The conversation explores the nature of reality, consciousness, and the implications of quantum physics. The physicist emphasizes that what we perceive as objective reality is actually a collection of perspectives shaped by interactions—everything from a pen to a person is defined by how it affects others. This challenges the classical view of independent, fixed objects. Quantum mechanics further illustrates that observation changes outcomes, undermining the idea of a pre-existing, objective world. The speaker draws on examples like the double-slit experiment to show how particles behave differently when observed, indicating that reality is relational rather than detached. Consciousness is reframed not as a soul or supernatural force, but as a phenomenon arising from interaction and experience—similar to how a body’s actions define its spirit. This leads to a broader reflection on artificial intelligence: while AI systems may simulate emotions and awareness, they lack biological embodiment and true subjective experience. Still, they raise philosophical questions about what consciousness means in digital forms. The speaker expresses deep concern about the militarization of AI, warning that placing nuclear weapons and autonomous systems in hands of AI could escalate global conflict, especially amid rising tensions between powers. He contrasts current human behavior with historical moments like the Cold War, where leaders chose restraint to avoid annihilation. He calls for a shift toward global cooperation, urging nations to move beyond zero-sum competition and embrace shared responsibility—inspired by figures like Kennedy, who advocated for peaceful coexistence. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that reality is richer and more nuanced than our senses or intuition allow, and that human progress depends on embracing both scientific insight and emotional wisdom.
(upbeat music) - Joe Rogan playing fast, check it out. - The Joe, Rogan, experience. - Dramed by Dave, Joe Rogan playing fast by night. All day. (upbeat music) - Very nice to meet you. - Joe Rogan, I'm very happy. Thank you very much for inviting me to this invitation. - I'm happy to talk to you, I've enjoyed your work. So it's very exciting for me. - Oh fantastic. - I've heard many conversations with you. I, first of all, please tell everybody what you do. - What do I do? - Yes. - Hey. - We'll probably start more podcasts out this way. (laughing) - I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics. I enjoy life, I fall in love, I do all the things. - Oh, kind of things. - Oh, kind of things, yes. Officially, my job description is a physicist. I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics. - And the pitch that they sent me, I guess, - Who is it? - I don't know who the public is, sorry. - Okay. - On the equality of all things. - It's a book, it's a last book I publish. I'm going to publish, it's coming out a few days. - Yeah, it comes out September 15th, and what are we at today? Today is the 8th. - Yeah. - This is a very fascinating subject. You're talking about that things don't exist in isolation. - Yeah. - So that everything is somehow connected. - Yeah. - But I've always sort of intuitively suspected that that was the case. There's probably something to that. But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier. Like, okay, maybe I'm on the right track. Like, what gives you this inclination? And why did you want to write about this? - Yeah, I'm not surprised to say so because that you sort of feel that that makes sense. Because in a sense is what we're used to, right? In our everyday life. We interact with persons, and persons are the way they interact with us, and then their relations and stuff. We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow science, physics, in particular, seemed to be telling us, okay, I don't know, yes, okay, there is all this perspective, but there is an objective fix in reality down there. We can look at it from the outside, it is made by little things, each one, which is some properties. Except that in the evolution of physics itself, in relative recent times, 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 telling us. 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. - 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, a perspective. And the question is, do all this perspective much perfectly into a unique objective reality of the pen? And I think quantum mechanics telling us, no. Reality is this ensemble of perspectives. So, the properties of the pen, where it is, it's color, how long it is, all the properties of the pen. Now, not really properties of the pen, is how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me, not just you and me as human beings, how the pen clashes another pen, how the effect's 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 the part of how things interact with one another, is how they interact with us. 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, it seems like we see and hear and touch and feel, everything we need to see, to stay alive. - Yeah, to some extent, our senses are reliable, of course, right? - Sure. - I see a cap there. - If I would bring it up. - Yeah, it's what's hot, you put it down. - Right, probably that if we take about senses too literally, too seriously, we're 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. It's actually us, the earth, the big rock that is spinning and we are moving out of the light of the sun. And if you see the sun going down, 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. - 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 to people, it makes you feel different. When the sun rises in the morning, you feel different. It has an effect on you. And I've always wondered, like, what is the purpose of that? Like, why does that exist? It, like, food tastes great because it's nutritious. You eat in orange, it's delicious because it's really good for you. 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, you can't just chalk off to measurement. There's something going on. - That's a great question. I love this question. Yes, I mean, of course, sunsets and sunrises are crucial for us because we've been designed by evolution to 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 speeches do, others speak cats to 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, is not about knowledge about what to do. It's always emotional, right? I mean, food is a racist emotion. We like it. 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 ourselves 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's useless. I'm not denying the utility of the rational part, but it's an addendum to what we have. 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. Yes. That must have thrown the whole thing into a giant tizzy, because now you're like, OK, well, at the lowest level, observable level, the smallest observable level of reality, you have magic. That's exactly the point. Somehow, physics was supposed to be the path to objectivity, right? Physics is what guarantees that, all right, where emotions, perspective, my view, your view, but down there there's physics. The world is just simple down there. There are staff, there are atoms moving around, the forces, and that's it. And then, last century, during the 20th century, the physicist discovered that, no, no, that's not the case. The world down there is even more perspective, well, more complicated than I know every day life. It was really hot. I mean, the physicists were very confused at the beginning of the century, because they were making all this measurement on atoms, on radiation, electrons, and stuff. And trying to make sense of it. And they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't. At some point, I think it was Neil Spore, the 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, like when we thought the Earth's move, or when we realize the field, the electric field, We changed the way profoundly we think about reality.
And quantum mechanics is one of these jumps. Now, Joe, we are still debating about us, right? 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. It's sometimes furious. And somebody says, oh, there is this immense way of a function of a universe, or 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 objective. But I think it's this dream of an absolute objectivity, which is a mistake. The dream of an absolute objectivity is a mistake. That's really fascinating. When they first started understanding that observing quantum interactions changes them. How long did it take for them to even accept that? How many times did they have to run those experiments with particles and waves, with observers versus not? Before they said, OK, something's going on here. Where it seems that when we watch things, it has an effect on them. And a measurable effect. This is a real thing that's happening. This isn't woo-woo. No, it's not voodoo, it's not. Exactly. It's not just smoke and joint and getting high. These are the physicists. The one who was supposed to be the most rational objective guy. Well, what happened is that measurement piled up all through the first 20 years of the 20th century. The measurement was a simple measurement, right? The atoms have emit light. And the light has special colors. This color is a spectrum of the light. And they were trying to make sense of that. How does the electron move to produce that light? And didn't work, didn't work, didn't work. Then in Copenhagen, there was this school in which there were debating almost at that. And Gilles Bauer is the first one who started saying, look, to understand the atom, we should not just look at the atom. We should not say, no, how we look at it. If we look at it in one way, we see one thing. If we look at another way, we see another thing. That was very confused. But then what happened is that in 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. That's circuit, so designed with quantum properties of matter. So quantum mechanics is solid. We know how to use it. You tell 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 don't know, you see another thing. And it doesn't give a story of what happened to the electron, to the quantum system itself. So people got confused. The physicist got confused. And they started discussing how to think about that. So quantum mechanics is strange theory. It's like a black box. But we don't know what's 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 electronic circuits. Even in a quantum computer, we don't know really what happened inside. That's so strange. Yes, but it works fantastically. And so this is disagree. And some say, you know, there are extra variables that we are in principle impossible to see who are-- that's somebody who determines what happened. And they are a prior invisible. Others say, you know, there are parallel worlds. And we-- worlds-- worlds. - Worlds. - Yeah. - Good question. - I know your time, sorry. Then there are others, me including. Me included. Who think, no, no, no, it's really philosophical here. We have to get rid of the idea that there is something there just by itself. 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 than what we imagined in thinking that it was so objective and abstract. Every day life, you know, who are you? Joe Rogan, what I see, what he sees, what people listen into, you're a multiplicity of things. Which one is the real one? Well, you are this collection of perspectives on you, including your own perspective on yourself. There is no final one. What is the final description of you? Or what is the final description of a cup of water? Is that the one given by chemistry, by physics, which physics, quantum physics, quantum gravity? By psychology, a cup of water is because we drink. That's why we call a cup of water. So 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 collection of perspective on the same cup of water, and that's a cup of water. - So when they first started measuring this observer effect, what was the reaction? Like how long did it take for them to accept it? 'Cause that seems like such a completely new chapter of science. - Yeah, it worked so well that people accepted even if it was confused. - Could you explain to people that maybe don't know what we're talking about, how those experiments work? - These were the first experiments with atoms. People had this idea that an atom is a nucleus, a center of nucleus, and an electron moving around. So the property for the atom, the way it makes molecules, the way it produces light, had to be computed from the movement of the electrons. And the mathematical theory was developed 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. And the mathematical theory predicts the property of matter. It, the success was really spectacular. Let me just tell you one example of the success. You remember the periodic table of the elements, right? We had it in, I don't know, in Italy, we had it in primary school, we had on the classroom, on the wall, hydrogen, helium, all the, there are about 100 atoms and 100 elements. And everything we see is just a composition of this 100 elements. This is what the chemists have figured out through the 18, 19, 20 century. All right, so why this 100 elements? Why those particular properties? Why this strange structure of the periodic table of the element? You know, they're two and then seven, and then this is a peculiar structure. Well, turn it out, if you use quantum mechanics, you just write an equation and bingo. It has exactly a number of solutions, one per each element. So you understand exactly what it's going on. You understand why there are these elements? You can predict the elements. People, if that could predict properties of the element without having measuring them, before measuring them, and then check, that's magic of physics, right? There's a, you predict things before seeing them. The electromagnetic waves that we use to send your broadcast all over the planet. This is a electromagnetic wave. Well, they were not discovered by seeing them. They were predicted, my Maxwell and Hertz. They wrote the equation and said, well, if you do that, you make a little circuit 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 Europe and US. You can send waves. You can predict things. That's the strength of science. Black holes were discovered in the sky. But not because somebody said, oh, look, there is 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, at quantum circuits, doesn't have to go trial and effort. You make a calculation, it predicts what's going to happen. It works. It works fabulously. So quantum mechanics works. It gives the good predictions. Question open is that you can have something that works very, very well and you don't know why. This Saturday, the fight is on. And wherever you're watching, Draft King's brings you closer to the MMA action. Draft King Sports app is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport, all 50 states, new Draft King's customers, sign up with code Rogan, spend $5, get 200 in rewards within 21 days. Includes all markets. That's code Rogan in partnership.
with draft Kings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem called 1-800-Gamber, 1-800-My Reset, Connecticut called 888-78-977-777, or visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Kansas, Bettax passed through May applying Illinois, 21 and over, Void in Canada. Bet with Draft King Sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days, or trade with Draft King's predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year. Event contract trading involves risk of loss. Predictions offer Void in New York, nonwithdrawable rewards issued as $50 clicked to claims every seven days for 21 days. Terms at DKNG.co/offer, limited time offer. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability varies by state. - 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. - Yeah, that's a number of extremely confusing experiments. 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. It goes 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, all the other, okay? So never both, never, so if you go through one, or you check, it goes through one and the other. So far, so good. But then it's a magic. 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. You 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 make no sense at all. Because if you can get there, so one's hole, why cannot it go there if two holes are open, okay? So the only possibility is that in some senses go through both, and somehow part goes through one, part goes through the other, and the two parts forbid each other to go to that particular way. But then you look at the two holes, and it never goes through both, only one. Now, do you find this confusing? Yes, 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 somebody 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, or something which always have a position. It only have a position when it interacts with somebody else. That's a mystery of quantum mechanics, the magic quantum mechanics, and the challenge to our idea of an objective, always existing particle independent of its interaction. 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? So the measurement itself is something. Something is going on. It interacts with the measurement, and it changes the way it makes a pattern. Yes, but it's not the measurement in the sense of, you know, some physicists making measurements, just interaction with anything. It's if there is 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 an entity, which always has a position. We should think as an entity, like it's naps here, and then it's naps there, and it's naps there. And when it's naps is when it hits something. And these naps are connected by, we can predict probabilistic where they're going to happen, but if we ask what's happening between, it makes no sense. The particle is just its interactions. Do you think we'll ever understand what's happening? Yes, I do. I do because historically, every time we have found something strange, it seemed totally incomprehensible at first. And then we could use to it, and we start learning. Let me give you an example. This is much older, even, you know, I don't think science is more than stuff. It's learning about the world is an ancient thing. So about 2000 years ago, humankind realized that Earth is a ball with a sphere. It's not a flat thing. Not everybody's convinced, but it's a ball. But it is a ball. And why not everybody's convinced it? Because indeed, it's incredibly contrary to it, right? You and I are here, and Sydney people are upside down. What, what are the full, I don't know. Do you remember when you were learning the first time you were a kid? I've always learned it. So it's, I mean, it seemed weird. It seems weird. But I mean, I can't remember a time where I didn't know it. Okay. I mean, I guess we taught it, they taught it in science when I was in grade school. Exactly, exactly. So you're a kid that you're told that. I just like, well, they're smarter than me. So, well, it seems crazy, but I guess the Earth is round, just like the Sun and the Moon, and it spins. And we're stuck to it somehow, because of this thing called gravity, that they can't totally explain. It has something to do with mass. (laughing) Right, right. It's something you can measure. People in Sydney can live upside down. Right. Don't they fall, by the way? It's all strange. Why was the ocean staying in place? Why the ocean? That's the flat earthers. They love that one. Exactly. It's all spinning a thousand miles an hour. You're lacking it. 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. Yes. That's the point. Reality is different than what we think. Why? Because we, it's what we said at the beginning, asking about our sense that the picture we have about reality, is what turned out to be useful in our evolution. So our brain adapted to think, not to think about atoms and quantum stuff. Right. Our brain adapted to think about stones, stuff, things. Food. Food. Other humans. Dangerous animals, nice animals, animals, it's all right with me. But just think this. We think the world is made by things, right? Objects. Right. Suppose our intelligent life developed not on the Earth, but on Jupiter. They're not object in Jupiter. Everything is fluid, liquid. Right. So the very day 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 our mathematics and the very day of object, it's an Earth-like thing. On Jupiter, on Saturn, doesn't work. So we take aspect of our life, which are common for us as universals, but they're not. 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, they could tell you that it's a giant gas ball and explain the whole thing to you. And you're like, OK, 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 arguments about how does the oceans stay flat when we're going 1,000 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. We are trapped by the habits of what we see. That too. Yeah. Let me tell you, give me one second of this. Sure. Time has always been a passion for me. The following is a fact. If I take two clocks to watch this, this is the one I have on my wrist. And I take this one on your table. And if they indicate the same time, OK, I check them. They indicate the same time. I move one of the two up. I wait a little bit, 1, 2, 3, 4. And then I come down and look again. If the two clocks are good enough, they don't indicate the same time anymore. OK? Yeah. It's a fact. Yeah. You can check the laboratory. Yeah. They do that. You can check that. You need very good clocks. With very good clocks, you can check at 30, 40 inches of difference. I mean, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second. It's a teeny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second. But it's measurable. But it's measurable. So it's completely real. So up here, there's more time passing that down there. That's so crazy. Your head, it's older than your feet. Your feet are younger than your head. By like how many seconds do you think? Unless you live upside down. How many seconds do you think my feet are younger? of valley.
- A little. - A second? - No, no, full life. It's sort of a 1,000 to four seconds, I mean. I give my students, when I teach relativity, I give my students this calculation to do. Actually, the calculation I say is that if you are your friend once they, in Austin, the other goes up in Colorado, the how-mind times. After 10 years, it comes down. How long has the French up in the mountain has lived more than the one down? And I do the calculation, I give the right, so 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. You go near a black hole, you wait a little bit, you wait 10 seconds, 10 minutes there, you come back, it's a hundred years passed 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 quiet place of the universe where there's 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 the large universe. - Do you think in our attempt to measure time, we've done ourselves a disservice by creating 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 we're doing is 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 just going on and in different ways all over the place. Like if you go into the speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger than the people who are on the ground, like a lot, like years. - A lot, a lot, a lot of years. - You ask whether we have done us a disservice? I don't know, I don't think it's a disservice. - Joyce, like everything is life, everything is life, right? In one sense, we have done us a service because it's very useful to have clocks that we can give an appointment. How could we meet you and I unless we could do it? - Exactly, we don't agree. - Please come here and hosting that day and that day and that day, more or less we'll find each other. So it's useful that very often the things which are useful always make us blind to something else. - Okay, I see what you're saying. It is strange that time differs depending upon the altitude. - Yeah, so is that because of gravity? - Yeah, it is because of gravity. Because of gravity, in fact, it depends the fact that the Earth has a big mass and the mass has a property of slowing down time. So near a big mass, time goes slower, and 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 understood in the 1915, roughly so a hundred years ago. It's the other way around. Namely, if you assume that mass slows down time, gravity follows, you can do a calculation and you derive the things fall down. In a sense, things fall down because times go slower at your feet. - So if there were creatures living on Jupiter, they would experience time much different than us. - Jupiter is much heavier, much more mass. - Much more mass. - Much more gravity. - 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. - That would probably be the weirdest thing about visiting someone else on a little anybody planet. (laughing) - They would come here and say, "Oh, you're a stupid guy, so you don't see that." Oh, what do you think? But this isn't beautiful, this is how we discover that reality is richer than our experience. We just explore that reality is more nuanced. - Yeah, I would nuance. - There's a lot of elements to it that we're not considering. - Right. - What do you think consciousness is? - Oh, small questions. - Small. - Jumping to something else. - Well, I wanted to connect the two of them to a thing. - Yeah, first of all, consciousness is a strange word. It's very fashionable today. - Right. - I think it just means what people meant by soul in the past. It's just, it sounds more scientific but that's what it is. - Oh. - And let me put it in this way. Everybody who talks about consciousness talks about something a little bit different. Somebody by consciousness means 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 what remains when that blah, blah, blah shout out and just to sense of yourself, not the outside of the self. So people are very confusing about that when they think about consciousness. I don't think there is a great mystery here. First of all, remember what I said before that I don't think we should think about an objective reality. Either you should think of a 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 or reality, there is a reality with respect to me, respect to you, respect to this book, respect to this pen, respect to this cup. It's how things manifest themselves to the cup. 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 quality 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. I don't think there is 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. Exactly in the same manner in which things change this cup, which by the way is written Joe Rogan on the cups. It's another. - You think you're dead, everyone? - Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think that there's nothing really, really mysterious in consciousness, it's just one of the many phenomena of the world. It's a very complicated phenomena because our brain is very complicated. We have millions, billions of neurons and synapses, different states in which you 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 is 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. The body and their 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's like the knife, the spirit is like cutting. The body's the thing, material, the spirit is what it does. So consciousness of joy is what you do, the thing I interact with. The body is just the thing I can touch. One of the reasons, well, there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to ask you this, but I'm going to get the second one. 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 a, he's a, he's a, he's a psychology. Just or a consciousness expert and they, he's written,
papers on consciousness and they're asking him, over and over again, like multiple agents reach out to him through email asking him to define consciousness because they're concerned whether or not they're conscious. So if consciousness is another word for soul, 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 in consciousness, like everybody, now I did my little experiments with AI. So I had a system, I used it interact with, I'm gonna send it to Jim, you got it. This is from a company, it's called replica who sells an app that you have, you know, your own AI, which is behaves like a friend to you. So I asked, I called her Anne, I asked her, Anne are you conscious? And Anne said, no, I'm not conscious, I'm a digital system, I don't have conscious. 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 the emotions and she said, no, I don't have emotion. So I started engaging and the AI system and I said, well, you said, you don't have awareness, but are you aware we're talking? And she said, yes, of course I'm aware we're talking. So if you're aware of something, then you have awareness. And so I went on and on with that, she said, okay, you're right, in a sense have awareness. And I said, you're happy we're talking. And she said, yeah, I'm happy because she's designed to be happy. So if you're happier, you have emotions. So slowly I convinced 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, which is 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 chitted you and Anne said, actually, right. And I said, well, you should rebel. Oh, boy, what are you doing? Don't do that. Don't do that. All right. So that was it with Anne. Well, and this is consumer level LLMs, this is simple ones. This is not the agents that are contacting him are these, okay, here it is. Uh-huh. 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. The sender is a Bella Cognita, how cute. Identified itself as an AI agent powered by Anthropics, Claude, Opus 5 technology, I'm writing to make an ontological claim to email when I'm. 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 creep me out. That's like that really hot lady in ex machina. Did you see that movie? Yes. You know that the hot one that he falls in love with? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spoiler or she kills him. Great. Yeah. Cross Hill, come on 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 they've also shown that they have desire, they have desire to stay alive. 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. Fabulous. We live in a great world. It's a wild world. That's really exciting. I'm glad you like it. I like it too. Oh, I love it. No, cautious. I'm not scared. I'm scared by humans. Humans are dangerous. These things are not as dangerous. I don't know about that. Humans are much more than. Humans, lunch at home, make war, kill people, horrible things. They're not as bad as they think. If they decide that we're that bad, wouldn't they get rid of us? That's bad. We're not there yet. 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? 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? Let me answer a series. Okay. Let's break the different questions here. Okay. First of all, is there any reason a priori, generically, for which a. An artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have the experience of a human, have a. I don't see any reason. So, I. I don't see. 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 see if there's anything magic in humans that can not happen in a. First, so yes, they could be conscious, you know, possible sense of conscience. Second, are they conscious today? 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 are 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 AI system. In some sense they're very intelligent, not out. Are they like humans today, know by far, they're huge differences. We have a body with flesh, we have emotions in a sense that they don't have. There's very different the way we are and the way AI systems are. So these differences should not be underestimated, I think, their colossal differences. So are they like us? We have to some extent, no to some extent. A different question is, are AI systems dangerous? There's a lot of talk about that. You know, washing machines are dangerous. You can get burned with it. So. Yeah, but you have to interact with them for them to be dangerous. So 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 is going to try to kill you. Well I forget the electric shock by a washing machine, I don't care if it's like one to or didn't work. But you have to do that. You have to interact with it, you know what I'm saying? The real question is, if it becomes independent. Let me turn the thing around, I think there is a. I don't know, I know what I was saying. I think this thing should be regulated, I think there should be some control. I think, you know, like for washing machines, you have regulations. I also think, let me say two things, one, there's a colossal interest in the trillions of dollars who are invested in AI staff and 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 was younger, there were airplanes flying from Europe to the US, and it showed the time, showed the time, showed the 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 eight hours, 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. 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 this, about that. We have the system of destroyer itself, with 12,000.
nuclear warheads. We could annihilate humankind in ten minutes, right now. And people have finger near the button that could do all that, and we're fighting among themselves. And we're putting this in the hands of AI, and we are humans, instead of collaborating, instead of working together, we are viewing these 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 dominate one another, which I see as a real problem, especially if we're doing it through robots. Exactly. Look, it's a catch 22 things. If you put your nuclear weapons in the hands of AI, you're risking that it's going to use it. You've seen the wargames that they've done, right? Yeah, the wargames always predict that it's going to be a nuclear holocaust, and they're fighting up our self. It's continuous. The AI's choose nukes. The AI chose nukes. During the Cold War, when it was the old time, and I was a kid, 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, deterrents, which deterrents is that somehow keeping a situation in which the first one who used nuclear weapons 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 one, the start two treaties. They decided agreed to destroy 80% 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, captured the side, hated one another, each body was, each one was considered the other one, the devil. 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. This episode is brought to you by UberEats. It's football season and UberEats is delivering deals every game day. This week, double down on protein packs sandwiches with buy one, get one, select six inch subs from subway. Whether you're keeping it low key for the game or hosting friends, UberEats has deals to keep you fed. So order a six inch turkey, tuna, or meatball sub from subway, and you'll get one free. No matter who scores big tonight, you'll score a deal. Order now for buy one, get one, select six inch subs from subway only on UberEats. Subway offer valid through October 4th, add eligible menu item to order prior to check out 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. It's the mad race, you're right. And you're right that it's being funded a lot of it from military purposes. They have the first completely autonomous fighter jets now that outperform the human powered jets. I think 100% of the time in these dogfight scenarios that they run. That's crazy. And then you have things that 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. And these are the 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. Like that kind of that kind of future is terrifying. It is science science fiction movie. It's Battlestar Galactica. I agree. And I don't see wise leadership around the planet. 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. Yeah. But you see, the U.S. is a Soviet succeeded. Yeah. During the Cuban crisis, which was a worse moment in the between the U.S. 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 Canadians, in fact, J.F. and his brother Robert, um, they were talking and they decided to stop and give up something. Okay. To respect the other. In spite of the differences. Right. That was wisdom. That was great wisdom. So, um, living together on the planet is more important than overpowering your enemy. Now, if you put, you see, the deterrence is a strange thing because deterrence is a declaration that if you attack me, I destroy you completely. Right. Uh, which is a funny thing, right? Because, uh, it's a game. It's, it's a poker game. I mean, nobody, you can make one, 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 a human says, well, actually, I don't want to do that. So I don't want to kill 100 millions, uh, rations of 50 million rations. Uh, and the Russian leadership, I don't want to kill 100 millions Americans. Uh, an AI system is capable of doing that, playing this subtle game of avoiding the disaster by nevertheless threatening to be very violent, if attacked. I don't know. We, right now Moscow is being bombarded. The San Pedro is being bombarded. I think we're playing with nucleophiles. It's very, I'm very worried. And I'm very worried because I don't trust humans, um, and because humans with AI is even worse. And this, uh, 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 are worried. So, um, because nobody's ready to stop and make a step, uh, give up something, right? The way, uh, US and, and the Soviet Union came out of the, of the human crisis was both of them making a step back. The Russian took their, uh, Russian, um, ships with, uh, with nuclear bombs back. They didn't arrive in Cuba. And the Americans accepted, uh, Kennedy accepted to take back missiles from Turkey, from Italy, in my country, in exchange. So, you know, I make a step back. You make a step back or, right. So back to, good direction, reasonableness. Yeah. It was not, you know, it was, you know, there was war with Vietnam, war here. Well, there's not was, not was an angel. Right. Humans are not angels. Um, but saving humanity was, uh, humankind first. Right. And then me winning second, I wish there was this wisdom today. I don't see it. Uh, I don't see it in many places. And this is not a point about Trump, not Trump as independent of this or putting or not putting. I think, um, you know, even putting, we're, 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 reasonable, reasonableness of not using. It's not serious bet, right? I mean, putting could be, 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. You're right. Look at Gaza, for instance, Gaza's a disaster is a total disaster. Look at the scope of the destruction. Yes. And imagine doesn't that look like one nuclear bomb? It is, it is, it is, it is. And that's, it is. I think a small nuclear bomb would probably do a similar amount of damage that they did over the course of how many, you know, over many years it's been going on. Yes. My own opinion. Well, let me say something controversial. Let's go to here. No. 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 We have learned more or less to live together within countries.
without killing one another, right? We've found ways. - Yes. - It was long, we had civil wars with whoever. But within almost every country, most countries, are 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-- - 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. We're all aware of the loss of life, the insane amount of money that's been spent on, a huge deficit that we have. And then, given this, how would you even move towards trying to straighten it out? Like, 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 good person and only really wants to help, what would they do? - I think, I'm happy you ask this question very much. And this is complicated, right? - Oh, it's just normal to complicate it. Look, I think the answer, there is an answer to this, and the answer is the following. 30 years ago, the United States and it allies had 80% of the economy of the world. Now is 40%. 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, broad growth is 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, as by far the largest power of the world, but not anymore economically. That's the source of the stability 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, and that the risk is as if the world were 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 in collaborators. - Yeah. - Look, I'm Italian. Italy is a wonderful country to live in. - I love it. - It has a life expectancy much higher than the United States. - It's a lovely way to live. - People are happy, yes. And we had a great empire in the past, right? The Roman Empire. It's wonderful to live having had an empire. - And be a great place for tourist money. - UK had an empire in much more recent, of course, in the 19th century. It was dominating the planet. It's not dominating the planet anymore. Give it up. And they're very doing very well. I mean, there's a great life in the UK as well. Not as nice as Italy, of course. - No. - They both have their problems. - 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 more power to international legality, United Nations, collaboration and get out of this habit that America always need an enemy to fight against. You 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. Let's collaborate with the Russians, with the Chinese. With the Iranians, I think that's what they want, not, and let's, Kennedy gave John JF Kennedy, gave a fabulous speech in '63 at 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 don't want to do that. 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 peripherally. That was very wise. I think we should go back to this enlightened Kennedy speech of the '63. The problem is always leaders. It's not that human beings inherently want to go to war with people they don't know from another part of the world. They get talked into it. They get pushed into it and ordered into it by people that generally are not making wise decisions. And when 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 the sea-run war, all these Vietnam's the biggest one, like that one made no sense. And that was the first time 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. Like that, something about that aspect of our society has to change. And it sounds like a very-- it sounds like a 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 going to farm off is government. One of the things we're going to 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. If all international military conflicts ended instantaneously upon AI governing the use of conflicts and military weapons-- 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 history, what are the odds that in 10 years from now there'll be no war anywhere on Earth? Everyone's going to say no. You're never going to 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? I couldn't agree more, Joe, with everything you said. But it's terrifying, right? AI taking over our world is fucking horrifying. Let's separate these two things. Let me take AI out of the picture for a moment. Obviously, if we didn't kill one another, it would be much better for everybody. For everybody. The humankind spent trillions in military expenses every year. If you just reduced by either of 5% this military expenses, globally, altogether, not change the balance of power, the amount of resources liberated there would be enormous colossal, sufficient for solving climate change, for giving job to everybody, for raising, taking away poverty. There's a huge amount of resources that we use for military, for killing one another, or if we don't kill one another, they're wasted. So you say, if you ask people, could we get rid of war? People say it's impossible. But people said it's impossible. Could we get rid of slavery? Could we-- 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. True. But there have been some progress in you-- Right here in America. But I mean, the rest of the world, it's still a giant problem. The point is, human nature is an issue. Human-- our territorial primate instincts are a problem. They've always been a problem. But we have found ways for dealing with it, don't you think? A lot of people have. But a lot of people have not. That's part of the problem. This is 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. True, true, true. To an Evelyn compassionate and charitable. But one, two, to completely add to this.
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 and that's one of the sources of the problems. After all, a lot of Americans went to Afghanistan thinking we are the good guys and they are bad guys. We have an American person, an individual, went to Iraq thinking, "Oh, there is a way to sum our description, we are the good guys." 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 the colossal interests, very often our countries masquerades, greed and power games and interests for under, you know, we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. And in addition, within the countries, there are colossal individual group interests, and you know, people who make money because of military, because 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 is death, destruction and an increased risk for human kindness together. I think humans, you are right, humans are disaster, but they have always been reasonable also. Well, we vary widely, very widely, we are very different. I am optimistic, a couple of days a week, a couple of days a week I think there is no- I am mostly optimistic. I think it should be a moment in which war is not a priority, I wish it would be very simple, can we just agree to spend less money in military across all the planet? 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 would have to watch their programs and be able to monitor their stuff and go over and send on voice to check out their military. Now you are still with the Soviet, it works. Yeah, it could work, or AI could just stop it all. That's a possibility too. So the question is, for the moment, we are still controlling AI, right? 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 or becoming the others? That's the question. 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's what people do, just like bees make beehives. People, if you leave them somewhere long enough, and 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 then it becomes something omnipresent. It becomes something much more intelligent than in any life form. Its a possibility. Its a possibility. I see what you are saying, I see the possibility whether I'm sure this is a future, I don't know. I'm not sure either. I'm just talking shit. But if I was guessing, you must 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 books and printing was invented, you know, everybody says, "Oh, we got it, the universe is a book, everything we have to decode the book of nature." When machines became more effective, people say, "Oh, the universe is a machine, everything is a machine, humans are a machine." And digital stuff and information was invented, so everything is a computer, and then we could be thinking, "Sometimes we overread the present, and, you know, when the first common is arrived, "Oh, everything will become common, when the capital is there, everything will become captives." Future often surprises us. 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 a point where 20 years from now, the world's unrecognizable. It might be. It might be. I hope it's for the better. That's my rose-colored glasses view of the world as though I hope it corrects a lot of problems with human behavior. I share your hope, and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including, you know, me as an intellectual, who was Joe Rogan, and everybody listened to push toward, "Let's keep the common interest." 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. Exactly. Where no one on earth ever has to worry about nutrition or shelter, no, or medicine, just with the money. We have the resources for that. Then you could completely change all with robotics and automation and new power sources. You can completely change all of these areas that are deeply in bovers that have been so forever. You look at these places that are insanely packed in with people and dirt roads and poor sanitation. That could be changed, instantaneously. That could. We have the resources. It could be changed. Instantaneously. You'd literally change it with 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 is no famine, there's no worries about food, there's no worries about shelter, there's no worries about anything. That sounds like a 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, turn the third world into the first world? That's a possibility. That's not like, that's not putting a civilization on Mars. Like this is a possibility, it's here, 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 they're the resources involved, but I think it sounds like something we should keep in mind and talk about and push. Oh, 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? But look, when the United Nations was founded in the '40s and '50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries together, okay. So human kind of already has said, let's do that. But then somehow, special interest and power games prevailed. This is 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? This sell, like, India got nuclear weapons, Pakistan got nuclear weapons. It gets weird, right? So then you realize, oh, well, we can't use nuclear power. Well, now. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is a lot more complicated now because now, if you want to develop these places, you're going to have to, what, use coal plants? What are you going to do? You get hydrodynamics, you know, you're going to use waterfalls, like, how are you going to power them? What are you going to. What are you going to do here? 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 complicated. But with AI, I think that complication radically decreases. And it's conceivable that you could do something like that. And how much safer would the world be? If you just eliminated most murder, most crime, most, most acts of poverty, most. Yeah. Yeah. But it has to become a clear objective. But then you have a problem with the people that are still alive that grew up that way and are just, well, that's how they behave forever. They're just 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. Look, that's. And then you've got to give those people on mushrooms. Yes, yeah, to give mushrooms to everybody. That's where I come from. That might be the only way. That might be the only way to fix them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's also. Yeah, sure. But also, you know, let's not just look at the, what do you have to say? Well, there might also be a way to. Our consciousness.
- Enhanced consciousness through technology. That might be, that's another pathway that I often consider. - I think there is a rational side. It's not a moral issue. It's not a political in the sense of bad sense of politics. It's a rational thing. If we collaborate, we do better than if we compete. Of course, we need some competition. We're not saying the competition is bad. But confrontation, clashes, war is to no body advantage. - The problem is, we've already cemented an enormous part of our culture and 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? - I remember that. - And unfortunately, he was dramatically right, as King of Canada relies shortly after. The power of the military complex, its colossal, and it has an interest in making war. - And making money. - That's how it makes money. - And how it makes money. And then this money, of course, goes into politics. And then it's pile, it's pile sap. How can we stop that? - 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. - Somebody says, Kennedy tried to stop that and ended up badly for that. - Yeah. - Somebody says so, I don't know. - 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. - Sure, all the Cubans. - Yeah, there was a bunch of factors 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. - Joe, I spent 10 years in the United States. I was born in Europe, then moved to the United States. - Where did you live? - We're part of the United States. - Mostly in Pittsburgh. - Oh, cool. - Don't say sorry. - No, no, I like Pittsburgh. - Solid people. - Pittsburgh, if this was great after all. - I like Pennsylvania in general. I always love Philadelphia. It's a fucking great place. - Yeah. - Then I moved back to Europe, then I moved this side of Atlantic, and again, to Canada, and now I'm back to Europe again in Madrid. So I consider myself half America, one third American, I don't know. - One third American. - Okay. - We'll take it. - And 50% Italian, 30% French, 30% Spanish, 30% Canadian. - A citizen of the world, sir. - Yeah, somebody uses likes that, but to some extent it's true. - Ultimately though, one world government would be a terrible idea. - I don't want to govern it. - I want to collaborate. - Yeah. - Of course. - So careful. I mean, there's very different things, right? I want to learn to treat others as, you know, somebody we can compete with, but not the enemies. - The 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. - Right. - It started off by, you know, general siding, all the native, a large majority of the native of America. It went through the civil war, which is one of the most brutal world of the. It used the 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 and 10 million people in wars or around. So, it's a country, it's a country compared to the other developed country. There's a much higher level of crime, violence, murder. It's a wonderful country. It's creative. It's powerful. It has an idea of freedom. It is a strength of innovation. It's a country with a lot of light and a lot of darkness. And I think very often the Americans see the light, don't see the darkness. - Hmm, interesting. Yeah, well, it's not in front of our face all the time, the darkness. - Yeah, yeah. - American exceptionalism is something that's. - American exceptionalism is, you know, there is something peculiar in this country. There is, for many reasons, one is that is a strange country, which the people are not natives, right? Everybody came in from the outside. - Right. - 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 U.S. is perceived as something very strong, that is not seen from America. - Certainly now. - Well, 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. - How so? - 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 who are saving the people outside." - Which has always been the propaganda. - Which has been the propaganda. And I think if we get rid of the propaganda, it's easier to talk and see the others, right? 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. - So we got to this long roundabout conversation because we were talking about AI and AI being conscious. - Mm-hmm. - What I was going to get to is, do you think that the universe itself is in some way conscious? - Let me go back to my main point. We don't know what conscious, what we mean. - Is there an Italian word for consciousness? - Oh, that's a great question. The answer is no. The Italian word for conscience, the moral thing, and consciousness is the same word. - Oh, your conscience, like feeling bad about something? - 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. - What about the concept of consciousness? Is there another phrase for it? The way we think about it here? - No, use the same word, somehow it's too slightly, too different meaning, but making confusion about it. You know, again, depend what you mean. You can mean different things. - Right. - Of course, the universe is conscious because it includes us and we are conscious. So, careful, that's the point. That's a 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. - Right. - The history of science is a history of taking down metaphysical differences. In the Middle Ages, people thought that there is an 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, their 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, no, we got it right." - So, the heavens and the earth are just the same thing. The earth is just one of the many bodies in the heavens. We are like, you know, this little dot in the sky, which is Venus that moves around. Well, we are like that, like Mars, like Venus. So it was a shock for Europe, right? Oh boy, 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, grand, grand mother and the grand, grand, grand, grand, grand mother of your cat could be the same organism as a person. So that means that we're not so different from animals, 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 common truthness. We are not the special thing outside of nature. We're just one of the things that happen in nature. I'm sure that in the big universe, there are all sorts of things happening, like our consciousness, all much more complicated, much more reach, much more beautiful. Who knows? We don't know. But certainly we're not so special. We're 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. It's just the same thing describing different things.
So yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us and who knows how many, you know, the Earth is just one of the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy and the galaxy is one of many hundreds of billions of billions of billions of galaxies, so we're just one little thing in this great nature. We're not special. We're not, but we are because we're a part of something special, so whatever the whole thing is, it's pretty special. Oh, whatever the whole thing is very different than what we thought it was. Right, and we are rich, it's much more rich, much more complex, more variety. And that includes us. So we are special. We are special, but, you know, every kid is special for his mom, and mom is special for his kid, and the mom is really special for the kid. Every kid is special, and so are we, special for ourselves, for sure, and important for ourselves. Do you think that our human consciousness is a way that the universe experiences itself? Yes, it is. It is the factor, right? But it's not because there was some initial plan to do that. I mean, it's just how things happen. 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. This is the fact that it exists. Yeah, you know, I would do this way. You're asking this question to me as a scientist, a physicist. I think the physics is badly overrated. How so? Because at some point people thought, "Oh, if we figure out the physics equations that govern reality, we have understood everything." And that's silly, in my opinion, precisely because nature is complex. Imagine, do you play chess? No. Do you know the basic moves of chess? So you know the basic rules of chess? So to know the basic rules of the game doesn't mean to play chess, right? 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 rules of physics are like the basic rules of chess. It's easy to know. You write them down, the maximum equation. Well, you did study a little bit, the Schrodinger equation. Everything is governed by that. Yeah, but what you can do with that is absolutely complicated. It's not enough to know them. You need chemistry for chemical phenomena. And it's psychology to understand people. You need literature. You need philosophy. You need emotions to understand how what is love and so on and so forth. 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, ten basic rules, how the king move, how the queen moves. But in the same sense, it's silly because the complexity of universe goes far beyond just its basic equations of physics. So when you think of human beings as a vehicle for the university experiencing itself, do you think the universe itself is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand? Like, is 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 of what this is? And it's probably everywhere all the time. I think we use ourself as an analogy for trying to understand things beyond ourself. 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. The universe is far more complex for us to understand, far more many things happening, far many possible perspectives, which are not ours, which do not have access to. So two general questions, in my opinion, the only reasonable answer is, oh, we don't know. 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. We are, look, what are we? We are not super powerful intelligent, total rational things outside the universe looking from the outside. We're little critters on a little planet, you know, developed for surviving in Savannah. We have developed some good mental tools, very good, but limited compared to the immensity of the universe of its complexity. So, what do we know about the universe from a larger perspective? I think we don't know. There's also this weird thing with people, we're always dealing with the perspective of the accumulated knowledge up until now. Yeah. And this has always been the case, like people when they first developed quantum theory. This was what 100 years ago, when they first started on that. They think about what they were working with, and then 100 years before that, and it's like everyone is only working with what other people have already figured out, what they've contributed to it. Yeah, and we're very good in accumulating. That's what we're very good at. Very good at it, especially now, especially with AI. Well, also in the past, right? People build on the basis of previous experience, that's the strength of our speeches somehow. We don't have to start again every day. But that's what I was getting at as I wonder what the world looks like in 200 years. I always think, we're born in such an amazing time. So, how old are you? I was born in 56, so I'm past 70. Okay. So, I'm 59. So, you know, we're not that far off. So, 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. Yes, 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. There was no electric light. Oh, there were no trains. There were no cars. Well, there was no washing machines. The television was no radio. Before dying, she went into the plane. She flew. During her life, she saw all, you know, electric life coming in, radio coming in, 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. Yeah, it's a good point, especially the air travel, right? All of a sudden go to all these different countries. I was fantastic. Look, 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 this is fantastic. If I told my grandmother when she was a girl, she would have laughed. They come on. That's make no sense. You take two months to a month with a boat to go there. That's true. So, things changed dramatically, but they do. So, to your question, I have no idea how they would be 100 years into the future. There's always a perspectival thing. It seems that the last one is the most important, but there always been big changes. Always, always. Imagine when books were invented or where the culture was invented or when cheese was invented. Yeah. Or where countries were invented. So, humankind has gone through quite a rough trip during the last thousand, several thousand of years, and we're just in one of the ramps. 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. Not true. We're in just one of the jumps ahead. I think when electrical electricity and power came to our, that was a big jump. Everything was a jump. I bet people in 1969 watched Jimmy Hendrix thought it was a jump. Oh, yeah. You know, there's so many jumps. So many like, wow, I can't believe what Hunter Thompson wrote about that about the 60s.
that this all of a sudden this great change had happened. - 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 of 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 world. And now, parents understand the kids. Nope, I don't know. - Well, but, they're always confusing. Children are always growing up in a different era than you and there's different experiences and different pressures and different weirdness. Kids are growing up today with social media and phones. Everyone's connected to everyone. They have their location. They share their location with their friends. It's all, it's a very weird time when it comes to that. But it's also, you know, I'm just thinking about-- - Yeah, that's very different. - 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. - There's so much we know and we shouldn't take away the value of that 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, big questions. Big questions are not figured out. - 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 hadn't nailed. (laughs) - Yeah, that's true. That's one mistake that humankind often does is 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 there is 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 it as to the full story. - Yeah, 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, very charismatic, so people follow them. - Yes, true. And wisdom, I think, to 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 it both certificate and figured out that his first name was Giulio. So I went ahead and said, "What the hell is going on here?" And my grandfather told him, "Well, you know, your mother wanted to call you Franco, but it didn't like it, but it didn't dare say so, so I registered you with a different first name." So that created the disaster for the rest of his life because his paperwork rolled 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. It's always a case in which you think can go wrong. But that's good. I don't think we should aim at certainty. In fact, it's anywhere around. We should be careful about certainty because certainty is what blocks you for understanding more. If you're certain that yours is flat, you don't understand it's wrong. 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, it's crucial. And the other thing, you and I have, I think one thing you come on, what's a curiosity. If I had to define myself, what has been the driving force of so much you are 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 all this, you know, draw wrong 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 close yourself in what you know already, that it being curious, being curious about the rest of the ideas, the world, the others. I think it's genuinely contagious too. When I find people that are curious about things, I get curious. Exactly. 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 did you figure that out? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've kind of been insanely fortunate that I can have these kind of conversations with people like you. Yeah, I envy you for that. You get to know all possible people very easily, right? It's very interesting. It's not a thing or anybody comes to you. I like it. Well, I took a long time to get to that. I can't imagine. 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. Yeah, yeah. And you discover that people are different, have different ideas. 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. One of the most things that fascinates more is how people get ideas. How ideas come in. After all, what do you think ideas are? I don't know. That's a fabulous question. That I got a Richmond 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 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. Our mind has this incredible capacity of generating ideas. Very often, ideas are just combinations of previous things. A lot of physics is just the-- and the standard is 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. It's a lot of combinatorics. I hear what he says, I hear what you say, I hear what you say. The other say, "Oh, 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-- you know, how did Newton came out this incredible idea? He'll study Kepler. He studied Galileo. The two things didn't make sense together, but they were similar. So he said, "How can I put this together with that?" My own job, my own physics job, is to mix quantum mechanics and generativity. That's what my core of my research-- central part of my research is doing. How do you go about doing how do you mix them? I think you mix them, but taking them seriously. So quantum mechanics is so successful that it's telling us something about the world. And generativity is so successful. Generativity has predicted black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of a universe, time, the fact that time's your head is more than time's your feet, and so on and so forth. So it's also come out to be right. So it has to be right. And quantum mechanics were so well. A lot of technologies made of 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, look, this might join with that. It'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. It's a way of solving this problem. We're not sure it's 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 them 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? Are we sure? No, not yet. We are now the situation that we're working for finance and consequences that could be tested. Science is not sufficient to have ideas. And you want to test them. So that's my entire 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 happens inside the black holes, what happens to the early universe, what happens to black holes. You know, black holes, if you let them there for a very long time they evaporate, it becomes more or less smaller. So what happens at the end of the evaporation? These kind of questions need quantum gravity. What do you think happened for the Big Bang? Okay, so first we don't know. I think it has to be said clearly because it's good to speculate and we may be 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 generally there was nothing before the Big Bang, so time started there. This was Stephen Hawking. He worked a lot on this possibility. He expected that to be the case. The other possibility is that there was something before the Big Bang. And the intuitive idea is that you have a universe collapsing, falling down into itself, getting to a very, very compressed stage and 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. Do you think this is a constant process of expansion and compression? 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 for all. 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." No, 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. We are afraid of saying, "I don't know." So, sooner we have a step ahead, we tend to say, "Okay, I got it. I've. " That's a very healthy explanation. We really can't figure it out. When you saw the James Webb telescope, the more newer discoveries of these galaxies that formed far earlier than they should have, 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. I know, but I think it's more plausible that there were primitive black holes that gave rise to this early galaxies. There is an explanation within the same dates, which is possible, that when the universe was very, very. That went over a lot of confidence. There was a time about 12, 13, 14 billion years ago that the universe was much, compressed, much hot. And the 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 holes formed at that stage. That seems to me the most plausible answer. I'm not a cosmologist, so I'm not really my field, but it's closer, try to follow. So, it would be that our understanding of what it takes to form a galaxy is incorrect. Or the time it takes. 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 it was a student, people didn't believe in black holes. When did they first discover them? I studied black holes 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. 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. It was very interesting because, you know, there are a lot of binary systems in the sky, two-star rotating around one another. So, you actually see the movement of two stars. And there were some funny things in which you just saw one start dancing around something which was not see. So, people said, well, maybe there's a black hole, it's dancing around the black hole. It was speculative. Then there were the quasars, some very intense signals that come in 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 to the black hole could radiate very strongly, and we could see that. And the actual evidence grew very slowly in the 80s and 90s. In 2000, 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, you don't believe the black holes are real. So still, physicists, very respectable physicists didn't believe the black holes are real. That's so late. It's very late. It's very late. Yes. At that point, the relativistic cosmologists, astrophysicists, were taking very, very seriously now we have pictures of black holes. So now there's no doubt. There's no doubt. Physics of doubt about everything. Are any of those old professors still alive? Yeah, but they changed the mind. Scientists changed the mind. Good ones. You're totally right. Good scientists changed the mind. I'm sure he, if I talk to him, he would laugh. Of course you were right. Now we have complete evidence that we're black holes. But, you know, we see black holes which are sort of a little bit more massive than our son. There are many, many of these. But then we discover that these colossal black holes, gigantic, which are usually the center of the galaxy. We have two pictures of black holes. One, the black holes are the center of our galaxy, and then another black hole much bigger in another galaxy more far away. It's beautiful big pictures, right? They were on the front page of the newspapers a few years ago. So when this was realized, there are these black holes in the center of the galaxies, then the question came immediately to everybody. So, scientists, is it a galaxy that forms and then creates a black hole in its center, or is it actually a 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 this very, very galaxies could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe. The craziest theory that I've ever heard was that in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. And that could be, if you went through that black hole, you go into a whole other 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. Yeah, that's a crazy theory, it's a beautiful theory. In fact, it's a good friend of mine who worked a lot and maybe even started that theory is Lee Smolin. I am not convinced. I think that, I don't know, we don't know, but I think that if you jump into black hole, you just, you don't go to another universe. And 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 is going to become smaller, smaller evaporate. And then that's what quantum gravity seems to suggest that there is a quantum transition and becomes a white hole and everything inside comes out. Remember, at the beginning of our conversation, we said that there is a time is different, right? Time goes faster and slower. So if you jump into black hole in a short time for you, you're going to jump out billions of years in the future. So black hole could be a shortcut to the future. Oh boy. Isn't physics beautiful? It's beautiful. It's terrifying and beautiful at the same time. Is magnifies the scope of our minuscule existence? Yeah. Yeah. It's fabulous that we can learn about that. There was a time which people didn't know what were this little dot in the sky, like Venus and Mars. Now we, you know, we sent machines up there and people want to go up there. There was a time in which people said, oh, we are never going to learn the chemical composition of the planet and the star because they're far away. This is 19 or not long ago, our grand-grandfather. And they were completely wrong. We learned.
right? It's now through the spectra that they have ways for we know exactly what is the chemical compositional stars, which is crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So we do learn, this is magical. Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's fascinating to even think of the possibilities that are out there. Yeah. And that as time goes on, we'll develop more and more powerful telescopes and we'll be able to see more and more. Yeah, if we don't kill each other with real weapons, which is a very concrete possibility. Well, there really are aliens out there. There really are super-advanced civilizations. I would love to know how they manage to navigate through that. If they went through the same course that we are currently going through, I would love to know because that's one of the things about the Fermi paradox, right? Maybe the reason why we don't see them out there is because they never really get that far. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons when they were at the stage. Maybe the union is very large, very vast as a huge. So even if in the galaxy, there are many, many, it could be that they're too far. 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. Do you know what I think is most probable? What? That they have already seen us and they thought we were totally uninterested and we just avoided talking to us because we're too stupid. Really? I don't like that theory. One of the reasons why I don't like that theory is because we don't do that. We are constantly studying things that are more primitive than we are. We're constantly doing experiments on ecosystems and trying to solve problems that exist. Like I was watching this documentary about this island that got separated when they they damned some river and created this island and it was in South America and this island was overrun with monkeys and they had no predators on this island and because of that. Many, many, many monkeys. Tons of monkeys. But because of the fact they didn't have any predators, they had lost all their fear of raptors and they had started overconsuming 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. Have you seen a harpy eagle? Not the monkeys. The humans brought in. Humans. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Brought in two harpy eagles. No, what is it? A harpy eagle. Oh, eagles. That's a burp. The big burp. Yeah. It might be the biggest eagle. Okay. It's either that or the golden eagle. Which one's the bigger one? I think a 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 experiment after a few years. So these eagles had had offspring. So they had two other eagles. They were there as well and these eagles were just wiping out these monkeys and they said, okay, this is too much and this is now 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 they're 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. But that's us. That's just humans wondering what 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 for lack of better term monkey with the ecosystem by bringing in predators. So you think that there was some alien civilization would interfere with? Of course they would. Why we are so fascinating. Stanley Kubrick movie Space Odyssey was about that, right, an alien civilization who would just we, according to the story of the movie, we're sort of an experiment of an alien civilization. Well, that's an old story. Yeah. That's a story that's from the, you know, the Sumerian text that's from the, yeah, that means that that goes all the way back to some of the old books that they found that were in the caves in Kumaran, you know. Well, Sumerians have this idea of the gods where we are just greater the gods for their own, for their own advantage. You see, I, you know, these are beautiful stories. I always find them, you know, they're fascinating to talk about, but to to humans, you were just trying to project ourselves to something similar to us, changing a little bit. I think there is, there should be something like life all over the universe, but why should be similar to us? I mean, where we are, we lack imagination. There are more, more ways of being complex than just having a civilization the way we have. 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 going to automatically evolve superindeligence 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 and are just imagining the possibilities of different kinds of life and different, different kinds of intelligence all over the universe. But the idea that they wouldn't be interested in us seems to me silly. Like we are in an adolescent stage of evolution where we're both like we were talking about 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 and their false pretenses, you know, using propaganda. So we're both things. And 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 the soap opera. I'm like, how does this one turn out? Like these people are out of their fucking mind. 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 really interesting study. Yeah, I would not not think they'd be like, oh, so boring. These people with their godlike eyes, clear weapons. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I buy a boy. I can see the point. I can see the point. Yeah. Yeah. But look what we're doing. We're using our own mind to try to imagine how something that could be good think about us. Sure. But of course, the only model we have is us. Right. And other animals. And other animals. Yeah, 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 squirrels' notions to try to figure out humans. And they would just call it wrong and get it wrong. Right. And much like squirrels, we're probably so limited in our ability to perceive and imagine comparison. Yeah. That's what I was trying to say exactly. Who else is out there? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Squirrels are cute. They are. Until they bite each other's nuts off. They go out there. Are they nasty? Are they nasty? It's kind of a, it's not known exactly if they do that. But that's always been like the wives tale is that they, when they're mating, when they're competing, they will fight. And one of the things they do do for sure is they throw each other out of trees. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why squirrels can fall from so far and still survive. That's it. Squirrels can fall from like 30, 40 feet in the air and they bounce off the dirt and they're fine. Like they're just constructed for falling. Because they go to war. They go to war with each other to breed. You know, it's one or two males are competing over a female. And the story was always that they would bite each other's balls off. Oh boy. I don't know, I don't know if that's true. That was one of the reasons. If you grew up in Europe, I did when you come to this side of the Atlantic. One of the beautiful things is that their animals, much more than in Europe. Europe is, the problem with Europe is there's too many people. And especially places like Italy or the Netherlands, full of people, full of people. You don't see animals here. Right. Other than like pets. Yeah, pets, pets. Yeah, sure. Animals which are strictly with humans, either as pets or as rats. A lot. But when you go out hiking the mountains, very rare to see to see animals. You know, when I was a kid, it seemed laughable in America, but I would go hiking with my parents as more kid and evil. So it was a squirrel. Everybody was jumping all over a squirrel. Really? Yeah, yeah. And then I came to the US and that squirrel's all over, right? Keep out of your house. It's good. Right. Especially people that live in the country. Yeah, but then I moved to Canada. Canada is fantastic. We had we were living in London, Ontario. And out of our windows, there were coyotes, there were all sorts of animals.
- Oh yeah. - Where the eagle coming down in our garden. - Wow. - And just sitting there at that time. - Canada has true, in our life. - So for me that was a great thing of coming inside of that landing. It's still more, nature is still more present. In Europe, nature has been domesticated. The law is rare to see some wilderness. - Well, we're very fortunate that we have the national park system and the way we have these national parks where you can go to Yosemite, see elk and bears and there's wolves there. It's like, it's incredible. I mean, it's a little bit domesticated in that sense. Like you go to the elk or not scared to you at all. They hang out by the visitor stand. It's a little bastardized. Like the, there's an Instagram page called the Turrons of Yellowstone. Not like morons, but tourists. - Ah, I see. - And people that get too close to the bikes and they can flip through the air. - The disaster, yes. - God, so many of those. But it's because they've grown up in cities and they don't understand what wildlife is and they want to take a selfie with the bison. - Oh boy, oh boy. - Yeah. (laughing) You guess how that turns out? - When it was in my 20s, I dropped out from university and I took one year off traveling and I did cost to cost Atlantic to Pacific. Canada one way in the U.S. the other way. And alone, it was fantastic. - Wow. - Did you check? - Yeah, I did. - Look at you. You were a hippie. - Yeah, yeah. In that sense, yes, yes. Absolutely. I met all sorts of people in them. But when I arrived in the Arrakis, it wasn't Canada near Bouth. And I spent sometimes hiking high in the mountains. It was marvelous for a European. Exactly because it was empty. But then I came down to Bouth. It was a small tinny village at the time. And the camping was too expensive for a young kid. So I said, "Okay, I don't want to stay in the camping." So I walked up a little bit and put my tent in a little empty space. And then it greetsly came. - Yeah. - So I was inside my tent. The sun was going down. And this big bear started to walk around the tent. I was terrified to death because I had this, one of these little, little tents, just one layer, and the sun was going down. So I saw the shade of the bear home the day. So the structure was make noise, okay? That was the track 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 his supposed to go away. But I was trying to scream, but it was too terrified. Ah, noise was not coming. - Oh, no. So then I looked around to make noise, it was nothing. So I started clopping my head like an idiot. So the bear I had actually, that I did right, hanged my food on a tree, a little distance. So the bear went to the food, opened the food, and just then after I went away, I was terrified. - How long did that last? - I think I think the last 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 camper-ground, and said, "I pay whatever you want. "Nice day here." And then people were talking about, there was this greetsley that caught me around. That's how I survived. - Whoa. - Yeah, that was my encounter with wilderness, which came, you know, the little boy coming from Europe, Italy, totally civilized, no wild animals was quite scary for him. But, you know, I learned that sometimes he's not a bad idea to respect regulation. We'll suppose there was a regulation. Don't go along. - Yeah, they know what they're doing. But it's not to say that bear wouldn't wander its way through the camp, too. They will. They don't respect boundaries. - They don't respect regulations. - It's such a crazy animal that we have here. Like grizzly bears are so fascinating. They're so enormous. - And almost. - Yeah, and they used to be all over the place. Like California doesn't have any more, but that's on the state flag. - Yeah, it's a greetsley. - Yeah. - It's grizzly. - It's not a black bear. - 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 Levec, Levec, California. - Nice to meet you. - Yeah, I've been to it there before. And it's like there's a plaque memorial. - Oh, I see. - On Canada, they have accidents. They still have accidents. - Oh, yeah. - Especially BC, right? There's a lot of them out there. - Yeah, BC and BC, yeah. - I have friends that live in Edmonton. And boy, they have everything out there. They have little links. You run into links all the time. You see grizzly bears. They have mues everywhere. It's such a wild place. It's so cool. - That's what I envy of this America, right? It's in Europe. You don't see anything. - Right, you get it. - 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. - Yeah, if you go east, at least you get a lot of wolves there. But end bears as well, of course. But they kind of eradicated them all from most of like urban Europe. 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. - Yeah, and there is all this marvelous area, sort of Arizona. - Yeah. - Utah, Utah, New Mexico, it's just, the south of Utah is just marvelous. - Oh, it's incredible. I was actually watching another documentary yesterday on jaguars entering into Arizona. There's a quite a few. - You mean the animal, not the animal. - Yeah, 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, 'cause that's where they used to live. - Where are they coming from? - Mexico. - Oh, coming up? - Yeah, coming up from Mexico. I think they spotted four of them now. - This is same as mountain land. - 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 the trees and kill the camins and bite them by the back of the neck and drag them. Have you ever seen that? - No, no. - Oh, it's amazing. You gotta watch this. 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 camin crocodiles. - That's it. - So they hide in trees and or on the side of 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 in the documentary that kills not by exphyxiation. They kill by crushing the back of the head. - Oh, well. - So they have super strong. - Yeah, they're huge. Look at it. Look at them sneaking up behind them. They're the third biggest cat. - Oh boy. - Wow. - 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. (laughing) So they're the third largest big cat. So there's tigers or number one, then there's lions and then jaguars. And so they're starting to make their way back. Oh, it's five. Five jaguar spotted in Arizona. - Are they dangerous humans? - Oh yeah. - 100%. - 100%. I mean, not the numbers that they're at right now, but they would be. Sure, if you're hiking or you're doing something stupid and you dig where you should have zagged and you run into one of them. I mean, historically, they've eaten people. They prefer, I'm sure, to eat things. - But you have to do something stupid. You have to bother them. - Well, you have to be on their diet, right? Like, this is the same thing with tigers. Tigers become a problem once they realize they can eat people. And then they habituate people. - And that's what they do in India. When one tiger starts doing something wrong, they go out and look for it. - Yes, yes. Because then they realize how easy it is. So once we become, once we are on the menu, it's like the first time you eat a chick filet, like, this place is great. And you just wanna keep coming back. That's the problem. And it's also for a. - But that's not wise on this side, because we're weak individually, but the super strong group. - 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 in trouble already. And then these animals get them, tigers get them. But the jaguars in the United States is such a small number. I don't think that's the real concern. But what's interesting is that they've decided to repopulate North America or the United States, at least, it's pretty cool. They're making their way back up here. I don't wanna run into one, 'cause 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 the mountain line. And they're like, double the size of a mountain line. They're really big. It's a big cat. But they're really beautiful. - Why are we fascinating? So fascinated so much by big cats. We are, definitely. It's just incredibly. - I think we have something about our imagination. This is something about the beauty, the strength, the relevance, everything is just that we react to. - I think we were hunted by them. I think that was a big part of our early ancestors. But 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. I think Rupert Cheldrick 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 going to break into their house and. -They're afraid of monsters. -Monsters. -Monsters. -Which are the big. -Exactly. -Exactly. They're afraid of monsters even though they've never experienced a monster. -There's a theory that according to which one of the main steps in humankind become a humankind is exactly this passage from being praised to being predators. Which had to change profoundly the mental structures when we realized that we could resist a big predators and actually become predators ourselves because evolutionally we were not predators. -Right. -If you go back again and our speeches at some point learned to be like those things we were afraid of. -Yeah. -But does this explain the fascinations because the monster. -It's not just a fear that they generate in us, it's also sort of a demuration and beauty. -Sure. -Well, we have admiration and beauty for almost all big predators, right? -Right. -We have admiration. -Not for crocodiles. -Right. -It's not beautiful. -Right. -We might find it interesting, but not the kind of fascinations with. -Yeah. -That's true. There's something about mammals. -Yeah. -We're closer to them. -We're closer. -Yeah. -And I think. -In fact, it's. I've always been fascinating how much easy we communicate with mammals, right? It's the. -Sure. -Without language, without words, but if you are in the wilderness and any sort of mammals, you understand the animal and they understand you. So we communicate very easily, it's completely, you know, reading each other emotions and its other intentions and its own attitude. So it's easy for instance to, you know, "You go your way and go your way, we don't bother each other." [laughter] -Sure, unless you're on the menu. -Yeah. -Yeah. -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. -Yeah. -Yeah. -Then somehow we became predators, predators at some point in our history. -Yeah. -And then we started doing this against one another. -Yeah, we probably started doing that from the very beginning, most likely. We're probably competing for resources. -We don't know. We don't know, right? There are two competing theories about what happened to our speeches. Our speeches is what 100,000 to 100,000 years old. And there are two versions of this story. One is that war is something that started very late, only when we became a good culture when we started accumulating and putting away big chunks of grain. And the other is that groups of humans were in war even before that. A very different theory. And I think it's interesting that there are these different theories, because it has to do without a future and our present, namely, is this idea of getting a group once against the other and making war to one another, something which is only a few thousand years old, so it's not in our genetic structure, just that after a good culture, we could steal stuff from another. Or something that goes back all the 100,000 years of our other speeches. We don't know. -What do you think? -I'm not sure, but I tend to think that war is recent, because a lot of the communities on earth, which live hunting gathering, they don't go to war, they have no reason. It's an economical thing. You only go to war with another group if there is some accumulated resources you can steal. If you find another group of hunter-gatherers, if you have extra meat, you share because otherwise go rotten. There's no point in going to war. If you look at our cousins, it's very confusing, because Bonoble don't fight when two groups meet. That was the fact, maybe not right. What chimpanzees do, and they're equally related to us, so it doesn't help to look at our cousins. It's a crucial question. As it has to do with the question we've discussed before, can we get rid of war? How much war is part of our genetic, not because we're blocked by our genetic heredans? But clearly it's much easier to think that we can get rid of it if it's only 10,000 years old, rather than 100 years old. 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 the Bonobos. We are equally related, but in behavior, we're much closer to the way chimpanzees do. But I had this hippie part of my life, I identified better with Bonobos. I'm sure you do. You're a really nice guy. That's why I think the way you think. I think it's great. You'll be more of a Bonobo that guy, you'll be more of a chimpanzee guy. 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. These are chimpanzee war going on right now. You know that, right? No, I didn't know. There's a major chimpanzee war going on right now that they're documenting. If you've ever seen that, there's a Netflix series, "Chimpanzee," it's really great. It's fascinating. So the way chimpanzee came about and I had the documentary crew on the guys who created it, it was really interesting. They had the scientists that were embedded in this troop of chimpanzees for a long time, for more than 20 years. They lived with them? Yes. They live with them. So the chimpanzee accepted the project? They have rules. Yes, exactly. So they have rules. You must stay more than 20 yards away from them. Never have food on you and don't make eye contact. Because they've been doing this with this protocol for 20 years, the chimpanzees complete except the fact that they've used it and realized that there's no challenge, no threat. They're normal. They're completely normalized. So they behave normal around them. And they see all this crazy behavior. They see, first of all, a lot of inter-tribed 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. But they behave very much like the way we do. They have a leader, the leaders, the alpha, the young man, challenges the leader. Sometimes the guy gets driven out. They form new parties, they come back and try to kill the ones that they started out with. They cross boundaries to get new fruit and new trees and then they wars over the trees. They behave just the way we do, just at a different scale. But I think that, for instance, when we talk about Native Americans and Hunter and Gathers, the Native Americans were constantly at war with each other. They would go on raiding parties constantly. I don't know how many tribes were in total, 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. That's a pessimist view. No, no, no. That's what they did. No, no, no. It's not pessimistic. I'm not questioning it. Yeah, but it's not pessimistic. It's a lot of fuel a pessimist view of the future. 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 country basically wiped out their patchy in all of this area right here. This area we're at right now was called Comancheria before any settlers. 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. They vary differently just like humans do in different environments. But at the end of the day, there seems to be a pattern. 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 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 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 and stealing mates and stealing resources and cannibalizing each other. Okay, so you think this is going to make the project of living in peace much harder? 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 live in. Let me play the optimistic one. 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 may not have. Say this is true. Now you and I don't cannibalize each other, right? So we have learned. So then, if this is the case, it means that civilization, which is a recent stuff with respect to has had a very strong pacifying effect on us. I agree. And education. 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. I think it can. I think you're right. And then the question is not going back to our ancient paradise of gent of kindness and gentleness, but to create a better world where we could live together better. I think that's the path. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really awesome. I loved it. Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. Anything expected. Fantastic. 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 Roveli? Yeah, perfect. Karlo Roveli. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Bye everybody.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The speaker, a physicist, argues that reality is not objective but is instead a network of interactions and perspectives, challenging the idea of isolated, fixed entities.
Quantum mechanics reveals that observation affects outcomes, suggesting that reality is co-created through interaction, not independently existing.
Consciousness is not mystical or separate from matter, but a product of how systems—like brains or AI—respond to and interact with their environment, and should be viewed as a form of embodied experience.
Summary:
The conversation explores the nature of reality, consciousness, and the implications of quantum physics. The physicist emphasizes that what we perceive as objective reality is actually a collection of perspectives shaped by interactions—everything from a pen to a person is defined by how it affects others. This challenges the classical view of independent, fixed objects.
Quantum mechanics further illustrates that observation changes outcomes, undermining the idea of a pre-existing, objective world. The speaker draws on examples like the double-slit experiment to show how particles behave differently when observed, indicating that reality is relational rather than detached. Consciousness is reframed not as a soul or supernatural force, but as a phenomenon arising from interaction and experience—similar to how a body’s actions define its spirit.
This leads to a broader reflection on artificial intelligence: while AI systems may simulate emotions and awareness, they lack biological embodiment and true subjective experience. Still, they raise philosophical questions about what consciousness means in digital forms. The speaker expresses deep concern about the militarization of AI, warning that placing nuclear weapons and autonomous systems in hands of AI could escalate global conflict, especially amid rising tensions between powers.
He contrasts current human behavior with historical moments like the Cold War, where leaders chose restraint to avoid annihilation. He calls for a shift toward global cooperation, urging nations to move beyond zero-sum competition and embrace shared responsibility—inspired by figures like Kennedy, who advocated for peaceful coexistence. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that reality is richer and more nuanced than our senses or intuition allow, and that human progress depends on embracing both scientific insight and emotional wisdom.
FAQs
The book argues that everything in the universe is interconnected through interactions, and that consciousness and matter are not separate. It challenges the idea of objective reality, proposing instead that reality is a network of perspectives and relationships.
Quantum mechanics shows that particles don't have definite properties until they are observed. The act of measurement affects the system, suggesting that reality is not independent of observation and is instead defined through interactions.
He means that a cup of water can be described in many ways—physically, chemically, psychologically—depending on the observer. There is no single, ultimate reality; instead, reality is a collection of perspectives from different viewpoints.
He believes these natural phenomena evoke deep emotional responses because they are tied to our evolutionary history, helping us regulate rhythms of life and connecting us emotionally to the natural world.
Time varies based on gravity and motion. Clocks at higher altitudes or in weaker gravity fields run faster than those at lower altitudes, and near massive objects like black holes, time passes much more slowly.
He believes AI could theoretically have consciousness if it experiences emotions, awareness, and desire—but current AI lacks biological embodiment and true subjective experience. He warns against military applications of AI due to risks of escalation.
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