- So a quick and impossibly deep question, last question, about mortality. You've spoken about death as an interesting topic. Do you think about your own mortality? - Yeah, every day. It's really scary. - So what do you think is the meaning of life that mortality makes very explicit? So why are you here on earth, Michael?

What's the point of this whole thing? What does mortality in the context of the whole universe make you realize about yourself? Just you, Michael Stevens. - Well, it makes me realize that I am destined to become an ocean. I'm destined to become a memory and we can extend life.

I think there's really exciting things being done to extend life, but we still don't know how to like, you know, protect you from some accident that could happen, you know, some unforeseen thing. Maybe we could like save my connectome and like recreate my consciousness digitally. But even that could be lost if it's stored on a physical medium or something.

So basically I just think that embracing and realizing how cool it is that like someday I will just be an idea and there won't be a Michael anymore that can be like, no, that's not what I meant. It'll just be what people like, they have to guess what I meant and they'll remember me and how I live on as that memory will maybe not even be who I want it to be.

But there's something powerful about that and there's something powerful about letting future people run the show themselves. I think I'm glad to get out of their way at some point and say, all right, it's your world now. - So you, the physical entity, Michael, has have ripple effects in the space of ideas that far outlives you in ways that you can't control, but it's nevertheless fascinating to think, I mean, especially with you, you can imagine an alien species when they finally arrive and destroy all of us would watch your videos to try to figure out what were the questions.

- But even if they didn't, I still think that there will be ripples. Like when I say memory, I don't specifically mean people remember my name and my birth date and have like, there's a photo of me on Wikipedia, like all that can be lost, but I still would hope that people ask questions and teach concepts in some of the ways that I have found useful and satisfying.

Even if they don't know that I was the one who tried to popularize it, that's fine. But if earth was completely destroyed, like burnt to a crisp, everything on it today, the universe wouldn't care. Like Jupiter is not gonna go, oh no. And that could happen. - That could happen.

- So we do however, have the power to launch things into space to try to extend how long our memory exists. And what I mean by that is, we are recording things about the world and we're learning things and writing stories and all of this and preserving that is truly what I think is the essence of being a human.

We are autobiographers of the universe and we're really good at it. We're better than fossils. We're better than light spectrum. We're better than any of that. We collect much more detailed memories of what's happening, much better data. And so that should be our legacy. And I hope that that's kind of mine too, in terms of people remembering something or me having some kind of effect.

But even if I don't, you can't not have an effect. That's the thing, this is not me feeling like, I hope that I have this powerful legacy. It's like, no matter who you are, you will. But you also have to embrace the fact that that impact might look really small and that's okay.

One of my favorite quotes is from Tess of the D'Urbervilles. And it's along the lines of the measure of your life depends on not your external displacement, but your subjective experience. If I am happy and those that I love are happy, can that be enough? Because if so, excellent.

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