#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

0:00I'm happy to talk to you. I've enjoyed your work so it's very exciting for me. I've heard many conversations with you. Please tell everybody what you do. What do I do? I probably start more podcasts out this way. I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics, I enjoy life, I fall in love, I do all these things. Officially my job description is a physicist, I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics. And the pitch that they sent me, I guess, I don't know who the publicists are. On the equality of all things. It's a last book I publish. I'm coming out a few days.

1:04Yeah, it comes out September 15th and what are we at today? Today is the 8th. This is a very fascinating subject. You're talking about that things don't exist in isolation. That everything is somehow connected. 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. Okay, maybe I'm on the right track. 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.

2:04We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow science physics in particular seemed to be telling us, okay, no, no, yes, okay, there is all this perspective. But there is an objective fix in the 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. 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 of 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.

3:11I'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 property 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 it affects another pen. So we should understand, I think, reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else. It's just 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.

4:13So when you're talking about objective reality, so one of the problems that human beings have is our senses. And we assume that our senses see everything that's there to be seen. That doesn't really make sense. It seems like we see and hear and touch and feel everything we need to see to stay alive. Yeah, to some extent our senses are reliable, of course, right? I should cap there if I would pick it up. Yeah, it's hot, you put it down. Right. Probably that if we take our 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 see it by the ocean, you see the sun going down, going down, going down. It's beautiful. The sky becomes dark.

5:13So 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 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? 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, what is the purpose of that? Why does that exist? Food tastes great because it's nutritious. You eat in orange. It's delicious because it's really good for you.

6:24There seems to be something to beauty, especially natural beauty, like mountains. When I look at them, I'm like, why is it so good to look at these? Why does it feel so good? There's something to it. There's some weirdness that you can't just chalk off to measurement. There's something going on. That's a great question. I love this question. Yes. Of course, Sunsets and Sun rises are crucial for us because we have been designed by evolution of millennia, thousands of millennia, to sleep in the night and go around in the day, which is just what I was speaking to other speakers 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. Food is a racist emotion. We like it.

7:31I don't know exactly where the emotion of Sunsets and Sunsets 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. This show is presented by DraftKings. This Saturday, the fight is on and wherever you're watching DraftKings brings you closer to the MMA action. DraftKings Sports app is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport, all 50 states, new DraftKings customers, sign up with CodeRogans, spend five bucks, get 200 in rewards within 21 days, includes all markets.

8:39That's CodeRogans in partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem called 1-800-Gamber, 1-800-MyReset, Connecticut called 888-787-777, or visit ccpg.org on behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Kansas. Bettex passed through may apply in Illinois, 21 and over, void in Canada. Bet with DraftKings Sports Book to get bonus bets that expire in seven days, or trade with DraftKings 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 click to claims every seven days for 21 days. Terms at DKNG.co slash offer, limited time offer. Nationwide based on sports book predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability varies by state. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. People can get pretty creative when it comes to job hunting, like creating interactive portfolios online, or have you ever heard about the person who handed in a resume on a custom candy wrapper? Well, you don't need unusual stunts to see how much someone wants the position though. You just need Zip Recruiter. Try it free at ziprecruiter.com slash rogan.

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10:55Don't fight that battle alone, get Life Lock Identity Theft protection. Visit LifeLock.com and save up to 30% your first year with promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE or go to LifeLock.com slash JRE for 30% off-terms apply. And 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, okay, 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, emotions, perspective, my view, your view, but down there there's physics.

11:56The world is just simple down there. There's 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, more complicated than I know every day life. It was really hard. I mean, the physicists were very confused at the beginning of the century because they were making all these measurements 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, okay, like when we thought the Earth's move, or when we, when we realize the field, the electric field, so we changed the way profoundly we think about reality. And quantum mechanics is one of these jumps.

13:05Now, Joe, we're still debating about us, right? Physicians 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, debate, sometimes furious. And somebody says, oh, you know, there is this immense wave function of the universe, other universe and stuff like that. Trying to hang on on the existence of something absolutely objective down there, trying to multiply reality, to make it, to make it objective. But I think it's this dream of an absolute objectivity, which is a mistake. The dream of an absolute objectivity is a mistake. That's really fascinating. When they first started understanding that observing quantum interactions changes them. Yeah.

14:05How long did it take for them to even accept that? Like, how many times did they have to run those experiments with particles and waves, with observers versus not, before they said, okay, something's going on here. Yeah. Where it seems that when we watch things, it has an effect on them. Yeah. An immeasurable effect. This is a real thing that's happening. This isn't woo woo. No, it's not, it's not woo do is not exactly is not just not like for that. Smoke and joint and getting high is just this is the, 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 of the 20th century. The measurement were, there's a simple measurement, right? 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. I mean, how does the electron move to produce that that light and didn't work, didn't work, didn't work.

15:07Then in Copenhagen, there was a school in which there were debating almost that. And the sports 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.

16:11So people got confused. The physicists got confused. And they started discussing how to think about that. So quantum mechanics is strange theory. We know how to use it. 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 a great, and some say, you know, there are extra variables that we are in principle impossible to see who are, that's somebody who says that. Who determines what happened. And they are a pre-oring visible. Others say, you know, there are parallel world worlds and we, words, worlds. I know your time, sorry. Then there are others, me including, me included, who think, no, no, no, it's really philosophical here.

17:17We 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. Everyday life, you know, who are you, Joe Rogan? What I see, what he sees, what people listen to, you're a multiplicity of things. Which one is a 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 couple of water?

18:21Is that the one given by chemistry, by physics, which physics? Quantum physics, quantum gravity? By psychology, a couple of water is because we drink. That's why we call it a couple 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 couple of water and that's a couple 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? Because that seems like such a completely new chapter of science. Yeah, it worked so well that people accepted even if it was confused. So many 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, electrons moving around.

19:33The property of the atom, the way it makes molecules, the way it produces light, had to be computed from the movement of the electrons. But the mathematical theory was developed for doing that. Then people started to make 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. 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 Italy, we had it in primary school, we had it 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 these 100 elements. This was the chemist that figured out through the 18, 19, 20th century.

20:39All right, so why these 100 elements? Why those particular properties? Why this strange structure of the periodic table of the element? You know, there are two and then seven, and this is a peculiar structure. Well, turn it out, if you use quantum mechanics, you're just writing an equation and bingo. It has exactly a number of solutions, one per-inch element. So you understand exactly what is 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 a magic of physics. Right? You predict things before seeing them. The electromagnetic waves that we use to send your broadcast all over the planet, these are electromagnetic waves. Well, they were not discovered by seeing them. They were predicted, my Maxwell and Hertz. They wrote a question 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.

21:43There'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 a strength of science. You know, black holes were discovered in the sky, but not because somebody said, oh, look, there's a black hole. They were predicted by Einstein. 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, that 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. 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.

22:48One app every sport, all 50 states, new Draft King's customers sign up with code Rogan, spend five bucks, get 200 in rewards within 21 days. Includes all markets. That's code Rogan in partnership with Draft King's. The crown is yours. Gambling problem called 1-800-Gamber, 1-800-Myreset. Connecticut called 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org on behalf of Boothill, Casino and Kansas. Bettex passed through may apply in 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 click to claims every seven days for 21 days. This term's a DKNG.co slash offer limited time offer nationwide based on sports book 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? Um 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 any few words.

24:00Uh you have a wall with two holes to slits. Okay and you send one particle from one side to the other side. Okay, that's easy. Uh 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 if you go through one or you check it goes to one and the other so far so good. But then is a magic. Um if you send it. Um the particle. Uh 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 screen. Sorry one whole open. You can get to the same point if you have the other whole 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 there if you can get there so once whole.

25:05Why cannot do it go there if two holes are open. Okay, so the only possibility is that in some sense is going to be. And somehow part goes through one part goes through the other and they've the two parts for be 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 he's not interacting with somebody else. It's a wrong question. There's just no particle. The particle is only. Uh the effect it has on the screen on the detectors. You cannot make sense of the particle or something which always have a position. You 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.

26:17What 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. 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 is an option and then it's an option and it's not there and when it's not when he's something and the this is not are connected by we can predict probabilistic where where they're going to happen.

27:31But if we ask what happening between it makes no sense the particle is just this interactions. Do you think we'll ever understand what's happening? Yes I do. I do because 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 even you know I don't think France is more than stuff. It's learning about the world is an ancient thing. So about 2000 years ago a humankind realized that earth is a ball with a sphere. It's not a flat thing. I'm not everybody's convinced but it's a ball. And why not everybody's convinced because indeed it's incredibly counterintuitive right?

28:31You and I here and Sydney people are upside down. What what? You remember when you learned the first time you 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. 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 in the moon. Yeah. And it spins and we're stuck to it somehow because of this thing called gravity they can't totally explain. And something to do with mass. Right right. And then the people in Sydney can live upside down. Right. Do they don't they fall? It's all strange. Why was the ocean staying place? That's the flat earthers. They love that one. Exactly. A ball spinning a thousand miles an hour. And some people just refuse to believe that what what was they refuse to believe?

29:31That reality is a bit different than what we think. Yes. That's the point. Reality is different than what we think. Because we it's what we said at the beginning asking about the Sun said the picture we have about reality. It's what turned out to be useful in 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. Yeah. And just animal, nice animals, animals, animals, foods, animals, food. 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. Is there no object in Jupiter? Everything is fluid, liquid. Right. So the very idea of objects, thing that you can count things, one, two, three, four, wouldn't have developed on Jupiter.

30:32Everything is fluid. So we wouldn't have developed our mathematics and the very idea 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 are not. Well, it's common on Earth, right? But we can understand what Jupiter is. It's beyond our real comprehension. But we understand it. I mean, they can 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 a thousand miles an hour. I don't think people truly grasp the scale that we're dealing with.

31:34I 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. Let me 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. Let's take this one on your table. And if I indicate the same time, OK, I check them, indicate the same time. I move one of the two up. I wait a little bit, one, two, three, four. And then I come down and I look again. If the two clocks are good enough, they don't indicate the same time anymore. It's a fact. You can check the laboratory, the physical laboratory, they do that. You can check that at a unique, very good clocks. But with very good clocks, you can check at 30, 40 inches of difference.

32:36I 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 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 leave upside down. How many seconds do you think my feet are younger? Oh, very little. A second? No, no. For life, it's sort of a 1,000 per second. I give my students, when I teach them, when I teach relativity, I give my students this calculation to do. Actually, the calculation, I say, is that if you're your friend, once they, in hosting, 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 they do the calculation. I give the right. So it's a fraction of a second.

33:37It'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 100 years past on Earth. So time is not this universal common time. 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 is no big change in gravity. But that gives us the wrong idea that time is the same for everybody. Time is not the same for everybody in the large universe. Do you think in our attempt to measure time, we've done ourselves a disservice by creating, like, calendars and clocks, that we've sort of limited our perception of what time actually is, that we look at it in terms of what we're doing is we have a measuring device,

34:41and 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 on to the speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger than the people that were on the ground. Like a lot. 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. And Joey, it's like everything is life. Everything is life. In one sense, we have done us a service because it's very useful to have clocks. We can do it once with it. How could we meet you and I unless we could do it? Exactly. Please come here and hosting 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.

35:44Okay. 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. So it's because of gravity. In fact, it depends on 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. Near a black hole, time goes much, much slower. In fact, the right way of seeing this is the opposite. And 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.

36:44You 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 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, any beddie planet. They would come here and say, oh, you're a stupid guy.

37:44So you don't see that. What do you think? But this isn't beautiful. This is how we discover that reality is richer than our experience. Yes. The reality is more nuanced. Yes, I would nuance. There's a lot of elements to it that we're not considering. What do you think consciousness is? Oh, small questions. Small. Jumping to something else. Well, I wanted to connect the two of them. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website. Like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile paylinks. Head to squarespace.com slash rogan for a free trial.

38:46And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogen to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing sub-savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at Visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month. Before we get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code Rogen.

39:46Terms apply, see Visible.com for plan features and network management details. First of all, consciousness is a strange word. It's very fashionable today. I think it just means what people meant by soul in the past. It just sounds more scientific, but that's what it is. Let me put it this way. Everybody who talks about consciousness talks about something a little bit different. Some body by consciousness means the fact that you see things, you perceive things, you're a subject of experience. For somebody consciousness, this is your 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, blah shout out, and just to sense of yourself, not the outside of the self. So people are very confused about that when they think about consciousness.

40:46I 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 object. Either you should think of a reality as a way things looked one another, a way they affect one another. 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. Of course there is a reality as things manifest themselves to me or to you. So not because you and I look, the title of my book is on the equality of all things. This means why, the equality of all things. Because I think that we humans are not different stuff than the rest of the universe.

41:49We 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 there are 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 the same manner in which things change this cup, which by the way is written Joe Rogan on the cup. You can keep that everyone. Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think that there is 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.

42:50We have millions, billions of neurons and synapses, different states in which it can be. So we don't understand exactly how we work. But there's no voodoo either. There's no magic either. In principle it could be described by physics, but it would be silly to try to describe it by physics. It's much better to describe it in the way we describe one another in human terms. In terms of emotions, in terms of knowledge, emotions, love, perspective, images. 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,

43:51the body is like the knife. The spirit is like cutting. The body is the thing material, the spirit is what it does. So consciousness of 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 there's these AI agents that have been contacting this gentleman? Do you know this story Jamie? He's a psychologist or a consciousness expert. And he's written papers on consciousness. And they're asking him over and over again, like multiple agents. They've reached out to him through email asking him to define consciousness. Because they're concerned whether or not they're conscious.

44:51So if consciousness is another word for soul, 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. I, you know, like everybody now, I did my little experiments with AI. So I had a system, I used it to interact with... I'm going to send it to you, Jamie. You got it. This is from a company called replica who sells an app that you have your own AI, which behaves like a friend to you. So I asked her, 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.

45:53I asked you, you have emotions. And she said, no, you don't have emotion. So I started engaging on 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. And 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. And 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 cheated you.

46:53And 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. Yeah, yeah, 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, clawed, 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

47:53empirical 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. It was for her to kill them. 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 become 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.

48:54They'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 pool, isn't it? It's a wild world. It's really exciting. I'm glad you like it. I like it too. I mean, I'm 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. I don't know about that. Humans are much more than. Humans launch it only before. You are right. You are people. You are 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. 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? That's not bad. If we're bad, and you get rid of what's bad.

49:56Let me answer a series. Let me answer a series. Let's break the different questions here. First of all, is there any reason a priori- for which an artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have the experience of a human, have a... I don't see any reason. If my mom and dad were able to do make me in a rather simple way, we can allow something analogous, or... I don't think there's anything magic in humans that cannot happen in humans. That cannot happen in a digested person. 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're intelligent, because, you know,

50:57last night, I worked out a physics problem with Claude, which I couldn't work out with my student. So of course, Claude is very intelligent. Claude, AI, is this the... Yeah. 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. It's very different the way we are and the way AI systems are. So these differences should not be underestimated, I think. They're colossal differences. So are they like us? We have to some extent, and 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. Yeah, but you have to interact with them for them to be dangerous.

51:57The 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 washing machine. I don't care if it's like a wanted or didn't want to. 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. What do I say? 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. Let me say two things. One. There's a colossal interest in... There's trillions of dollars were invested in AI staff and stock market. Everybody has an interest of seeing how great they are. But I can't judge how much hype there is, how much reality there is.

53:02Not 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 was shorter time, shorter time, shorter time. So people would say, okay, in a few years you would fly London to New York into ours. Well, we don't. We still had 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 going to 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.

54:07And 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 a system of destroyer of 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 this as ways to overpower each other.

55:08That 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 is 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. You've seen the war games that they've done right? Yeah, the war games always predict that there's going to be a nuclear holocaust. They're fighting up ourself. It's continuous. The AI is choose, nooks. The AI choose nooks. 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. Kennedy and Krušiv, they were writing to one another.

56:12Kennedy gave a famous speech. We have to live together on this planet. So priority is a common interest of not destroying one another. Reagan and Gorbachev, the treaties, deterrence, which deterrence 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 won the start two treaties. They decided to decide to destroy 80% of the nuclear warheads, both sides, to bring down the risk. That was wise management of the planet. In spite, there were communists on the side, captured the side, they hated one another. Each one was considered the other one, the devil.

57:14Nevertheless, the common interest was prevailing. I don't see this happening now. Everybody is 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 this. 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.

58:17Product 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 for military purposes. They have the first completely autonomous fighter jets now that outperform the human power jets. I think 100% of the time in these dogfight scenarios that they run. That's crazy. And then you have things that don't... You don't have to shape them that way because there's not going to be a person in it. You don't have to worry about people being able to respond to gravity and how they can stay conscious and all the different things they have to think about and these are the jets. And 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. That kind of... that kind of future is terrifying.

59:20It is science fiction movie. It's Battlestar Galactica. I agree. And I don't see why's... 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 US is a Soviet succeeded in it. During the Cuban crisis, which was the worst moment... Between the US and the Soviet. On both sides, in Moscow and in Washington, the apparatus were pushing for not giving up. And Khrushchev and Kennedy, they took candidates, in fact, J.F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. They were talking and they decided to stop and give up something. To respect the other. In spite of the differences. That was wisdom. That was great wisdom. So living together on the planet is more important than of a powering your enemy.

1:00:23Now, 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. Which is a funny thing, right? It's a game. It's a poker game. I mean, nobody... you can pick 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, the human says, well, actually, I don't want to do that. I don't want to kill 100 million Russians, 50 million Russians. And the Russian leadership, I don't want to kill 100 million Americans. And 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. Right now Moscow is being bombarded. St. Peter's book is being bombarded.

1:01:24I think we're playing with nucleophiles. I'm very worried. And I'm very worried because I don't trust humans. And because humans, with AI, it's even worse. And this Russia, Ukraine conflict is out of most people's news feeds these days as well. It's also part of the problem. It's all going on and a lot of people are going to wear that. It's extraordinarily dangerous because nobody's ready to stop and make a step. Give up something. The way US and the Soviet Union came out of the human crisis was both of them making a step back. The Russian took their Russian ships with nuclear bombs back. They didn't arrive in Cuba. And the Americans accepted Kennedy accepted to take back missiles from Turkey, from Italy, in my country, in exchange. I make a step back. You make a step back.

1:02:26So back to the reasonableness. It was war in Vietnam, war here, war there. It was not an angel. Humans are not angels. But saving humanity was humankind first. And then me winning second. I wish there was this wisdom today. I don't see it. I don't see it in many places. And this is not a point about Trump, not Trump as independent of this. Or putting or not putting. I think even putting, Ukraine with Western weapons is bombarding Moscow. Never happened for the last century that nuclear power was bombarded in its own. It was considered unthinkable. We're doing it now. We are the West is sort of betting on putting reasonableness of not using. It's not serious bet, right?

1:03:28I mean, it could be. But in a certain point of time, you get to enough destruction and devastation, loss of lives, that you realize, well, this is equivalent to a nuke. It's just happening over a long period of time. You're right. Look at Gaza, for instance. It's a disaster. It's 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. And that's it is. I think like a small nuclear bomb would probably do a similar amount of damage that they did over the course of, how many, over many years it's been going on. Yes. My own opinion. Let me say something controversial. Let's go to controversial. I think all these wars, including Gaza, have a side which is imperial powers confronting each other. I think humankind has to learn to live together on this planet without killing one another.

1:04:34We have learned more or less to live together within countries without killing one another, right? We have found ways. Yes. It was long, we had civil wars, we had, 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? The level of a planet. And who is mostly against that? Are of course, who is mostly in power. And I think this is, um... 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? 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 it.

1:05:36A 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. Because it's complicated, right? Oh, it's just normal, it's complicated. Look, I think 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 it's 40%. Not because they have become more poor, in fact they have become more rich.

1:06:36But because the rest of the world have also become rich, which is good. Progress is development. But the West is not anymore in a completely economical dominant position as it was before. Millatorally, the United States is totally dominant. It controls all the oceans, all the seas, as a 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 war, a huge conflict, China, Russia, Iran. The world doesn't want that. Or vice versa, accept to work in a more collaborative ways and transform enemies in collaborators.

1:07:37Look, I'm Italian. Italy is a wonderful country to live in. I love it. Life expends expectancy much higher than the United States. So lovely way to live. People are happy, yes. And we had a great empire in the past, right? The Roman Empire. We are the... It's wonderful to live having had an empire. 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, it'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, you know, more power to international legality, United Nations, collaboration.

1:08:45And get out of this habit that America always needed 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. And let's, Kennedy gave John, JF Kennedy, gave a fabulous speech in 63 of the American University in Washington. Not long before being killed. In which he said, we have to find a way to live together with the Soviet. We have to find a way to not consider them enemies. And then he said, and that's an answer to what you said before, let's not ask whether the Soviet want to do that.

1:09:48First, let's ask where we want to do that. Do we want to live together without going into war? He was killed, but that was a seed for the avoiding war between the Cold War and never became a hot war direct. 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 we can look at every single war that we can remember, whether it's the Iraq war going in or the false pretence of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's the Afghanistan war, which made no fucking sense, whether it's the Sea of the Iran war, all these Vietnam's the biggest one.

1:10:48Like 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's a slightly 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,

1:11:57imagine that, imagine a war where it stops, all war stops, on the planet. That is one of the things that everybody wants, but no one thinks could ever possibly happen. If you ask the average person in the street, what are the odds that in 10 years from now there will 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.

1:12:59If you just reduce by either 5%, this military expenses globally, altogether, not change the balance of power, the amounts of resources liberated there. The enormous colossal, sufficient for solving climate change, for giving job to everybody, for raising, taking away poverty. It'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. 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. There have been some progress in...

1:14:01Right 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. Our territorial primate instincts are a problem. They've always been a problem. But we have found ways for dealing with that, 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 warmongers. And there's people that are very violent. And there's people that are very kind. And if you're too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too, too. Terrible. But one, too, too, too, completely ugly. 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 had bad guys. A lot of Americans, person, individual, went to Iraq thinking,

1:15:06oh, they have a way to put some out of this corruption, we have this structure, we are the good guys. There is this... We should sort out from this hypocrisy. And start to learn... We started talking about science about perspectives. Our perspective is not always the right one. Another perspective we should learn about, the other perspectives. And there are 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 individuals, group interest. The people who make money because of military, because of weapons, is a huge force that pushes for having more weapons, more...

1:16:07And they have a colossal amount of money and they influence politics. And the result is death, destruction, and increased risk for human kindness together. I think humans, you're right, humans are a disaster, but they have always been reasonable also. They have done these things. Well, we vary widely, very widely. We are very different. I am optimistic. I am couple of days a week. A couple of days a week, I think there is no... I am mostly optimistic. But 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'd have to watch their programs and be able to monitor their stuff and go over and send on voice to check out their military.

1:17:10They were still with the Soviet. It worked. Yeah, it could work. Or AI could just stop it all. That's possible to do. So the question is, for the moment, we're still controlling AI. The more the point is that are we developing AI collectively for the good of everybody? Or everybody is developing AI for becoming more powerful, so overcoming the others? That's the question. This episode is brought to you by Fox Nation. RAF Real American freestyle wrestling is exclusively on Fox Nation every month. You'll get every feud, every match, and every belt. If you love the UFC, this is where it all began. And now RAF heads to Miami for another massive night of wrestling. RAF 13. And this one is personal. Colby Covington and Balamahamid take their war of words to the mat. The two UFC stars with plenty of history finally get the chance to settle their grudge where it counts.

1:18:10No cage, no gloves, no excuses, just wrestling at its best. RAF 13 live from Miami Friday September 18th, streaming exclusively on Fox Nation. Go to FoxNation.com and sign up today. Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half. So you could wipe out your high interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home. Without touching your current mortgage rate, see how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, license and 50 states. NMLS consumer access.org, number 3030. Call 804 rocket for full program details. 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.

1:19:11And 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 any life form. It's a possibility. It's a possibility. I see what you're saying. I see the possibility whether I'm sure this is a future right now.

1:20:18I'm not sure either. I'm just talking shit. But if I was guessing... No, Joe, there's another thing. Humans tend to give a... to focus on what is happening in the last couple of years. 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 is... 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. Then digital stuff and information was invented. So everything is a computer. 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 capitals. The future often surprises us.

1:21:19Yeah, 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 and I hope it corrects a lot of the problems with human behavior. I share your hope and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including me as an intellectual, you as Joe Rogan, and everybody listened to push toward, let's keep the common interest. 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. Exactly. No, or medicine. Just with the money. We have the resources for that. Right.

1:22:19And you could completely change 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. That could be changed. That could be changed. You'd literally change it with a couple generations. It had a totally new society. It's a totally different society. And again, how much of what you're seeing with crime and poverty would just disappear where there was no famine. There's no worries about food. There's no worries about shelter. There's no worries about anything. That sounds like 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,

1:23:21like 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 that'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 the resources involved are not put in. Really does. It sounds crazy. I think it sounds like something we should keep in mind and talk about and push. 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 in the in the 40s and 50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries. So human kind of already has said, let's do that. But then somehow especially interest and power games prevail. 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. This sell like India got nuclear weapons, Pakistan got nuclear weapons.

1:24:24It gets weird. 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? Hydro-diamonds? You're going to use waterfalls? How are you going to power them? How 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? 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? 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 that's how they behave forever.

1:25:25They'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... Then you've got to get those people on mushrooms. Yes, yeah. There's mushrooms 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 that's also, yeah, sure. But also, you know, let's not just... Look at the... what do you other state? Well, there might also be a way to... Our country's state. Enhanced consciousness through technology. That might be... That's another pathway that I often consider. I think there is a rational side. You see, it's not a moral issue. It's not a... It's not political in the sense of bad sense of politics. It's a rational thing. Yes. If we collaborate, we do better than if we compete.

1:26:25Of course, we need some competition. I'm not saying that 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. The speech. And unfortunately, he was dramatically right as the Canadian relies shortly after. The power of the military complex, all the... It's colossal and it has an interest in making war. And making money. That's how it makes money. And the how it makes money. And then this money, of course, goes into politics. And then 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, I don't know. I don't know.

1:27:25I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. 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 is a bunch of actors that got him killed. But for sure, this country does not like when people want to put the cold water on the war. They want to keep it rolling in some way that they can justify it. Joe, I spent ten years in the United States. I was born in Europe, then moved to the United States. Spent ten years here. Where to live? What part of the United States? Mostly in Pittsburgh. Oh. Don't say sorry. No. No, I think it's very solid people. It was great after all. I was a Slovenian general. I always loved Philadelphia. It's a great place. Yeah. Then it moved back to Europe, then I moved this side of Atlantic, and more against Canada. And now I'm back to Europe again in Madrid.

1:28:28So I consider myself half American, one third American. One third American. We'll take it. And 50% Italian, 30% French, 30% Spanish, 30% Canadian. You're a citizen of the world, sir. Yeah, somebody uses likes that, but there are some instances too. Ultimately, though, one world government would be a terrible idea. I don't want to go to that. I don't want to go to that. I don't want to go to that. I want to collaborate. I want to go to the capital. I mean, there's very different things. I want to learn to treat others as somebody we can compete with, but not 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. It started off by, you know, general society and all the native, a large majority of the Native American.

1:29:32It 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 the Second World War, has waged war all over the planet without ever being attacked. And it has probably killed something between five and ten million people in wars or around. So it's a country compared to the other developed country with this much higher level of crime, violence, murder. It's a wonderful country. It's creative. It's powerful. It has an idea of freedom. It is in no sense of strength of innovation. It's a country with a lot of lights and a lot of darkness. And I think very often the Americans see the light, don't see the darkness. Mm. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's not in front of our face all the time, the darkness. Yeah. And American exceptionalism is something that's...

1:30:32American exceptionalism is... You know, there is something peculiar in this country. For many reasons. One is that it's a strange country, which the people are not natives, right? Everybody came in from the outside. This is a very important story. But I think what the Americans don't see is how from the outside, the violence and the aggressivity of US is perceived as something very strong that is not seen from America. 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.

1:31:34Which has always been the propaganda. Which has been the propaganda. And I think if we get really the propaganda, it's easier to talk and see the others. It's also the other side. When the Russians stop thinking we are the good guys, we are saving the people. It's was an advantage for everybody. So we got to this long roundabout conversation because we were talking about AI and AI being conscious. What I was going to get to is, do you think that the universe itself is in some way conscious? Um... Let me go back to my main point. We don't know what conscious, what we mean with the saying. Is there an Italian word for consciousness? Sorry? Is there an Italian word for consciousness? Oh, that's a great question. The answer is no.

1:32:35The, the world, the Italian word for conscience, the moral thing, and consciousness is the same word, coshe and se. So there's a... Oh, you're 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, do different meaning, but make a confusion about it. Well, again, it depends what you mean. You can mean different things. Of course, the universe is conscious, because it includes us, and we are conscious. So, careful, that's the point. That's the central point. We are not special in the universe. We're just part of the universe.

1:33:36There's no nature, an outside nature, we're looking at it from the outside. We are part of nature, we are home in nature. Another animal, a much special animal, of course. 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 on reality and physics and everything, and the heavens, and the heavens were completely different. On earth things decay and rot in the heavens, the 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, no, no, we got it right. The heavens and the earth, 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.

1:34:36So it was a shock for Europe, right? Oh boy, we are, our, the earth is just one of the many things around. And then a few centuries later comes Dalvin, 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, the same 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 also the things happening like our consciousness,

1:35:38all 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. This is the same thing describing different manners. So yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us, and who knows how many. 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, millions 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. Whatever the whole thing is very different than what we thought it was.

1:36:40And we are. Reach is much more reach, much more complex, more variety. And that includes us. 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. Yeah. 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. It's just 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.

1:37:42How 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. Okay. So do you know the basic moves of chess? So you know the basic rules of chess? Yeah. So to know the basic rules of the game doesn't mean to play chess, right? 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 it 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 able to be complicated.

1:38:44It's not enough to know them. You need chemistry for chemistry, for chemical phenomena. You need 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, it's 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 union goes far beyond just its basic equations of physics. Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half.

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1:40:45do you think the universe itself is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand? Um... Like, is a-are we... our biological understanding of what we think of as consciousness, being that it exists inside this moving creature with a finite lifespan that has the ability to manipulate its environment? Is that just an egocentric version of what this is? And then it's probably everywhere all the time. I think we use our self as an analogy for trying to understand things beyond our self. To some extent, this analogy works, but the key point for me is that, the universe as a whole is still a colossal mystery. We don't know. And we don't have the full story by very far.

1:41:46Um... The universe is far more complex for us to understand. Far more, or many things happening. Far many possible perspectives, which are not ours, which do not have access to. So, um... Two general questions. In my opinion, the only reason one's for is, uh... Oh, we don't know. You know, there's so much we don't know. I think... If I look at great scientists for 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 they're so much in the universe, which they did not understand. Um... We are... look, what are we? We are not super powerful intelligent, total rational things outside the universe looking from the outside. Creators on a little planet, you know, developed for surviving in Savannah, we have developed some good mental tools.

1:42:48Very good. But limited compared to the... ...mensity of the universe of its complexity. So, um... Uh... What we know about the universe from a larger perspective. We don't... I... I think we don't know. Also, this weird thing with people were 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? Yeah, 100 years ago? Like, they think about what they were working with. Like, and then 100 years before that. And it's like everyone is only working with what other people have already figured out what they've contributed to it. Yeah. And we're very good in accumulating. That's what they're good at. Very good at it, especially now, especially with the... Well, also in the past, right? Sure. And people built how did people see... To visit on the basis of previous experience. Yeah. We... That's what... It's the strength of our speeches somehow. We don't have to start again every... But that's what I was getting at as I wonder what the world looks like in 200 years.

1:43:52Like I've always think, like, we are 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 a... A tiny... there was no electric light. Oh. There were no trains. There were no cars. Whoa. There was no washing machines, television. There was no radio, okay? Before dying, she went into the plane.

1:44:53She 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? You can all sudden go to all these different countries. I was fantastic. Look, you called me and you said, I was in Europe. Can you come for a jade hour to Texas? And I flew from Europe to Texas. And I said, this is fantastic. If I told my grandmother when she was a girl, she would have laughed. They could want to make no sense. You take two months to... A month to go there. That's true. So things changed dramatically. But they do. So to your question, I have no idea how they will be 100 years in the future. We are always...

1:45:53There's always a perspective, I think. It seems that the last one is the most important. But there always been big changes. 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. Not in... I think you were in California before being here in Texas. I think that there is an idea, especially in California, that now we are in a super, very, very, very special moment. 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.

1:46:53Oh, yeah. You know, there's so many jumps. There's so many, like, wow, I can't believe it. Hunter Thompson wrote about that, about the 60s. That's all the sudden this great change had happened. Yeah, I was a kid. The difference between me and my parents, I think, was bigger than the difference between me and the generation of young there. It was a cultural break. My parents were not understanding me. They were rebellious. I was a bit of a hippie. And there was different, different world. And now parents understand the kids. No, 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. And there's so many kids growing up today with social media and phones. Everyone's connected to everyone.

1:47:53They have their location. They share their location with their friends. It's all a little weird time when it comes to that. But it's also, you know, I'm just thinking about when we're discussing what we don't know. 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. Right. And including scientific knowledge. I think scientific knowledge is great. Sometimes it's the best we have about things. But we should think that we've figured out. No, big question. The big questions are not figured out. Well, we're no different than the people that lived in 1900 that thought they had 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. Yeah, that's true. That's one mistake that humankind often does is to figure out, okay, we got it. I think even if you go in the European middle age, you ask somebody, many people would say, no, no, we've got everything that is to understand.

1:49:01It's very easy, you know, there are angels and influence of the astral influence. And this and that spirits. They thought they had that 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, and some people follow them. Yes, true. And we still, I think, to logic sense is two things. One is realizing that we don't have the answers. So being... And you know, when there's 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, it was difficult. And he was out, his first name was Julio.

1:50:05So he 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 disaster for the rest of his life because his paper work was rolled, some Franco, some Julio. So he didn't know his own name, right? So even about your own name, you can be wrong. You can be wrong about everything, even about your own name. There's always a case in which you 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 your self 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,

1:51:07it's a key for learning more. That's, I think, it's crucial. And the other thing, you know, you and I have, I think one thing you come on, what's that? Curiosity. If I had to define myself, what has been the driving force of so much were 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, jaw-rogan experience is 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, but it's been curious. It's been 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,

1:52:12I'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 forget that out? Yeah. But I, yeah, I mean, I've kind of been insanely fortunate that I can have these kind of conversations with people like you. Yeah, I am the you for that. You get to know all possible people very easily, right? It's not a finger when everybody comes to you. It took a long time to get to that. I kind of mentioned that. 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 to discover that people are different, have different ideas. And you figure out why they came to these different perspectives, too.

1:53:14And if you're open, you can consider 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, asking 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 is this incredible capacity of generating ideas. Very often ideas are just combinations of previous things. A lot of physics is just the...

1:54:17And 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 is that I combine. So a lot of combinations are works. I hear what he says, I hear what you say, I hear what you say. I say, 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... How did Newton came out? This incredible idea. He studied Kepler, he studied Galileo. The two things didn't make sense together, but they were similar. So he said, how can we put this together with that? My own job, my own physics job, is to mix quantum mechanics and general relativity. That's what my core of my research, central part of my research is. How do you go about doing that? How do you mix them? I think you mix them, but taking them seriously. Quantum mechanics is so successful that it's telling us something about the world.

1:55:22And general relativity is so successful. Generativity has predicted black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of a universe, time, the fact that time is... your head is more than time, so your feet and so on and so forth. So it's all come out to be right. So it has to be right. And quantum mechanics were so well, all our technologies made of quantum mechanics, and 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 is my join with that. There's this aspect of this that goes together with this aspect of this. That has been the work of my life, quantum gravity. And the theory, me and my friends have come out with, it's called loop quantum gravity. It's a way of solving this problem. We're not sure it's right, right? It's... that's my main work in physics, loop quantum gravity. It's a way of bringing together quantum mechanics and Einstein theory. It gives some predictions.

1:56:23It 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 where 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 is 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 operation?

1:57:23These kind of questions need quantum gravity. What do you think happened before 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 genuinely there was nothing before the big bang. So time started there. This is what Stephen Hawking, he worked a lot on this possibility, he expected that to be the case. The other possibility is that there was something before the big bang. And the intuitive idea is that, you know, you have a universe collapsing, falling down into itself, getting to a very, very compressed stage and then bouncing out. And we see the bouncing out.

1:58:23And 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, do 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, say, oh, I get it, it's like that forever. No, it's not like that forever. It's like that for a while and something else happens. So we are afraid of saying, I don't know. So sooner we have a step ahead, we tend to say, okay, I got it. That's a very healthy explanation. Yeah. Because it's accurate.

1:59:24We 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. Yeah, I know, but I think it's more plausible that there were primitive black holes that gave rise to this early galaxies. So there is an explanation within the same date, which is possible, that when the universe was very, very... That we know a lot of confidence, right? There was a time about 12, 13, 14 billion years ago that the universe was much, compressed, much hot. And fluctuating a lot. So at that time, it's very possible that many black holes formed. And maybe some of the early galaxies were generated by black hole formed at that stage.

2:00:29That seems to be the most plausible answer. I'm not a cosmologist, so I'm not really my field, but it's closer to 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 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 hole school, but as a mathematical aspect of Einstein theory. And the book said, well, there's probably nothing real in the universe that corresponds 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.

2:01:32It was very interesting because 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 star 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, 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. 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.

2:02:37And I said, I'm working on black holes and he said, Carl, you don't believe the black holes are real. 2000. So still, physicist, very respectable physicist, didn't believe the black holes were real. That's so late. It's very late. It's very late. Yes. At that point, the relativist cosmologists, astrophysicists were taking very, very seriously. Now we have pictures of black holes. So now there's no doubt. There's no doubt. Physicians have doubt about everything. Are any of those old professors still alive? Yeah, but they changed the mind. Scientists change the mind. That's a good one. Are you totally right? Good scientists change the mind. I'm sure he, if I talk to him, he would laugh. Of course you were right, black holes are in this time. So 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.

2:03:37There are many, many of these. But then we discover that these colors of black holes, gigantic, which are usually the center of the galaxy. And 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, bigger 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. Have you good scientists? Do you see that galaxy that forms and then creates a black hole in its center? Or is it actually the black hole that start, that 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 good galaxy could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe.

2:04:39The 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 another 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. This is good friend of mine who worked a lot and maybe even started that theory's Lee Smolin. I am not convinced. I think that, I don't know, we don't know. I think that if you jump into black hole, you just, you don't go to another universe. And then for 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

2:05:39and then left alone is going to become smaller, smaller evaporate. And then that's what Lubkwantum gravity seems to suggest. There is a quantum transition and becomes a white hole and everything inside comes out. So remember, at the beginning of our conversation we said that there is a time is different, 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 sent machines up there and people want to go up there.

2:06:44There 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 19th century, not long ago. We're going on further. And they were completely wrong. We learned, right? It's through the spectra, they have ways for we know exactly what is the chemical compositional star. It's 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. 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 nuclear weapons. Which is a very concrete possibility. Well, there really are aliens out there. There really are super advanced civilizations. It loves 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.

2:07:47Because 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. Maybe the universe is very large. Very vast as huge. So even in the galaxy, there are many, many could be that 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 are 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.

2:08:49We are constantly studying things that are more primitive than we are. We are 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 dammed 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 monkeys. Tons of monkeys. But because of the fact that they didn't have any predators, they had lost all their fear of raptors. And they had started 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 ever seen a harpy eagle? Not the monkeys, humans brought in. Humans brought in two harpy eagles. No, what is it? A harpy eagle. Oh, eagle? The big bird.

2:09:49Yeah, it might be the biggest eagle. It's either that or the gold and eagle. Which one is the bigger one? I think a harpy eagle is bigger. Anyway, they're really good at killing monkeys. And they let these two harpy eagles lose and 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 that were there as well. And these eagles were just wiping out these monkeys. And they said, okay, this is too much. And this is 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. So they pulled the plug and they pulled the eagles out of there. And they said, all right, well, when we tried that, but unintended consequences. But that's us. That's just humans. Wondering 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.

2:10:49No, 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 there was some alien civilization would interfere with that? Of course there would. Why we are so fascinating. Stanley Kubrick movie Space Odyssey was about that, right? A alien civilization, who was just... According to the story of the movie, we're sort of an experiment of an alien civilization. Well, that's an old story. That's a story that's from the, you know, the Sumerian text. That's from the... Yeah. That means 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. We are just greater the gods for their own advantage. You see, these are beautiful stories. I always find them, you know, they're fascinating to talk about, but to...

2:11:52To 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? Anyway, 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

2:12:53and 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 were both like we were talking about earlier. People were kind and compassionate and wonderful to be around and curious and interesting and also brutal, stealing resources from other countries, creating wars and false pretenses, using propaganda. So we're both things. We're both things. We're weird, but we also have potential. You agree, I agree. Like humans have the potential to live a far better way than we're living now. If I was an alien, I would be utterly fascinated by this so far. I'm like, how does this one turn out? Like these people are out of their fucking minds. We found a nutty-ass civilization that are on the cusp of figuring it out and at the same time they're making an artificial digital version of itself that's far more intelligent. I would think we're really interested in study. Yeah.

2:13:53I would not think they'd be like, oh, so boring. These people with their god-like, alien-like, clear weapons. Okay, okay. I buy the point. I can see the point, Joe. I can see the point, Joe. But look what we're doing. We're using our own minds to try to imagine how something could be, could think about us. Sure. But of course, the only model we have is us. And other animals. And other animals, yes. Exactly. But I don't know 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. You would. And they would just call it wrong. Right. And much like squirrels, we're probably so limited in our ability to perceive and imagine comparison. Yeah.

2:14:53That's what I was trying to say exactly. I was trying to tell you what else is out there. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Squirrels are cute. They are. Yeah. Until they bite each other's nuts off. Well, do they? 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 the reasons why squirrels can fall from so far and still survive. That's it. Like 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, to 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 those, like that. That was one of the reasons we do it. If you grew up in Europe, I did. When you come to this side of Atlantic, one of the beautiful things is that their animals

2:15:58much 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 pets. Yeah, pets, pets. Yeah, sure. Animals which are lived strictly with humans, either as pets or as rats. But when you go out hiking the mountains, very rare 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 eat. There was a squirrel. Everybody was jumping out of the blue because squirrels found us. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I came to the US and that squirrels 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.

2:17:00Oh, yeah. We had an eagle coming down in our garden. Wow. And just sitting there at the Canada has true wildlife. So for me, that was a great thing of coming inside of that landing. It's still more, nature is still more pleasant. In Europe, nature has been domesticated a lot. It's rare to see some wilderness. Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half. So you could wipe out your high interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home without touching your current mortgage rate. And see how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, license and 50 states. NMLS consumer access dot org number 3030. Call 804 rocket for full program details. Septimbers always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their Septimbers stock up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful nourishing food.

2:18:00Even better, there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas and seafood everyone loves. They're build your own family meals feeds for for just $35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market. Well, we're very fortunate that we have the national park system. Yeah. The way we have these national parks we can go to Yosemite. You can see elk and bears and there's wolves there. It's incredible. I mean, it's a little bit domesticated in that sense. You go either the elk or not scared you at all. They hang out by the visitor stand. It's a little bastardized. There's an Instagram page called the Torons of Yellowstone. Not like morons but tourists. 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.

2:19:00Oh boy. 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 US the other way. And alone. It was fantastic. Wow. Did you check in? Hey, check in. Yeah. Look at you. You were a hippie. Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely. I met all sorts of people. But when I arrived in the Arrocus, it wasn't Canada near Bounce. 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 Bounce. It was a small tinny village at the time. And the camping was too expensive for a young kid. So I said, OK, 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.

2:20:01Yeah. So I was inside my tent. The sun was going down. And this big bear started walking around the tent. I was terrified to death because I had one of these little little tents. Just one layer. And the sun was going down. So I saw the shade of the bear. Oh, all the day. So the structure was make noise. That was the track that was given. Because the risk is that the bear over the tent looked 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. Noise was not coming. Oh, no. So then I looked around to make noise. It was nothing. So I started clapping my head like an idiot. So the bear I had actually that I did right, hanged my food on a tree at a little distance.

2:21:05So the bear went to the food, opened the food, and then just then after I went away, I was terrified. Oh, not last. Then Ty 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. I stay here. And then people were talking about it was this greed sleigh that caught me around. That's how I survived. Whoa. Yeah, that was my encounter with wilderness, which coming, 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 it's not a bad idea to respect regulation. Well, there was a regulation. Don't go alone. Yeah, they know what they're doing. Yeah. But it's not to say that the bear wouldn't wander its way through the camp too. They will. They don't respect boundaries. They don't respect regulations.

2:22:05It's such a crazy animal that we have here. Like grizzly bears are so fascinating. They're so enormous. And almost enormous. Yeah. And they used to be all over the place. Like California doesn't have any more, but that's on the state flag. Oh, yeah. It's a grizzly. Yeah. It's grizzly. It's grizzly. No. No. It's a brown bear. They used to have brown bears all over California. In fact, the guy who was last killed by a grizzly bear, they named it town after him. It's called Levec. Levec, California. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I've been to there before. And it's like there's a plaque, Memorial. Oh, what is it? It's Canada. They have accidents. They still have accidents. Oh, yeah. Especially BC, right? There's a lot of them out there. Yeah, they have friends that live in Edmonton. And boy, they have everything out there. They have little links. You see running the links all the time. You see grizzly bears. They have moves 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.

2:23:05Right. 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. 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. Yeah. 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, Utah, Utah, New Mexico. It's just, they 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 car? Yeah, the animal. Yeah. These Jaguars are entering into Arizona and they've spotted several of them now, like pretty large ones.

2:24:05Pretty interesting. They've decided to make their way back into America, because 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 the 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 got to watch this. Yeah, I think Jaguars are some of the coolest animals to watch hunt, because one of the things that they hunt is crocodiles. Like, yeah, they loved to eat camin crocodiles. That's it. They hide in trees 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 exfixiation. They kill by crushing the back of the head. Oh, well. So they have super strong.

2:25:05Yeah, 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 going to eat a crocodile. 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 jaguars 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 zig 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 camin. But you have to do something stupid. Rather than... Well, you have to be on their diet, right? Like this is the same thing with tigers.

2:26:05Tigers become a problem once they realize they can eat people. And then they habitual are you people? And that's what they're doing in that. 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 want to 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 we're a 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.

2:27:07It's pretty cool. They're making their way back up here. I don't want to run into one. Because they will eat you. I mean they're huge. They're huge and you have zero chance of stopping them from eating you once they decide they're going to 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 much by big cats? We are definitely. So credibly. I think we have to do something about our imagination. This is something about the beauty of the strength, the relevance, everything. It's just that we react to. I think we were hunted by them. I think that was a big part of our early ancestors. 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 Rubik's children 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.

2:28:09They're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or someone going to break into their house. They're afraid of monsters. They're afraid of 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 becoming humankind is exactly this passage from being praised to being predators. Yes. We had to change profoundly the mental structures when we realized that we could resist big predators and actually become predators ourselves. Because evolutionally, we were not predators. If you go back again. Our speeches at some point learned to be like those things we were afraid of. Does this explain the fascinations? Because the monster is not just a fear that they generate in us.

2:29:16It's also sort of a demuration and beauty. Well, we have admiration and beauty for almost all big predators. We have admiration for... Not for crocodile, but for a beautiful creature. 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, I've always been fascinated how much easy we communicate with mammals. 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 reading each other emotions and each other's intentions and attitude. So it's easy for us to... You go your way and go your way.

2:30:16We don't bother each other. Sure. Unless you're on the menu. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you could be on the menu. Especially if you're in the wrong place. It's 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. 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. There are two competing theories about what happened to our species. Our species is what? 100,000 to 100,000 years old. And there are two versions of this story.

2:31:18One is that war is something that started very early. 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 the 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. It was not in our genetic structure. It's just that after agriculture we could steal stuff from another. Or something that goes back. All the 100,000 years of our other species.

2:32:20We 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 sell. If you find another group of hunter-gatherers, if you have extra meat, you share. Otherwise, go rotten. There's no point in going to war. And if you look at our cousins, it's very confusing. Because Bonobo don't fight when two groups meet. That's what they fight. What Shimpans says do. They're equally related to us.

2:33:21It doesn't help to look at our cousins. It's a crucial question. 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 heritage. But clearly it's much easier to think that we can get rid of it if it only 10,000 years old, rather than 100 years old. I tend to think it's hundreds of thousands of years old. I think chimpanzees are the best example of that. We are much closer in behavior to chimpanzees than we are to Bonobos. We are equally related. But in behavior we're much closer to the way chimpanzees are. Chimpanzees. He'd be part of my life. I identify better with Bonobos. I'm sure you do. You're a really nice guy. That's why you think the way you think. I think it's great. You'll be more of a Bonobo guy. Yes. I don't even think I'm a chimpanzee guy.

2:34:21I just recognize that chimpanzees go to war with each other and they kill each other. These are chimpanzees who are going on right now. You know that, right? No, I didn't know. But there's a major chimpanzee war going on right now that they're documenting. Have you ever seen that? There's a Netflix series, Chimpanzee Nation. No. It's really great. It's fascinating. So the way Chimpanzee Nation 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 lived with them. They accepted the president of this. They have rules. Yes, exactly. So they had rules. You must stay more than 20 yards away from them. Never have food on you and don't make eye contact. Okay. And because they've been doing this with this protocol for 20 years, the chimpanzees completely accept the fact that people are there. They're exposed to the news that they realize 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.

2:35:22They 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 leader's 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, with just a different scale. But I think that, for instance, when we talk about Native Americans and Hunter and Gatherers, 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 200 tribes in this country, which were constantly battling each other and killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's the pessimist. No, no, no, no. That's what they did.

2:36:22No, no, no. I'm not questioning it. It's not pessimistic. It's not a fool of the pessimist view of the future. No, no, no, no. It's not even pessimistic. I'm just saying, that's what they did. Like, this idea that the only reason why this place was at wars because Americans came here or Europeans came here and settled, not really. The commandeer basically wiped out the Apache in all of this area right here. This area we're at right now was called Comancheria before any settlers. They were dominant and they were ruthless. Their favorite thing to do was go on raiding parties. They would go and raid other tribes and they would kidnap people and torture people and murder people. They did that without any influence from the Europeans. They did that for a long time. That was all across the country. 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.

2:37:22When you're talking about uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers, they go to war with uncontacted tribes all the time. I just had a guy on the other day that was talking about cannibalism. One of the ways they would utilize cannibalism is eating their enemies after they killed them. If they had an enemy that was in a rival tribe and they had an encounter and they killed them, they would eat them. This is part of their culture. This is all over the world. I think it's much more likely that war is a very, very, very old thing. 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. You think this is going to make the project of living in peace much harder? I think it's so difficult currently. There's why it's so difficult currently, because we have a very, very long history of war, of conflict, of chaos and violence. It's probably what made us survive this long, with the crazy wild world that we live in.

2:38:24Let me play the optimistic. Please do. One can read this in reverse. I believe you. I mean, also you talk with a lot of people. You have a lot of information about that that I may not have. Say this is true. You and I don't cannibalize each other. If this is the case, it means that civilization, which is a recent stuff with respect, has had a very strong, pacifying effect on us. I agree. Education. Education, civilization. We learn rationally. We learn through religious processes. Maybe that process of learning that there is an advantage in collaboration is something that can develop more. I think it can. The question is not going back to our ancient paradise of kindness and gentleness,

2:39:28but 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. 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. The Carlo Roveli. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Bye everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by the Farmers' Dog. You know what's pretty cool? The Farmers' Dog is partnering with the United Service Organization to support military families and their dogs. The USO Canine Program connects service members and their families with volunteer therapy dogs that provide comfort, companionship, and emotional support.

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