeah i just did an impression but so this this actor

I'd said, yeah, what would you think if you saw the aliens? They landed like outside here now. What do you think? And I said, I'd just be relieved. Yeah. And he was like really confused. He was like. But you're scared. No, because the responsibility, I'd feel the weight of being the only repository of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns lifted off my shoulders. Yeah.

And then he looked so confused. I thought, I wonder if I've ruined this scene. Because I remember he's like, I know what I'm going to do. Yeah, I'd be terrified. And then he's like, what was he going to do? Is he going to look relieved when he sees this thing, which wouldn't kind of work? So, yeah.

I mean, that is the terrifying bit, I think, is the lack of meaning, isn't it? Because yes, there's the lack of life, but the lack of meaning, which is only cultivated via the human brain. That's what I, yeah, that's my position. You know, I think that, I mean, you could, you know, argue if you're religious, you would not say that, right? But I think that as far as we can tell.

Meaning is a prophecy of consciousness. It comes from consciousness. It comes from thinking. And thinking is something that we do and we're physical structures. So it's something that emerges from a very complex physical system. the most complex thing we know of anywhere in the universe, which is the human brain. So my argument is that if there are no structures as complex as human brains on any of these other planets in the Milky Way galaxy, then there's likely no meaning there.

So it means meaning I have a friend who is who is the dean of Guildford Cathedral, a wonderful man called Victor Stock, who's great. I had loads of conversations with him. And in the end, we figured out that the only thing we disagreed on was that he thinks meaning is eternal and universal. Because he believes in God. Like an energy? Well, he believes in God. He ran a cathedral. Whereas I think it's local and temporary. Right. So I think it comes from us. It's a property of things like us.

And I think that it's sort of weird to say that because it's a scientific way of looking at the world, right? It's just there's nothing. That's what it is. But it kind of puts us back at the center of the universe in some strange sense. Or elevates us, I think. It makes us very valuable because of the rarity of structures like us. Yeah. So, I mean, science has spent, we've spent the last 400 years demoting ourselves from the center of the universe physically.

and finding that we're physically insignificant. But I also think we've got more and more knowledge about what a remarkable and probably rare thing a human being is. I mean, you say when you open shows, often you'll say, what does it mean to live a finite life in an infinite universe? And I wonder what your personal reaction to that question is, because...

For me, it feels extremely motivating. Like, oh, my God. I mean, it is quick. It's ephemeral. I need to get a move on. I need to experience life and live it to the max. But I think equally it could make you feel quite nihilistic and go, what's the fucking point in anything? Yeah, so there are two.

two reactions to it but i think you know if you um If you're walking through some forest and you just tread on an orchid, let's say a rare orchid is there, it's just there and it's one thing you tread on it. what's your reaction to that is it is it to say it doesn't matter it was going to be gone tomorrow anyway it's a little it's a rare thing they don't last very long or do you

think that there's something of immense beauty that should be protected because of its ephemeral nature of its existence. Yes. I once visited Frank Drake, actually. So there's a thing called the Drake equation that is very famous. It was Frank Drake in the 50s and 60s was one of the founders of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

And so he had a thing which, can we try and work out how many civilizations there might be in the galaxy? But I went to meet him quite late in his life. He died a few years ago, but it was wonderful at his house. And he collects orchids. And there was an orchid there. That we'd arrived and it blooms for one day a year. Wow. And it was just happened to be on the on the day that we arrived. And he said, you know, this may obviously makes it more beautiful.

No one could argue that this one that blooms on one day a year is less beautiful than the one that's just always there. Obviously, it's a beautiful thing. So we all understand that. But he said, actually, that maybe that's what civilizations are like. So maybe the fact that we haven't seen anyone or heard anyone is just because they're like these little orchids that just flower and then disappear. Yeah, yeah. But that would make them more beautiful.

to me yeah without a doubt yeah and that is that's what we are yeah we're just things if we're kind of immortal That's the thing in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams wrote where someone got made accidentally immortal and life was so pointless that they went around the galaxy insulting everybody in alphabetical order. So good. Not even per planet, but in alphabetical order. So good. Maybe that's the only thing that would be left if you were immortal. Yeah.

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I mean, what are your thoughts on life after death? Because... Again, I'm going to quote you and I've got to try and I've got a whole list of quotes here, but you say life is a conduit through which energy in the universe passes. So say a human, an animal, a plant dies. Where is that energy going? Yeah, I mean, it's...

What is life? I mean, that's a very good question, by the way. The answer is we don't really know that there are two very famous books on the reading list. The reading list is immense. One is called What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger, which was a very famous book in the 40s that sort of...

predicted the existence of DNA, which was discovered later. A great friend of mine, actually, Paul Nurse, Sir Paul Nurse, who's got a Nobel Prize, who runs the Francis Crick Institute here, or founded it in London. He wrote a book recently called What is Life, which is brilliant from Nobel Prize winning biologists. And he ultimately says that we don't really know, but you can pin some things down. So one, as you said, is it's something that happens. It's that there's energy.

By energy, I mean, what do we do? We burn food in oxygen. And if we stop burning food in oxygen, then we die. There's an energy in the way a steam engine does things. So there's that part of it. And then there's information. It processes information as well. So that's what we do. So there's an information component and an energy component. But the point is, it's just a fundamental level. It's no different to something like a computing device in the sense that it obeys these basic physical laws.

which there's got to be a source of energy and you've got to be able to do things and your structure remains and things like that. So that would imply that it's the same as if you... Your iPhone will stop processing information if you take the battery out. Yeah. So it's dead. It's a dead iPhone then.

Admittedly, you can bring it back to light, so it's probably not a good analogy because you can recharge it, which we can't do. We are yet to do that currently. But the idea is that we, and this was all the way back in Schrodinger's book, he said this in the 40s.

Life obeys the laws of physics. So it is part of the physical universe. And so therefore, there's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can... persist when the the thing that the machine stops working so and that might sound harsh but i i would flip it around as we did before and say isn't it remarkable that

There's this kind of thing. It's just obeying the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are pretty simple. There are only four forces of nature that we know of, and it all started out as hydrogen and helium 13.8 billion years ago. And we've managed to get into these patterns that can genuinely, I really mean it, bring meaning to the universe. Do you find that that, again, personally enables you to look at...

Your reactions to I'm talking about everyday stuff here, you know, nothing particularly traumatic or extra stressful, but like the everyday either mundanity or. Or maybe it could be the bombardment of like outside news where we're receiving daily or stuff you've got going on in the family home. Can you look at everything through the lens of science and go, I'm reacting to this because of, you know, my history and the day.

and whatever can you can you apply it to your own life in that way well no obviously I just get pissed off but but I think there is something to be said, like you mentioned data. So it's quite liberating if you say, like, let's say you don't like flying, for example. So some people don't like flying and you get nervous.

But you can actually go and look at the data and find out that it's safe compared to other modes of transport. Yeah. So you could just say, okay, I'm not going to be scared of flying them. Yeah. If you really can trust the data. So it is useful to look at. Facts are useful. I agree. Data is useful. I know it's difficult and I know that we all have different things that worry us for different reasons.

You know, that's part of being human. But you can kind of liberate yourself a bit from it. I agree. I think, like, I... I don't deal with it so much now, but I had like really bad OCD at one point. And you have to apply logic and facts to it because it's so illogical. It's so... like fantastical and over the top and enlarged at times that you need to have whether it's like photo evidence fact data that you've done this thing before it's nothing bad's going to happen yeah

And treat yourself like a machine, like a computer. Yeah, because, I mean, you are, basically. I mean, it's a good question. I did... Talking about the Crick Institute, there's a podcast. I'm not promoting that, but I'll promote it anyway. We're like a very friendly podcast. We'll promote other ones. There's a podcast called The Question of Science, and I love it, actually. And it's out at the moment. They're coming out once a week.

And it's just at the Crick Institute and it's just experts on the panel and I chair it and the audience asks questions. So it's like question time, but with people who know what they're talking about, basically is the difference. So we did one. We did, for example, Can We Cure Cancer? Because it's mainly a lot of the Crick Institute, it's cancer research. And it was a tremendously optimistic programme, actually, because you realise how rapid the progress is.

in understanding this disease. And just look at the statistics, as you said earlier, the survival rates. Anyway, so we did cancer, aging, dementia, those things. But also we did one on AI. Which was really interesting to me because the question is, you know, is there any difference between us and a computer, let's say? So could you imagine, they call it AGI, artificial general intelligence that's like us.

rather than just a thing that does one thing at a time, which is what we have now. And there was some debate, actually. And the more neuroscience-y people felt, no, that it's really very difficult, that the human brain is... Not that there's anything mystical going on, but it's so complicated and it's all to do with our experience of the world. It's connected to our bodies.

So you can't have a brain in a jar, you know, that thing that you could just imagine just having, taking your brain out and putting it in a thing. But yeah, so it's like, so I think the jury's still out on... whether we're just, whether you could, whether we now in our conversation, whether we could be having this in a big computer. It's kind of the, are we living in a simulation kind of question. Yeah.

and i think the jury seems to be still out amongst the experts on that whether biology is really difficult to simulate i mean our brains are not that different to space in terms of the fact that there's so little we know still there's so much more to be learned about how it works and yeah it's

It's amazing. I'll probably get it wrong now, but someone was telling me at the Crick about some work they've done on mice and they're looking at how they smell, you know, the olfactory sort of system. And they had these sort of... they just begin to see that there's little co-processes in the brain. So a smell will come in and this thing will kind of take that data, which is just some, it's the same data that comes from your eyes or your ears, right? They're all just neurons going in there.

So your brain figures out what is it? It's a smell thing. It's not a sight thing. And then what is it? And then what would that do? Where is it? So it sends some data to a spatial bit of the brain that is... dealing with where it is and how far away it is. And then another bit, is it something you should not like or like a reflex sort of thing? Or is it something that you use to build your model of the world? So is it telling you there's some...

a forest around the corner or something like that. And it's so remarkable that just beginning to map out which bits of the brain do this and how they... get the data and where they distribute it to and it was amazing to me because you're right we don't know we know a lot about it but we don't know

as much as we would like to know about it. It's like the universe, as you said, in that sense. Yeah, and we're living amongst, you know, there's been bad poor mental health forever, but it seems like, and that's the sort of thing that I'm deeply in. interested in is people's mental health and how we can help ourselves better it and you know we're still yet to crack that one because we're in you know we're up Schitt's Creek with that one at the moment yeah yeah

I think it all comes back to what we were talking about earlier, that we've not figured out how to run a world, definitely. And we've sort of figured out how to run societies, but maybe we're... not doing a very good job at the moment. I would guess it's something to do with the rate of change. And, you know, I suppose social media and things are fed into that. And we're having to live in a different way and interact with people in a different way. And we've not adapted.

But I think it's the number one challenge that we face for all the reasons we've spoken about how valuable this society is. But, you know, one of the... possible explanations for why we don't see any other civilizations out there is because they don't get very far. So if you think about us at the moment, it's only in the last... century, half a century that we've had the power to destroy ourselves. Yeah. And we've managed to avoid it. It's remarkable, probably.

That for 70 years or so since the invention of the atomic bomb, we haven't used them again. Yeah. After we used the 200. Yeah. But we might do. And maybe. There's a theory that essentially says it's too difficult to manage your planet. So when you have so many billion living things, people in this case on the planet, you just can't get along. There's too many.

Yeah. So I would hate that to be the case because I think that we're so valuable and so rare. Yeah. But we don't really, you know, the progress we've made seems to be unraveling somewhat at the moment. Yeah. I mean.

As we are running out of time really quickly, there's so many different tangents. We are like, ah, the world's going to end. The whole civilisation. But I think one burning question I have, and this is more from talking to my kids. So my son, who is 12, is... bang into science like it's his whole world he loves it he and I'm constantly trying to learn from him and go back to the drawing board with my like lack of scientific knowledge and my daughter who's 10 she's

You know, I spoke to her in the car yesterday about this chat today. And what would you ask Professor Brian Cox? And it was all around aliens, obviously. But there seems to be a point in the education system where girls are, whether it's discouraged or feel like they don't have so much of a place in the science world. And we can see that reflected throughout history with...

the few scientific women that are, you know, historically held up and shown as an example of someone that's done, I can think of like Marie Curie and then I'm sort of out of ideas. How can we encourage women to get more into science or for young, I think it starts at the school. doesn't it how can we how can we really focus on that and ensure that we're creating space and room for young women to really find their place in this conversation i think

As you said, we have to, and this applies to all fields, actually. You have to, when a child shows interest in something, you've got to... Really make sure that you don't snuff out that curiosity, that you encourage it. And also, you're right that there's what could it be that's preventing girls going into science?

It's quite complicated. And the only bit I know is I was involved a few years ago now in a prize, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering, which looked at this because engineering does. an equal problem, if not a larger problem. And one of the things that was found is that there are unconscious biases from parents. If you think of engineering, your view of what engineering is might be...

building a road with a hard hat on. Now, that's actually quite high tech now and really interesting. But you might think, I don't want my daughter digging up roads, you know, with all these big blokes or something. So you have preconceptions. And so in engineering, that is the case. And so then, and it wouldn't be that it's very rare that parents would try and put their daughter off going into something. But your reaction might not quite be.

It might not be quite as encouraging as it should be because you might be unknown. And so science maybe has that image that maybe, you know, like... been a rocket engineer, for example. And we have a shortage of spacecraft builders in the UK. We're very good at it. It's one of our great industries that we're world leading in. and we we don't have enough people going into the industry wow so it could be that if you're

your daughter, you say which rocket building, you might have this unconscious image of a load of geeky blokes in a room, you know, playing with computers or something. So we have to make sure that teachers and parents don't. transfer any lack of understanding of the career to their daughters in this case but it applies to sons as well it's we try and let them do what they want to do and encourage them whichever way that they want to go yeah yeah and then

And then you're right. And then you get into more complicated issues about career structures, which many industries have that. And that's true in academia as well. And people try to do that. So, yeah, it's a very good question. But in terms of real youngsters, I really believe that it's making sure that if your daughter says, I'm interested in astronomy. You go, right. So you take them outside and you start to know what the stars are.

Could you buy him some binoculars maybe? And which you can get, you know, and you can start, you encourage it. I think it's all about encouragement. Yeah, I agree. And not putting barriers in the way. The one thing I would say also is that it's really important as parents that you can, let's say you haven't been to university, let's say university, you haven't been to university and your son or daughter says, I'd like to do that.

then you can go to the universities as a parent and you can find out what it's like because you might not know people who've been to university. And that's one of the big blocks, actually. And so the universities are really happy if you say, what would happen to my child if they came to, where would they stay? Where would they live? Because you might be anxious about that and you can transfer that to your child as well.

But all the universities and higher education colleges are really happy if you come and say, I don't understand this myself. Can you show me? Then you can provide encouragement and you can begin to remove the blocks that might be there. Yeah, I think there's just some brilliant young women out there who are ready to change the world and it's exciting. You know, I mean, you said about the scientists, I mean...

So one of the questions I get asked a lot is how do we know how far away the stars are? I got asked that in a school the other week. How do we know how far away the stars are? One of the most important... It was a great astronomer called Henrietta Leavitt who was the first to work out that there are some stars.

They call sea feed variable stars, but it allows you to work out how bright they actually are by looking at them. And she noticed that in the early part of the 20th century. That's the foundation. That work was used to prove that the Andromeda gal...

which is our nearest neighbouring galaxy, is far outside the Milky Way. But it was her work. So there are actually quite a lot of famous women in the history of... astronomy but also science but as you said it's usually Marie Curie yeah but there's I mean I felt embarrassed that I couldn't think of any more earlier I was like I'm gonna have to ask chat GPT because I'd like I need to like know about more of them the men you can list off but the women

and they're maybe harder to find. Maybe that's a slight block for young girls too. They're not seeing it in history. Yeah. But there are increasing numbers now. Yeah. of role models. But you're right. It's just, you know, the history of science. I said that it really did start modern science in like 1600. Yeah. So those names like Newton and Einstein. and Galileo, they're men. But of course, we're talking about society in 1600.

So there's part of that, I think, just historically, until you get to the 20th century, it was extremely difficult to be a woman and go into science. It's changing. But as you said, when you say I was going to say not fast enough, the reason I would say that is because what we need in all sort of areas of human endeavor are.

people who are good at it and want to push the boundaries. You need talent. And if you're only drawing talent from a small pool, in this case, you should say men, you're missing.

half the potential to advance human knowledge. So there's a practical point to be made as well. You just want to find the best talent. Yeah, exactly. To end things. Where is your happy place? I think it is. If you're allowed to, does it have to be a physical place? No, no, it can be. Can it be a kind of a state of mind? Exactly, yeah. I think it is trying to understand something.

that i don't understand and at some point figuring it out i really loved that process is the figuring out essential does that lead to frustration if there's not a conclusion of sorts i think that If you're trying to understand something that is understood, but someone understands it, but it might be very difficult, then that process of trying to find your own way.

of internalizing that idea so that it becomes natural to you and you really understand it is a really exhilarating thing to do. And I always say to students, actually, so I teach at the University of Manchester. I teach first years. And I always say to them that these ideas, I talk about relativity, right? Relativity is a bit confusing quite a lot. But ultimately, it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get a particular thing into.

into your mind right to understand it and it's different for everybody and it's different for each different idea some ideas someone will get in 10 seconds they go yeah i understand that and sometimes it might take a month for someone else but it doesn't matter And I interviewed recently a great Nobel Prize winning mathematician, Roger Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose, who got the Nobel Prize in the 60s. He proved that black holes would form.

So this very famous paper in 1963, and he got the Nobel Prize in 2020. And someone asked him, a young person from the audience said to him, how do you win a Nobel Prize? And he said, he said, he said, I was really slow at school. And actually, I was so slow that they thought I wasn't very good at maths. And he's one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th and 21st century. But he's slow. So he understood that.

Really, the thing that's really enjoyable is just taking your time and keeping going until you understand something. You know then. You don't need to do an exam. Or have anyone test you. You know when you understand something. Yeah. And the thing is not to be worried about the fact that it might take you ages.

Well, our culture is like tomorrow, yesterday, like it should have been done. Why are things not moving more quickly? So it's amazing advice in life in general to not be in a rush for any conclusion or any moment. You can't rush, understand.

You can't be in a rush to understand stuff. No. You know it when you understand it, you know it. Yeah, I think that goes for just... learning about yourself doesn't it you know you think if you look back to my 30s i'm like oh my god i didn't know who the hell i was or what i was doing and you can't rush that you it's with age and experience um basil who i work with said that i should have asked you where is your happy space instead of

place happy space yeah well is there anywhere in space that you love if you look at the history of the universe in which point in that history would you like to hang out in now right here Because I think that all the things that we talked about earlier, about the challenges that we face, it is true that there's no better time to be a human being than now.

You know, it's obvious in some ways the way, if you go back, go back to when our grandparents were born, there were no antibiotics. They didn't exist. When our grandparents were born. It's mad. It's post Second World War, really, that we have access to antibiotics in any large amount. So really, if you think about it, certainly.

in a country like this, that we're lucky to live here. There is no better place in history to live. Now it's up to us whether that continues to be the case. It might not. We could have the Third World War and then it would not be the best place to live. But that's a choice that we have to make. But at the moment, I would rather live in a time where there were antibiotics. Me too.

me too well look i wish you all the luck with your tour i want to bring the kids they will just love it from what i've seen from the trailer and what i've read about it it just sounds like it's going to be an amazing show and i'm definitely going to be all eyes open wanting to learn as much as I can so have an amazing tour thank you so much thank you very much bloody hell my brain hurts does your brain hurt my brain hurts

The thing about having a chat like that is you're actually left with more questions at the end. It's just there's... eight more like i walked away and then as soon as he left i was like oh i didn't ask that oh my god i asked that but what about that follow-up question it's never ending it's never ending that's why you need to go and watch his tour uh tickets for brian's 2026 world tour emergence are available Now I'm going, I'm taking the kids 100%. My son Rex is massively into science.

By the way, there will be a list of all the books that Brian mentioned in the show notes. If you didn't write them down, do not worry. And talking of books, do you want to know what book we're reading next month in November in the Happy Place Book Club? Oh, it's my wonderful mate, Elizabeth Day's latest novel, One of Us. Ah, this book, there's betrayal. There are buried scandals in this one. Do you know what? It's just so different from Elizabeth's other books. She's just...

Not that she needed to find her stride because she was already a very accomplished writer before she started writing books. But this is just like she is charging ahead with this one, guys. Come and read along with us and join in the chat on Instagram at Happy Place Book Club over the next few.

weeks and there's something quite exciting that i'm going to be revealing on that instagram account by the way at happy place book club go over to it follow it something really cool happening soon that's all i can say All right, a huge thanks again to Brian, to the producer, Anush Gute at Happy Play Studios, and to you, you gorgeous ball of stardust. Hi, this is Knox.

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