-
The Romance of Reality
- How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $24.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- By: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
-
-
MUST read for studying intelligence, AI, or psychology
- By Chris on 04-24-22
By: Ogi Ogas, and others
-
Complexity
- The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- By: M. Mitchel Waldrop
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
-
-
You won't learn anything you didn't know
- By Dennis E. Alwine on 12-26-20
-
Zero to Birth
- How the Human Brain Is Built
- By: W.A. Harris
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg's fertilization through each step of a human brain's development in the womb—and even a little beyond. As W. A. Harris guides you through the process of how the brain is built, he takes up the biggest questions that scientists have asked about the developing brain.
-
-
A fantastic devo-evo journey of brain formation
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 05-24-22
By: W.A. Harris
-
Transformer
- The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
- By: Nick Lane
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight-how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
By: Nick Lane
-
The Future of Humanity
- Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth
- By: Michio Kaku
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The number-one best-selling author of The Future of the Mind traverses the frontiers of astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and technology to offer a stunning vision of man's future in space, from settling Mars to traveling to distant galaxies. Formerly the domain of fiction, moving human civilization to the stars is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility - and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, humans will one day need to leave Earth.
-
-
Fantastic!
- By Robert Puckett on 12-26-18
By: Michio Kaku
-
Bitch
- On the Female of the Species
- By: Lucy Cooke
- Narrated by: Lucy Cooke
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: All her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. But Cooke tells a new story.
-
-
Fun narrative, fascinating facts, & new angle
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 06-14-22
By: Lucy Cooke
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- By: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
-
-
MUST read for studying intelligence, AI, or psychology
- By Chris on 04-24-22
By: Ogi Ogas, and others
-
Complexity
- The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- By: M. Mitchel Waldrop
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
-
-
You won't learn anything you didn't know
- By Dennis E. Alwine on 12-26-20
-
Zero to Birth
- How the Human Brain Is Built
- By: W.A. Harris
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg's fertilization through each step of a human brain's development in the womb—and even a little beyond. As W. A. Harris guides you through the process of how the brain is built, he takes up the biggest questions that scientists have asked about the developing brain.
-
-
A fantastic devo-evo journey of brain formation
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 05-24-22
By: W.A. Harris
-
Transformer
- The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
- By: Nick Lane
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight-how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
By: Nick Lane
-
The Future of Humanity
- Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth
- By: Michio Kaku
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The number-one best-selling author of The Future of the Mind traverses the frontiers of astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and technology to offer a stunning vision of man's future in space, from settling Mars to traveling to distant galaxies. Formerly the domain of fiction, moving human civilization to the stars is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility - and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, humans will one day need to leave Earth.
-
-
Fantastic!
- By Robert Puckett on 12-26-18
By: Michio Kaku
-
Bitch
- On the Female of the Species
- By: Lucy Cooke
- Narrated by: Lucy Cooke
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: All her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. But Cooke tells a new story.
-
-
Fun narrative, fascinating facts, & new angle
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 06-14-22
By: Lucy Cooke
-
The Immortality Key
- The Secret History of the Religion with No Name
- By: Brian C. Muraresku, Graham Hancock - foreword
- Narrated by: Graham Hancock, Brian C. Muraresku
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations.
-
-
Most important book of the now.
- By Balls on 10-02-20
By: Brian C. Muraresku, and others
-
The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric.
-
-
Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
-
The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
- Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
- By: Peter Zeihan
- Narrated by: Peter Zeihan
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days—even hours—of when you decided you wanted it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going. Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.
-
-
Everyone dies except Americans
- By preetam on 06-22-22
By: Peter Zeihan
-
Endure
- How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering
- By: Cameron Hanes
- Narrated by: Cameron Hanes, David Goggins, Joe Rogan
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cameron Hanes discovered his true passion for bowhunting when he was twenty. Inspired by the physical challenges of stalking elk in the Oregon wilderness—traversing mountainous terrain, braving erratic weather, and evading his quarry’s even more dangerous predators—he began an ever-evolving journey of self-improvement. To become the best bowhunter of wild elk, to the caliber he believed he could be, Cam realized he would need more than archery skills.
-
-
Great story but hunting is a luxury, not a burden
- By Anonymous User on 05-18-22
By: Cameron Hanes
-
The Biggest Number in the World
- A Journey to the Edge of Mathematics
- By: David Darling, Agnijo Banerjee
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We all know that numbers go on forever, that you could spend your life counting and never reach the end of the line, so there can’t be such a thing as a "biggest number". Or can there? To find out, David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee embark on an epic quest, revealing the answers to questions like: are there more grains of sand on Earth or stars in the universe? Is there enough paper on Earth to write out the digits of a googolplex? And what is a googolplex? Then things get serious.
By: David Darling, and others
-
How the Mind Changed
- A Human History of Our Evolving Brain
- By: Joseph Jebelli
- Narrated by: Joe Eyre
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We’ve come a long way. The earliest human had a brain as small as a child’s fist; ours are four times bigger, with spectacular abilities and potential we are only just beginning to understand. This is How the Mind Changed, a seven-million-year journey through our own heads, packed with vivid stories, groundbreaking science, and thrilling surprises. Discover how memory has almost nothing to do with the past.
By: Joseph Jebelli
-
Future Stories
- What's Next?
- By: David Christian
- Narrated by: Jamie Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Christian is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. With Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the individual to the cosmological. Christian consults theologians, philosophers, scientists, statisticians, and scholars as he explores how we prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more.
By: David Christian
-
An Immense World
- How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
- By: Ed Yong
- Narrated by: Ed Yong
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
-
-
If you’ve never read about the wonder of animal sensory capabilities this is for you
- By MediaBaron on 06-27-22
By: Ed Yong
-
Invisible Empire
- The Natural History of Viruses
- By: Pranay Lal
- Narrated by: Mishal Varma
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Viruses are the world's most abundant life form, and now, when humanity is in the midst of a close encounter with their immense power, perhaps the most feared. But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all. Everything about them is extreme, including the reactions they evoke. However, for every truism about viruses, the opposite is also often true.
By: Pranay Lal
-
Fossil Future
- Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less
- By: Alex Epstein
- Narrated by: Alex Epstein
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing—including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency”, reality has proven Epstein right.
-
-
Unvarnished truth in a sea of lies
- By Jamie Klein on 05-24-22
By: Alex Epstein
-
The Case Against Reality
- Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
- By: Donald Hoffman
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
-
-
“The accompanying pdf”
- By Will Lee on 09-10-19
By: Donald Hoffman
-
Mindwandering
- How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity
- By: Moshe Bar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Our brains are noisy; certain regions are always grinding away at involuntary activities like daydreaming, worrying about the future, and self-chatter, taking up to forty-seven percent of our waking time. This is mindwandering—and while it can tug your attention away from the present, cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar is here to tell you about the method behind this apparent madness. Mindwandering is the first popular book to explore this multi-faceted phenomenon of your wandering mind and introduces you to the new, exciting research behind it.
-
-
Genius author
- By Amazon Customer on 06-29-22
By: Moshe Bar
Publisher's Summary
Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table.
According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning.
But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science”. Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight.
In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness.
Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”. The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Romance of Reality
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Nigel
- 08-04-22
Masterful synthesis
Azarian delivers a truly grand sweep from the Big Bang through the end of time. He focuses on the phase of greatest interest to us: the origins of Life to the present day. Having been a Second Law junkie for forty years, I was instantly grabbed by the central role of entropy, free energy and engagement of natural selection in the book’s many propositions. I loved the consistent building of the framework. The completely untestable nature of the propositions in the last sections of the book did not detract (too much) from my deep satisfaction from having invested the time in listening to the whole book. It is a masterful synthesis and I heartily recommend it.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Nolan ramsey
- 08-04-22
Excellent book on the understanding of the human experience and function of the universe.
Cant recommend enough. If possible, I would recommend listening to Visionary by Graham Hancock, and The immortality Key by Brian Muraresku before embarking into this. These books give a solid understanding of the roots of human consciousness leading to where we are today without too much esoteric speech.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Paul
- 08-02-22
We just cannot bear being unimportant.
I’m reminded of a saying, “you have to be really smart to be that wrong.” So are all the trillions of planets that do not contain life, evidence that life is not important to the universe? It’s the same wrong question that this book asks. I really tried to keep reading this but just couldn’t after he showed his hand. Makes me proud of the scientists who will stand up to the cold bracing wind of reality and honestly say, “no, life is not significant from the perspective of the universe, only from our perspective.” Just because the conditions of this planet were ripe for life to quickly arise, does not mean the universe was just giddy with excitement waiting for us. Teleology and religion are so seductive, they will even bed atheist scientists.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Kindle Customer
- 06-30-22
Road to Omega Indeed
An Incredibly Beautiful Journey of Evolution. A Roadmap to Life, Mind, Spirituality and Consciousness. Awakening.
-
Overall

- arash
- 07-30-22
absolutely amazing
it's been a while since I read a book that I learnt so much from.