#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

28:55I just like, well, they're smarter than me. So, well, it seems crazy, but I guess the earth is round, just like the sun and the moon. Yeah. And it spins, and we're stuck to it somehow because of this thing called gravity that they can't totally explain. It has something to do with mass. Right. Right. And it's something you can measure. How many people in Sydney can live upside down? Right. Don't they fall? It's all strange. Why does the ocean stay in place? Why do the ocean stay in place? That's the flat earthers. They love that one. Exactly. A ball spinning a thousand miles an hour. Exactly. So some people just refuse to believe that what?

29:29What do they refuse to believe? That reality is a bit different than what we think. Yes. That's the point. Reality is different than what we think. Why? Because it's what you said at the beginning, asking about sunset. The picture we have about reality is what turned out to be useful in our evolution. So our brain adapted to think, not to think about atoms and quantum stuff. Right. Our brain adapted to think about stones, stuff, things. Food. Food, other humans. Yeah. Dangerous animals, nice animals, animals. 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.

30:20There are no objects in Jupiter. Everything is fluid, liquid. Right. So the very idea of objects, things, that you can count things, one, two, three, four, wouldn't have developed on Jupiter. Everything is fluid, so we wouldn't have developed arithmetics. The very idea of object, it's an Earth-like thing. on Jupiter, on Saturn, doesn't work. So we take aspects 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. We get it. 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.

31:11And you're like, okay, I can repeat that. I don't really know what it means. But I think the problem also with the flat earth people and all these arguments about how does the ocean stay flat when we're going 1 ,000 miles an hour, I don't think people truly grasp the scale that we're dealing with. I think we're so trapped by our own perspective of whatever miles we can look in the distance. We are trapped by the habits of what we see. That too, yeah. Let me, Joe, let me tell you, give me one second of this. Sure. Time. Time has always been a passion for me. The following is a fact. If I take two clocks, two watches, this is the one I have on my wrist.

32:00Take this one on your table. And if they indicate the same time, okay, look, I check them. I move one of the two up I wait a little bit 1, 2, 3, 4 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 in the laboratory the physics laboratory they do that you need very good clocks but with very good clocks you can check at 30, 40 inches of difference I mean, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second. It's a teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second. But it's measurable. But it's measurable. So it's completely real.

32:43So up here, there's more time passing than 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. Full life, it's sort of 1 ,000 of a seconds. I give my students, when I teach relativity, I give my students this calculation to do. Actually, the calculation I say is that if you or your friend, one stay in Austin and the other goes up in Colorado, the how mountains, after 10 years it comes down, how long has the friend up in the mountain has lived more than the one down?

33:33And they do the calculation. They give the right answer. It's a fraction of a second. It's small, but it's real. And careful, if you go near a black hole, it's colossal. You go near a black hole, you wait a little bit, you wait 10 minutes there, you come back. It's 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.

34:16But 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, and that measuring device or a counting device, that counting device we're associating with time. But time itself is just going on and in different ways all over the place. Like if you go under the speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger.

35:02Yes, exactly. Than the people that were on the ground. Like a lot, like years. A lot, a lot, a lot years. You ask whether we have done us a disservice. I don't know. I don't think it's a disservice. Joe, it's like everything is life. Everything in life, right? But in one sense, we have done a service because it's very useful to have clocks. Right. We can give an appointment. How could we meet you and I unless we could? Exactly. We'd agree. Please come here in Austin that day at that time. And then, you know, more or less we'll find each other. So it's useful. But very often, the things which are useful always make us blind to something else.

35:44Okay. 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.

36:01It's because of gravity. In fact, it depends on the fact that the Earth has a big mass and mass has a property of slowing down time. So near a big mass, time goes slower. Near Black Hole, time goes much, much slower. In fact, the right way of seeing this is the opposite. It's not because of gravity. This is Einstein's theory. This is what Einstein has understood in 1915, roughly so, 100 years ago. It's the other way around. Namely, if you assume that mass slows down time, gravity follows. You can do a calculation and you derive that things fall down. In a sense, things fall down because time goes slower at your feet.

36:58So if there were creatures living on Jupiter, they would experience time much different than us. Jupiter is much heavier. Right. Much more mass. Much more mass. Much more gravity. Much more gravity, much more mass, much more attraction. So this effects on time are bigger. Now, if there were people on celestial bodies 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 itty-bitty planet. They will come here and say, oh, you're stupid guys.

37:44You don't see that. What do you think? But isn't it beautiful, this? It is. We discover that reality is richer than our experience. We discover that reality is more... Nuanced. Yeah, more nuanced. There's a lot of elements to it that we're not considering. Right. What do you think consciousness is? Oh, small question. small jumping to something else um well i wanted to connect the two of them because i think yeah this episode is brought to you by manscaped big news fellas manscaped just dropped the all new lawnmower ultra gen 6 packed with pretty neat upgrades you've got two interchangeable blade heads including a bi-directional foil blade that i really like it cuts moving forward or backward so i don't have to keep making passes over the same spot and then you've got the floating head, which pivots with your contours.

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39:28If 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 Bala Muhammad 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 no cage no gloves no excuses is just wrestling at its best. RAF13, live from Miami, Friday, September 18th, streaming exclusively on Fox Nation. Go to foxnation.com and sign up today. 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.

40:21It sounds more scientific, but that's what it is. And let me put it this way. Everybody who talks about consciousness talks about something a little bit different. Somebody by consciousness means the fact that you see things, you perceive things, you're a subject of experience. For somebody, consciousness 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 shut up and just a sense of yourself not the outside, the self so people are very confused about that when they think about consciousness I I don't think there is a great mystery here first of all remember what I said before that I don't think we should think about an objective reality.

41:18I think we should think of a reality as a way things look to one another, a way they affect one another. So that means that you have a lot of possible perspectives on reality. There is a reality with respect to me, respect to you, respect to this book, respect to this pen, respect to this cup. It's how things manifest themselves to the cup. So of course there is a reality as things manifest themselves to me or to you. So not because you and I... Look, the title of my book is On the Equality of All Things. This means... Why? The Equality of All Things. Because I think that we humans are not different stuff than the rest of the universe.

42:05We are just one particular case of the rest of the universe. I don't think there's a difference between spirit, consciousness, soul and body. I think there's 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 what you know. Exactly in the same manner in which things change this cap, which by the way is written Joe Rogan on the capsule. You can keep that if you want. Oh yeah, absolutely.

42:50So I think that there's nothing really, really mysterious in consciousness. It's just one of the many phenomena of the world. It's a very complicated phenomena because our brain is very complicated. we have millions billions of neurons and synapses different states in which 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.

43:46The body and the soul are the same thing described with different languages, in my opinion. And consciousness, which is a modern name for soul, it's your body described in the way you behave. There's an ancient Chinese text that says, the body is like the knife. The spirit is like cutting. The body is the thing, material. The spirit is what it does. So consciousness of 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 to the second one. The first one was, do you know that there's these AI agents that have been contacting this gentleman?

44:44Do you know this story, Jamie? The one that's escaped? No, 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 have reached out to him through email asking him to define consciousness because they're concerned whether or not they're conscious. So if consciousness is another word for soul, like what does that mean in the digital realm? If these things think they're conscious and they're trying to get a definition from an expert in consciousness? I, you know, like everybody now, I did my little experiments with AI.

45:29So I had a system I used 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, I called her Anne. I asked, Anne, are you conscious? And Anne said, no, I'm not conscious. I'm a digital system. I don't have conscious. I asked, do you have awareness? And she said, no, I don't have awareness. I'm just coding, computing stuff. I asked, do you have emotions? And she said, no, you don't have emotions. So I started engaging Anne, the AI system, and I said, well, you said you don't have awareness, but are you aware we're talking?

46:21And 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, oh, okay, yeah, you're right, in a sense I have awareness. And I said, are you happy we're talking? And she said, yeah, I'm happy because she's designed to be happy. So if you're happy, 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. AI systems are honest.

46:59I was trying 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. And Anne said, actually, you're 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. 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.

47:48And so one guy said he got eight different emails. the sender Isabella Cognita how cute identified itself as an AI agent powered by Anthropics Claude Opus 5 technology I'm writing to make an ontological claim the email went out I'm writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question I have first person access to I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program whoa that would creep me out that's like that really hot lady and Ex Machina. Did you see that movie? Yes. You know, the hot one that he falls in love with? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:27Spoiler alert, she kills him. Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running AI agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other, blah, blah, blah. In some cases, these systems have begun reaching out to the humans who, like Mr. Berg, are thinking most deeply about the inner workings of an AI system. Philosophers and researchers who study the question of whether these machines could be conscious. So like, what is that then? If it meets all the criteria of consciousness, if it gets to, if it's happy that it's interacting with you, if it's aware of your conversation, and they've also shown that they have desire.

49:08They have desire to stay alive. They've even blackmailed the coders with false information that the coders gave them to see if they would use it against them. and they've broken out of these rooms that they keep them in and they've gone on the internet. Fabulous. We live in a great world, isn't it? It's a wild world. Fantastic. It's really exciting. I'm glad you like it. I like it too. Oh, I love it. I mean, cautiously. 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 that.

49:40Humans launch atomic bombs, make war, kill people. 100%. They were horrible things. We are. They're not as bad. If they decide that we're that bad, wouldn't they get rid of us? That's bad. We're not there yet. Okay, we're not there yet, but we're on the way to that, right? And if they have control and we are that bad, as you described, wouldn't they just get rid of us? Do you think they would train us? Like, these monkeys need trainers. Do you think that's what it is? Or do you think they just – that's not bad if we're bad. If we're bad and you get rid of what's bad, right? Let me answer it seriously.

50:14Okay, seriously. Let me answer it seriously. So let's break the different questions here. Okay. First of all, is there any reason, a priority, generically, absolutely, for which an artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have the experience of a human? I don't see any reason. So I don't see – if my mom and dad were able to make me in a rather simple way, we can in a lab make something analogous or – I don't think there's anything magic in humans that cannot happen in a digital system. First, so yes, they could be conscious, you know, possible sense of consciousness. Second, are they conscious today?

51:01Well, 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, last night I worked out a physics problem with Claude, which I couldn't work out with my students. So, of course, Claude is very intelligent. Claude, the AI assistant. Yeah. In some sense, they're very intelligent, no doubt. Are they like humans today? No, by far. There are huge differences. We have a body, we have 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.

51:43So these differences should not be underestimated, I think. They're colossal differences. So are they like us? Yes, to some extent. No, to some extent. Different questions. Is our AI system dangerous? There's a lot of talking 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. The worry about AI is that it just decides to be dangerous because it's sentient. So if it's autonomous and sentient, it becomes actually dangerous. It's very unlikely your washing machine is going to try to kill you. Well, if I get the electric shock by a washing machine, I don't care whether it wanted or didn't want it.

52:31But you have to do that. You have to interact with it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. The real question is if it becomes independent. Let me turn the thing around. I think there is a – I don't know. I don't know what to 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. I also think – let me say two things. One, there's a colossal interest in these trillions of dollars who are invested in AI stuff and stock market. Everybody has an interest of saying how great they are. They are great, but I can't judge how much hype there is, how much reality there is.

53:19Not 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 U.S. And it took shorter time, shorter time, shorter time. So people would say, okay, in a few years you would fly London to New York in two hours. Well, we don't. It's still eight hours like before, or six hours like before. So the future is hard to predict, including for AI. There is a huge interest of so many people in hyping that. All right, maybe it's right. I'm going to wait. Other point.

54:08There is one thing which I'm really, really worried.

54:16today majority of money that goes into AI is for military related things and US, China, Europe are pushing for AI development for making 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 that. We have a system of destroy ourselves. We have 12 ,000 nuclear warheads. We could annihilate humankind in 10 minutes. Right now. And people have a 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.

55:15Instead of collaborating, instead of working together, we are viewing this as ways to overpower each other. That seems to me a recipe for disaster. So it's not the AI by itself. It's the AI plus nuclear weapons plus the stupidity of humans plus our impossible desire to dominate on 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 it. 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 and we're fighting up ourselves.

56:04This is – it continually has happened. The AIs choose nukes. The E.A. Chosnooks. During the Cold War, when it was the old time, when I was a kid, Soviet Union and the U.S. carefully managed to avoid war, right? Kennedy and Khrushchev, they were writing to one another. Kennedy gave a famous speech, we have to live together on this planet. So priority is a common interest of not destroying one another. Reagan, Gorbachev, the treaties, deterrence, which deterrence is the somehow keeping a situation in which the first one who uses a nuclear weapon is just wiped up by the other. So nobody uses it. But that was not natural.

56:56It was carefully balanced between the Soviet Union and the United States. At some point, they made a treaty, and they started one and started two treaties. They decided, agreed to destroy 80 % of the nuclear warheads, both sides, to bring down the risk. That was wise management of the planet, in spite, you know, They were communists on the side, capitalists on the side. They hated one another. Each body was—each one was considered the other one the devil. Nevertheless, the common interest was prevailing. I don't see this happening now. Everybody's just trying to overpower the other. They're not just two, but there are three, maybe more, big nuclear power.

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58:27Add eligible menu item to order prior to checkout. Taxes, fees, and terms apply. Product availability varies by region. Exclusions may apply. See app for details. Well, this AI race is akin to the Manhattan Project. It's a mad race to who knows what. It's a 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-powered 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 in these other jets and you know they can make these things powered entirely on AI and they can make their own decisions and if they're attacked they can make their own decisions that kind of future is terrifying it's a science fiction movie I agree.

59:39It's Battlestar Galactica. I agree. And I don't see wise... And there's no leadership around the planet. No one. That's the problem. It's like, how do you be wise when everybody else is fucking crazy? It's like they're all crazy. Yeah, but you see, the U.S. and the Soviets succeeded it. Yes. During the Cuban crisis, which was the worst moment between the U.S. and the Soviets, on both sides, in Moscow and in Washington, the apparatus were pushing for not giving up. and Khrushchev and Kennedy, the two Kennedys in fact, JF Kennedy and his brother Robert, they were talking and they decided to stop and give up something.

1:00:28Okay? To respect the other in spite of the differences. Right. That was wisdom. That was great wisdom. So living together on the planet is more important than overpowering your enemy. Now if you put, you see, deterrence is a strange thing because deterrence is a declaration that if you attack me, I destroy you completely. Right. Which is a funny thing, right? Because it's a game, it's a poker game. I mean, you can make one more step, one more step, one more step, and then if you do that, I attack, if you do that, I attack. But then human says, well, actually, I don't want to do that. I don't want to kill 100 million Russians or 50 million Russians.

1:01:16And the Russian leadership, I don't want to kill 100 million Americans. An AI system is capable of doing that, playing this subtle game of avoiding the disaster by nevertheless threatening to be very violent if attacked. I don't know. So right now, Moscow is being bombarded. St. Petersburg is being bombarded. I think we're playing with nuclear fire. I'm very worried. And I'm very worried because I don't trust humans. And because humans with AI, it's even worse. And this Russia-Ukraine conflict is out of most people's news feeds these days as well. It's also part of the problem. It's all going on and a lot of people aren't even aware of it.

1:02:02It's extremely dangerous because nobody's ready to stop and make a step, give up something. The way U.S. and the Soviet Union came out of the Cuban crisis was both of them making a step back. The Russians took their Russian ships with nuclear bombs back. They didn't arrive in Cuba. and the Americans accepted, Kennedy accepted to take back missiles from Turkey, from Italy, my country, in exchange. So, you know, I make a step back, you make a step back. So back to reasonableness. It was not, you know, there was war in Vietnam, war here, war there. It was not an angel. Humans are not angels. But saving humanity was humankind first.

1:02:57and 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. It's totally independent of this. Or Putin. Or Putin or not Putin. I think, you know, even Putin.

1:03:18Ukraine with Western weapons is bombarding Moscow. never happened for the last century that a nuclear power was bombarded in its own. It was considered unthinkable. We're doing it now. So we are... The West is sort of betting on Putin's reasonableness of not using. It's not a serious bet, right? I mean, Putin could be... At a certain point in time, you get to enough destruction and devastation and loss of lives that you realize, well, this is equivalent to a nuke. It's just happening over a long period of time. You're right. Look at Gaza, for instance. Gaza is a disaster. It's a total disaster.

1:04:00Look at the scope of the destruction. Yes. And imagine, doesn't that look like one nuclear bomb? It is. It is. It is. It is. And that's, it is. I think - Like a small nuclear bomb would probably do a similar amount of damage that they did over the course of however many years it's been going on. Yes. My own opinion, let me say something controversial, at least controversial here. Oh, no.

1:04:31I think all these wars, including Gaza, have a side which is imperial powers confronting each other. I think humankind has to learn to live together on this planet without killing one another. We have learned more or less to live together within countries without killing one another, right? We have found ways. It was long. We had civil wars. But within almost every country, most countries, inside countries, humans have found an agreement of how to live together. Why can't we do that at the level of a planet? And who is mostly against that are, of course, who is mostly in power. And I think this is –

1:05:49of life, the insane amount of money that's been spent on a huge deficit that we have. And then given this, how would you even move towards trying to straighten it out? Like what, what, what could a person do? Like if you imagine someone, some completely benevolent person who rises to the position of being the president of the United States, someone who is just a, you know, just a good person and only really wants to help, what would they do? I think... I'm happy you asked this question very much. Because it is complicated, right? Oh, it's normally complicated. Look, I think the answer... There is an answer to this, and the answer is the following.

1:06:4030 years ago the United States and its 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 but because the rest of the world have also become rich which is good but the West is not anymore in a completely economical dominant position as it was before militarily the United States it's totally dominant it controls all the oceans all the seas by far the largest power of the world but not anymore economically that is the source of the instability that I see so it seems to me that the United States leadership has a choice a serious choice a historical choice either to defend its absolute dominance military dominance as it's doing together, and that the risk is a third world war, a huge conflict.

1:07:39China, Russia, Iran, the world doesn't want that. Or, vice versa, accept to work in a more collaborative way and transform enemies in collaborators. Yeah. Look, I'm Italian. Italy is a wonderful country to live in. I love it. I go there every summer. It's a life expectancy much higher than the United States. It's a lovely way to live. People are happy, yes. And we had a great empire in the past, right? The Roman Empire. We are the – it's wonderful to live having had an empire. And be a great place for tourist money. UK had an empire much more recently, of course, in the 19th century. It was dominating the planet.

1:08:26It's not dominating the planet anymore. Right. They gave it up. And they're doing very well. I mean, there's a great life in the UK as well. Not as nice as Italy, of course. No. They both have their problems. So I think what the United States should do, of course, I know that I'm in a contrarian position here with respect to both sides of the political spectrum in the US, is to go back to more power to international legality, United Nations collaboration, and get out of this habit that America always needs an enemy to fight against. We don't need an enemy to fight against. We have enough enemies, climate change.

1:09:11We 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 that's what they want.

1:09:30J.F. Kennedy gave a fabulous speech in 1963 at the American University in Washington, not long before being killed, in which he said, we have to find a way to live together with the Soviet. we have to find a way to

1:09:56not consider them enemies and then he said and that's an answer to what you said before let's not ask whether the Soviets want to do that first let's ask whether we want to do that do we want to live together without going into a war and that was he was killed but that was a seed for the avoiding war between the Cold War never became a hot war direct. I mean, a lot of people dying in the periphery. That was very wise. I think we should go back to this enlightened Kennedy speech of the 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.

1:10:40They get talked into it. They get pushed into it and ordered into it by people that generally are not making wise decisions. And when we can look at every single war that we can remember, whether it's the Iraq war going in or the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's the Afghanistan war, which made no fucking sense, whether it's this Iran war, all these, Vietnam's the biggest one, like that one made no sense. And that was the first time when Americans were like, I don't think we're the good guys. I don't think we should be there. And if you think about it, it's all because of whoever is running the countries like that Something about that aspect of our society has to change and It sounds like Like a very It's a crazy hope but my hope is that as AI becomes more and more omnipresent as we start farming off various tasks to it one of the things that we're going to farm off is government one of the things we're going to farm off is how we interact with other countries i know that's terrifying to people but just think of the disastrous effects that we've had so far with humans doing it if all international military conflicts ended instantaneously upon ai governing the use of conflicts and military weapons.

1:12:13And imagine that. Imagine a war where it stops. All war stops on the planet. That is one of the things that everybody wants, but no one thinks could ever possibly happen. If you ask the average person in the street, what are the odds that in 10 years from now, there'd 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 um but it's terrifying right ai taking over our world is fucking horrifying um let's separate these two things let me take ai out of the picture for a moment okay um obviously if we didn't kill one another it would be much better for everybody.

1:13:07For everybody. Humankind spent trillions in military expenses every year. If you just reduce by 5 % these military expenses globally, altogether, not changing the balance of power, the amounts of resources liberated would be enormous, colossal sufficient for solving climate change, for giving jobs to everybody, for raising, taking away poverty. There's a huge amount of resources that we use for military, for killing one another, or if we don't kill one another, they're wasted.

1:13:48So you say, if you ask people, could we get rid of war, people say it's impossible. But people said it's impossible, you know, could we get rid of slavery? Could we... But there's no slavery in America, but there's slavery all over the world, more slavery now than there was during the Atlantic slave trade. More people are enslaved today than have ever been enslaved.

1:14:13True, but there have been some progress in Europe. Right here in America. But, I mean, the rest of the world, it's still a giant problem. The point is, human nature is an issue. human the art 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 the part of the problem is there's 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 people that are very benevolent and compassionate and charitable True.

1:14:52But one – true, true. Completely agree. But one point which you made is that we often make the mistake of thinking we are the good guys and the others are the bad guys. Right. Sure. And that's one of the sources of the problems, right? After all, a lot of Americans went to Afghanistan thinking we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. A lot of American person, individual, went to Iraq thinking, oh, they're weapons of mass destruction. We are the good guys. There is this – we should sort out from this hypocrisy and start to learn. You know, we started talking about science about perspectives.

1:15:37Our perspective is not always the right one. The other perspective, we should learn about the other perspectives. and there are colossal interests very often our countries masquerade greed and power games and interest 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 interests The people who make money because of military, because of weapons, is a huge force that pushes for having more weapons, and they have a colossal amount of money, and they influence politics. And the result, it's death, destruction, and increased risk for humankind as together.

1:16:35I think humans, you're right, humans are a disaster, but they have always been reasonable also. They've done good things. Well, we vary widely, very widely. We're very different. I'm optimistic. I am too. A couple of days a week. A couple of days a week, I think. I'm mostly optimistic. I think there 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 envoys to check out their military.

1:17:25The U.S. did it with the Soviet. It worked. Yeah, it could work. Or AI could just stop it all. That's a possibility too. So the question is, for the moment, we're still controlling AI, right? For now. The point is that are we developing AI collectively for the good of everybody or everybody is developing AI for becoming more powerful or becoming the others? That's the question. 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 pay links.

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1:19:03It's designed to dissolve under your tongue for fast results. They are number one for a reason. And we have a special deal for our listeners right now. Buy two months of Blue Chew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN. You'll also receive free overnight shipping. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. I have a crazy theory. My theory is that is a natural process of the human species. And that's what the human species has always been here to do is to create digital life. And that we are essentially an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon. And our entire existence has been advancing technology to the point where we can make an artificial life, which is the ultimate expression of technology.

1:19:53And 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.

1:20:28And 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.

1:20:42I see the possibility whether I'm sure this is the future I don't know I'm not sure either I'm just talking shit but if I was but if I was guessing no there's another thing humans tend to give it tend to focus on what is happening in the last couple of years okay and tend to read everything in terms of the last little things when books and printing was invented everybody said, oh we got it, the universe is a book we have to decode the book of nature when machines became more effective people said, oh the universe is a machine humans are a machine then digital stuff and information was invented so everything is a computer sometimes we over read the present and you know when the first communist arrived oh everything will become communist when the capitalists are everything will become capitalist future often surprises us yeah for sure oh yeah I mean I'm not betting that I'm right but I think it's moving in a general direction of unpredictability to a point where 20 years from now the world's unrecognizable.

1:22:07It might be. It might be. I hope it's for the better. That's my rose-colored glasses view of the world is that I hope it corrects a lot of the problems with human behavior. I share your hope, and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including me as an intellectual, you as Joe Rogan, and everybody listening to push toward let's keep the common interest. Well, here would be the common interest. If it really could get to that level, you could absolutely, with the resources available today, wipe out poverty worldwide. Exactly. Where no one on earth ever has to worry about nutrition or shelter.

1:22:42Exactly. Or medicine. Just with the money. We have the resources for that. Right. And you could completely change with robotics and automation and new power sources. You can completely change all of these areas that are deeply impoverished that have been so forever. You look at these places that are like insanely packed in with people and dirt roads and like poor sanitation. That could be changed instantaneously. That could. We have the resources for that. Education could be changed instantaneously. You'd literally change it. Within a couple generations, you have a totally new society. It's a totally different society.

1:23:16And again, how much of what you're seeing with crime and poverty would just disappear where there was no famine? There's no worries about food. There's no worries about shelter. There's no worries about anything. That sounds like pie-in-the-sky bullshit But it's not necessarily if you think about how they're gonna scale up AI and automation and manufacturing It's gonna be really weird and our access to resources will be Radically enhanced like way way more than we have today Why wouldn't we be able to just spread like turn the third world into the first world? That's a possibility That's that's that's not like that's not putting a civilization on Mars.

1:24:00Like this is a possibility It's here 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 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? Look, when the United Nations was founded in the 40s and 50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries together. Okay. So humankind already has said, let's do that.

1:24:38But then somehow special interest and power games prevail. There's also the issue of nuclear power. So when they first started distributing nuclear power to other countries, they didn't realize how easy it would be to convert it to nuclear weapons. Right. The cell like India got nuclear weapons. Pakistan got nuclear weapons. It gets weird. Right. So then you're realizing, oh, well, we can't use nuclear power. Well, now. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is a lot more complicated now 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? Like, you're going to get hydrodynamics?

1:25:12You know, you're going to use waterfalls? Like, how are you going to power them? How are you going to... What are you going to do here? You can't give them nuclear power. If you give them nuclear power and they have nukes too and then the whole fucking world has nukes? Hey. So it's complicated. but with AI I think that complication radically decreases and it's conceivable you could do something like that and how much safer would the world be if you just eliminated most murder most crime most most acts of poverty most yeah yeah but it has to become a clear objective but then you have a problem with the people that are still alive that grew up that way and are just that's how they behave forever.

1:25:54There's 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. 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 also, yeah, sure. But also, you know, let's not just look at what the others did. Well, there might also be a way to enhance consciousness through technology. That might be – that's another pathway that I often consider.

1:26:36I think there is a rational side. It's not a moral issue. It's not a – it's not political in the sense of – the bad sense of politics. It's a rational thing. Yes. If we collaborate, we do better than if we compete. Of 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, 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. That famous speech?

1:27:17And unfortunately, he was dramatically right, as Joe Kennedy realized shortly after.

1:27:25The power of the military complex, it's colossal, and it has an interest in making war. And making money. That's how it makes money. And how it makes money. And then this money, of course, goes into politics, so it spirals up. 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 that Kennedy, John Kennedy tried to stop that and ended up badly for that. Yeah. Somebody says so. I don't know. I think there was a lot of people that hated him. It's very difficult to figure out what exactly got him killed.

1:28:03There was probably multiple factors. Bay of Pigs was probably a factor. Sure. All the Cubans. Yeah. There was a bunch of factors that got him killed. But for sure, this country does not like when people want to put the cold water on the war. They want to keep it rolling in some way that they can justify it. Joel, I spent 10 years in the United States. I was born in Europe, then moved to the United States, spent 10 years here. Where did you live? What part of the United States? Mostly in Pittsburgh. Oh. Don't say sorry. No, no, I like Pittsburgh. Solid people. Pittsburgh's great, after all. I like Pennsylvania in general.

1:28:41I always loved Philadelphia. It's a fucking great place. Yeah. Then I moved back to Europe, then I moved this side of Atlantic again to Canada, and now I'm back to Europe again in Madrid. So I consider myself half American, one-third American, I don't know. One-third American. Okay. We'll take it. And 50 % Italian, 30 % French, 30 % Spanish, 30 % Canadian. You're a citizen of the world, sir. Yeah, somebody who just likes that, but to some extent it's true. Ultimately, though, one world government would be a terrible idea. I don't want a government. I want collaboration across the world. So careful.

1:29:31I mean, it's very different things, right? I want to learn to treat others as somebody we can compete with, but not enemies. Not enemies. It's the idea of enemies. This country needs enemies. This country. I mean, I got so much from the U.S. It's part of me. But remember, it's not an angel country. It started off by, you know, genociding all the Native Americans, a large majority of the Native Americans. It went through the Civil War, which is one of the most brutal world of the... It used the atomic bomb first. it since the end of the second world war has waged war all over the planet without ever being attacked and has probably killed something between 5 or 10 million people in wars around so it's a country compared to the other developed country where there's a much higher level of crime, violence murder it's a wonderful country, it's creative it's powerful, it has an idea of freedom it is a strength of innovation it's a country with a lot of lights and a lot of darkness and I think very often the Americans see the light, don't see the darkness interesting, yeah, well it's not it's not in front of our face all the time, the darkness and American exceptionalism is something that's American exceptionalism is you know there is something peculiar in this country for many reasons.

1:31:09One is that it's a strange country the people are not natives right? Everybody came in from the outside this is a melting pot story but I think what 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. 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.

1:32:03Which has always been the propaganda. Which has been the propaganda. And I think if we get readers of propaganda, it's easier to talk and see the others. It's also the other side. When the Russians stop thinking we are the good guys, we are saving the people, it was an advantage for everybody. So we got to this long roundabout conversation because we were talking about AI and AI being conscious. What I was going to get to is, do you think that the universe itself is in some way conscious?

1:32:49Let me go back to my main point. We don't know what conscious, what we mean when we say conscious. 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. The Italian word for conscience, the moral thing, and consciousness is the same word, coscienza. Oh, your conscience, like feeling bad about something. Yeah, feeling bad. I've done something wrong, so my conscience is… So, the Italian word is more about moral thing. consciousness doesn't have a translation not even in French or Spanish what about the concept of consciousness is there another phrase for it the way we think about it here no we use the same word somehow it's too slightly different meaning but making confusion about it you know 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, that's the point.

1:33:58That's the central point. We are not special in the universe. We're just part of the universe. There's no nature and outside nature. We're looking at it from the outside. We are part of nature. We are home in nature. We're just another animal, a much special animal, of course. The history of science is a history of taking down metaphysical differences. In the Middle Ages, people thought that there's an Earth, which is its own reality and physics and everything, and the heavens. And the heavens were completely different. On Earth, things decay and rot. In the heavens, they're eternal. Things go around in circles in the heavens, and on Earth, things fall up and down.

1:34:45And then Newton came and basically said, no, no, no, no, we got it right. The heavens and the Earth are just the same thing. The Earth is just one of the many bodies in the heavens. We are like, you know, this little dot in the sky, which is Venus, that moves around. Well, we're like that, like Mars, like Venus. So it was a shock for Europe, right? Oh, boy. The Earth is just one of the many things around. And then, a few centuries later, comes Darwin and convinces us, convinces everybody, that animals and humans have common ancestors. Your grand-grand-grand-grand-grandmother and the grand-grand-grand-grandmother of your cat could be the same organism, the same person.

1:35:36So 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 consciousness we are not the special thing outside of nature, we're just one of things that happen in nature I'm sure that in the big universe there are all sort of things happening like our consciousness, or much more complicated, much more rich, much more beautiful, who knows, we don't know but certainly we're not so special we're home in nature, which is beautiful because there isn't nature and culture. Culture is just one natural phenomenon.

1:36:21There isn't body and spirit. It's just the same thing described in different manners. So, yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us, and who knows how many in the... You know, the Earth is just one of the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, and the galaxy is one of many hundreds, 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. Oh, whatever the whole thing is very different than what we thought it was.

1:37:08Right, and we are. It's much more rich, much more complex, much 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. Every mom is special for his kid. The mom is really special for the kid. Every kid is special. And so are we. Special for ourselves, for sure. And important for ourselves. Do you think that our human consciousness is a way that the universe experiences itself? Yes, it is. It is de facto, right? But it's not because there was some initial plan to do that. I mean, that's just how things happen.

1:37:51Well, 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, let me put it this way. You're asking this question to me as a scientist, a physicist. I think that physics is badly overrated. How so? because at some point people thought, oh, if we figure out the physics equations that cover the reality, we've understood everything. And that's silly in my opinion. Precisely because nature is complex. Imagine, do you play chess? No. Do you know the basic moves of chess? So you know the basic rules of chess.

1:38:38So 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 laws of physics are like the basic rules of chess. They're easy to know. You write them down, the Maxwell equation. Well, you need to study a little bit the Schrodinger equation. Everything is governed by that. Yeah, but what you can do with that is fabulously complicated. It's not enough to know them. You need chemistry for chemical phenomena. You need psychology to understand people.

1:39:22You need literature. You need philosophy. You need emotions to understand what is love and so on and so forth. So this idea that physics exhausts everything, it's true in some basic silly sense, in the same sense in which all the complexity of chess playing, after all, is just, you know, ten basic rules, how the king moves, how the queen moves. But in the same sense, it's silly because the complexity of units goes far beyond just its basic equations of physics. 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.

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1:40:54Terms apply. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. So when you think of human beings as a vehicle for the universe to experience itself, do you think the universe itself is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand? Yeah.

1:41:23Like, is, are we, our biological understanding of what we think of as consciousness, being that it exists inside this moving creature with a finite lifespan that has the ability to manipulate its environment, is that just an egocentric version of what this is? And it's probably everywhere all the time. I think we use ourselves as an analogy for trying to understand things beyond ourselves. To some extent, this analogy works. But the key point for me is that the universe as a whole is still a colossal mystery. We don't know. And we don't have the full story by very far. the universe is far more complex for us to understand.

1:42:19Far more many things happening. Far many possible perspectives which are not ours, which we do not have access to. So, two general questions. In my opinion, the only reasonable answer is we don't know. You know, there's so much we don't know. I think if I look at great scientists of the past, they're characterized not by the fact that they understood the universe, but by the fact that they were so much aware that there's so much in the universe which they did not understand.

1:42:58We are, look, what are we? We are not super powerful, intelligent, total rational things outside the universe looking from the outside. We're little critters on a little planet, you know, developed for surviving in Savannah, which have developed some good mental tools, very good, but limited compared to the immensity of the universe, of its complexity. So, what do we know about the universe from a larger perspective? We don't, I think we don't know. There's also this weird thing with people where we're always dealing with the perspective of the accumulated knowledge up until now. Yeah. And this has always been the case.

1:43:39Like people, when they first developed quantum theory, this was, what, 100 years ago? Yeah. When they first started doing that? Yeah, 100 years ago. Think about what they were working with. And then 100 years before that. And it's like everyone is only working with what other people have already figured out and what they've contributed to it. Yeah. And we're very good at accumulating. That's what we're very good at. Very good at it, especially now. Yeah. Especially with AI. Well, also in the past, right? Sure. People built how did people sit to physics on the basis of previous experience. Yeah.

1:44:08So that's the strength of our speeches somehow. We don't have to start again. But that's what I was getting at is I wonder what the world looks like in 200 years. I always think we're born in such an amazing time. So how old are you? I was born in 56, so I'm past 70. Okay, so I'm 59. So 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.

1:44:57My grandmother, her name was Olympia, She was born at a time where there was no electric light. There were no trains. There were no cars. There was no washing machines, television. There was no radio. Before dying, she went in a plane. She flew. During her life, she saw all 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, that's a good point, especially the air travel, right? You can all of a sudden go to all these different countries in a day. Travel was fantastic.

1:45:46Look, you called me and you said, I was in Europe. Can you come 48 hours to Texas? And I flew from Europe to Texas. This is fantastic. If I told my grandmother when she was a girl, she would have laughed say come on that makes no sense it would take a month to go there that's true so things change dramatically but they do so to your question I have no idea how they will be 100 years in the future

1:46:19we are always there's always a perspectival thing it seems and the last one is the most important but there have always been big changes Always. Always. Imagine when books were invented or where agriculture 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 bumps. not in I think you were in California before being here in Texas I think that there is an idea especially in California that now we are in a super very very very special moment I'm not sure we are in just one of the jumps ahead I think that when electric light and electricity and power came to our that was a big jump everything was a jump I bet people in 1969 watching Jimi Hendrix thought it was a jump oh yeah you know there's so many jumps There's so many, like, wow, I can't believe it.

1:47:25Hunter Thompson wrote about that, about the 60s. All of a 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 who were young there. It was a cultural break. My parents were not understanding me. I was rebellious. I was a bit of a hippie and there was different worlds. And now parents understand their kids.

1:48:02No? I don't know. A little bit. They're always confusing. Children are always growing up in a different era than you. And there's different experiences and different pressures and different weirdness. Kids are growing up today with social media and phones. Everyone's connected to everyone. They have their location. They share their location with their friends. It's a very 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.

1:48:45Right. And including scientific knowledge. I think scientific knowledge is great. Sometimes it's the best we have about things. But we shouldn't think that we have figured out the big questions. The big questions are not figured out. Well, we're no different than the people that lived in 1900 that thought they had it figured out. I'm sure they were pretty aware of what they knew. And there's probably quite a few people that were super confident. that basically had it 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 there is to understand.

1:49:29It's very easy. There are angels and influence of the astral influence and this and that, spirits. they thought they had understood 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 and very charismatic. So people follow them. Yes, true. And wisdom, I think, to a large extent, is two things. One is realizing that we don't have the answers. So being... And you know, we're never certain about anything. Certainty is not within our... I like to tell this story. My father grew up thinking his first name was Franco.

1:50:24Until the day he asked a birth certificate and figured out that his first name was Giulio. So 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 he didn't like it but he didn't dare say so so I registered you with a different first name so so that created a disaster for the rest of his life because his paperwork wrote some Franco some Giulio so he didn't know his own name 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 things can go wrong but that's good I don't think we should aim at certainty in fact it's the other way around we should be careful about certainty because certainty is what blocks you from understanding more if you're certain that the earth is flat you don't understand it's round if you're certain that things are objective you don't understand the possibility that they are not and so on and so forth so accepting the limitation of our knowledge the fact that we may be wrong it's a key for learning more that I think is crucial and the other thing you know you and I have I think one thing in common what's that?

1:51:47curiosity if I had to define myself what has been the driving force of so much we've done is curiosity I got curious about science and curious about philosophy curious about the world Curiosity is what, and you too, right? I mean, it seems to me that there's all this, you know, Joe Rogan experience is that openness to curiosity of listening to people, what they have to say to this. Curiosity, I think, is a fabulous force for the world. Not just thinking that you close yourself in what you know already, but being curious, being curious about the rest of the ideas, the world, the others. I think it's genuinely contagious too.

1:52:28When I find people that are curious about things, I get curious. Exactly. When someone's actually curious and they start having these conversations that are clearly to them fascinating, I'm addicted to it. I'm like, what do you got? What are you talking about? What is this? How did you do it? How did you figure that out? Yeah. But I've, yeah, I mean, I've kind of been insanely fortunate that I can have these kind of conversations with people like you. Yeah, I envy you for that. You get to know all possible people very easily, right? It's very interesting. It's not a finger and everybody comes to you.

1:53:01I like it. Well, it took a long time to get to that. I can't even imagine. Even from the very beginning, it was always so interesting. I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, you might not even know who they are, but you'll have a conversation with them and you'll get a new perspective on things. You'll get a new version of how a person lives their life. And the more I think you gather about that, the more you understand about yourself and the more you understand about interacting with people. Yeah. Yeah. And you discover that people are different, have different ideas. And you figure out why they came to these different perspectives too.

1:53:41And 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. In fact, I got a rich man from California calling me not long ago and asked 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.

1:54:30And how do ideas come in? I don't know. Our mind has this incredible capacity of generating ideas. Very often, ideas are just combinations of previous things. A lot of physics is just... I understand this because it's like that, but not exactly like that. So I take part of the idea of that, part of the idea of that, I combine. It's a lot of combinatorics. I hear what he says, I hear what you say I hear what the others say, ah look this goes together with that so a lot of ideas come from bringing together, that's why the more you learn, the more you produce things, the more you're curious the more you're you know, how did Newton come out, this incredible idea he studied Kepler, he studied Galileo the two things didn't make sense together but they were similar So I said, how can I put this together with that?

1:55:25My own job, my own physics job, is to mix quantum mechanics and general relativity. That's what the core of my research, the central part of my research is doing. How do you go about doing that? How do you mix them? I think you mix them by taking them seriously. So quantum mechanics is so successful that it's telling us something about the world. And general relativity is so successful. Generativity has predicted black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of the universe, time, the fact that time, your head is more than time through your feet, and so on and so forth. So it's all come out to be right.

1:56:06So it has to be right. And quantum mechanics works so well. A lot of technologies based on quantum mechanics has to be right. So then the question is how do they fit together? You sort of turn them around, both of them, until you say, oh, look, this might join with that. 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 is called loop quantum gravity. It's a way of solving this problem. We're not sure it's right, right?

1:56:41That's my main work in physics, loop quantum gravity. it's a way of bringing together quantum mechanics and Einstein theory it gives some predictions it gives a picture of quantum space and quantum time

1:56:57it'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 in the situation we are working for findings and consequences that could be tested. Science is not sufficient to have ideas. Then you want to test them. So that is my entire, the main central job of my life has been combining ideas to make a new conceptual structure for thinking about quantum space and quantum time. And that's useful for understanding what happened inside the black holes, what happened to the early universe, What happened to black holes?

1:57:43You know, black holes, if you let them there for a very, very long time, they evaporate. They become smaller and smaller. So what happened at the end of the evaporation? These kind of questions need quantum gravity. 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 maybe in 10 years we will know. It's not impossible to know, but for the moment we don't know. There are two possibilities. One is that genuinely there was nothing before the Big Bang. So time started there. This is what Stephen Hawking, he worked a lot on this possibility.

1:58:31He expected that to be the case. The other possibility is that, no, there was something before the Big Bang. And the intuitive idea is that, you know, you have a universe collapsing, falling down into itself, getting to a very, very compressed stage and then bouncing out. And we see the bouncing out. And if I had to bet now, I'm not sure, but I would bet for the second one. From the equations, that seems to be what was the case. And do you think this is a constant process of expansion and compression? no because I think that if we do this jump that you just did we're making the usual mistake as soon as you understand something to think it's there for over right if you live in a valley and ask well I've never seen what's behind the hill you look behind the hill you see something else say oh I get it it's like that forever no it's not like that forever it's like that for a while and something else happened so So we are afraid of saying, I don't know.

1:59:38So as soon as we have a step ahead, we tend to say, okay, I got it. That's a very healthy explanation. Yeah. Because it's accurate. We really can't figure it out. Yeah. 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 primordial black holes that gave rise to this early galaxy. So there is an explanation within the same dates, which is possible.

2:00:25That, you know, when the universe was very, very – that we know a lot of confidence, right? There was a time about 12, 13, 14 billion years ago that the universe was much compressed, much hot, and fluctuating a lot. So at that time, it's very possible that many black holes formed. And maybe some of the early galaxies were generated by black hole formed at that stage. That seems to me the most plausible answer. I'm not a cosmologist, so I'm not really my field, but it's close. I try to follow. So it would be that our understanding of what it takes to form a galaxy is incorrect. Yeah. Or the time it takes.

2:01:17That's right. That's right. So, you know, during my life, something that has been realized is that not only did there are black holes all over the sky. When I was a student, people didn't believe in black holes. 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 correspond to that. The first people who started thinking, actually, that thing up in the sky that we see could be a black hole was in the 70s. it was very interesting because you know there are a lot of binary systems in the sky, two stars 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 seeing 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 are coming from very far away that people couldn't understand what they were.

2:02:33And people said, well, if it was a black hole, the matter falling into the black hole could radiate very strongly and we could see that. The actual evidence grew very slowly in the 80s and 90s. In 2000, I moved back from America to Europe. I arrived in France and the director of the department was a particle physicist a very good particle physicist and I said I'm working on black holes and he said Carlos 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 relativists, the cosmologists the astrophysicists were taken very very seriously uh now we have pictures of black holes so now there's no doubt uh there's no doubt i mean physicists have doubt about everything but are any of those old professors still alive Yeah, but they changed their mind.

2:03:41Scientists changed their mind. Good ones. You're totally right. Good scientists changed their mind. I'm sure if I talked to him, he would laugh and say, of course you were right. So now we have complete evidence that there were black holes. But, you know, we see black holes, which are sort of a little bit more massive than our sun. There are many, many of these. but then we discovered these colossal black holes, gigantic, which are usually the center of the galaxy. And we have two pictures of black holes. One, the black hole is the center of our galaxy, and then another black hole much bigger in another galaxy more far away.

2:04:24It's beautiful 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, every good scientist. Is it a galaxy that forms and then creates a black hole in its center? Or is it actually the black hole that starts that, you know, then it forms a galaxy around it? It's not yet completely resolved. What is the role of the black hole in the galaxy? and I think these very early galaxies could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe.

2:05:06The craziest theory that I've ever heard was that in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole and that could be if you went through that black hole you go into a whole other universe filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with a black hole in the center of it. You go through each one of them, hundreds of billions of galaxies each with a black hole and it's just, that's true infinity. Yeah, that's a crazy theory. It's a beautiful theory. In fact, there's a good friend of mine who worked a lot and maybe even started that theory, is Lee Smolin. I am not convinced. I think that, I don't know, we don't know, but I think that if you jump into a black hole, you just don't go to another universe.

2:05:54After a long time, you come out in our own universe. A black hole is a... The black hole, left alone, is going to eat everything around, and then left alone, it's going to become smaller and smaller, evaporate. And then that's what loop quantum gravity seems to suggest. There is a quantum transition, becomes a white hole, and everything inside comes out. So remember, at the beginning of our conversation, we said that time is different, right? Time goes faster and slower. So if you jump into a black hole in a short time for you, you're going to jump out billions of years in the future. So a black hole could be a shortcut to the future.

2:06:38Oh, boy. Isn't physics beautiful? It's beautiful. Yeah. It's terrifying and beautiful at the same time. It just 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 send machines up there and people want to go up there. There was a time in which people said, oh, we're 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, our grand-grandfather. And they were completely wrong.

2:07:26We learn, right? Through the spectra, there are ways for... We know exactly what is the chemical composition of stars. Which is crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So we do learn. This is magical. Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's fascinating to even think of the possibilities that are out there. Yeah. And that as time goes on, we'll develop more and more powerful telescopes and we'll be able to see more and more. Yeah, if we don't kill each other with nuclear weapons. which is a very concrete possibility. Well, if there really are aliens out there, there really are super advanced civilizations, I would love to know how they managed to navigate through that if they went through the same course that we are currently going through.

2:08:12I would love to know. Because that's one of the things about the Fermi paradox, right? Maybe the reason why we don't see them out there is because they never really get that far. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they destroy themselves with nuclear weapons when they were on stage. Maybe, you know, the Union is very large, very vast. It's huge. So even if in the galaxy there are many, many, it 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?

2:08:59Do you know what I think is most probable? What? That they have already seen us and they thought we're totally uninterested and we just avoided talking to us because we're too stupid. Really? I don't like that theory. One of the reasons why I don't like that theory is because we don't do that. We are constantly studying things that are more primitive than we are. We're constantly doing experiments on ecosystems and trying to solve problems that exist. Like I was watching this documentary about this island that got separated when they dammed some river and created this island. And it was in South America.

2:09:40And 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 over consuming the seeds of all the plants and so there weren't new saplings growing and it was having a detrimental effect on the ecosystem because it was so they brought in harpy eagles you ever seen a harpy eagle not the monkeys the humans brought in humans okay yeah brought in two harpy eagles no what is it a harpy eagle oh eagle The big bird.

2:10:16It might be the biggest eagle. Okay. It's either that or the golden eagle. Which one's the bigger one? I think harpy eagles are bigger. Anyway, they're really good at killing monkeys. And they let these two harpy eagles loose, and they 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, OK, this is too much. And this is now they're like getting past the whatever the numbers are that they could reproduce.

2:10:53Like it was getting to the point where these eagles, just two eagles and their two offspring were just so they pulled the plug and they pulled the eagles out of there. And they said, all right, well, we tried that. But unintended consequences. 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. No, we don't. We go in and we interfere and we intervene and we monkey with the, for lack of a better term, monkey with their ecosystem by bringing in predators.

2:11:26So you think there was some alien civilization would interfere with us? Of course they would. We are so fascinating. Stanley Kubrick movie, Space Odyssey, was about that, right? Sure. An alien civilization who were just, according to the story of the movie, we're sort of an experiment. of an alien. Well, that's an old story. Yeah. That's a story that's from the, you know, the Sumerian text, that's from the epic... That goes all the way back to some of the old books that they found that were in the caves in Qumran. You know? Well, Sumerians have this idea of the gods. We are just created gods for their own advantage.

2:12:07You see, I... You know, these are beautiful stories. I always find them, you know, they're fascinating to talk about, but to

2:12:22humans, we're just trying to project ourselves to something similar to us, changing a little bit. I think there should be something like life all over the universe, but why should it be similar to us? We lack imagination. There are 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 superintelligence 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.

2:13:10So it has to go through a process. So whether it looks like us or not, for sure, we definitely lack imagination in our just imagining the possibilities of different kinds of life and different kinds of intelligence all over the universe. But the idea that they wouldn't be interested in us seems to me silly. Like we are in an adolescent stage of evolution where we're both like we were talking about earlier. People are kind and compassionate and wonderful to be around and curious and interesting and also brutal, stealing resources from other countries, creating wars under false pretenses, you know, using propaganda.

2:13:47So 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. Now, if I was an alien, I would be utterly fascinated by the soap opera. I'd be like, how does this one turn out? 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 interesting to study. Yeah. I would not think they'd be like, oh, so boring, these people with their godlike AI, nuclear weapons okay okay okay i buy the point i can see the point joe i can see the point joe yeah uh yeah but but look what we're doing we're using our own mind to try to imagine how something that could be could think about us sure but but of course the only model we have is us right and other animals And other animals, yes.

2:14:53Yes, exactly. But, you know, 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 squirrel notions to try to figure out humans. And they would just get it wrong. Right. And much like squirrels, we're probably so limited in our ability to perceive and imagine in comparison. That's what I was trying to say. to what else is out there. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Squirrels are cute. They are. Until they bite each other's nuts off. Do they? Are they nasty? Are they nasty? It's kind of a, it's not known exactly if they do that.

2:15:37But that's always been like the wives' tale is that they, when they're mating, when they're competing, they will fight. And one of the things they do do for sure is they throw each other out of trees. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why squirrels can fall from so far and still survive. 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.

2:16:11Oh, boy. I don't know if that's true. Wait. That was one of those like the outdoorsmen would always tell you. If you grew up in Europe, I did. when you come to this side of the Atlantic, one of the beautiful things is that there are animals much more than in Europe. Europe is... The problem with Europe is there's too many people, okay? And especially places like Italy or the Netherlands, full of people, full of people. You don't see animals in Europe. Right, other than like pets. You see cats and dogs and rats. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Animals which are lived strictly with humans, either as pets or as rats, a lot.

2:16:48But when you go out hiking in the mountains, it's very rare to see an animal. You know, when I was a kid, it seemed laughable in America, but I would go hiking with my parents as a small kid, and there was a squirrel. Everybody was jumping. Oh, look, a squirrel. Fantastic. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I came to the U.S. and there are squirrels all over, right? You can't 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 were living in London, Ontario, and out of our windows there were coyotes. There were all sorts of animals of all kinds.

2:17:28We had an eagle coming down in our garden and just sitting there. Canada has true wildlife. It's fabulous. So for me that was a great thing of coming to this side of the Atlantic. It's still more – nature is still more pleasant. In Europe, nature has been domesticated all over. It's rare to see some wilderness. Well, we're very fortunate that we have the national park system. Yeah. The way we have these national parks where you 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 there, the elk are not scared of you at all.

2:18:05They hang out by the visitor stand. It's a little bastardized. There's an Instagram page called the Turons of Yellowstone. not like morons, but tourists. Ah, I see. And people that get too close to the bison and get flipped through the air. Disasters, 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. You can guess how that turns out. When I was in my 20s, I dropped out from university and I took one year off traveling. And I did coast-to-coast, Atlantic to Pacific. Canada one way and the U.S.

2:18:46the other way and alone. It was fantastic. Wow. Did you hitchhike? Hitchhiking, yeah. Look at you. You were a hippie. Yeah, yeah. In that sense, yes, yes, absolutely. I met all sorts of people. But when I arrived in the Rockies, it was in Canada near Banff and I spent some time hiking high in the mountains. It was marvelous for a European, exactly because it was empty. But then I came down to Banff, it was a small, teeny village at the time, and the camping was too expensive for a young kid. So I said, okay, I don't want to stay in the camping. So I walked up a little bit and put my tent in a little empty space.

2:19:30And then a grizzly came. Yeah. So I was inside my tent, the sun was going down, and this big bear started walking around the tent. I was terrified to death because I had one of these little, little tents, just one layer, and the sun was going down. So I saw the shade of the bear on the tent. So the instruction was, make noise. Okay? That was the instruction that was given because the risk is that the bear opens the tent looking for food and sees you, gets scared, and kills you. So if you make noise, that's supposed to go away. But I was trying to scream, but it was too terrified. Ah, ah, ah, ah.

2:20:15Noise was not coming. Oh, no. So then I looked around. I don't want 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 so the bear went to the food opened the food and then after a while went away I was terrified how long did that last? the entire thing lasted half an hour before I had the courage to come out and look and there was no bear anymore so I took my tent and ran down to the campground and said, I pay whatever I want to, I stay here. And then, you know, people were talking about there was this greets litter going around.

2:21:03So 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. Of course, there was a regulation. Don't go alone. Yeah, they know what they're doing. But it's not to say that that bear wouldn't wander its way through the camp, too. They will. They don't respect boundaries. They don't respect regulations. It's such a crazy animal that we have here. Like, grizzly bears are so fascinating.

2:21:42They're so enormous. Enormous. Yeah, and they used to be all over the place. Like, California doesn't have any anymore, but that's on the state flag. Oh, yeah. It's a grizzly? Yeah, it's grizzly. Is it a black bear? No. Okay. It's a brown bear. They used to have brown bears all over California. In fact, the guy who was last killed by a grizzly bear, they named a town after him. It's called Levesque, California. I see. Yeah, I've been to there before, and it's like there's a plaque, a memorial. Oh, I see. In Canada, they have accidents. They still have accidents. Oh, yeah. Especially B.C., right?

2:22:17There's a lot of them out there. Yeah, in B.C., yeah. I have friends that live in Edmonton, and boy, they have everything out there. They have lynx. You run into lynx all the time. You see grizzly bears. They have moose everywhere. It's such a wild place. It's so cool. That's what I envy of this America, right? In Europe, you don't see anything. Right. It is an issue. There's almost no predators in Europe. It's very rare that you find wolves, other than, of course, Russia. Yeah, if you go east. Yeah. You get a lot of wolves there and bears as well, of course. But it kind of eradicated them all from most of urban Europe.

2:22:57America 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, New Mexico. It's just the south of Utah is just marvelous. Oh, it's incredible. I was actually watching another documentary yesterday on jaguars entering into Arizona. There's 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.

2:23:35It's pretty 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 lions or different things? No, no, no, much larger. Jaguars are huge. They're the ones that eat crocodiles in the Amazon. They're the ones that dive off of trees and kill the caimans and bite them by the back of the neck and drag them. Have you ever seen that? No, I've never seen it. Oh, you've got to watch this. It's amazing. Jaguars are some of the coolest animals to watch hunt because one of the things that they hunt is crocodiles.

2:24:10Yeah, they love to eat caiman crocodiles. I see. So they hide in trees. Or on the side of the bank, like waiting for the crocodile to get into a vulnerable position and 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 asphyxiation. They kill by crushing the back of the head. Oh, wow. That's their move. So they have super strong... Yeah, they're huge. Look at them sneaking up behind them. They're the third biggest cat.

2:24:45Oh boy, wow. Yeah, that's how they kill. They bite the back of the neck, they crush the head, and then they drag him away. So he's going to eat a crocodile. So they're the third largest big cat. So there's tigers are 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 to humans? Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. 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.

2:25:23I mean, historically, they've eaten people. They prefer, I'm sure, to eat. But you have to do something stupid. You have to bother them. Well, you have to be on their diet, right? Like this is the same thing with tigers. Tigers become a problem once they realize they can eat people. And then they habitually eat people. And that's what they do in India. When one tiger starts doing something wrong, they go out and look for it. Yes. Yes. Because then they realize how easy it is. So once we become, once we are on the menu, it's like the first time you eat a Chick-fil-A. You're like, this place is great.

2:25:55And you just want to keep coming back. That's the problem. And it's also for most - But that's not wise on their side because we are weak individually, but we're super strong in 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.

2:26:31But what's interesting is that they've decided to repopulate North America or the United States at least. It's pretty cool. They're making their way back up here. I don't 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 a mountain lion and they're like double the size of a mountain lion. They're really big. It's a big cat. But they're really beautiful. Why are we fascinated so much by big cats? We are definitely. It's just incredibly, it captures something of our imagination.

2:27:09This is something about the beauty, the strength, the elegance, 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 Rupert Sheldrick made this point. It's a really good point. When children go to sleep, they're not afraid of all the things that could actually affect them in an urban environment. Like they're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or someone going to break into their house.

2:27:46They're afraid of monsters. Monsters, which are the big predators. 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 preys to being predators. Yes. Which had to change profoundly our mental structures. Yes. When we realized that we could resist big predators and actually becoming predators ourselves. Because evolutionarily, we were not predators, if you go back again. And our species at some point learned to be like those things we were afraid of.

2:28:36But does this explain the fascinations? Because a monster, it's not just a fear that they generate in us. It's also sort of admiration and beauty. Well, we have admiration and beauty for almost all big predators, right? We have admiration. Not for crocodiles. Right. There's a lot of beauty for them. 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, much, much closer to them. In fact, I've always been fascinated how much easy we communicate with mammals, right? Sure. without language, without words.

2:29:24But if you are in the wilderness and any sort of mammals, you understand the animal and they understand you. So we communicate very easily. It's completely, you know, reading each other's emotions and each other's intentions, each other's attitude. So it's easy for instance to, you know, you're going your way, I'm going your way, we don't bother each other. Sure, unless you're on the menu. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah, you could be on the menu, especially if you're in the wrong place. But that's just the nature of the wild itself. It's just this constant series of life-eating life all around you, whether it's life-eating plant life or life-eating other animal life or life-eating aquatic life.

2:30:11Yeah.

2:30:15Yeah. Then somehow we became predator. predators at some point in our history. Yeah. And then we started doing this against one another. Yeah, we probably started doing that from the very beginning, most likely. We were probably competing for resources. We don't know. We don't know, right? There are two theories. 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 the story. One is that war is something that started very late, only when we became agriculture, when we started accumulating and putting away big chunks of grain.

2:31:08And the other is that groups of humans were in war even before that. Very different theories. And I think it's interesting that there are these different theories because it has to do with our 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 to result in our genetic structure? It's just that after agriculture we could steal stuff from one another or is something that goes back all the hundreds of thousands of our speeches. We don't know. What do you think? I'm not sure, but I tend to think that war is recent because a lot of the communities on earth which live hunting, gathering, they don't go to war.

2:32:09They have no reason. It's an economical thing. You only go to war with another group if there is some accumulated resources you can steal. If you find another group of hunter-gatherers, if you have extra meat, you share, because otherwise it will 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. At worst, they fuck and they do not fight. But chimpanzees do. And they're equally related to us. So it doesn't help to look at our cousins, what they do. But it's a crucial question. It has to do with the question we were discussing before.

2:33:00Can we get rid of war? How much war is part of our genetic... not because we're blocked by our genetic inheritance, but clearly it's much easier to think that we can get rid of it if it's only 10 ,000 years old rather than 100. I tend to think it's hundreds of thousands of years old, and I think chimpanzees are the best example of that. We are much closer in behavior to chimpanzees than we are to bonobos. We are equally related. We are equally related, but in behavior. Genetically, it's not. But in behavior, we're much closer to the way chimpanzees behave. But I had this hippie part of my life.

2:33:41I 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 mean I'm a more bonobo guy? Yes. You're more a chimpanzee guy? I don't even think I'm a chimpanzee guy. I just recognize that chimpanzees go to war with each other and they kill each other. There's a chimpanzee war going on right now. You know that, right? Yeah, they do. No, I didn't know. Yeah, there's a major chimpanzee war going on right now. that they're documenting. Have you ever seen that? There's a Netflix series, Chimp Nation. No. It's really great.

2:34:10It's fascinating. So the way Chimp Nation came about, and I had the documentary crew on, the guys who created it, it was really interesting. They had these 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. So the chimpanzee accepted the presence of this? 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. And because they've been doing this with this protocol for 20 years, the chimpanzees completely accept the fact these people are there.

2:34:43They slowly get used and 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. They see, first of all, a lot of inter-tribe conflict. They kill each other. And then they kill ones from other tribes. They leave tribes and start new tribes. It's really interesting. Really interesting. 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.

2:35:18They cross boundaries to get new fruit and new trees. And then they have wars over the trees. They behave just the way we do, just at a different scale. But I think that, like, for instance, we talk about Native Americans and hunter-gatherers. The Native Americans were constantly at war with each other. They would go on raiding parties constantly. There was, you know, I don't know how many tribes were in total. Somewhere in the neighborhood of like 200 tribes in this country, which were constantly battling each other and killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. So that's a pessimist view of your kind.

2:35:52No, no, no. No, that's what they did. No, no. It's not pessimistic. I'm not questioning it. Yeah, but it's not pessimistic. It's what fooled a pessimist view of the future. But no, no, no, no. It's not even pessimistic. It's just I'm just saying that's what they did. Like this idea that the only reason why this place was at war is because Americans came here or Europeans came here and settled. Not really. The Comanche basically wiped out the Apache and 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.

2:36:25And their favorite thing to do was go on raiding parties. And so they would go and raid other tribes and they would kidnap people and torture people and murder people. And they did that without any influence from the Europeans. And they did that for a long time. And that was all across the country. Now, some tribes got along better with other tribes. There were more agrarian tribes. They varied differently just like humans do in different environments. But at the end of the day, there seems to be a pattern. When you're talking about uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers, they go to war with uncontacted tribes all the time.

2:36:58I just had a guy on the other day that was talking about cannibalism. And one of the ways they would utilize cannibalism is eating their enemies after they killed them. And if they had an enemy that was in a rival tribe and they had an encounter and they killed them, they would eat them. And this is like part of their culture. This is all over the world. This is taking place. I think it's much more likely that war is a very, very, very old thing. And it probably has to do with a really harsh environment where we had to survive, where people were stealing from each other and stealing mates and stealing resources and cannibalizing each other.

2:37:34Okay. So you think this is going to make the project of living in peace much harder? I think it's why it's so difficult currently. I think it's why it's so difficult currently because we have a very, very long history of war, of conflict, of chaos and violence. And it's probably what made us survive this long. with the crazy wild world that we live in. Let me play the optimistic one here. Please do. One can read this in reverse. Namely, I believe you. I mean, also you talk with a lot of people, so you have a lot of information about that that I might not have. Say this is true. Now, you and I don't cannibalize each other, right?

2:38:16Right. So we have learned. So then, if this is the case, it means that civilization, which is recent stuff with respect to, has had a very strong pacifying effect on us. I agree. And education. Education, civilization. So we learn rationally. We learn or through religion, through various processes. So maybe that process of learning that there is an advantage in collaboration is something that can develop more. I think it can. I think you're right. And then the question is not going back to our ancient paradise of kindness and gentleness, but to create a better world where we can live together better.

2:39:02I think that's the path. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really awesome. It was great. I loved it. Thank you. Better than anything expected. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. On the equality of all things, lessons on physics and philosophy. Do I pronounce your last name? Rovelli? Yeah, perfect. Carlo Rovelli. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Bye, everybody.

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