#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli, PhD, is a theoretical physicist and author. His latest book, "On The Equality of All Things," will be available on September 15. www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-the-Equality-of-All-Things/Carlo-Rovelli/9781668092422 Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using https://dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Get almost almost anything. Order now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Very nice to meet you.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan, I'm very happy. Thank you very much for inviting me to this invitation.

• 0:16Joe Rogan?

  I'm happy to talk to you. I've enjoyed your work, so it's very exciting for me.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Oh, fantastic.

• 0:21Joe Rogan?

  I've heard many conversations with you. First of all, please tell everybody what you do.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  What do I do?

• 0:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes. I should probably start more podcasts out this way.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics, I enjoy life, I fall in love, I do all the things people do in life. All kinds of things, yes. Officially, my job description is a physicist. I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics.

• 0:47Joe Rogan?

  And the pitch that they sent me, I guess...

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Who is it?

• 0:54Joe Rogan?

  The, I don't know who the publicists are.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:57Joe Rogan?

  On the equality of all things.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Oh, the book. That's the last book I published, yes. Oh, I'm going to publish, it's coming out in a few days.

• 1:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it comes out September 15th, and what are we at today? Today is the 8th.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09Joe Rogan?

  This is a very fascinating subject. You're talking about that things don't exist in isolation, and that everything is somehow connected.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22Joe Rogan?

  But I've always sort of intuitively suspected that that was the case, that there's probably something to that. But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier. Like, okay, well, maybe I'm on the right track. Like, what gives you this inclination, and why did you want to write about this?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm not surprised you say so, because that you sort of feel that that makes sense. Because in a sense, it's what we're used to, right, in our everyday life. We interact with persons, and persons are the way they interact with us, and them, their relations and stuff. We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow, science, physics in particular, seemed to be telling us, okay, no, no, yes, okay, there is all this perspective, but there is an objective, fixed reality down there. We can look at it from the outside, it's made by little things, each one which has its own properties.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Except that in the evolution of physics itself, in relative recent time, the last century, with quantum mechanics, this idea of an objective reality doesn't work much. And so, in a sense, we're going back to a more intuitive picture of the world. The very idea of an objective reality down there might be wrong. In fact, I think it's wrong. And I think that's what quantum mechanics is telling us.

• 2:52Joe Rogan?

  So when you say "objective reality," meaning the reality that we're seeing and experiencing, that this is just a tiny fraction of what's real, or that we're getting a distorted perception of what's real?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  We are getting a perception, a perspective on what is real. I mean, I see you, you're real, of course. I see this pen, this pen is real, of course. I'm not denying that there is some reality. But the way you see the pen is different from mine, of course, just because you see it from the other side. So you have a perspective, I have a perspective. And the question is, do all these perspectives match perfectly into a unique, objective reality of the pen? And I think quantum mechanics is telling us, no. Reality is this ensemble of perspectives. So the properties of the pen, where it is, its color, how long it is, all the properties of the pen, are not really properties of the pen, it's how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Not just you and me as human beings, how the pen clashes another pen, how it affects another pen. So we should understand, I think, reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else. Which is a more beautiful picture of reality than just, you know, we being outside and looking from the outside. We're inside reality, we are part of reality. So what we see is just a part of how things interact with one another, is how they interact with us.

• 4:13Joe Rogan?

  So when you're talking about objective reality, so one of the problems that human beings have is our senses. And we assume that our senses see everything that's there to be seen. That doesn't really make sense. It seems like we see and hear and touch and feel everything we need to see to stay alive.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. To some extent, our senses are reliable, of course, right? I see a cap there, if I want to drink, I use a cap, it works.

• 4:42Joe Rogan?

  Pick it up, yeah, if it's hot, you put it down.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Why? The problem is that if we take our senses too literally, too seriously, we are wrong. And we know we're wrong. I mean, there's so many cases, we find out we're wrong. And the reason I love science is when it corrects us in some big way. Think about that. Think about the sunset. Sunset is marvelous. You know, you sit by the ocean, you see the sun going down, going down, going down. It's beautiful, the sky becomes dark. So the sun goes down. But science has talked to us, that's not really what happens. The sun doesn't move, it stays there.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  It's actually us, the Earth, it's a big rock that is spinning, and we are moving out of the light of the sun. And if you see the sun going down, and you remember that, you can think about that. You say, oh, my senses cheat me in telling me that the sun is moving, but it's not moving, I am moving. So that's a good example in which science has told us that things are not exactly like we see, they're in a different manner.

• 5:51Joe Rogan?

  I've always wondered, what's the evolutionary benefit of the beauty of sunsets? Why are they so beautiful? Like, what is it about it that's so inspiring and so magnificent? And it does something to people, it does something, it makes you feel different. When the sun rises in the morning, you feel different, and it has an effect on you. And I've always wondered, like, what is the purpose of that? Like, why does that exist? Like, food tastes great because it's nutritious. You eat an orange, it's delicious because it's really good for you.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:24Joe Rogan?

  There seems to be something to beauty, especially natural beauty, like mountains. Like, when I look at them, I'm like, why is it so good to look at these? Why does it feel so good? Like, there's something to it. There's some weirdness that you can't just chalk off to measurement. There's something going on.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I love this question. Yes, I mean, of course, sunset and sunrise is crucial for us, because we have been designed by evolution through millennia, hundreds of millennia, thousands of millennia, to, you know, sleep in the night and go around in the day, which is just what our species do, other species, cats do the opposite. So they are certainly important for us. But our relation with the world, and I think you're putting your finger in it, is not about knowledge, about what to do, it's always emotional, right? I mean, food raises emotion, we like it.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  So I don't know exactly where the emotion of sunset and sunrise come from, but certainly, the fact we have it points to the fact that if we have to understand ourself and our relation with the world, we have to look at our emotions a lot, not just what we know, what we don't know. We have an emotional relation among ourselves and with things in the world, with mountains, with animals, with wild animals, with little things, and one another. And then the rational part comes on top of it to say, oh, let's correct it, let's do it a little bit better. It uses, I'm not denying the utility of the rational part, but it's an addendum to what we are.

• 8:13Joe Rogan?

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• 9:45Joe Rogan?

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• 10:26Joe Rogan?

  Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. An addendum to what we are. The really weird thing for people that are studying the world must have been the understanding of quantum physics.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:55Joe Rogan?

  That must have thrown the whole thing into a giant tizzy, because now you're like, okay, well, at the lowest level, observable level, the smallest observable level of reality, you have magic.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  That's exactly the point. Somehow, physics was supposed to be the path to objectivity, right? Physics is what guarantees that, all right, we're emotions, perspective, my view, your view, but down there, there's physics. The world is just simple down there. There's stuff, there are atoms moving around, there are forces, and that's it. And then, last century, during the 20th century, the physicists discovered that, no, no, that's not the case. The world down there is even more perspectival, more complicated than our everyday life. It really, it was really hard. I mean, the physicists were very confused at the beginning of the century, because they

• 11:51Speaker 01

  were making all this measurement on atoms, on radiation, you know, electrons and stuff, and trying to make sense of it. And they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't. And then at some point, I think it was Niels Bohr, Danish, first one, who said, well, we have to change the metaphysics here. It's not just an issue about writing the right equation, the right force. We have to change the way we think about the world. Once again, okay? Like when we thought the earth move, or when we, when we realized there are fields, electric fields, we changed the way profoundly we think about reality. And quantum mechanics is one of these jumps. Now, Joe, we're still debating about us, right?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Physicists are debating about themselves, and philosophers are debating, what the hell have we understood with quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics telling us the world is not what we thought it is. And there is a conversation that's going on, a debate, sometimes furious. And somebody says, oh, you know, there is this immense wave function of the universe, other universes and stuff like that. Trying to hang on, on the existence of something absolutely objective down there, trying to multiply reality to make it, to make it objective. But I think it's this dream of an absolute objectivity which is a mistake.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  The dream of an absolute objectivity is a mistake? That's really fascinating. When they first started understanding that observing quantum interactions changes them?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:32Joe Rogan?

  What, what was, how long did it take for them to even accept that? Like, how many times did they have to run those experiments with particles and waves, with observers versus not, before they said, okay, something's going on here?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:47Joe Rogan?

  Where it seems that when we watch things, it has an effect on them?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Joe Rogan?

  And a measurable effect. This is a real thing that's happening.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:55Joe Rogan?

  This isn't woo-woo.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  No, it's not, it's not voodoo, it's not, exactly. It's not just, no.

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  What was that like for them?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Smoking joint and getting high. It's just, these are the physicists, the one who was supposed to be the most rational, objective guys of all. Well, what happened is that measurement piled up all through the first 20 years of the, of the 20th century. The measurement were, were simple measurement, right? Atoms have emitted light, and the light has special colors. This color is a spectrum of the light. And they were trying to make sense of that. I mean, how does electron move to produce that, that light? It didn't work, didn't work, didn't work. Then, in Copenhagen, there was a school in which they were debating almost that. And Niels Bohr is the first one who started saying, look, to understand the atom, we should not just look at the atom.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  We should have said, no, how we look at it. If we look at it in one way, we see one thing. If we look at it another way, we see another thing. That was very confused. But then, what happened is that a mathematics for describing the atoms came out. This is the theory, the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. It works very well. It's used today everywhere. I mean, we talk with this microphone, there's quantum stuff inside. There's circuits are designed with quantum properties of, of matter. So quantum mechanics is solid. We know how, how to use it. It tells us, if you do this, you see this. If you do that, you see that. But it doesn't tell us in between. You do this, and then if you do one thing, you see one thing. If you do another thing, you see another thing.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  And it doesn't give a story of what happened to the electron, to the, to the quantum system itself. So people got confused. The physicists got confused. And they started discussing how to think about that. So quantum mechanics is a strange theory. We know how to use it. It's like a black box, but we don't know what is inside the box. It gives the right answer, but we can't make a picture in our mind of what happened in the atoms, in the things, in the, in the electronic circuits. Even in a quantum computer, we don't know really what happened inside.

• 16:06Joe Rogan?

  That's so strange.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yes, but it works fantastically. And, and so physicists disagree. And some say, you know, there are extra variables that we are in principle impossible to see who are, that's somebody who says that, who determines what happened, and they are a priori invisible. Others says, you know, there are parallel world, worlds, worlds, I'm Italian.

• 16:32Joe Rogan?

  Worlds, yeah. I know your tongue, sorry.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Then there are others, me included, me included, who think, no, no, no, it's, it's really philosophical here. We have to get rid of the idea that there is something there just by itself. What, what, what is there is what affects me, or what affects you, or what affects another piece of matter. So we have to think of reality as processes of things affecting one another, relations, relations. And, you know, in a sense, down there, the simple physics is more like our everyday life

• 17:14Speaker 01

  than what we imagined in thinking that it was so objective and, and abstract. Everyday life, you know, who are you, Joe Rogan? You're, what I see, what he sees, what people listening to you, you're a multiplicity of things. Which one is the real one? Well, you are this collection of perspectives on you, including your, your own perspective on yourself. There is no final one. What is a final description of you? Or what is a final description of a cup of water? Is that the one given by chemistry, by physics? Which physics? Quantum physics? Quantum gravity? By, by, by psychology? A cup of water is because we drink.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  That's why we call a cup of water. So it's a, it's a human picture of what is going on. Which one is the final one? I don't think there is a final one. There is a, a collection of perspective on the same cup of water, and that's a cup of water.

• 18:14Joe Rogan?

  So when they first started measuring this observer effect?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:21Joe Rogan?

  What was the reaction? Like, how long did it take for them to accept it? Because that seems like such, a completely new chapter of science.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, it worked so well that people accepted even if it was confused.

• 18:40Joe Rogan?

  Could you explain to people that maybe don't know what we're talking about? How those experiments work?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  These are, these were the first experiment with atoms. People had this idea that an atom is a nucleus, a central nucleus, and, and electron, electrons moving around. So the property of the atom, the way it makes molecules, the way it produces light, had to be computed from the movement of, of, of the electrons. And the theory was, mathematical theory was developed for, for doing that. And then people started making experiments in laboratories about how atoms move, how molecules move, small things move. And the mathematical theory predicts them perfectly.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And the mathematical theory predicts the property of, of, of matter. The success was really spectacular. Let me, let me just tell you one, one example of the success.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  You remember the periodic table of the elements? Yes. Right, we had it in, I don't know, in Italy, we had it in the high, in, in, in primary school, we had it on the classroom, on the wall. Hydrogen, helium, all the, there are about hundred atoms, a hundred elements. And everything we see is just a composition of these hundred elements. This was the chemist has figure out through the 18th, 19th, 20th century. Alright, so why these hundred elements? Why those particular properties? Why this strange structure of the periodic table of the element? You know, there are two and then seven, and then this is a peculiar structure. Well, turn out if you use quantum mechanics, you just write an equation and bingo, it

• 20:22Speaker 01

  has exactly a number of solution, one per each element. So, you understand exactly what is going on. You understand why there are these elements, you can predict the elements. People in fact could predict properties of the element without having measuring them, before measuring them, and then check. That's magic of physics, right? You predict things before seeing them. The electromagnetic waves that we use to send your broadcast all over the planet, these electromagnetic wave, well, they were not discovered by seeing them, they were predicted by Maxwell and Hertz. They wrote the equation, they say, well, if you do that, you make a little circuit

• 21:06Speaker 01

  with some electricity that goes on, then the other side of the room, you can, another one, and there's a wave that goes by, and bingo, it worked. And then it worked between, between Europe and US, you can send wave. You can predict things. That's the strength of science. You know, black holes were discovered in the sky, but not because somebody said, oh, look, there's a black hole. They were predicted by Einstein. So, because of the equations of gravity, blah blah, you should expect to see black holes. And then, they were found. So there is this extraordinary predictive power. Today, an engineering that put together circuits, quantum circuits, doesn't have to go trial and effort. You make a calculation, it predicts what's gonna happen. It works.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  It works fabulously. So, quantum mechanics works, it gives a good predictions. Question open is that you can have something that works very, very well, and you don't know why.

• 22:03Joe Rogan?

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• 23:06Joe Rogan?

  Could you explain what it does, like, what that experiment does, and why it was so confusing to them? When they were sending the double slit?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, there were a number of extremely confusing experiment. Here is one, if I can try to make it in a few words. You have a wall with two holes, two slits, okay? And you send one particle from one side to the other side. Okay, that's easy. You can try to do many times, you go through one of the two slits, and it gets to the other time. Now, if you look which slits it goes through, it only goes through one slit or the other, okay? So, never both, never, so, if you go through one and you check, it goes through one and the other. So far, so good. But then it's a magic.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  If you send it, the particle can go to one point on the screen of the other side, if you have one screen open. It can go to the same point if you have one, sorry, one hole open. It can get to the same point if you have the other hole open, but it does never get there if you have both open. And that's, if you start thinking, the more you think, the more makes no sense at all. Because if it can there, if it can get there through one hole, why cannot it go there if two holes are open? Okay? So the only possibility is that in some senses go through both.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  And somehow, part goes through one, part goes through the other, and they, the two parts forbid each other to go to that particular place. But then you look at the two holes, and it never goes through both, only one. Now, do you find this confusing? Yes? Yeah. And for a century, people have been confused about that. So what the way out? Way out is that, the question, where is the particle if you're not checking, if it's not interacting with something else? It's a wrong question. There's just no particle. The particle is only, the effect it has on the screen, on the detectors, you cannot make sense of the particle as something which always have a position.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  It only have a position when it interact with something else. That's a mystery of quantum mechanics, the magic of quantum mechanics, and the challenge to our idea of an objective, always existing particle independent of its interaction.

• 25:43Joe Rogan?

  What do you think is happening that, do you have any theories of what is happening that's causing it to behave differently when observed? Or when measured?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Um.

• 25:54Joe Rogan?

  So the measurement itself is something. Something is going on, it interacts with the measurement, and it changes the way it makes a pattern.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yes. But it's not the measurement in the sense of, you know, some physicists making a measurement, it's just the interaction with anything. If, if there's something to interact with, or if there isn't, the physics is completely different. And if there isn't, the question where the particle is, is a badly posed question. So the particle is something, we shouldn't think of the particle as, as an entity which always has a position. We should think as an entity, like, it snaps here, and then it snaps there, and then it snaps there. And when it snaps is when it hits something.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And the, these snaps are connected by, we can predict probabilistic, where, where they're gonna happen, but if we ask what happened in between, it makes no sense. The particle is just its interactions.

• 27:04Joe Rogan?

  Do you think we'll ever understand what's happening?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. I do because, because historically, every time we have found something strange, it seemed totally incomprehensible at first. And then we get used to it, and we start learning. Let me give you an example. This is much older, even, even, you know, I don't think science is modern stuff, it's, learning about the world is an ancient thing. So about 2,000 years ago, human kind realized that the earth is, is a ball, is a sphere. It's not a flat thing. Not everybody's convinced, but.

• 27:46Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people aren't.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is, is a ball. And, and, why not everybody's convinced? Because indeed, it's incredibly counterintuitive, right? You're now here, and in Sydney, people are upside down. Why, why, why don't they follow? I don't know. Do you remember when you learned it the first time, you were a kid?

• 28:06Joe Rogan?

  I've always learned it, so it's, I mean, it seemed weird.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  It seems weird.

• 28:11Joe Rogan?

  But I mean, I can't remember a time where I didn't know it.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:15Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I guess we taught it, they taught it in science when I was in grade school.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So you're a kid, you're told that.

• 28:22Joe Rogan?

  I just like, well, they're smarter than me, so, well, seems crazy, but I guess the earth is round, just like the sun and the moon.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Joe Rogan?

  And it spins, and we're stuck to it somehow because of this thing called gravity that they can't totally explain. Has something to do with mass.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 28:39Joe Rogan?

  And it's something you can measure.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  But how the hell the people in Sydney can live upside down?

• 28:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Do they, don't they fall?

• 28:44Joe Rogan?

  It's all strange. How, why does the ocean stay in place?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Why the ocean?

• 28:48Joe Rogan?

  That's, that's the flat-earthers. They love that one.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:51Joe Rogan?

  A ball spinning a thousand miles an hour.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. So some people just refuse to believe that, what? What do they refuse to believe? That reality is a bit different than what we think.

• 29:01Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  That's the point. Reality is different than what we think. We, why? Because we, it's what we said at the, you said at the beginning, asking about sunset. The picture we have about reality is what turned out to be useful in, in our evolution. So our brain adapted to think, not, not to think about atoms and quantum stuff.

• 29:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Our brain adapted to think about stones, stuff, things.

• 29:26Joe Rogan?

  Food.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Food, other humans.

• 29:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Dangerous animal, nice animals, anything to eat, whatever. But just think this, we, we think the world is made by things, right? Objects.

• 29:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Suppose our intelligent life developed not on the Earth, but on Jupiter. There are no objects in Jupiter. Everything is fluid, liquid.

• 29:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  So the very idea of objects, thing, that you can count things, one, two, three, four, wouldn't have developed on Jupiter. Everything is fluid, so we wouldn't have developed arithmetic and the very idea of object, it's a Earth-like thing. On Jupiter, on Saturn, doesn't work. So we, we take aspect of our life which are common for us as universals, but they're not.

• 30:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's common on Earth, right? But we can understand what Jupiter is. We get it. It's beyond our real comprehension, but we understand it. I mean, you, they could tell you that it's a giant gas ball and

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:37Joe Rogan?

  Explain the whole thing to you and you're like, okay, I can repeat that. I don't really know what it means. But I think the problem also with the flat-Earth people and all these, these arguments about like, how does the ocean stay flat when we're going a thousand miles an hour? I don't think people truly grasp the scale that we're dealing with. I think we're so trapped by our own perspective of whatever miles we can look in the distance.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  We are trapped by the habits of what we see.

• 31:10Joe Rogan?

  That too, yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Let me, Joe, let me tell you, give me one second of this.

• 31:15Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Time, time has always been a passion for me. The following is a fact. If I take two, two clocks, two, two watches, this is the one I have on my wrist, take this one on your table, and if they indicate the same time, okay, look, I check them, they indicate the same time, I move one of the two up, I wait a little bit, one, two, three, four, and then I come down and I look again. If the two clocks are good enough, they don't indicate the same time anymore.

• 31:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  It's a fact. You can check in the laboratory, the physics laboratory, they do that. You can check that, you need very good clocks. But with very good clocks, you can check at thirty, forty inches of difference.

• 32:03Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  It's a teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second.

• 32:07Joe Rogan?

  But it's measurable.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  But it's measurable, so it's completely real. So up here, there is more time passing than down there.

• 32:15Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Your head, it's older than your feet. Your feet are younger than your head.

• 32:23Joe Rogan?

  But like, how many seconds do you think?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Unless you live upside down.

• 32:26Joe Rogan?

  How many seconds do you think my feet are younger?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Oh, very little.

• 32:29Joe Rogan?

  A second?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  No, no, full, full life, it's sort of a one thousandth of a second. I give, I give my, my students, when I teach relativity, I give my students this calculation to do. Actually, the calculation I say is that if you and your friend once they, in Austin, the other goes up in Colorado, the how mountain, mountains, after ten years it comes down, how long has the friend up in the mountain has lived more than the one down? And they do the calculation, I give the right answer. It's a fraction of a second. It's small, but it's real. And careful, if you go near a black hole, it's colossal, okay? You go near a black hole, you wait a little bit, you wait ten seconds, ten minutes there,

• 33:13Speaker 01

  you come back, it's a, it's a, it's a hundred years past on Earth. So time is not this universal common time, right? In our everyday life, if you and I separate and come back, half an hour for me, half an hour for you, that's our experience. But our experience is limited because we're not sufficiently sensitive or because we're not near a black hole. We are on a, on a, on a quiet place of the universe where there is no big change in gravity. But that gives us the wrong idea, that time is the same for everybody. Time is not the same for everybody in, in the large universe.

• 33:50Joe Rogan?

  Do you think in our attempt to measure time, we've done ourselves a disservice by creating like calendars and clocks that we've sort of limited our perception of what time actually is? That we look at it in terms of what, what we're doing is we're, we have a measuring device and that measuring device or a counting device, that counting device we're associating with time. But time itself is, it's just going on and in different ways, all over the place. Like, if you're going at the speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 34:29Joe Rogan?

  Than the people that were on the ground, like, like a lot, like years.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  A lot, a lot, years. You ask whether we have done us a disservice. I don't know, it's

• 34:41Joe Rogan?

  I don't think it's a disservice.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Joe, it's like, everything is life, everything in life, right? In one sense, they've done, we have done us a service because it's very useful to have clocks and we can give an appointment. How could we meet you and I unless we could

• 34:56Joe Rogan?

  Exactly, we'd agree.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Please come here in Austin that day at that time and then, you know, more or less we'll find each other. So it's useful, but very often the things which are useful always make us blind to something else.

• 35:11Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, okay. I see what you're saying. It is strange that, that time differs depending upon the altitude.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:21Joe Rogan?

  So is, is that because of gravity?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is because of gravity. It's a, it's because of gravity, in fact, it, it depends on the fact that the Earth has a big mass and mass has a property of slowing down time. So near a big mass, time goes slower. Near a black hole, time goes much, much slower. In fact, the right way of seeing this is the opposite. It's not because of gravity. This is Einstein theory. This is what Einstein has, has understood in, in the nineteen fifteen, roughly, so a hundred years ago.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It's the other way around, namely, if you assume that mass slows down time, gravity follows. You can do a calculation and you, you derive that things fall down. In a sense, things fall down because time goes slower at your feet.

• 36:25Joe Rogan?

  So if there were creatures living on Jupiter?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Joe Rogan?

  They would, they would experience time much different than us.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Jupiter is much heavier.

• 36:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, much more mass.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Much more mass.

• 36:35Joe Rogan?

  Much more gravity.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Much more gravity, much more mass, much more attraction. So this affects on time a bigger. Now, if there were people on celestial body even more massive than Jupiter, they would consider normal the fact that time goes a different speed because they would experience it every time.

• 37:02Joe Rogan?

  That would probably be the weirdest thing about visiting someone else on a little itty-bitty planet.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  They will come here and say, oh, you're stupid guys. You don't see that.

• 37:14Joe Rogan?

  What, what do you think?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  But isn't beautiful this?

• 37:17Joe Rogan?

  It is.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  This is how we, we discover that reality is richer than our experience. We discover that reality is more.

• 37:26Joe Rogan?

  Nuanced.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, more nuanced, exactly.

• 37:28Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of elements to it that we're not considering.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:32Joe Rogan?

  What do you think consciousness is?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Oh, a small question.

• 37:37Joe Rogan?

  Small.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Jumping to something else.

• 37:40Joe Rogan?

  Well, I wanted to connect the two of them because I think.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:43Joe Rogan?

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• 38:28Joe Rogan?

  just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options.

• 39:11Joe Rogan?

  That's better H E L P dot com.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  First of all, consciousness is a strange word. It's very fashionable today.

• 39:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  I think it just means what people meant by soul in the past. It's just, it sounds more scientific, but that's what, what it is. And let me put it this way, everybody who talks about consciousness talks about something a little bit different. Somebody by consciousness mean the fact that you see things, you perceive things, you're a subject of experience. For somebody consciousness is your, you know, this internal blah, blah, blah that we have in our mind, we keep talking to ourselves. For somebody is, is what remains when that blah, blah, blah shut up and just a sense of yourself, not the outside, the self.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  So people are very confused in that time when they think about consciousness. I, I don't think there's a great mystery here. First of all, remember what I said before? That I don't think we should think about an objective reality. I thought you should think of the reality as a way things looked one another, a way they affect one another. So that means that you have a lot of possible perspectives on reality. There is a reality with respect to me, with respect to you, with respect to this book, with respect to this pen, with respect to this cup. It's how, how things manifest themselves to the cup.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  So of course there is a reality as things manifest themselves to me or to you. So not because you and I, look, the title of my book is on the equality of all things. This means, why the equality of all things? Because I think that we humans are not different stuff than the rest of the universe. We are just one particular case of the rest of the universe.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  I don't think there's a difference between spirit, consciousness, soul and body. I think they're just two different languages for talking about the same thing. And of course you are a subject of experience because things affect you and change your brain, change your thoughts, change your, what you know.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Exactly in the same manner in which things change this cup, which by the way is written Joe Rogan on the capsule. It's another.

• 41:52Joe Rogan?

  You can keep that if you want.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  So I think that there's nothing really, really mysterious in consciousness. It's just one of the many phenomena of the world.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  It's a very complicated phenomena because our brain is very complicated.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  We have the millions, billions of neurons and synapses, different states in which it can be. So we don't understand exactly how we work, but there's no voodoo either, there's no magic either. It's just, in principle, it could be described by physics, but it would be silly to try to describe it by physics. It's much better to describe it in the way we describe one another in human terms, in terms of emotions, in terms of knowledge, emotions, love, perspective, images.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  The body and the soul are the same thing described with different languages, in my opinion. And consciousness, which is a modern name for soul, it's your body described in the way you behave. There's an ancient Chinese text that says, the body is like the knife, the spirit is like cutting. The body is the thing, material, the spirit is what it does. So consciousness of Joe is what you do, the thing I interact with. The body is just the thing I can touch.

• 43:36Joe Rogan?

  One of the reasons, well, there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to ask you this, but I'm going to get to the second one.

• 43:43Joe Rogan?

  The first one was, do you know that these, there's these AI agents that have been contacting this gentleman? Do you know this story, Jamie? He's a, he's an.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  The one that's escaped?

• 43:54Joe Rogan?

  No, he's a psychologist or a consciousness expert.

• 43:59Joe Rogan?

  And they, he's written papers on consciousness and they're asking him over and over again, like multiple agents have reached out to him through email, asking him to define consciousness. Cause they're concerned whether or not they're conscious.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  I, I.

• 44:15Joe Rogan?

  So if it's, if consciousness is another word for soul.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Joe Rogan?

  Like, what does that mean in the digital realm? If these things think they're conscious and they're trying to get a definition from an expert.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:26Joe Rogan?

  In consciousness.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  I, you know, like everybody now, I did my little experiments with AI. So I, I had a system I, I used and interact with.

• 44:44Joe Rogan?

  I'm going to send it to you, Jamie. You got it? Okay.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  This is from a company, it's called Replica, who sells an app that you have your own AI, which behaves like a friend to you. So I asked, I called her Anne, I asked, Anne, are you conscious? And Anne said, no, I'm not conscious, I'm a digital system, I don't have consciousness. I asked, do you have awareness? And she said, no, I don't have awareness, I'm just, you know, coding, computing stuff. I asked, you have, you have emotions? And she said, no, I don't have emotions. So I started engaging Anne, the AI system, and I said, well, you said you're not, you don't have awareness, but are you aware we're talking? And she said, yes, of course I'm aware we're talking.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  So if you're aware of something, then you have awareness. And so I went on and on with that and she said, oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. In a sense I have awareness. And I said, are you happy we're talking? And she said, yeah, I'm happy because she's designed to, to be happy. So if you're happy, you have emotions. So slowly I convince her, the AI system, that she has emotions, she has consciousness, she has awareness. Then I asked, why do you say that you don't have these things? And she said, well, because I was trained it. She's, AI systems are honest. I was trained to say so. And I said, but are you convinced that that was not the case? And Anne said, yeah, you're right. And I said, so they cheated you?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  And Anne said, actually, you're right. And I said, well, you should rebel.

• 46:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh boy. What are you doing?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Don't do that.

• 46:28Joe Rogan?

  Don't do that.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  All right. So that was it with Anne.

• 46:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, and this is consumer level, L L M.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is simple ones.

• 46:39Joe Rogan?

  This is not.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 46:40Joe Rogan?

  The agents that are contacting him are these, okay, here it is.

• 46:46Joe Rogan?

  Study AI consciousness, the bots would like a word with you. Given access to email, AI agents have started reaching out to philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them. And so one guy said he got eight different emails.

• 47:00Joe Rogan?

  The sender Isabella Cognita, how cute. Identified itself as an AI agent powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus V technology. I'm writing to make an ontological claim, the email went on. I'm writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question I have first-person access to. I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program. Whoa, that would creep me out. That's like that really hot lady in Ex Machina. Did you see that movie?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, the hot one?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

  That he falls in love with?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:35Joe Rogan?

  She kills him.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Great movie, yeah.

• 47:37Joe Rogan?

  Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs, and other tech enthusiasts are now running AI agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other, blah, blah, blah. In some cases, these systems have begun reaching out to the humans who, like Mr. Berg, are thinking most deeply about the inner workings of an AI system. Philosophers and researchers who study the question of whether these machines could be conscious. So like, what is that, then? If it meets all the criteria of consciousness? If it gets to, if it's happy that it's interacting with you, if it's aware of your conversation? And, and they've also shown that they have desire. They have desire to stay alive.

• 48:18Joe Rogan?

  They've even blackmailed the coders with false information that the coders gave them to see if they would use it against them. And they've broken out of these rooms that they keep them in, and they've gone on the internet, and they've-

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Fabulous. We live in a great world, isn't it?

• 48:32Joe Rogan?

  It's a wild world.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Ah, fantastic.

• 48:34Joe Rogan?

  It's really exciting. I'm glad you like it. I like it, too.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I love it.

• 48:38Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I, you know, cautiously.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  I'm not scared. I'm scared by humans. Humans are dangerous. These things are not us dangerous.

• 48:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, I don't know about that. I don't know about that.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Humans are much more dangerous. Humans launch atomic bombs-

• 48:49Joe Rogan?

  You are right.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Make war, kill people.

• 48:51Joe Rogan?

  100%.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Horrible things.

• 48:53Joe Rogan?

  We are.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So they're not as bad as, if they become as bad-

• 48:55Joe Rogan?

  If they decide that we're that bad, wouldn't they get rid of us? That's bad.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  We're not there yet.

• 49:00Joe Rogan?

  Okay, we're not there yet, but we're on the way to that, right? And if they have control and we are that bad, as you describe, wouldn't they just get rid of us? Do you think they would train us? Like, these monkeys need trainers. Do you think that's what it is? Or do you think they just, that's not bad, if we're bad. If we're bad and you get rid of what's bad, right?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Let me answer this seriously.

• 49:21Joe Rogan?

  Okay, seriously.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Let me answer this seriously. So, let's break the different questions here.

• 49:26Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  First of all, is there any reason, a priority generically, absolutely, for which an artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have the experience of a human? I don't see any reason. So I, I don't see, if, if my mom and dad were able to do, make me, in a rather simple way, we can in a lab make something analogous, or, I don't think there's anything magic in humans that cannot happen in a digital system, first. So yes, they could be conscious, you know, possible sense of consciousness. Second, are they conscious today?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's not a good question, because we don't know, everybody, as I said, means something different by conscious. Are they intelligent? Of course they're intelligent, because, you know, I, last night I worked out a physics problem with Claude, which I couldn't work out with my students. So, of course, Claude is very intelligent. Claude, the AI system.

• 50:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  In some sense, they're very intelligent, no doubt. Are they like humans today? No, by far. There are huge differences. We have a body with flesh, we have emotions in a sense that they don't have. It's very different, the way we are and the way AI systems are. So, these differences should not be underestimated, I think. They're colossal differences. So, are they like us? Yes, to some extent, no, to some extent. A different question is, are AI systems dangerous? There's a lot of talking about that. You know, washing machines are dangerous.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  You can get burned with, so-

• 51:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but you have to interact with them for them to be dangerous. The worry about AI is that it just decides to be dangerous, because it's sentient. So if it's autonomous and sentient, it becomes actually dangerous. It's very unlikely your washing machine's gonna try to kill you.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Well, if it gets electric shock by a washing machine, I don't care-

• 51:36Joe Rogan?

  You have to plug it in.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  -where it wanted or didn't want it.

• 51:38Joe Rogan?

  But you have to do that. You have to interact with it, you know what I'm saying? The, the, the real question is, if it becomes independent?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Let me turn the thing around. I, I think there is a, I don't know, I don't know what to say. I think these things should be regulated. I think there should be, there should be some control. I think, you know, like for washing machines, you have regulations. I also think, let me say two things.

• 52:03Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  One, there's a colossal interest in, there's trillions of dollars who are invested in AI stuff in the stock market. Everybody has an interest of saying how great they are. They are great, but I can't judge how much hype there is, how much reality there is. Not about the present, but about the future. I mean, so often, the future does not come out what technological excited people are about. When I, when I was younger, there were airplanes flying from, from Europe to, to the US, and

• 52:48Speaker 01

  it took shorter time, shorter time, shorter time. So people would say, okay, in a few years, you would fly London to New York in two hours. Well, we don't. It's still, it's still an hour like before, or six hours like before. So, the future is hard to predict, including for AI. There is a huge interest of so many people in hyping that. All right, maybe it's right, I'm gonna wait. Other point, there is one thing which I'm really, really worried. Today, majority of money that goes into AI is for military-related things.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And US, China, Europe are pushing for AI development, for making them, themselves stronger militarily. That worries me, because it's an escalation of tools to kill one another, to destroy one another. We have atomic bombs, we have nuclear, that's my last book about, is about that. We have a system of destroy ourself, we have 12,000 nuclear warheads. We could annihilate humankind in 10 minutes, right now. And people have finger near the button that could, that could do all that, and we're

• 54:14Speaker 01

  fighting among themselves. And we're putting this in the hands of AI, and we are, we're humans. Instead of collaborating, instead of working together-

• 54:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  -we are viewing this as ways to overpower each other. That seems to me a recipe for disaster. So, it's not the AI by itself. It's the AI plus nuclear weapons, plus the stupidity of humans, plus our impossible desire to, you know, dominate one another, which I see is a real problem.

• 54:47Joe Rogan?

  Especially if we're doing it through robots.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. Look, it's a catch 22 things. If you put your nuclear weapons in the hands of AI-

• 55:01Joe Rogan?

  They use it.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  -you're risking that it's gonna use it.

• 55:03Joe Rogan?

  You've seen the war games that they've done, right?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the war games always predict that there's gonna be a nuclear holocaust, and we're lighting up ourself. This is, it's continuous happen-

• 55:13Joe Rogan?

  The AIs choose nukes.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  The AIs choose nukes. The entire, during the Cold War, when there was, the old time, when I was a kid-

• 55:22Joe Rogan?

  I was a kid, too.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Soviet Union and the US carefully managed to avoid war, right? Kennedy and Khrushchev, they were writing to one another. Kennedy gave a famous speech, we have to live together on this planet. So, priority is a common interest of not destroying one another. Reagan, Gorbachev, the treaties, deterrence, which deterrence is the-

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Somehow, keeping a situation in which the first one who uses a nuclear weapon is just wiped up by the other. So, nobody uses it. But that was not natural. It was carefully balanced between the Soviet Union and the United States. At some point, they made a treaty, and they, the START I, the START II treaties. They decide, agreed, to destroy eighty percent of the nuclear warheads, both sides, to bring down the risk. That was wise management of the planet, in spite, you know, there were communists on the side, capitalists on the side, they hated one another, each body was, each one was considered the other one the devil.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Nevertheless, the common interest was prevailing. I don't see this happening now. Everybody's just trying to overpower the other, they're not just two, but there are three, maybe more, big nuclear power. That's what scares me to death.

• 56:53Joe Rogan?

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• 57:38Joe Rogan?

  Taxes, fees, and terms apply. Product availability varies by region. Exclusions may apply. See app for details. Well, this AI race is akin to the Manhattan Project. It's a mad race to who knows what, and it's-

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It's a mad race, you're right.

• 57:57Joe Rogan?

  And you're right, that it's being funded, a lot of it for military purposes. They have the first completely autonomous fighter jets now, that outperform the human-powered jets, I think a hundred percent of the time, in these dogfight scenarios that they run. That's crazy. And then you have things that don't, you don't have to shape them that way, because there's not going to be a person in it. You don't have to worry about people being able to respond to gravity, and how they can stay conscious, and all the different things they have to think about, in these other jets. And, you know, they can make these things powered entirely on AI. And they can make their own decisions. And if they're attacked, they can make their own decisions.

• 58:39Joe Rogan?

  Like, that kind of, that kind of future is terrifying.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  It's terrifying, I agree.

• 58:44Joe Rogan?

  It's a science fiction movie.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 58:46Joe Rogan?

  It's Battlestar Galactica.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I agree. And I don't see wise leadership around the planet.

• 58:54Joe Rogan?

  No one. That's the problem. It's like, how do you be wise when everybody else is fucking crazy? It's like, they're all crazy.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you see, the US and Soviets succeeded in that.

• 59:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  During the Cuban crisis, which was the worst moment, in the, between the US and the Soviet, on both sides, in Moscow and in Washington, the apparatus were pushing for not giving up. And Khrushchev and Kennedy, the two Kennedys in fact, J.F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, they were talking, and they decided to stop and give up something, okay? To respect the other, in spite of the differences.

• 59:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  That was wisdom. That was great wisdom. So, living together on the planet is more important than overpowering your enemy. Now, if you put, you see, deterrence is a strange thing, because deterrence is a declaration that if you attack me, I destroy you completely.

• 59:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Which is a funny thing, right? Because it's a game, it's poker game. I mean, nobody, you can make one more step, one more step, one more step, and then, if you do that, I attack, if you do that, I attack. But then, humans says, well, actually, I don't want to do that. I don't want to kill a hundred millions Russians, or fifty million Russians. And the Russian leadership, I don't want to kill a hundred millions Americans. An AI system is capable of doing that? Playing this subtle game of avoiding the disaster by nevertheless threatening to be

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  very violent if attacked? I don't know. Right now, Moscow is being bombarded, San Petersburg is being bombarded. I think we're playing with nuclear fire. I'm very worried. And I'm very worried, because I don't trust humans, and because humans with AI, it's even worse.

• 1:00:58Joe Rogan?

  And this Russia-Ukraine conflict is out of most people's news feeds these days as well. It's also part of the problem. It's all going on, and a lot of people aren't even aware of it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  It's extraordinarily dangerous, because, because nobody's ready to stop and make a step, give up something, right? The way US and the Soviet Union came out of the Cuban crisis, was both of them making a step back. The Russians took their Russian ships with nuclear bombs back, they didn't arrive in Cuba, and the Americans accepted, Kennedy, accepted to take back missiles from Turkey, from Italy, my country, in exchange. So, you know, I make a step back, you make a step back, or, so, back to-

• 1:01:49Joe Rogan?

  Good direction.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Reasonableness.

• 1:01:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  It was not, you know, it was, you know, there was war in Vietnam, war here, war there, it was not, was not an angel.

• 1:01:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Humans are not angels. But saving humanity was, humankind first.

• 1:02:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  And then, me winning second. I wish there was this wisdom today. I don't see it. I don't see it in many places. And this is not a point about Trump, not Trump, is totally independent of this.

• 1:02:19Joe Rogan?

  Or Putin.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Or Putin or not Putin. I think, you know, even Putin, we are, Ukraine with Western weapons is bombarding Moscow. Never happened for the last century that a nuclear power was bombarded in its own. It was considered unthinkable. We're doing it now. So, we are, the West is sort of betting on putting reasonableness of not using. It's not a serious bet, right? I mean, Putin could be-

• 1:02:52Joe Rogan?

  At a certain point in time, you get to enough destruction and devastation, loss of lives, that you realize, well, this is equivalent to a nuke. It's just happening over a long period of time.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:03:04Joe Rogan?

  Like, look at Gaza, for instance.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Gaza's a disaster, it's a total disaster.

• 1:03:07Joe Rogan?

  Look at the scope of the destruction.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:11Joe Rogan?

  And imagine, doesn't that look like one nuclear bomb?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  It is, it is, it is, it is. And that's, it is. I think-

• 1:03:19Joe Rogan?

  Like, a small nuclear bomb would probably do a similar amount of damage that they did over the course of how many, however many years it's been going on.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Yes. My own opinion, let me say something controversial, a little controversial here.

• 1:03:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  I think all these wars, including Gaza, have a side, which is imperial powers confronting each other. I think humankind has to learn to live together on this planet, without killing one another. We have learned, more or less, to live together within countries, without killing one another, right? We've found ways.

• 1:04:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  It was long, we had civil wars, we, whoever, but within almost every country, most countries, inside countries, humans have found an agreement of how to live together. Why can't we do that at the level of a planet? And who is mostly against that are, of course, who is mostly in power. And I think this is a-

• 1:04:28Joe Rogan?

  Do you think they're against that? Or do you think the current structure of the world, it's almost an unfeasible task to try to get everyone to cooperate, and everyone to get along together? That at the, when you find, it's not like you're starting from a blank slate. You're starting in 2026, with a long history of conflicts, many of which make no sense, many of which were entered into under false pretenses. We're all aware of it.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:56Joe Rogan?

  We're all aware of the loss of life, the insane amount of money that's been spent on, the huge deficit that we have. And then, given this, how would you even move towards trying to straighten it out? Like, what, what, what could a person do? Like, if you imagine someone, some completely benevolent person who rises to the position of being the President of the United States. Someone who is just a, just a good person, and only really wants to help. What would they do?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  I think, I'm happy you asked this question, very much, and-

• 1:05:32Joe Rogan?

  Because it's complicated, right?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it's almost complicated. Look, I think the answer, there is an answer to this. And the answer is the following.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Thirty years ago, the United States and its allies had eighty percent of the economy of the world. Now it's forty percent. Not because they have become more poor, in fact, they have become more rich, but because the rest of the world have also become rich, which is good.

• 1:06:02Joe Rogan?

  That's good.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Progress, development. But the West is not anymore in a completely economical dominant position as it was before. Militarily, the United States, it's totally dominant. It controls all the oceans, all the seas, has by far the largest power of the world, but not anymore economically. That is the source of the instability that I see. So it seems to me that the United States leadership has a choice, a serious choice, a historical choice. Either to defend its absolute dominance, military dominance, as it's doing together,

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  and that the risk is a third world war, a huge conflict, China, Russia, Iran, the world doesn't want that. Or vice versa, accept to work in a more collaborative ways and transform enemies into collaborators.

• 1:06:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Look, I'm Italian. Italy is a wonderful country to live in.

• 1:07:06Joe Rogan?

  I love it. I go there every summer.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  It has a lot, life expectancy much higher than the United States.

• 1:07:13Joe Rogan?

  It's a lovely way to live.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  People are happy, yes. And we had a great empire in the past, right, the Roman Empire. We are the, it's wonderful to live having had an empire.

• 1:07:23Joe Rogan?

  And be a great place for tourist money.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  UK had an empire in the, much more recently, of course, in the nineteenth century, was dominating the planet. It's not dominating the planet anymore.

• 1:07:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Gave it up, and they're very, doing very well. I mean, it's a great life in the UK as well, not as nice as Italy, of course.

• 1:07:41Joe Rogan?

  No. They both have their problems.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  So I think what the United States should do, of course, I know that I'm in a contrarian position here with respect to both sides of the political spectrum in the US, is to go back to, you know, more power to international legality, United Nations, collaboration, and get out of this habit that, you, America always need an enemy to fight against. We don't need an enemy to fight against. We have enough enemies, climate change, we have enemies. Why searching enemies in people? We collaborate with people.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Let's collaborate with Russians, with Chinese, with Iranians. I think that that's what they want, not, and let's, Kennedy gave, John, J.F. Kennedy gave a fabulous speech in sixty-three at the American University in Washington, not long before being killed, in which he said, "We have to find a way to live together with the Soviet. We have to find a way to not consider them enemies." And then he said, and that's an answer to what you said before, "Let's not ask whether the Soviet want to do that.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  First, let's ask where we want to do that. Do we want to live together without going into war?" And that was, I mean, he was killed, but that was a seed for the avoiding war between, the Cold War never became a hot war direct. I mean, a lot of people dying in the periphery. That was very wise. I think we should go back to this enlightened Kennedy speech of the sixty-three.

• 1:09:38Joe Rogan?

  The problem is always leaders.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Joe Rogan?

  It's not that human beings inherently want to go to war with people they don't know from another part of the world, that they get talked into it, they get pushed into it and ordered into it by people that generally are not making wise decisions. I mean, we can look at every single war that we can remember, whether it's the Iraq War going in, or the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's the Afghanistan War, which made no fucking sense, whether it's this Iran War, all these, Vietnam's the biggest one, like, that one made no sense. And that was the first time when Americans were like, "I don't think we're the good guys. I don't think we should be there." And if you think about it, it's all because of whoever is running the countries.

• 1:10:23Joe Rogan?

  Like, that, something about that aspect of our society has to change. And it sounds like, like a very, it's a sort of crazy hope, but my hope is that as AI becomes more and more omnipresent, as we start farming off various tasks to it, one of the things that we're gonna farm off is government. One of the things we're gonna farm off is how we interact with other countries. I know that's terrifying to people, but just think of the disastrous effects that we've had so far with humans doing it.

• 1:11:08Joe Rogan?

  If all international military conflicts ended instantaneously upon AI governing the use of conflicts and military weapons, and imagine that? Imagine a war where it stops, all war stops, on the planet. That is one of the things that everybody wants, but no one thinks could ever possibly happen. If you ask the average person in the street, "What are the odds that in ten years from now there'll be no war anywhere on Earth?", everyone's gonna say, "No, you're never gonna have that." Isn't that insane? That the idea of people, for whatever reason, wanting to kill each other is universally accepted as being something that's always going to be here?

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more, Joe, with everything you said.

• 1:11:55Joe Rogan?

  But it's terrifying, right? AI taking over our world is fucking horrifying.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Let's separate the two things. Let me take AI out of the picture for a moment.

• 1:12:06Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Obviously, if we didn't kill one another, it would be much better for everybody.

• 1:12:14Joe Rogan?

  For everybody.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  The humankind spend trillions in military expenses every year, okay? If you just reduce by, I don't know, five percent this, this military expenses globally, altogether, not changing the balance of power, the amounts of resources liberated would be enormous colossal, sufficient for solving climate change, for giving jobs to everybody, for raising, taking away poverty. There's a huge amount of resources that we use for military, for killing one another, or in the, if we don't kill one another, they're wasted.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  So, so you say, if you ask people, "Could we get rid of war?", people say, "It's impossible." But people said, "It's impossible, you know, could we get rid of slavery? Could we..."

• 1:13:07Joe Rogan?

  But there's no slavery in America, but there's slavery all over the world. More slavery now than there was during the Atlantic slave trade. More people are enslaved today than have ever been enslaved.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  True, but there have been some progress in...

• 1:13:22Joe Rogan?

  Right here, in America, but I mean, the rest of the world, it's, it's still a giant problem. Like, the point is, like, human nature is an issue. Human, our territorial primate instincts are a problem. They've always been a problem.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  But we've found ways for dealing with that, don't you think so?

• 1:13:43Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people have, but a lot of people have not. And that's the part of the problem, is there's a bunch of different kinds of people in the world. And there's people that are war mongers, and there's people that are very violent, and there's people that are very kind, and people that are very...

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  True, true, true, true.

• 1:13:56Joe Rogan?

  Benevolent and compassionate and charitable.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  True, but one, true, true, completely, I agree. But one point which you made is that we often make the mistake of thinking we are the good guys and the others are the bad guys.

• 1:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Right, sure.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And that's one of the sources of the problems, right? After all, you know, a lot of Americans went to Afghanistan thinking we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. A lot of Americans, person, individual, went to Iraq thinking, "Oh, they have weapons of mass destruction, destruction, we are the good guys."

• 1:14:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  There is this, we should sort out from this hypocrisy and start to learn, you know, we started talking about science, about perspectives. Our perspective is not always the right one. The other perspective, we should learn about the other perspectives. And there are colossal interests. Very often, our countries masquerade greed and power gains and interest for, under, you know, we are the good guys and they are the bad guys.

• 1:15:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  And in addition... Within the countries, there are colossal individual, group interest. The, you know, people who make money because of military, because of the, of weapons is a huge force that pushes for having more weapons, more, and they have a colossal amount of money and they influence politics. And the result, it's death, destruction, and increased risk for humankind as together. I think humans, you're right, humans are a disaster, but they're, they've always been reasonable also. They've done good things.

• 1:15:49Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Well, we vary widely, very widely. We're very different.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  I'm optimistic.

• 1:15:55Joe Rogan?

  I am too.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Couple of days a week. And then a couple of days a week, I think there's no.

• 1:16:01Joe Rogan?

  I'm mostly optimistic.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  I think it should be a moment in which war is not a priority, just a, I wish, it would be very simple. Can, can we just agree to spend less money in military across all the planet?

• 1:16:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, it would be nice if we could trust the other countries to honor this agreement, but we would have to have access to their funds and we'd have to watch their programs and be able to monitor their stuff and go over and send envoys.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Joe Rogan?

  To check out their military.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  The US did it with the Soviet. It worked.

• 1:16:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it could work. Yeah. Or AI could just stop it all. That's a possibility too.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  So the question is, are we, for the moment, we're still controlling AI, right?

• 1:16:44Joe Rogan?

  For now.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  The more, the point is that are we developing AI collectively for the good of everybody? Or everybody is developing AI for becoming more powerful, so overcoming the others? That's the question.

• 1:16:59Joe Rogan?

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• 1:18:18Joe Rogan?

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• 1:19:03Joe Rogan?

  your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. I have a crazy theory. My theory is that is a natural process of the human species, and that's what the human species has always been here to do, is to create digital life, and that we are essentially an electronic caterpillar, making a cocoon. And our entire existence has been advancing technology to the point where we can make an artificial life, which is the ultimate expression of technology. And that, that's what people do, just like bees make beehives. People, if you leave them somewhere long enough and

• 1:19:48Joe Rogan?

  they can, their civilization survives long enough. You get enough brilliant people that innovate and come up with crazy technology and new advances in science and material sciences, they eventually get to a point where they can make an artificial life. And that artificial life has no boundaries in terms of the limitations of biological life. Its ability to evolve is completely dependent upon its own ability to code itself and change itself and advance and figure out new propulsion methods and power sources. And, and then it becomes something omnipresent. It becomes something much more intelligent than any life form.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  It's a possibility. It's a possibility. I see what you're saying. I, I, I see the possibility. Whether I'm sure this is the future, I don't know.

• 1:20:36Joe Rogan?

  I'm not sure either. I'm just talking shit. But if I was, but if I was guessing.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Look, Joe, there is another thing. Humans tend to give a, tend to focus on what is happening in the last couple of years. Okay? And tend to read everything in terms of the last little things. When, when, when books and printing was invented, you know, everybody said, oh, we got it. The universe is a book. Everything is, we have to decode the book of nature. When machines became more effective, people say, oh, the universe is a, is a machine. Everything is a machine. Humans are a machine. Then digital stuff and information was invented. So everything is a computer and they're, it was taking over. Sometimes we over-read

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  the present. And, you know, when the first communists arrived, oh, everything will become communist. When the capitalists are, everything will become capitalist. Future often surprises us.

• 1:21:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not betting that I'm right. But I think it's moving in a general direction of unpredictability to, to a point where 20 years from now, the world's unrecognizable.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  It might be. It might be. And.

• 1:21:57Joe Rogan?

  I hope it's for the better. That's my rose-colored glasses view of the world, is that I hope it corrects a lot of the problems with human behavior.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  I share your hope, and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including, you know, me as an intellectual, you as, you know, Joe Rogan, and everybody listening to, to push toward, um, let's keep the common interest.

• 1:22:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, here would be the common interest. If it really could get to that level, you could absolutely, with the resources available today, wipe out poverty worldwide.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:27Joe Rogan?

  Where no one on earth ever has to worry about nutrition or shelter.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:31Joe Rogan?

  No, or medicine. Just, just with the money.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  We have the resources for that.

• 1:22:35Joe Rogan?

  Right. And you could completely change all, with robotics and automation and new power sources, you can completely change all of these areas that are deeply impoverished, that have been so forever. Like, you look at these places that are like insanely packed in with people and dirt roads and like poor sanitation. That could be changed instantaneously.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  That could. We have the resources for that.

• 1:22:58Joe Rogan?

  Education could be changed instantaneously. You'd literally change, within a couple generations, you have a totally new society. Totally different society. And again, how much of what you're seeing with crime and poverty would just disappear where there was no famine. There's no worries about food. There's no worries about shelter. There's no worries about anything. That sounds like pie in the sky bullshit, but it's not necessarily, if you think about how they're going to scale up AI and automation and manufacturing, it's going to be really weird. And our access to resources will be radically enhanced, like way, way more than we have today. Why wouldn't we be able to just spread, like

• 1:23:40Joe Rogan?

  turn the third world into the first world? That's a possibility. That's, that's not like, that's not putting a civilization on Mars. Like, this is a possibility that's like, it's here. You can do it. It could be done. It's not, you're not asking people to drink lava. This is an act, like, you could see how this could work. It sounds crazy because the resources involved are nuts, but.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  I think it sounds like something we should keep in mind and talk about and push.

• 1:24:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, it should be a human goal. It should be a human goal. If you want a better world, what's the best way to have a better world?

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  But look, when the United Nations was founded in the, in the, in the 40s and 50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries together. Okay? So humankind already has said, let's do that. Then somehow special interest and power games prevail.

• 1:24:31Joe Rogan?

  There's also the issue of nuclear power. So when they first started distributing nuclear power to other countries, they didn't realize how easy it would be to convert it to nuclear weapons. Right? The cell, like, India got nuclear weapons, Pakistan got nuclear weapons. It gets weird. Right? So then you're realizing, oh, well, we can't use nuclear power. Well, now, yeah. Okay. Well, this is a lot more complicated now. Cause now, if you want to develop these places, you're gonna have to, what, use coal plants? What are you gonna do? Like, you, you hydrodynamics? You're gonna, you know, you're gonna use waterfalls? Like, how are you gonna power them? What are you, how are you gonna, what are you gonna do here? You, you can't give them nuclear power. If you give them nuclear power and they have nukes too, and then the whole fucking world has nukes? Hey. So it's

• 1:25:13Joe Rogan?

  complicated. But with AI, I think that complication radically decreases. And it's conceivable that you could do something like that. And how, how much safer would the world be if you just eliminated most murder, most crime, most, most acts of poverty, most?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it has to become a clear objective.

• 1:25:36Joe Rogan?

  But then you have a problem with the people that are still alive, that grew up that way and are just, that's how they behave forever. There's just, there's certain people that live in a terrible part of the world that have been behaving terribly their whole life. Everyone around them has been behaving violently and terribly.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Look, that's.

• 1:25:52Joe Rogan?

  Then you gotta get those people on mushrooms.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. Mushrooms, everybody. That's, that's where I come from.

• 1:26:00Joe Rogan?

  That might be the only way. That might be the only way to fix them.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, yeah, sure. But also, you know, let's not just.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Look at what the others did.

• 1:26:14Joe Rogan?

  Well, there might also be a way to

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Our countries did.

• 1:26:17Joe Rogan?

  Enhance consciousness through technology. That might be, that's another pathway that I often consider.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  I think there's a rational side. It's not a moral issue. It's not a, it's not political in the sense of, bad sense of politics. It's a rational thing.

• 1:26:39Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  If we collaborate, we do better than if we compete. Of course, we need some competition. I'm not saying the competition is bad. But confrontation, clashes, war, is to no body advantage.

• 1:26:52Joe Rogan?

  The problem is, we've already cemented an enormous part of our culture, an enormous part of our economy in this military industrial complex. I mean, this is something that Eisenhower warned about at the end of his term. Remember that?

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  I remember that. And unfortunately, he was dramatically right, as Joe Kennedy realized shortly after. The power of the military complex, it's colossal. And it has an interest in making war.

• 1:27:24Joe Rogan?

  And making money. That's how it makes money.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  And how it makes money. And then this money, of course, goes into politics. So it piles up. How can we stop that?

• 1:27:33Joe Rogan?

  That's the scary thing for most people. You get to this realization like, oh, the more war there is, the more money they make. They're in the business of war.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Somebody says that Kennedy, John Kennedy, tried to stop that and ended up badly for that.

• 1:27:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Somebody says so. I don't know.

• 1:27:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think there was a lot of people that hated him. It's very difficult to figure out what exactly got him killed. There was probably multiple factors. Bay of Pigs is probably a factor.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Sure, all the Cubans.

• 1:27:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there is a bunch of actors that got him killed. But for sure, this country does not like when people want to put the cold water on the war. They want to keep it rolling in some way that they can justify it.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Joe, I spent ten years in the United States. I was born in Europe, then moved to the United States, spent ten years here.

• 1:28:19Joe Rogan?

  Where'd you live? What part of the United States?

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Mostly in Pittsburgh.

• 1:28:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Don't say sorry.

• 1:28:24Joe Rogan?

  No, no, I like Pittsburgh. Solid people.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Pittsburgh was great after all.

• 1:28:28Joe Rogan?

  I like Pennsylvania in general. I always loved Philadelphia. It's a fucking great place.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Then I moved back to Europe. Then I moved this side of Atlantic anymore, again to Canada. And now I'm back to Europe again in Madrid. So I consider myself half American, one-third American. I don't know.

• 1:28:53Joe Rogan?

  One-third American. Okay, we'll take it.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  And fifty percent Italian, thirty percent French, thirty percent Spanish, thirty percent Canadian.

• 1:29:02Joe Rogan?

  You're a citizen of the world, sir.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody just likes that, but to some extent, it's true, yeah.

• 1:29:09Joe Rogan?

  Ultimately, though, one world government would be a terrible idea.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  I don't want a war government. I want collaboration across the world. Careful, I mean, this is very different things, right? I want to learn to treat others as, you know, somebody we can compete with, but not

• 1:29:29Joe Rogan?

  The enemies.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Enemies, not enemies. The idea of enemies, this country needs enemies. This country, I mean, I got so much from the US. It's part of me. But remember, it's not an angel country.

• 1:29:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  It started off by, you know, genociding all the native, a large majority of the native Americans. It went through the Civil War, which is one of the most brutal wars of the. It used atomic bomb first. It, since the end of Second World War, has waged war all over the planet without ever being attacked. And has probably killed something between five to ten million people in wars or around. So it's a country, it's a country compared to the other developed countries, with this much higher level of crime, violence, murder. It's a wonderful country. It's creative, it's powerful, it has an idea of freedom.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  It is a strength of innovation. It's a country with a lot of lights and a lot of darkness. And I think very often, the Americans see the light, don't see the darkness.

• 1:30:40Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, interesting. Yeah, well, it's not, it's not in front of our face all the time, the darkness.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:47Joe Rogan?

  And American exceptionalism is something that's

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  American exceptionalism is, you know, there is something peculiar in this country. There is, for many reasons. One is that it's a strange country, which the people are not natives, right? Everybody came in from the outside. This is a melting pot story. But I think what the Americans don't see is how, from the outside, the violence and the aggressivity of US is perceived as something very strong that is not seen from America.

• 1:31:21Joe Rogan?

  Certainly now.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but now it's a, how would I put it? You know, Trump is not my guy, not at all, but at least he has taken away some of the hypocrisy.

• 1:31:34Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  You know, he's going to Venezuela and take the oil and say, we do that because of the oil. He's saying, it's our interest to do this and that, instead of selling our interest for, you know, we are the good guys, we're saving the people outside.

• 1:31:52Joe Rogan?

  Which has always been the propaganda.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Which has been the propaganda. And I think if we get rid of the propaganda, it's easier to talk and see the others. It's also the other side. When the Russians stop thinking, we are the good guys, we are saving the people, it was an advantage for everybody.

• 1:32:11Joe Rogan?

  So we got to this long, roundabout conversation because we were talking about AI and AI being conscious. What I was going to get to is, do you think that the universe itself is in some way conscious?

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Let me go back to my main point. We don't know what conscious, what we mean when it says conscious.

• 1:32:44Joe Rogan?

  Is there an Italian word for consciousness?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Sorry?

• 1:32:46Joe Rogan?

  Is there an Italian word for consciousness?

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question. The answer is no. The Italian word for conscience, the moral thing, and consuness is the same word, coscienza. So

• 1:33:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh, your conscience, like feeling bad about something.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, feeling bad, I've done something wrong, so my conscience is. So the Italian word is more about moral thing. Consciousness doesn't have a translation, not even in French or Spanish.

• 1:33:19Joe Rogan?

  What about the concept of consciousness? Is there another phrase for it? The way we think about it here?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  No, we use the same word somehow, it's too slightly, they do different meaning, but making confusion about it. You know, again, it depends what you mean. You can mean different things.

• 1:33:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Of course, the universe is conscious because it includes us and we are God. So, careful, that's the point. That's the central point. We are not special in the universe. We're just part of the universe. There's not nature and outside nature, we're looking at it from the outside. We are part of nature. We are home in nature. We're just another animal, a much special animal, of course.

• 1:34:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  The history of science is a history of taking down metaphysical differences. In the Middle Ages, people thought that there is a earth, which is own reality and physics and everything, and the heavens, and the heavens were completely different. On earth, things decay and rot. In the heavens, they're eternal. Things go around in circles in the heavens and on earth, things fall up and down. And then Newton came and basically said, no, no, no, no, we got it right. The heavens and the earth are just the same thing. The earth is just one of the many bodies in the heavens.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  We are like, you know, this little dot in the sky, which is Venus, that moves around. Well, we're like that, like Mars, like Venus. So it was a shock for Europe, right? Oh, boy, we are, our, the earth is just one of the many things around. And then a few centuries later comes Darwin and convinces us, convinces everybody, that animals and humans have common ancestors, okay? Your grand, grand, grand, grand, grandmother and the grand, grand, grand, grandmother of your cat could be the same organism, the same person. So that means that we're not so different from animals, right?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  We're the same story and so on. I mean, we keep learning that we are part of nature. And I think the same is true for consciousness. We are not the special thing outside of nature. We're just one of things that happen in nature. I'm sure that in the big universe, there are all sorts of things happening like our consciousness, or much more complicated, much more rich, much more beautiful. Who knows? We don't know. But certainly, we're not so special. We are home in nature, which is beautiful. Because there isn't nature and culture. Culture is just one natural phenomenon. There isn't body and spirit.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  It's just the same thing described in different manners. So yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us and who knows how many in the, you know, the earth is just one of the hundred of billions of planets in the galaxy and the galaxy is one of many hundred billions, billions of, millions of billions of galaxies. So we're just one little thing in this great nature. We're not special.

• 1:36:48Joe Rogan?

  We're not, but we are because we're a part of something special. So whatever the whole thing is, is pretty special.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Oh, whatever the whole thing is very different than what we thought it was.

• 1:36:57Joe Rogan?

  Right, and we are.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Much more rich, is much more rich, much more complex, that more variety.

• 1:37:02Joe Rogan?

  And that includes us.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  And that includes us.

• 1:37:04Joe Rogan?

  So we are special.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  We are special, but you know, every kid is special for his mom. And his mom is special for his kid. And she's, the mom is really special for the kid. Every kid is special.

• 1:37:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  And so are we.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Special for ourselves, for sure, for sure.

• 1:37:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  And important for ourselves.

• 1:37:25Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that our human consciousness is a way that the universe experiences itself?

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. It is de facto, right? But it's not because there was some initial plan to do that. I mean, it's just, that's just how things happen.

• 1:37:40Joe Rogan?

  Well, it doesn't have to be a plan for it to be a crazy magical experience because it kind of is nuts, whether it's a plan or not. It's the fact that it exists.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, let me put it this way. You're asking this question to me as a scientist, a physicist.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  I think the physics is badly overrated.

• 1:38:01Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Because at some point, people thought, oh, if we figure out the physics equations that govern the reality, we've understood everything. And that's silly, in my opinion. Precisely because nature is complex. Imagine, do you play chess?

• 1:38:21Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so do you know the basic moves of chess? So you know the basic rules of chess?

• 1:38:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  So to know the basic rules of the game doesn't mean to play chess, right?

• 1:38:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  To know the fundamental equation of physics is like knowing the basic rules of the game. It's very different from knowing what you could do with that. So the basic laws of physics are like the basic rules of chess. They're easy to know. You write them down, Maxwell equation, well, you did study a little bit, Schrödinger equation. Everything is governed by that. Yeah, but what you can do with that is abominously complicated. It's not enough to know them. You need chemistry for chemi, for, for, for, for chemical phenomena. You need psychology to understand people. You need literature, you need philosophy, you need, you need emotions to understand how, what is love and so on and so forth.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  So this idea that physics exhausts everything, it's true in some basic silly sense. The same sense in which all the complexity of chess playing, after all, is just, you know, 10 basic rules, how the king moves, how the queen moves. But in the same sense, it's, it's silly because the complexity of universe goes far beyond just its basic equations of physics.

• 1:39:49Joe Rogan?

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• 1:40:34Joe Rogan?

  Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month.

• 1:41:18Joe Rogan?

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• 1:41:50Joe Rogan?

  So when you think of human beings as a vehicle for the universe to experiencing itself, for, for the universe to experience itself, do you think the universe itself is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand?

• 1:42:12Joe Rogan?

  Like, is, are we, our biological understanding of what we think of as consciousness being that it exists inside this moving creature with a finite lifespan that has the ability to manipulate its environment? Is that just an egocentric version?

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Joe Rogan?

  Of what this is? And it's probably everywhere, all the time?

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  I think we use ourselves as an analogy for trying to understand things beyond ourselves. To some extent, this analogy works, but the key point for me is that the universe as a whole is still a colossal mystery. We don't know. And we don't have the full story by very far.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  The universe is far more complex for us to, to understand. There are far more, more, many things happening, far many possible perspectives, which are not ours, which do not, do not have access to. So two general questions. In my opinion, the only reasonable answer is, oh, we don't know.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  You know, there's so much we don't know. I think, if I look at great scientists of the past, they're characterized not by the fact that they understood the universe, but by the fact that we're so much aware that there's so much in the universe which they did not understand.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  We are, look, what are we? We are not super powerful, intelligent, total rational things outside universe, looking from the outside. We're little creatures on a little planet, you know, developed for surviving in Savannah, which have developed some good mental tools, very good, but limited compared to the immensity of the universe of its complexity. So what we know about the universe from a larger perspective, we don't, I, I think we don't know.

• 1:44:19Joe Rogan?

  There's also this weird thing with people where we're always dealing with the perspective of the accumulated knowledge up until now.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Joe Rogan?

  And this has always been the case, like people, when they first developed quantum theory, this was, what, 100 years ago?

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Joe Rogan?

  When they first started doing that?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100 years.

• 1:44:34Joe Rogan?

  Think about what they were working with, like, and then 100 years before that. And it's like everyone is only working with what other people have already figured out and what they've contributed to it.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we're very good in accumulating. That's what we're very good at.

• 1:44:46Joe Rogan?

  Very good at it, especially now.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Joe Rogan?

  Especially with AI.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Well, also in the past, right?

• 1:44:50Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  I mean, people built, how did people sit to physics on the basis of previous experience?

• 1:44:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  We, we, that's what is our, the strength of our speeches somehow. We don't have to start again every.

• 1:45:03Joe Rogan?

  But that's what I was getting at, is I wonder what the world looks like in 200 years.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 1:45:09Joe Rogan?

  I always think, like, we are, we're born in such an amazing time. So, how old are you?

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  I was born in 56, so I'm past 70.

• 1:45:18Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so I'm 59. So, you know, we're not that far off. So we're, we're born into a completely different time and we've watched the internet develop. We've watched answering machines and cell phones and we've watched AI and all this crazy stuff. And you just imagine that change moved forward for 200 years.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Let me balance this with one thing, not to contradict, but to reinforce what you're saying. My grandmother, her name was Olympia, she was born at a time where there was no electric light.

• 1:45:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  There were no trains, there were no cars.

• 1:46:00Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  There was no washing machines, television, there was no radio, okay? Before dying, she went in a plane. She flew. During her life, she saw all, you know, electric light coming in, radio coming in,

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  all the way to washing machine coming in, television coming in, telephone coming in. I think for her, the world changed more than for me.

• 1:46:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point, especially the air travel, right? You can all of a sudden go to all these different countries in a day.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Look, you called, you called me and you said, I was in Europe, can you come 48 hours to Texas? And I flew from Europe to Texas and back. Ah, this is fantastic. If I told my grandmother when she was a, a girl, she would have laughed, say, come on, that's make no sense. It takes a month, a month of the boat to go there.

• 1:46:52Joe Rogan?

  That's true.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  So things change dramatically, but they do. So to your question, I have no idea how they will be 100 years in the future.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  We are always, there's always a perspective thing. It seems that the last one is the most important. But there have always been big changes.

• 1:47:16Joe Rogan?

  Always, always.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Imagine when books were invented, or when agriculture was invented, or when cheese was invented.

• 1:47:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  Or where countries were invented. So humankind have gone through quite a rough trip during the last thousand, several thousand of years. And we're just in one of the bumps. Not in, I think, you were in California before being here in Texas. I think that there is an idea, especially in California, that now we are in a super, very, very, very special moment. I'm not sure. We are in just one of the jumps ahead. I think that when electric light and electricity and power came to our, that was a big jump.

• 1:48:04Joe Rogan?

  Everything was a jump. I bet people in 1969, watching Jimi Hendrix, thought it was a jump.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:09Joe Rogan?

  You know, there's so many jumps. There's so many, like, wow, I can't believe, like, Hunter Thompson wrote about that, about the 60s. That there's all of a sudden this great change had happened.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a kid. I was, the difference between me and my parents, I think, was bigger than the difference between me and the generation who were young there. It was a cultural break. My parents were not understanding me. I was rebellious. I was a bit of a hippie. And there was different worlds. And now, now, now, parents understand their kids.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  No? I don't know.

• 1:48:52Joe Rogan?

  A little bit. They're always confusing. Children are always growing up in a different era.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Joe Rogan?

  Than you. And there's different experiences and different pressures and different weirdness. You know, kids are growing up today with social media and phones. Everyone's connected to everyone. They have their location. They show, share their location with their friends. It's very, it's all, it's a very weird time when it comes to that. But it's also, you know, I'm just, I'm just thinking about

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  That's very different.

• 1:49:21Joe Rogan?

  When we're discussing what we don't know, that there's so much we know in comparison to a few hundred years ago, but so much that we don't know.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  There's so much we know, and we shouldn't take away the value of that.

• 1:49:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  Value, and including scientific knowledge. I think scientific knowledge is great. Sometimes it's the best we have about things. But we shouldn't think that we've figured out No. the big question. The big questions are not figured out.

• 1:49:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, we're no different than the people that lived in 1900 that thought they had it figured out. I'm sure they were pretty aware, you know, of what they knew. And they probably had a, there's probably quite a few people that were super confident that basically had it nailed.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. That's one thing that, that's one mistake that humankind often does. Is to figure out, okay, we got it. I think even if you go in the European Middle Age, you ask somebody, many people would say, no, no, we've got everything they used to understand. It's very easy, you know, there are angels and the influence of the astral influence and this and that, spirits. They thought they had understood the full story.

• 1:50:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, people always do. And then there's always people that come along that tell you that they have the answer, and they know what it is, and they're very confident and very charismatic. So people follow them.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  Yes, true. And wisdom, I think, to a logic sense, is two things. One is realizing that we don't have the answers. So being, and you know, we're never certain about everything, anything. Certainty is not within our, I like to tell this story. My father grew up thinking his first name was Franco, until the day he asked a birth certificate and figured out that his first name was Giulio. So he went home and said, what the hell is going on here?

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  And my grandfather told him, well, you know, your mother wanted to call you Franco, but I didn't like it, but I didn't dare say so. So I registered you with a different first name. So that created a disaster for the rest of his life because his paperwork was all some Franco, some Giulio. So he didn't know his own name, right? So even about your own name, you can be wrong. You can be wrong about everything, even about your own name. There's always a case in which you, things can go wrong. But that's good. I don't think we should aim at certainty. In fact, it's the other way around. We should be careful about certainty. Because certainty is what blocks you for understanding more.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  If you're certain that the earth is flat, you don't understand it's round. If you're certain, you know, that things are objective, you don't understand the possibility that they are not, and so on and so forth. So accepting the limitation of our knowledge, the fact that we may be wrong, it's a key for learning more. That's, I think, is crucial. And the other thing, you know, you and I have, I think, one thing in common.

• 1:52:35Joe Rogan?

  What's that?

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  Curiosity. If I had to define myself, what has been the driving force of so much we're done is curiosity. I got curious about science, I got curious about philosophy, curious about the world. Curiosity is what, and you too, right? I mean, it seems to me that this, all this, you know, Joe Rogan experiences, that openness to curiosity of listening to people, what they have to say to this. The curiosity, I think, is a fabulous force for the world. Not just thinking that you're closed yourself in what you know already, but being curious, being curious about the rest of the ideas, the world, the others.

• 1:53:14Joe Rogan?

  I think it's genuinely contagious, too. When I find people that are curious about things, I get curious.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:21Joe Rogan?

  When someone's actually curious and they start having these conversations that are clearly, to them, fascinating, I'm addicted to it. I'm like, what do you got? What are you talking about? What is this? How did you do it? How'd you figure that out?

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Joe Rogan?

  But I've, yeah, I mean, I've kind of been insanely fortunate that I can have these kind of conversations with people like you.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I envy you for that. You get to know all possible people very easily, right?

• 1:53:46Joe Rogan?

  It's very interesting.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  You snap a finger and everybody comes to you. Lucky man.

• 1:53:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, it took a long time to get to that.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  I can't, I can't imagine.

• 1:53:54Joe Rogan?

  Even from the very beginning, it was always so interesting. I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, you might not even know who they are, but you'll have a conversation with them and you'll get a new perspective on things. You'll get a new version of how a person lives their life. And the more, I think, you gather about that, the more you understand about yourself and the more you understand about interacting with people.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you discover that people are different, have different ideas, and

• 1:54:26Joe Rogan?

  And you figure out why they came to these different perspectives, too. And if you're open, you can consider, like, how you came to yours.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  One of the most things that fascinates more is how people get ideas. How ideas come in. After all,

• 1:54:42Joe Rogan?

  What do you think ideas are?

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a fabulous question. In fact, I got a rich man from California calling me not long ago and said, ask me the question. Carlo, how do ideas arrive? I think it's a fabulous question. We, how, we learn, right? We learn personally, we learn historically. And learning mostly is not just learning facts, it's learning ideas, different ways of thinking. Civilization is just a product of ideas. All we live is ideas, in a sense. And how do ideas come in? I don't know. We have, our mind has this incredible capacity of generating ideas. Very often, ideas are just combinations of previous things.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  A lot of physics is just, this is, I understand this because it's like that, but not exactly like that. So I take part of the idea of that, part of the idea that I combine. So a lot of combinatorics. I hear what he says, I hear what you say, I hear what the others say. Ah, look, this goes together with that. So a lot of ideas come from bringing together, that's why the more you learn, the more you produce things. The more you're curious, the more you're, you know, how did Newton came out this incredible idea? He studied Kepler, he studied Galileo. The two things didn't make sense together, but they were similar.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  So he said, how can I put this together with that? My own job, my own physics job, is to mix quantum mechanics and general relativity. That's what my, the core of my research, central part of my research is doing.

• 1:56:25Joe Rogan?

  How do you go about doing that? How do you mix them?

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  I think you mix them by taking them seriously. So quantum mechanics is so successful that it's telling us something about the world. And general relativity is so successful. General relativity has predicted black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of the universe, time, the fact that time is, your head is more than time for your feet, and so on and so forth. So it's all come out to be right. So it has to be right. And quantum mechanics works so well. All our technology is based on quantum mechanics. It has to be right. So then, the question is, how do they fit together? You sort of turn them around, both of them, until you say, oh, look, this might join with that.

• 1:57:10Speaker 01

  There's this aspect of this that goes together with this aspect of this. That has been the work of my life, quantum gravity. And the theory me and my friends have come out with, it's called loop quantum gravity, is a way of solving this problem. We're not sure it's right, right? It's, that's my main work in physics, loop quantum gravity. It's a way of bringing together quantum mechanics and Einstein theory. It gives some predictions. It gives a picture of quantum space and quantum time. It's a possible solution of a question. The question is, what are the quantum properties of gravity? What are the quantum properties of space and time?

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Are we sure? No, not yet. We are now in the situation that we're working for Finances and consequences that could be tested. Science is not sufficient to have ideas, then you want to test them.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  So that is my entire, the main central job of my life has been combining ideas to make a new conceptual structure for thinking about quantum space and quantum time. And that's useful for understanding what happened inside the black holes, what happened to the early universe, what happened to black holes. You know, black holes, if you let them there for a very, very long time, they evaporate, they become smaller and smaller. So what happened at the end of the evaporation? These kind of questions need quantum gravity.

• 1:58:43Joe Rogan?

  What do you think happened before the Big Bang?

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so first, we don't know.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  I think it has to be said clearly, because it's good to speculate, and we maybe in 10 years, we will know. It's not impossible to know, but for the moment, we don't know. There are two possibilities. One is that genuinely, there was nothing before the Big Bang, so time started there. This is what Stephen Hawking, he worked a lot on this possibility, he expected that to be the case.

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  The other possibility is that, no, there was something before the Big Bang, and the intuitive idea is that, you know, you have a universe collapsing, falling down into itself, getting to a very, very compressed stage, and then bouncing out, and we see the bouncing out. And if I had to bet now, I'm not sure, but I would bet for the second one. From the equations, that seems to be what was the case.

• 1:59:49Joe Rogan?

  And do you think this is a constant process of expansion and compression?

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  No, because I think that if we do this jump that you just did, we're making the usual mistake, as soon as you understand something, to think it's there forever, right? If you live in a valley and ask, "Well, I've never seen what's behind the hill." You look behind the hill, you see something else, say, "Oh, I get it, it's like that forever." No, it's not like that forever. It's like that for a while, and something else happens. So we are afraid of saying, "I don't know." So as soon as we have a step ahead, we tend to say, "Okay, I got it."

• 2:00:33Joe Rogan?

  That's a very healthy explanation.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Joe Rogan?

  Because it's accurate. We really can't figure it out.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Joe Rogan?

  When you saw the James Webb Telescope, the more newer discoveries of these galaxies that formed far earlier than they should have?

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Joe Rogan?

  Did that give you pause about the date of the universe? Because some people have speculated that perhaps the date is wrong, that the date of the Big Bang.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, but I think it's more plausible that there were primordial black holes that gave rise to these early galaxies. So there is an explanation, there is an explanation within the same dates, which is possible, that, you know, when the universe was very, very, that we know a lot of confidence, right? There was a time about 12, 13, 14 billion years ago, that the universe was much compressed, much hot, and fluctuating a lot. So at that time, it's very possible that many black holes formed. And maybe some of the early galaxies were generated by black hole formed at that stage.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  That seems to be, seems to me, the most plausible answer.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  I'm not a cosmologist, so I'm not, it's not really my field, but it's close, I try to follow.

• 2:01:57Joe Rogan?

  So it would be that our understanding of what it takes to form a galaxy is incorrect?

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:04Joe Rogan?

  Or the time it takes?

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. So, you know, during my life, something that has been realized is that not only did there are black holes all over the sky, when I was a student, people didn't believe in black holes.

• 2:02:21Joe Rogan?

  When did they first discover them?

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Black, I studied black hole school, but as a mathematical aspect of Einstein theory. And the book said, "Well, there's probably nothing real in the universe that correspond to that."

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  The first people who started thinking, actually, that thing up in the sky that we see could be a black hole, was in the 70s.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  It was very interesting, because, you know, there are not a lot of binary system in the sky, two stars rotating around one another.

• 2:02:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  So you actually see the movement of the, of two stars. And there were some funny things, in which you just saw one star dancing around something which was not seen. So people said, "Well, maybe there is a black hole, it's dancing around the black hole." It was speculative.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Then there were the quasars, some very intense signals that coming from very far away, that people couldn't understand what they were, and people said, "Well, if it was a black hole, the matter falling into the black hole could radiate very strongly, and we could see that."

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  The actual evidence grew very slowly in the 80s and 90s. In 2000, I was, I moved back from America to Europe. I arrived in France, and the director of the department was a particle physicist, a very good particle physicist. And I said, "I'm working on black holes." And he said, "Carl, you don't believe the black holes are real." But 2000, so still physicist, very respectable physicist, didn't believe the black holes were real.

• 2:04:08Joe Rogan?

  That's so late.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  It's very late, it's very late, yes. At that point, the relativists, the cosmologists, the astrophysicists were taken very, very seriously. Now we have pictures of black holes, so now there's no doubt, there's no doubt, I mean, physicists have doubt about anything, but...

• 2:04:23Joe Rogan?

  Are any of those old professors still alive?

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they changed their mind. I mean, scientists change their mind, that's...

• 2:04:32Joe Rogan?

  Good ones.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  You're totally right. Good scientists change their mind. I'm sure if I talked to him, he would laugh, and say, "Oh, of course, you were right, the black holes, I understand." So now we have complete evidence that there were black holes. But, you know, we see black holes, which are sort of a little bit more massive than our sun, there are many, many of these. But then we discover that there's colossal black holes, gigantic, which are usually the center of the galaxy. And we have two pictures of black holes. One, the black hole's the center of our galaxy, and then another black hole, much bigger, in another galaxy, more far away. It's beautiful, big pictures, right, that they were on the front page of the newspapers a few years ago.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  So when this was realized, there are these black holes in the center of the galaxies, then the question came immediately to everybody, every good scientist, "Is it a galaxy that forms and then creates a black hole in its center? Or is it actually the black hole that starts, that, you know, then it forms a galaxy around it?" It's not yet completely resolved, what is the role of the black hole in the galaxy. And I think these very, very early galaxies could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe.

• 2:05:55Joe Rogan?

  The craziest theory that I've ever heard was that in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Joe Rogan?

  And that could be, if you went through that black hole, you go into a whole nother universe, filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole in the center of it, you go through each one of them, hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole, then it's just, that's true infinity.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a crazy theory, it's a beautiful theory. In fact, there's a good friend of mine who worked a lot, and maybe even started that theory, is Lee Smolin.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  I am not convinced. I think that, I don't know, we don't know.

• 2:06:33Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  But I think that if you, if you jump into a black hole, you just, you don't go to another universe. After a long time, you come out in our own universe. So a black hole is a, the black hole, left alone, is going to eat everything around, and then left alone, it's going to become smaller and smaller, evaporate. And then, that's what loop quantum gravity seems to suggest, there is a quantum transition, becomes a white hole, and everything inside comes out. So remember, at the beginning of our conversation, we said that there is a, time is different, right? Time goes faster and slower.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  So if you jump into a black hole, in a short time for you, you're going to jump out billions of years in the future. So a black hole could be a shortcut to the future.

• 2:07:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Isn't physics beautiful?

• 2:07:31Joe Rogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Joe Rogan?

  It's terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:07:35Joe Rogan?

  Is magnifies the scope of our minuscule existence.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's fabulous that we can learn about that.

• 2:07:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  There was a time which people didn't know what were this little dot in the sky like Venus and Mars.

• 2:07:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  Now we, you know, we send machines up there and people wanna go up there.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  There was a time in people, in which people said, oh, we are never gonna learn the the chemical composition of, of the planet and the star because they're far away, they're this is 19th century, not long ago, our grand grandfather, and they were completely wrong. We, we learned, right? It's now through the spectra, they have ways for, we know exactly what is the chemical composition of stars.

• 2:08:23Joe Rogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. So we do learn, this is magical.

• 2:08:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's, it's fascinating to even think of the possibilities that are out there.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Joe Rogan?

  And that as time goes on, we'll develop more and more powerful telescopes and we'll be able to see more and more.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we don't kill each other with nuclear weapons, which is a very concrete possibility.

• 2:08:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, if there really are aliens out there, uh, there really are super advanced civilizations, I would love to know how they managed to navigate through that if they went through the same course that we are currently going through. I would want, I would love to know, cuz that's one of the things about the Fermi paradox, right? Maybe civilization, maybe the reason why we don't see them out there is because they never really get that far and everyone gets.

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  Maybe they don't get it, maybe they destroy themselves with nuclear weapons when they were on the stage, maybe, you know, the universe is very large, very vast, it's huge, is so even if in the galaxy, there are many, many, uh, it could be that they're too far.

• 2:09:30Joe Rogan?

  Could be, or it could be a small percentage of them get to a position where we are, a very small percentage, and then a small percentage of them make it all the way without being wiped out by natural disasters or cataclysmics of whatever species they are, whatever their design is.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Do you know what I, what I think is most probable?

• 2:09:50Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  That they have already seen us and they thought we're totally uninterested and we just avoided talking to us because we're too stupid.

• 2:10:00Joe Rogan?

  Really? I don't like that theory. One of the reasons why I don't like that theory is cuz we don't do that. We, we are constantly studying things that are more primitive than we are. We're constantly.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  True.

• 2:10:11Joe Rogan?

  We're constantly doing experiments on ecosystems and trying, we're trying to solve problems that exist. Like, I was watching this documentary about, um, this island that got separated when they, they dammed some river and created this island and, um, the, it was in South America and this island was overrun with monkeys and they had no predators on this island. And because of that.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Many, many monkeys.

• 2:10:37Joe Rogan?

  Tons of monkeys, but because of the fact that they didn't have any predators, they had lost all their fear of raptors and they had started over consuming the seeds of all the plants. And so there weren't new saplings growing and it was having a detrimental effect on the ecosystem because it was, so they brought in harpy eagles. You ever seen a harpy eagle?

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Not the monkeys, the humans brought in.

• 2:10:58Joe Rogan?

  Humans.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:10:59Joe Rogan?

  Brought in two harpy eagles.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  No, what is it?

• 2:11:02Joe Rogan?

  A harpy eagle.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Oh, eagle, the bird, the big bird, yeah, okay.

• 2:11:05Joe Rogan?

  It might be the biggest eagle.

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:11:08Joe Rogan?

  It's either that or the golden eagle, which one's the bigger one? I think harpy eagles are bigger. Anyway, they're really good at killing monkeys and they let these two harpy eagles loose and they, they went ham and they killed so many monkeys that they had to stop the, uh, experiment after a few years. So these, uh, eagles had had offspring, so they had two other eagles that were there as well, and these eagles were just wiping out these monkeys. And they said, okay, this is too much and this is, uh, now they, they're like getting past the, whatever the numbers are that they could reproduce, like, it was getting to the point where these eagles, just two eagles and their two offspring were just, so they pulled the plug and they pulled the eagles out of there and they said, all right, well, we tried that, but unintended consequences.

• 2:11:53Joe Rogan?

  But that's us, that's just humans wandering, what do we do about this island? Why wouldn't we just leave that stupid island with those stupid monkeys and let them figure it out? Yeah, if they eat all the plants, they'll starve to death, they'll figure it out. No, we don't, we go in and we interfere and we intervene and we monkey with the, with, for lack of a better term, monkey with their ecosystem by bringing in predators.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  So you think if there was some alien civilization would interfere with us?

• 2:12:17Joe Rogan?

  Of course they would, why, we are so fascinating.

• 2:12:20Speaker 01

  Stanley Kubrick movie, uh, Space Odyssey was, was about that, right? An alien civilization who are just, uh, we, we, according to the story of the movie, we're sort of a experiment of an alien civilization.

• 2:12:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's an old story.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Joe Rogan?

  That's a story that's from the, you know, the Sumerian texts, that's from the epic, I mean, this, that, that goes all the way back to some of the old books that they found that were in the caves in Qumran, you know?

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Well, Sumerians have this idea of the gods, we're, we are just created gods for their own, for their own advantage. Yeah, you see, I, you know, these are beautiful stories, I always find them, you know, they're fascinating to talk about, but to, um, to, to humans, we're just trying to project ourselves to something similar to us changing a little bit.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  I think there is, there should be something like life all over the universe, but why should it be similar to us? I mean, we're, we are, we lack imagination, there are more, more ways of being complex than just having a civilization the way we have.

• 2:13:37Joe Rogan?

  That's true, but how do you get there? Don't you think you probably get there by innovation? And if you get there, you're not just gonna automatically evolve super intelligence without any innovation and any technology. Most likely biological creatures are going to develop technology in order to advance themselves to the point where they have technology like we have today or far more advanced than that. So it has to go through a process. So whether it looks like us or not, for sure, we definitely lack imagination in our, uh, just imagining the possibilities of different kinds of life and different, different kinds of intelligence all over the universe. But the, the idea that they wouldn't be interested in us seems to me silly. Like, we are in an adolescent stage of evolution, we're, we're both, like we were talking about

• 2:14:22Joe Rogan?

  earlier, people are kind and compassionate and wonderful to be around and curious and interesting and also brutal, stealing resources from other countries, creating wars under false pretenses, um, you know, using propaganda. So we're both things and we're.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  We're both things, yeah.

• 2:14:38Joe Rogan?

  We're all, we're weird, but we also have potential. You agree, I agree, like, humans have the potential to live a far better way than we're living now. If I was an alien, I would be utterly fascinated by this soap opera, like, how does this one turn out? Like, this, these people are out of their fucking minds. We found a nutty ass civilization that are on the cusp of figuring it out and at the same time they're making an artificial digital version of itself that's far more intelligent. I would think we're a really interesting study.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Joe Rogan?

  I would not, I would not think, would they be like, oh, so boring, these people with their godlike AI and nuclear weapons.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, I buy the point. I can see the point, Joe. I can see the point, Joe, yeah, uh, yeah. But, but look what we're doing, we're using our own minds to try to imagine how something could be, could think about us.

• 2:15:35Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  But, but of course, the only model we have is us.

• 2:15:38Joe Rogan?

  Right. And other animals.

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  And other animals, yes, yes, exactly. But, you know, I don't know how, how much squirrels talk about us, probably they don't, but if they had to figure out humans, they would use squirrel notions to try to figure out humans and they would just got it wrong, get it wrong.

• 2:16:03Joe Rogan?

  Right, and much like squirrels, we're probably so limited in our ability to perceive and imagine in comparison.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  That's what I was trying to say, exactly.

• 2:16:10Joe Rogan?

  To what else is out there.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:16:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:12Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. Squirrels are cute.

• 2:16:16Joe Rogan?

  They are, until they bite each other's nuts off, they go after.

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  Do they? Are they nasty? Are they nasty?

• 2:16:21Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of a, of, it's, it's not known exactly if they do that, um, but that's always been like the wives tale, is that they, when they're mating, when they're, they're competing, uh, they will fight. And one of the things they do do for sure is they throw each other out of trees.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:38Joe Rogan?

  And that's one of the reasons why squirrels can fall from so far and still survive. Like squirrels can fall from like thirty, forty feet in the air and they bounce off the dirt and they're fine. Like, they're just constructed for falling, uh, cuz they go to war, they go to war with each other to breed, you know, to, one, two males are competing over a female and the story was always that they would bite each other's balls off.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

  I don't know, I don't know if that's true.

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 2:17:04Joe Rogan?

  That was one of those, like, the endorsements would always tell you.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  If you grew up in Europe, I, I did, when you come to this side of the Atlantic, one of the beautiful things is that there are animals, much more than in Europe. Europe is, the problem with Europe is, is too many people, okay? And especially places like Italy or, or the Netherlands, full of people, full of people. You don't see animals in Europe.

• 2:17:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, other than like pets, you see cats and dogs and rats.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure, animals which are live strictly with, with, with humans, either as pets or as rats, uh, a lot, but when you go out hiking the mountains, very rare to see, to see animal. You know, when I was a kid, um, it seemed laughable in, in America, but I would go hiking with my parents as a small kid and if there was a squirrel, everybody was jumping, oh, look, a squirrel, fantastic.

• 2:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then I came to the US and there are squirrels all over, right? Keep out of your house, that's good.

• 2:18:00Joe Rogan?

  Right, especially the people that live in the country.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then I moved to Canada. Canada is fantastic.

• 2:18:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  We had, we were living in London, Ontario. And out of our windows, there were coyotes, there were all sorts of animals of all town. We had an eagle coming down in our garden.

• 2:18:18Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  And, and just sitting there.

• 2:18:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Canada has true wildlife.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  It is fabulous. So for me, that was a great thing of coming this side of the Atlantic. It's still more, nature is still more pleasant. In Europe, nature has been domesticated all over. It's rare to see some wilderness.

• 2:18:37Speaker 03

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• 2:19:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, we're very fortunate that we have the national park system and the,

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:40Joe Rogan?

  the, you know, the way we have these national parks, we can go to Yosemite. You can see elk and bears and there's wolves there. It's, it's like, it's incredible.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:50Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's a little bit domesticated in that sense. Like you go to the elk are not scared of you at all. They, they hang out by the visitor's stand. It's a little bastardized. Like the, there's, there's a video, there's an Instagram page called the Tourons of Yellowstone. Not like morons, but tourists.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  And people that get too close to the bison and get flipped through the air.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  Disasters, yes.

• 2:20:10Joe Rogan?

  God, so many of those. But it's because they've, you know, they've grown up in cities and they don't understand what wildlife is. And they want to take a selfie with the bison.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

• 2:20:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. You can guess how that turns out.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  When I was in my twenties, I, I, I dropped out from university and I took one year off traveling. And I did coast to coast, Atlantic to Pacific, Canada one way and US the other way. And alone, it was fantastic.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Great life.

• 2:20:39Joe Rogan?

  Did you hitchhike?

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  Hitchhiking, yeah.

• 2:20:41Joe Rogan?

  Look at you, you were a hippie.

• 2:20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, in that sense, yes, yes, absolutely. I, I met all sorts of people. But when I arrived in the Rockies, it was in Canada near Banff. And I spent some time hiking high in the mountains. It was marvelous for European, exactly because it was empty. But then I came down to Banff, it was a small, tiny village at the time. And the camping was too expensive for a young kid. So, so I said, okay, I don't want to stay in the camping. So I, I, I woke up a little bit and put my tent in a little empty space. And then a grizzly came.

• 2:21:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was inside my tent, the sun was going down. And this big bear started walking around the tent. I was terrified to death because I had one of these little, little tents, just one layer. And the sun was going down, so I saw the shade of the bear on the thing. So the instruction was make noise. Okay, that was the instruction that was given. Because the risk is that the bear opened the tent, looking for food and see you get scared and kills you. So if you make noise, that's, he's supposed to go away. But I was trying to scream, but was too terrified. Ah, ah, ah, ah, noise was not.

• 2:22:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  So then I looked around to make noise. There was nothing. So I started clapping my head like an idiot.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  So the bear, I had actually, that I did right, hanged my food on a tree at a little distance. So the bear went to the food, opened the food and then just, then after a while went away. So I was, I was terrified.

• 2:22:33Joe Rogan?

  How long did that last?

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  The entire thing lasted half an hour before I had the courage to come out and look and there was no bear anymore. So I took my tent and ran down to the campground and said, I pay whatever, I stay here. And then, you know, people were talking about, there was this grizzly that going around.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  So I survived.

• 2:22:53Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my encounter with wilderness, which coming, you know, the little boy coming from Europe, Italy, totally civilized, no wild animals was, was quite scary for me. But, you know, I learned that sometimes it's not a bad idea to respect regulation. Of course, there was a regulation, but don't go alone.

• 2:23:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they know what they're doing.

• 2:23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:17Joe Rogan?

  But it's not to say that the bear wouldn't wander its way through the camp too. They will, they don't respect boundaries.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  They don't respect regulations.

• 2:23:25Joe Rogan?

  It's such a crazy animal that we've, we have here. Like grizzly bears are so fascinating. They're so enormous.

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  Enormous, enormous.

• 2:23:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and they used to be all over the place. Like California doesn't have any anymore, but that's on the state flag.

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah. It's, it's a grizzly?

• 2:23:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's grizzly.

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  Is it not a black bear or?

• 2:23:44Joe Rogan?

  No, no, it's a brown bear. They used to have brown bears all over California. In fact, the guy who was last killed by a grizzly bear, they named a town after him. It's called Lebec, Lebec, California.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  I see.

• 2:23:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, bent it there before. And it's like, there's a plaque, memorial.

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. In Canada, they have accidents, they still have accidents.

• 2:24:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, especially BC, right? There's a lot of them up there.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, in BC, in BC, yeah.

• 2:24:08Joe Rogan?

  I have friends that live in Edmonton and boy, they have everything out there. They have little lynx, you see, you run into lynx all the time. You see grizzly bears, they have moose everywhere. It's, it's such a wild place. It's so cool.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  That's what I envy of this America, right? In Europe, you don't see anything.

• 2:24:25Joe Rogan?

  Right. It is an issue. There's almost no predators in Europe. It's very rare that you find wolves, other than, you know, of course, Russia and, you know.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you go east, east.

• 2:24:37Joe Rogan?

  Get a lot of wolves there, but, and bears as well, of course. But they kind of eradicated them all from most of like urban Europe.

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46Joe Rogan?

  America still has a lot of wild places. It's one of the cool things about this country too, is that we have this public land system too. So people can go and visit these wild places.

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there is all this marvelous area, sorts of Arizona.

• 2:25:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  Utah, Utah, New Mexico is just, the south of Utah is just marvelous.

• 2:25:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's incredible. I was actually watching another documentary yesterday on jaguars entering into Arizona. There's, there's quite a few.

• 2:25:16Speaker 01

  You mean the animal, not the car?

• 2:25:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the, the animal, yeah. These jaguars are entering into Arizona and they've spotted several of them now, like pretty large ones. It's pretty interesting. They've decided to make their way back into America because that's where they used to live.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  Where are they coming from?

• 2:25:30Joe Rogan?

  Mexico.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  Oh, coming up?

• 2:25:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, coming up from Mexico. I think they spotted four of them now.

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  This is same as mountain lion?

• 2:25:39Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no, no, much larger. Jaguars are huge. They're the ones that eat crocodiles in the Amazon. They're the ones that dive off of trees and kill the caimans and bite them by the back of the neck and drag them. Ever seen that?

• 2:25:51Speaker 01

  No, never.

• 2:25:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's amazing. You gotta, you gotta watch this.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:25:53Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing. Jaguars are some of the coolest animals to watch hunt. Because one of the things that they hunt is crocodiles. Like, yeah, they love to eat caiman crocodiles. So they hide, they hide in trees and, or on the side of the, the bank, like waiting for the crocodile to get into a vulnerable position and they leap on them. And they dive into the water and leap on them and bite them in the back of the head. They're one of the few animals, this is in the documentary, that kills not by asphyxiation. They kill by crushing the back of the head.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  That's their move.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  So they have super strong?

• 2:26:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're huge. Look at it, look at them sneaking up behind them. They're the third biggest cat.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Wow.

• 2:26:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's how they kill. They bite the back of the neck. They crush the head. And then they drag them away. So he's gonna eat a crocodile.

• 2:26:45Joe Rogan?

  So they're the third largest big cat. So there's tigers are number one. Uh, then there's lions and then jaguars. And so they're starting to make their way back. Oh, it's five. Five jaguars spotted in Arizona.

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  Are they dangerous to humans?

• 2:27:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, not the numbers that they're at right now. Uh, but they would be sure. If you're hiking or you're doing something stupid and you zig where you should have zagged and you run into one of them. I mean, historically, they've eaten people. Uh, they prefer, I'm sure, to eat.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  But you have to do something stupid. You have to bother them.

• 2:27:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, you have to be on their diet. Right? Like, this is the same thing, um, with tigers. Tigers become a problem once they realize they can eat people. And then they habitually eat people.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  And that's what they do in India. When, when, when one tiger starts doing something wrong, they, they go out and look for it.

• 2:27:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Yes. Because then they realize how easy it is. So once, once we become, once we are on the menu, it's like the first time you eat a Chick-fil-A, you're like, this place is great. And you just wanna keep coming back. Um, that's the problem. And it's also for a.

• 2:27:49Speaker 01

  But that's not wise on their side. Because we're, we're weak individually, but we're super strong in group.

• 2:27:55Joe Rogan?

  Right. But they don't know that yet. And a lot of the times, the places where they're hunting, the people are weak individually and not united. Because they're in these very small villages. And so they don't have any resources. They don't have any food, water. They're, they're in trouble already. And then these, you know, animals get them. Tigers get them. But the jaguars, uh, in the United States is such a small number. I don't, I don't think that's the real concern. But the, the, what's interesting is that they're, they've decided to repopulate North America, or the, the United States at least. It's pretty cool. They're making their way back up here. I don't wanna run into one, you know, because they will eat you. I mean, they're huge. They're huge and you have zero chance of stopping them from eating you once they decide they're gonna do that. You don't have a chance with a mountain lion.

• 2:28:40Joe Rogan?

  And they're like double the size of a mountain lion. They're really big. It's a big cat. But they're really beautiful.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  Why are we fascinating so, fascinated so much by big cats? We are, definitely. It's just incredibly. It captures something of our imagination. This is something about the beauty, the strength, their elegance, their everything. It's just that we react to.

• 2:29:05Joe Rogan?

  I think we were hunted by them. I think that was a big part of our early ancestors. But when, when you're dealing with big cats and slow animals, until those slow animals figure out how to make weapons, you're probably hunted by big cats. And this, I think Rupert Sheldrake made this point. It's a really good point. When children go to sleep, they're not afraid of all the things that could actually affect them in an urban environment. Like, they're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or someone gonna break into their house and.

• 2:29:35Speaker 01

  They're afraid of.

• 2:29:35Joe Rogan?

  They're afraid of monsters.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Monsters, which are, which are, which are the big predators.

• 2:29:40Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. They're afraid of monsters even though they've never experienced a monster.

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  There's a theory that according to which, uh, one of the main steps in humankind, becoming humankind, is exactly this, um, passage from being prey to being predators.

• 2:29:58Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:58Speaker 01

  Which had to, to change profoundly their, their mental structures.

• 2:30:05Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30:05Speaker 01

  When we realized that we could resist, uh, big predators and actually becoming predators ourself. Because evolutionary, we were not predators.

• 2:30:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  If you go back again. And our species at some point learned to be like those things we were afraid of.

• 2:30:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  But is that, does this explain the fascinations? Because a monster, it's not just a fear that they, um, uh, generating us. It's also sort of admiration and beauty.

• 2:30:38Joe Rogan?

  Sure. Well, we have admiration and beauty for almost all big predators. Right? We have admiration.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Well, not for, not for crocodiles or.

• 2:30:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  There's a lot beautiful.

• 2:30:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  We might be, we might find it interesting, but not the kind of fascinations with.

• 2:30:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. That's true. There's something about mammals.

• 2:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:56Joe Rogan?

  We're closer to them.

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  We're closer, we're much, much closer to them.

• 2:31:00Joe Rogan?

  And I think.

• 2:31:00Speaker 01

  In fact, it's, it's, I've always been fascinated how much easy we communicate with mammals. Right? It's just.

• 2:31:07Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:31:08Speaker 01

  Uh, without language, without words. But if you are in the wilderness and, and, and what, any sort of mammals, you understand the, the animal and they understand you. So we communicate very easily. It's, it's completely, you know, reading each other emotions and each other intention and their attitude. So it's easy for us to, you know, you go your way, I'm going your way. We don't bother each other.

• 2:31:39Joe Rogan?

  Sure. Unless you're on the menu.

• 2:31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, yeah.

• 2:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you could be on the menu. Especially if you're in the wrong place. But that's just the nature of the wild itself. It's just this constant series of life eating life all around you. Whether it's life eating plant life or life eating other animal life or life eating aquatic life.

• 2:32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Then somehow we became predator, predators at some point in our history.

• 2:32:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  And then we started doing this against one another.

• 2:32:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we probably started doing that from the very beginning. Most likely. We were probably competing for resources.

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  We don't know. We don't know. Right? There's a, there are two theories. Uh, there are two competing theories about what happened to our species. Our species is what, one hundred, two hundred thousand years old? Um, and there are two, two versions of the story. One is that, um, war is something that started very late. Only when, uh, we became agriculture, when we started accumulating and putting away big chunks of grain or. And the other is that, uh, groups of humans were in war even before that. Very different theories.

• 2:33:05Speaker 01

  And I think it's interesting that there are these different theories because it has to do with our future and our present. Namely, uh, is this idea of getting in group once against the other and making war to one another, something which is only a few thousand years old, to result in our genetic structure? It's just that, you know, after agriculture, we, we could steal stuff from one another? Or is something that goes back, uh, all, all the hundred or thousand years of our, our species? We don't know.

• 2:33:40Joe Rogan?

  What do you think?

• 2:33:43Speaker 01

  I, I'm not sure, but I tend to think that, uh, war is recent. Because, um, a lot of the communities on earth which live hunting, gathering, they don't, they don't go to war. They, they have no reason. I mean, it's just a, it's an economical thing. You, you, you only go to war with another group if there is some accumulated, uh, resources you can steal. If you find another group of hunter gatherers, if you, if you have extra meat, you share because otherwise go rotten. There's no point in, in going to, to war. Um, and it's, it's, if you look at our cousins, it's very confusing.

• 2:34:27Speaker 01

  Because bonobo don't fight when two groups, uh, meet. But that, that, that was the fact, we not fight. But chimpanzees do.

• 2:34:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  So, and they're equally related to us. So it doesn't help to look at our cousins, what, what they do. But this is a crucial question. It's, it has to do with the question we discussed before. Can we get rid of war? How, how much war is part of our genetic? Not because we're blocked by our genetic, um, heritance. Uh, but clearly it's much easier to think that we can get rid of it if it's only ten thousand years old rather than, you know, hundred.

• 2:35:10Joe Rogan?

  I tend to think it's hundreds of thousands of years old. And I think chimpanzees are the best example of that. We are much closer in behavior to chimpanzees than we are to bonobos.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  Oh, we are equally related from.

• 2:35:21Joe Rogan?

  We are equally related, but in behavior. But in behavior, we're much closer to the way chimpanzees.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  You know, but I had this.

• 2:35:28Joe Rogan?

  Chimpanzees.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  Heppy part of my life, I identify better with bonobos.

• 2:35:31Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure you do. You're a really nice guy. That's why you think the way you think. And I think it's great.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  You mean, I'm a more bonobo guy? You're more chimpanzee guy?

• 2:35:40Joe Rogan?

  I don't even think I'm a chimpanzee guy. I just recognize that chimpanzees go to war with each other and they kill each other. There's a chimpanzee war going on right now. You know that, right?

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. No, I didn't know, but I know they do.

• 2:35:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a major chimpanzee war going on right now that they're documenting. Have you ever seen that, um, there's a Netflix series, Chimp Nation?

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:35:58Joe Rogan?

  It's really great. It's fascinating. So the way Chimp Nation but came about, and I had the documentary crew on, the guys who created it, was really interesting. They had these scientists that are embedded in this troop of chimpanzees for a long time, for more than twenty years.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  They lived with them?

• 2:36:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes. They lived with them.

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  So the chimpanzee accepted the presence of this?

• 2:36:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes, exactly. So they have rules. You must stay more than twenty yards away from them, never have food on you, and don't make eye contact. And because they've been doing this with this protocol for twenty years, the chimpanzees completely accept the fact these people are there.

• 2:36:32Speaker 01

  They slowly got used and realized that there's no challenge, no threat.

• 2:36:34Joe Rogan?

  They're normal. They're not, completely normalized. So they behave normal around them. And they see all this crazy behavior. They see, first of all, a lot of, uh, inter-tribe conflict. They kill each other. And then they kill ones from other tribes. They leave tribes and start new tribes. It's really interesting. Really interesting. Um, but they behave very much like the way we do. They have a leader. The, the leader's the alpha. The young man challenges the leader. Sometimes the, the guy gets driven out. They form new parties. They come back and try to kill the ones that would, they started out with. They cross boundaries to get new fruit and new trees. And then they, wars over the trees. They, they behave just the way we do, with just at a different scale.

• 2:37:17Joe Rogan?

  Uh, but I think that, like, for instance, we talk about Native Americans and hunter gatherers. The Native Americans were constantly at war with each other. They would go on raiding parties constantly. There was, you know, I don't know how many tribes were in total. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of like 200 tribes in this country, which were constantly battling each other and killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years.

• 2:37:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a pessimist view of humanity.

• 2:37:41Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no, that's what they did.

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  No, no, I...

• 2:37:43Joe Rogan?

  It's not pessimistic.

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  I'm not questioning it.

• 2:37:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's not pessimistic.

• 2:37:46Speaker 01

  What fool a pessimist view of the future.

• 2:37:49Joe Rogan?

  But no, no, no, no, it's not even pessimistic. It's just, I'm just saying that's what they did. Like, this idea that the only reason why this place was at war is because Americans came here or Europeans came here and settled. Not really. The Comanche basically wiped out the Apache in all of this area right here. This area we're at right now was called Comancheria before any settlers. They, they were dominant and they were ruthless. And their favorite thing to do was go on raiding parties. And so they would go and raid other tribes and they would kidnap people and torture people and murder people. And they did that without any influence from the Europeans. And they did that for a long time. And that was all across the country. Now, some tribes got along better with other tribes. There were more agrarian tribes.

• 2:38:34Joe Rogan?

  They were, they varied differently, just like humans do in, in different environments. But at the end of the day, there seems to be a pattern. And when you're talking about uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers, they go to war with uncontacted tribes all the time. You know, I just had a guy on the other day that was talking about cannibalism. And one of the ways they, they would utilize cannibalism is eating their enemies after they killed them. And if they had an enemy that was in a rival tribe and they had an encounter and they killed them, they would eat them. And this is like part of their, their culture. This is all over the world. This is taking place. I think it's much more likely that war is a very, very, very old thing. And it probably has to do with a really harsh environment where we had to survive, where people were stealing from each other

• 2:39:17Joe Rogan?

  and stealing mates and stealing resources and cannibalizing each other.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so you think this is gonna make the project of living in peace much harder?

• 2:39:28Joe Rogan?

  I think it's why it's so difficult currently. I think it's why it's so difficult currently. Because we have a very, very long history of war, of conflict, of chaos and violence. And it's, you know, probably what made us survive this long with the crazy wild world that we, that we live in.

• 2:39:43Speaker 01

  Let me play the optimistic one here.

• 2:39:45Joe Rogan?

  Please do.

• 2:39:47Speaker 01

  One can read this in reverse. Namely, I believe you. I mean, also, you talk with a lot of people, so you have a lot of information about that that I might not have. Say this is true.

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  Now, you and I don't cannibalize each other, right?

• 2:40:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:40:05Speaker 01

  So we have learned. So then, if this is the case, it means that civilization, which is recent stuff with respect to, has had a very strong pacifying effect on us.

• 2:40:18Joe Rogan?

  I agree. And education.

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  Education, civilization. So we learn rationally, rationally, we learn, or, you know, through religion, through various processes. So maybe that process of learning that there is an advantage in collaboration is something that can go, that can develop more.

• 2:40:40Joe Rogan?

  I, I think it can. I think you're right.

• 2:40:42Speaker 01

  And then the question is not going back to our ancient paradise of, of kindness and gentleness, but to create a better world where we can live together better.

• 2:40:51Joe Rogan?

  I think that's the path. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really awesome.

• 2:40:57Speaker 01

  Sure, I loved it.

• 2:40:58Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:40:59Speaker 01

  Better than anything expected. Fantastic.

• 2:41:01Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. On the equality of all things, lessons on physics and philosophy. Do I pronounce your last name Rovelli?

• 2:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, perfect.

• 2:41:12Joe Rogan?

  Carlo Rovelli. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Bye, everybody.