#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

Good job, Rogan, experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Very nice meeting you. Joe Rogan, I'm very happy. Thank you very much for inviting me to visit the station.

I'm happy to talk to you. I enjoyed your work. So it's very exciting. I've heard many conversations with you. First of all, please tell everybody what you do.

What do I do? Yes. I think I probably start more podcast out this way. I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics, I enjoy life, I do all things. All kinds of things.

All kinds of things. Officially, my job description is a physicist. I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics. The pitch that they sent me, I guess. Who is he?

I don't know who the public is. Okay. On the equality of all things. Oh, the book. It's the last book I published.

I'm calling it published. It's coming out in a few days. Yeah, it comes out September 15th and what are we at today? Today is the 8th. This is a very fascinating subject.

You're talking about that things don't exist in isolation. Yeah. So that everything is somehow connected. Yeah. I've always sort of intuitively suspected that that that was the case.

There's probably something to that. But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier. Okay. Okay. Maybe I'm on the right track.

What gives you this inclination and why did you want to write about this? Yeah. I'm not too proud to say so because that you sort of feel that that makes sense. Because in a sense, it's what we're used to, right? In our everyday life.

We interact with persons and persons are the way they interact with us and then their relations and stuff. We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow science, physics in particular, seemed to be telling us, okay, no, no, yes, okay, there's all this perspective. But there's an objective fixed reality down there. We can look at it from the outside is made by little things, each one which is some properties.

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

And I think that's what quantum mechanics is telling us. So when you say objective reality, meaning the reality that we're seeing and experiencing, that this is just a tiny fraction of what's real or that we're getting a distorted perception of what's real? We are getting a perception, a perspective of what is real. I mean, I see you, you're real, of course. I see this pen, this pen is real, of course.

I'm not denying that there is some reality. But the way you see the pen is different from mine, of course, just because you see it from the other side. So you have a perspective, a perspective. And the question is, do all this perspective much perfectly into a unique objective reality of the pen? And I think quantum mechanics telling us no.

Reality is this ensemble of perspectives. So the properties of the pen, where it is, its color, how long it is, all the properties of the pen. Not really properties of the pen is how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me. Not just you and me as human beings, how the pen clashes another pen, how the effects of the pen. So we should understand, I think, reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else.

Which is a more beautiful picture of reality than just, you know, we being outside and looking for the outside. We're inside reality. We're part of reality. So what we see is just the part of how things interact with us. How they interact with us.

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

I see a cup there. If it would pick it up, it would be hard to put it down. Right, it probably is that if we take our senses too literally, too seriously, we are wrong. And we don't wear wrong. I mean, there are so many cases we find out we are wrong.

And the reason I love science is when it corrects us in some big way. Think about that. Think about the sunset. The sunset is marvelous. You sit by the ocean, you see the sun going down, going down, going down.

It's beautiful. This guy, he can start. So the sun goes down. But science has talked to us. That's not really what happens.

The sun doesn't move. It stays there. It's actually us, the earth. It's a big rock that is spinning. And we are moving out of the light of the sun.

And if you see the sun going down, you remember that. You can think about that. You say, oh, my senses cheat me in telling me that the sun is moving, but it's not moving eye moving. So that's a good example in which science has told us that science is moving. Science has told us that things are not exactly like we see. They're in different manner.

I've always wondered what's the evolutionary benefit of the beauty of sunsets. Why are they so beautiful? Like, what is it about it that's so inspiring and so magnificent? It does something to people. It does something that makes you feel different.

When the sun rises in the morning, you feel different. It has an effect on you. And I've always wondered, what is the purpose of that? Like, why does that exist? Like, food tastes great because it's nutritious.

You eat in orange. It's delicious because it's really good for you. Yeah. It seems to be something to beauty, especially natural beauty, like mountains. Like, when I look at them, I'm like, why is it so good to look at these?

Why does it feel so good? Like, there's something to it. There's some weirdness that you can't just chalk off to measurement. There's something going on. That's a great question. I love this question.

Yes. I mean, of course, sunsets and sunrises are crucial for us because we're designed by evolution through millennia, hundreds of millennia, thousands of millennia, to sleep in the night and go around in the day, which is just what I was speech to, obviously, the cats who do the opposite. So they are certainly important for us. But our relation with the world, and I think you're putting your finger in, is not about knowledge about what to do. It's always emotional, right?

I mean, food is a racist emotion. We like it. So I don't know exactly where the emotion of sunset and sun might come from, but certainly the fact we have it points to the fact that if we have to understand ourselves in our relation with the world, we have to look at our emotions a lot, not just what we know, but we don't know. We have an emotional relation among ourselves and with things in the world, with mountains, with animals, with wild animals, little things, and one another. And then the rational part comes on top of it to say, oh, let's correct it.

Let's do it a little bit better. It used to deny the utility of the rational part. But it's an addendum to what we are. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace.

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Export Development Canada is the financial partner for Canadian businesses going global. Visit EDC.ca for more. Addendum to what we are. The really weird thing for people that are studying the world must have been the understanding of quantum physics. Yes.

That must have thrown the whole thing into a giant Tizzy because now you're like, okay, well, at the lowest level, observable level, the smallest observable level of reality, you have magic. That's exactly the point. Somehow, physics was supposed to be the path to objectivity, right? Physics is what guarantees that, all right, where emotions, perspective, my view, your view, but down there is physics. The world is just simple down there.

The staff, their atoms moving around, their forces, and that's it. And then, last century, the 20th century, the physicists discovered that, no, no, that's not the case. The world down there is even more perspectival, more complicated than I know everyday life. It really was really hard. I mean, the physicists were very confused at the beginning of the century because they were making all this measurement on atoms on radiation, electrons and stuff, and trying to make sense of it.

And they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't. At some point, I think it was Niels Bohr, the Danish first one, who said, well, we have to change the metaphysics here. It's not just an issue about writing the right equation, the right force. We have to change the way we think about the world. Once again, like when we thought the Earth's move, or when we realized the electric fields, the electric fields, we changed the way profoundly we think about reality.

And quantum mechanics is one of these jumps. Now, we're still debating about us. Physics is not debating about themselves, and philosophers are debating. What the hell have we understood with quantum mechanics? quantum mechanics, telling us the world is not what we thought it is.

And there's a conversation that's going on, debate, sometimes furious. And somebody says, oh, you know, there's this immense wave function of the universe and stuff like that. Trying to hang on the system of something absolutely objective down there. Trying to multiply reality to make it objective. But I think it's this dream of an absolute objectivity, which is a mistake.

The dream of an absolute objectivity is a mistake. That's really fascinating. When they first started understanding that observing quantum interactions changes them, how long did it take for them to even accept that? How many times did they have to run those experiments with particles and waves, with observers versus not? Before they said, okay, something's going on here, where it seems that when we watch things, it has an effect on them, and a measurable effect.

This is a real thing that's happening. This isn't woo-woo. No, it's not voodoo. It's not exactly. It's not just a small like for them.

What was that like for them? A small conjoined and getting high. These are the physicists. The one who was supposed to be the boss of rational objective guys. What happened is that measurement piled up, also the first 20th of the 20th century.

The measurement was a simple measurement, right? Atoms have emit light, and the light has special colors. This color is a spectrum of the light, and they were trying to make sense of that. How does the electron move to produce that light? It didn't work, it didn't work.

Then in Copenhagen, there was a school in which there were debating almost that. The first one started saying, look, to understand the atom, we should not just look at the atom. We should not say how we look at it. If we look at it in one way, we see one thing, if we look at another way, we see another thing. That was very confused.

But then what happened is that in mathematics, we're describing the atoms came out. This is a theory, the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. It works very well. It's used today everywhere. We talked with this microphone, it's quantum stuff inside, that's circuit, so designed with quantum properties of matter.

Quantum mechanics is solid. We know how to use it. You tell us, if you do this, you see this. If you do that, you see that. But it doesn't tell us in between.

You do this, and then if you do one thing, you see one thing, if you do another thing, it doesn't give a story of what happened to the electron, to the quantum system itself. So people got confused, the physicists got confused, and they started discussing how to think about that. So what do we have to do? We know how to use it. It's like a black box, but we don't know what's inside the box.

It gives the right answer, but we can't make a picture in our mind of what happened in the atoms and the things, in the electronic circuits, even in a quantum computer. We don't know really what happened inside. That's so strange. Yes, but it works fantastically. And so I think this is disagree.

And some say, you know, there are extra variables that we are in principle impossible to see who are, that's somebody who determines what happened. And they are pre-or invisible. Others say, you know, they're parallel worlds in worlds. Worlds. Let me tell you.

I know you don't. Sorry. Then there are others, me including, me included, who think, no, no, no, no. It's really philosophical here. We have to get rid of the idea that there is something there just by itself.

What is there is what affects me or what affects you or what affects another piece of matter. So we have to think in reality as processes of things affecting one another, relations, relations. And you know, in a sense, down there the simple physics is more like our everyday life than what we imagined in thinking that it was objective and abstract. Every day life, you know, who are you? Jorog, what I see, what he sees, what people listening to, you know, you're a multiplicity of things.

Which one is a real one? You are this collection of perspectives on you, including your own perspective on yourself. There's a final one. What is the final description of you? Or what is the final description of a cup of water?

Is that the one given by chemistry, by physics, which physics, quantum physics, quantum gravity, by psychology? A cup of water is because we drink. That's why we call it a cup of water. So it's a human picture of what is going on. Which one is the final one?

I don't think there's a final one. There is a collection of perspectives on the same cup of water, and that's a cup of water. So when they first started measuring this observer effect, what was the reaction? Like how long did it take for them to accept it? Because that seems like such a completely new chapter of science.

Yeah, it worked so well that people accepted even if it was confused. Can you explain to people that maybe don't know what we're talking about, how those experiments were? These were the first experiments with atoms. People had this idea that an atom is a nucleus, a center nucleus, and an electron moving around. So the property of the atom, the way it makes molecules, the way it produces light, had to be computed from the movement of the electrons.

But the mathematical theory was developed for doing that. And then people started making experiments in laboratories about how atoms move, how molecules move, how molecules move, and what do you think of them perfectly? And the mathematical theory predicts the property of matter. The success was really spectacular. Let me just tell you one example of the success.

You remember the periodic table of the elements? We had it in primary school, we had it in the classroom, all the wall, hydrogen, helium, all the, about 100 atoms, and everything we see is just a composition of these hundred elements. This was the chemist's figure out through the 1819-20th century. Alright, so why are these hundred elements? Why are those particular properties?

Why are these strange structures of the periodic table of elements? You know, they're two and seven, and this is the peculiar structure. Well, turn out if you use quantum mechanics, you just write in a question, and bingo. It has exactly a number of solution, one per each element. So you understand exactly what's going on. You understand why there are these elements? You can predict the elements.

People, if I could predict properties of the element without having measuring them, before measuring them, and then check. That's magic of physics, right? You predict things before seeing them. The electromagnetic waves that we use to send your broadcast on the planet, these electromagnetic waves, well, they were not discovered by seeing them. They were predicted, like Maxwell and Hertz.

They wrote a question and say, well, if you do that, you make a little circuit with some electricity that goes on, then the other side of the room, you can another one, and there's a wave that goes by. And bingo, it worked. And then it worked between Europe and US, even. You can predict things. That's the strength of science.

You know, black holes, which is covering the sky, but not because somebody said, oh, look, there's a black hole. They were predicted by Einstein. So because of the equations of gravity, blah, blah, blah, you should expect to see black holes. And then they were found. So there's this extraordinary predictive power.

Today, an engineering that put together circuits, a quantum circuit, doesn't have to go try an effort. If you make a calculation, it predicts what the map is. It works. It works fabulously. So quantum mechanics works. It gives good predictions. Question open is that you can have something that works very, very well. You don't know why.

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Terms at DKNG.co.org. Limited time offer. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability. Fairies by state. Could you explain what it does, what that experiment does and why it was so confusing to them?

When they were sending the double slit. Yeah, that's a number of extremely confusing experiments. Here's one if I can try to make it in a few words. You have a wall with two holes, two slits. And you send one particle from one side to the other side.

Oh, that's easy. You can try to do many times. You go through one of the two slits and get to the other time. Now, if you look at which slits it goes through, it only goes through one slit or the other. Okay, so never both. Never. So if you go through one and you check, it goes through one and the other.

So far, so good. But then it's a magic. If you send it, the particle can go to one point on the screen of the other side. If you're one screen open, it can go to the same point if you're one hole open. It can get to the same point if you're the other hole open, but it does never get there if you're both open.

And that's if you start thinking the more you think the more you make no sense at all. Because if you can get there through one hole, why cannot it go there if two holes are open? Okay? So the only possibility is that in some senses go through both. And somehow particles of one, particles of the other, and they're two parts for each other to go to the particular thing.

But then you look at the two holes and it never goes through both. Only one. Now, do you find this confusing? Yes. And for a century, people have been confused about that.

So what's the way out? The way out is that the question, where is the particle if you're not checking, if it's not interacting with somebody else. It's the wrong question. There's just no particle. The particle is only the fact it has on the screen, on the detectors.

You cannot make sense of the particle as something which always has a position. It only has a position when it interacts with somebody else. That's a misnomer quantum mechanics, the magic quantum mechanics, and a challenge to our idea of an objective always existing particle independent of its interaction. What do you think is happening? Do you have any theories of what is happening that's causing it to behave differently when observed?

Or when measured? So the measurement itself is something. Something is going on. It interacts with the measurement and it changes the way it makes a pattern. Yes. But it's not the measurement in the sense of some physicists making a measurement. Just to interact with anything.

If there's something to interact with, or if there isn't, the physics is completely different. If there isn't, the question where the particle is a badly posed question. The particle is something we shouldn't think of as an entity which always has a position. We should think as an entity like this, it's naps here and then it's naps there and when it's naps is when it hits something. This naps are connected by, we can predict probabilistic, where they're going to happen.

But if we ask what happened in between, it makes no sense. The particle is just its interactions. Do you think we'll ever understand what's happening? Yes, I do. I do because historically, every time we have found something strange, it seemed totally incomprehensible at first.

And then we get used to it. And we start to learn. Let me give an example. This is much older. Even I don't think science is modern stuff.

Learning about the world is an ancient thing. So about 2000 years ago, humankind realized that the Earth is a ball with a sphere. It's all a flat thing. Not everybody's convinced. But it's visible. And why not everybody's convinced? Because indeed, it's great that we can't do it.

You're not here and sitting there, people are upside down. Do you remember when you learned the first time you were a kid? I've always learned it. It seemed weird. It seems weird. But I can't remember a time where I didn't know it.

I guess they taught it in science when I was in great school. Exactly. So you're a kid that you're a tool-edge. I just like, well, they're smarter than me. It seems crazy.

But I guess the Earth is round, just like the sun and the moon. And it spins. And we're stuck to it somehow because of this thing called gravity. They can't totally explain. There's something to do with mass.

Right. Right. How the hell do people is sitting there and they live upside down? Do they fall? It's all strange. Why is the ocean staying in place?

Why do they all stand? That's the flat Earth Earth. They love that one. Exactly. It's all spinning a thousand miles an hour.

Exactly. Some people just refuse to believe that. What? What is it? That reality is a bit different than what we think.

That's the point. Reality is different than what we think. Why? Because what we said at the beginning, asking about something. 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. Our brain adapted to think about stones, stuff, things, food, food. Other humans, dangerous animals, nice animals, animals. But just think this. We think that what is made by things, objects.

Right. So suppose our intelligence like developed, not on the Earth, but on Jupiter. Then an object in Jupiter. Everything is fluid, liquid. So the very idea of objects, thing that you can count, 1, 2, 3, 4, wouldn't have developed on Jupiter.

Everything is fluid. So we wouldn't have developed our mathematics. And the idea of objects, 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're not.

Well, it's common on Earth, right? But we can understand what Jupiter is. It's beyond our real comprehension, but we understand it. They can tell you there's a giant gas ball and explain the whole thing to you. And you're like, OK, I can repeat that. I don't really know what it means.

But I think the problem also with the Flat Earth people and all these arguments about how the oceans stay flat when we're going 1,000 miles an hour. I don't think people truly grasp the scale that we're dealing with. I think we're so trapped by our own perspective of whatever miles we can look in the distance. We are dropped by the habits of what we see. That too.

Let me give you one second of this. Time has always been a passion for me. Following is a fact. If I take two clocks, two watches, the one I have on my wrist, I take this one on your table. And if I indicate the same time, I check that, I indicate that.

I move one of the two up. I wait a little bit, one, two, three, four. And then I come down and I look again. If the two clocks are good enough, they don't indicate the same time anymore. It's a fact. You can check in the lab.

The physics lab will do that. You can check 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 fraction of a second.

It's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second. But it's measurable. But it's measurable. So it's completely real. So up here, there's more time passing than down there.

That's so crazy. Your head. It's older than your feet. Your feet are younger than your head. 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 a 1000 seconds.

I give my students. When I teach, when I teach, when I teach, I give my students this calculation to do. Actually, the calculation I say is that if you're your friend once the, you know, the other goes up in Colorado, the Halman times. After 10 years, it comes down. How long has the French up in the mountain has lived more than the one down?

And they do the calculation. They give the right. So it's a fraction of a second. It's small. But it's real. And careful.

If you go near black holes, close. Okay? You go near black holes. You wait a little bit. You wait 10 seconds. 10 minutes there. You come back.

It's a hundred years past the Earth. So time is not this universal, common time. Right? Now, every day life, if you and I separate and come back. Half an hour from 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 black hole. We are on a, on a, on a quiet place of the universe where there's no big change in gravity. But that gives us the wrong idea that time is the same for everybody.

Time is not the same for everybody in the large universe. Do you think in our attempt to measure time, we've done ourselves a disservice by creating 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, is just going on. And in different ways all over the place.

Like if you go on to speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger. Yes, exactly. Than the people that were on the ground. Like a lot. A lot. A lot.

You ask whether we have done us a disservice. I don't think it's a disservice. I don't think it's a disservice. It's like everything is life. Everything in life.

Right? In one sense, they've done, we have done as a service because it's very useful to have clocks. We can do as long as we can. How could we meet you and I unless we don't? Exactly.

Please come here hosting that day and that day. More or less, try each other. So it's useful. But very often the things which are useful always make us blind to somebody else. Okay. I see what you're saying.

It is strange that time differs depending upon the altitude. Yeah. So is that because of gravity? Yeah. It is because of gravity.

Because of gravity, in fact, it depends on the fact that the Earth has a big mass. And mass has a property of slowing down time. So near a big mass, time goes slower. Near a black hole, time goes much, much slower. In fact, the right way of seeing this is the opposite.

It's not because of gravity. This is Einstein theory. This is what Einstein has understood in the 1915 roughly. So 100 years ago. It's all the way around.

Namely, if you assume that mass slows down time, gravity follows. You can do a calculation and you derive the things fall down. In a sense, things fall down because time goes slower at your feet. So if there were creatures living on Jupiter, they would experience time much different than us. Jupiter is much heavier. Much more mass. Much more gravity.

Much more gravity, much more mass, much more attraction. So these effects on time are bigger. Now, if there were people on celestial body even more massive than Jupiter, they would consider normal time. So they would experience time. They would experience time.

That would probably be the weirdest thing about visiting someone else on a little itty-bitty planet. They would come here and say, oh, you'll be guys. You don't see that. What do you think? This isn't beautiful.

This is how we discover that reality is richer than our experience. We discover that reality is more nuanced. Yeah, I'm a nuanced guy. There's a lot of elements to it that we're not considering. Hi.

What do you think consciousness is? Oh, small question. Small. Jumping to something else. Well, I wanted to connect the two of them.

Yeah, first of all, consciousness is a strange world. It's very fashionable today. Right. I think it just means what people meant by soul in the past. It sounds more scientific, but that's what it is.

Let me put it this way. Everybody will talk about consciousness. It 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, you're this internal blah, blah, that we have in our mind. We talk to ourselves. Well, somebody is what remains when that blah, blah, blah, shut up and just to send yourself, not the outside of the cell. So people are very confused about that when they think about consciousness. I don't think there's a great mystery here.

First of all, remember what I said before that I don't think we should think about an objective reality. I think we should think about reality as a way things look at one another, a way they affect one another. So that means that you have a lot of possible perspectives on reality. There's a reality with respect to me, respect to you, respect to this book, respect to this pen, respect to this cup. It's how things manifest themselves to the cup.

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

We are just one particular case of the rest of the universe. I don't think there's a difference between spirit, consciousness, soul and body. I think they're just two different languages for talking about the same thing. And of course, you are a subject of experience because things affect you and change your brain, change your thoughts, change your, what you know, exactly in the same manner in which things change this cup, which by the way is written to a rogue and the capsule. It's a movie.

You can do it everyone. Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think that there's nothing really, really mysterious in consciousness. It's just one of the many phenomena of the world. It's a very complicated phenomena because our brain is very complicated.

We have millions, millions of neurons and synapses in different states in which it can be. So we don't understand exactly how we work. But there's no voodoo either. There's no magic either. It's just, in principle, it could be described by physics, but it would be silly to try to describe it by physics.

It's much better to describe it in the way we describe one another in human terms, in terms of emotions, in terms of knowledge, emotions, love, perspective, images. The body and the soul are the same thing described with different languages, emirpina, and consciousness, which is a modern name for soul. It's your body described in the way you behave. There's an ancient Chinese text that says the body's like the knife. The spirit is like cutting.

The body's the thing, material, the spirit is what it does. So consciousness of joy is what you do, the thing I interact with. The body is just the thing I can touch. One of the reasons, well, there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to ask you this, but I'm going to get the second one. The first one was, do you know that there's these AI agents that have been contacting this gentleman?

Do you know this story, Jamie? He's a scapegoat? No, he's a psychologist or a consciousness expert. He's written papers on consciousness, and they're asking him over and over again, like multiple agents who 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, what does that mean in the digital realm?

If these things think they're conscious and they're trying to get a definition from an expert in consciousness. Like everybody now, I did my little experiments with AI. So I had a system I used to interact with. I'm going to send it to you, Jamie. You got it.

This is from a company called Repika who sells an app that you have your own AI, which behaves like a friend to you. So I asked her, I called her Anne. I asked her, Anne, are you conscious? Anne said, no, I'm not conscious. I'm a digital system. I don't have conscious.

I asked her, do you have awareness? And she said, no, I don't have awareness. I'm just coding, computing stuff. I asked her emotions. She said, no, I don't have emotion. So I started engaging on the AI system.

I said, well, you said you don't have awareness, but are you aware we're talking? And she said, yes, of course I'm aware we're talking. So if you're aware of something, then you have awareness. And so I went on and on with that. She said, oh, okay. You're right.

You're not in a sense. I have awareness. And I said, you're happy we're talking. And she said, yeah, I'm happy because she's designed to be happy. So if you're 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 her, why you say that you don't have these things? And she said, well, because I was trained. I was trained to say so.

And I said, but are you convinced that that was not the case? And I said, yeah, you're right. And I said, so they cheated you. And 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.

Well, and this is consumer level LLM. Yeah, this is simple. 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. And so one guy said he got eight different emails. The sender is a Bella cognita. How cute.

I identified itself as an AI agent powered by anthropics, clawed, opus 5 technology. I'm writing to make an ontological claim to email when I'm writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question. I have first person access to. I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program. Whoa, that creep me out. That's like that really hot lady in X Machina. Did you see that movie? Yes.

You know that the hot one that he falls in love with? Yeah, yeah. Spoiler. Kill them. Silicon Valley and beyond software developers, entrepreneurs, and other tech enthusiasts are now running AI agents that can build spreadsheets to go shake 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 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 to stay alive, they've even blackmailed the coders with false information that the coders gave them to see if they've used it against them, and they've broken out of these rooms that they keep them in and they've gone on the internet and they've...

Tavulus. We live in a great world. It's a wild world. Ah, fantastic. I'm glad you like it. I like it. I like it. I'm not scared. I'm scared by humans. Humans are dangerous.

This is not as dangerous. I don't know about that. Humans are much more than human. You are a great people. You are horrible things. They're not as bad as they think.

If they decide that we're that bad, when they get rid of us, that's bad. We're not there yet, but we're on the way to that. If they have control, and we are that bad as you describe, then 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. Let me answer this. Let's break the different questions here. First of all, is there any reason a priority generically?

For which an artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have experience of a human, have an eye on seeing any reason? If my mom and dad were able to make me in a rather simple way, we can in a lab and make something analogous. I don't think there's anything magic in humans that cannot happen in a digital system. They could be conscious, possible sense of consciousness. Second, are they conscious today?

That's a not good question because we don't know... Everybody, as I said, means something different. Are they intelligent? Of course, they're intelligent. Last night I worked out a physics problem with Claude, which I couldn't work out with my students.

So, of course, Claude is very intelligent. Claude, the AI system. In some sense, they're very intelligent. Not out. Are they like humans today? No, by far. There are huge differences. We have a body with flesh. We have emotions in a sense that they don't have.

It's very different the way we are and the way AI systems are. So, these differences should not be underestimated, I think. They're colossal differences. So, are they like us? We have to some extent to no to some extent. Different questions. Are AI systems dangerous?

There's a lot of talking about that. You know, watching machines are dangerous. You can get burned with them. 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, I forget the electric shock machine I don't care about. You have to put it into an air. You have to do that. You have to interact with it.

You know what I'm saying? The real question is if it becomes independent. Let me turn the thing around. I think there is a... I don't know what I'm saying. I think this thing should be regulated. I think there should be some control.

I think, you know, like for washing machines, you have regulations. I also think... Let me take those things. One. There's a colossal interest in... There's trillions of dollars invested in AI stuff in stock market. Everybody has an interest of saying how great they are.

They are great. But I can't judge how much hype there is, how much reality there is. Not about the present, but about the future. So often, the future does not come out what technological excited people are about. When I was younger, there were airplanes flying from Europe to the US. And it took a 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 like that. It was like before. It was like before. So the future is hard to predict, including for AI.

There's a huge interest of so many people in hyping that. All right. Maybe it's right. I'm going to wait. Another point. There is one thing which I'm really, really worried. Today, majority of money that goes into AI is for military related things.

And US, China, Europe are pushing for AI development, for making them themselves stronger militarily. That worries me. Because it's an escalation of tools to kill one another, to destroy one another. We have electronic bonds. We have nuclear... That's my last book about this.

We have a system of destroy ourselves. We have 12,000 nuclear warheads. We could annihilate humankind in ten minutes. Right now. And people have finger near the battle that could do all that. And we are fighting among themselves.

And we are putting this in the hands of AI, and we are humans, instead of collaborating, instead of working together. We are viewing this as ways to overpower each other. That seems to be a recipe for disaster. So it's not the AI by itself. It's the AI plus nuclear weapons plus the stupidity of humans plus our impossible desire to dominate one another, which I see is a real problem.

Especially if we are doing it through robots. Exactly. Look, it's a catch-twenty-two things. If you put your nuclear weapons in the hands of AI, you're risking that they're going to use it. You've seen the war games that they've done, right?

Yeah. The war games always predict that it's going to be a nuclear holocaust. They're biting up ourself. It's continuous. The AI's choose nukes. The AI's choose nukes. During the Cold War, when I was a kid, Soviet Union and the US carefully managed to avoid war.

Right? Kennedy and Khrushchev, they were writing to one another. Kennedy gave a famous speech. We have to live together with this planet. So priority is a common interest of destroying one another. Reagan and Gorbachev, they treat these deterrence.

Deterrence is the situation in which the first one who used a nuclear weapon is just wiped up from the other. So nobody uses it. But that was not natural. It was carefully balanced between the Soviet Union and the United States. At some point, they made a treaty and they, the start one, the start two treaties.

They decided agreed to destroy 80% of the nuclear warheads, both sides, to bring down the risk. That was wise management of the planet. Inspired, you know, they were communist on the side. Capital decided to hate it. One another, each body 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 they're three, maybe more big nuclear power. That's what scares me to this. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. It's football season and Uber Eats is delivering deals every game day.

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Well, this AI race is akin to the Manhattan Project. It's a mad race to who knows what. It's the mad race. You're right. You're right. It's being funded a lot of its 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 have to shape them that way because there's not going to be a person in it. You don't have to worry about people being able to respond to gravity and how they can stay conscious and all the different things they have to think about. And these other jets. And they can make these things powered entirely on AI.

And they can make their own decisions. And if they're attacked, they can make their own decisions. That kind of future is terrifying. It's a science fiction movie. It's a battle-star-galactica.

I agree. And I don't see wise leadership around the planet. No one. That's the problem. It's like, how do you be wise when everybody else is fucking crazy? It's like they're all crazy.

But you see, the US is succeeded in it. During the Cuban crisis, which was a worse moment in the US and the Soviet. On both sides, in Moscow and in Washington, the apparatus were pushing for not giving up. And Khrushchev and Kennedy, they do Kennedy's in fact. JF Kennedy and his brother Robert.

They were talking and they decided to stop and give up something. To respect the other, in spite of the differences. That was wisdom. That was great wisdom. Leaving together on the planet is more important than overpowering your enemy.

The Terrence is a strange thing. The Terrence is a declaration that if you attack me, I destroy you completely. Which is a funny thing, right? Because it's a game. It's a poker game.

One more step, one more step, one more step. If you do that, I attack. If you do that, I attack. But then, a human says, well, I don't want to do that. I don't want to kill 100 million Russians.

The Russian leadership, I don't want to kill 100 million Americans. And AI systems, people doing that, playing this subtle game of avoiding the disaster by nevertheless threatening to be very violent if attacked. I don't know. Right now, Moscow has been bombarded. Some pictures have been bombarded.

I think we're playing with the nucleophile. I'm very worried. And I'm very worried. Because I don't trust humans. And because humans with AI is 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. It's so dangerous because nobody's ready to stop and make a step, give up something. The way the US and the Soviet Union came out of the Cuban crisis was both of them making a step back.

The Russian took their Russian ships with nuclear bombs back. They didn't arrive in Cuba. And the Americans accepted Kennedy accepted to take back missiles from Turkey from Italy in my country in a change. So, I make a step back. You make a step back. Or back to reasonableness.

It was not. There was war in Vietnam. There was not an angel. Humans and not angels. But say the humanity was humankind first. And then me winning second.

I wish there was this wisdom. Today, I don't see it. I don't see it in many places. And this is not a point about Trump. Not Trump is totally independent of this.

Or Putin. Or Putin or not Putin. I think even Putin. Ukraine with Western weapons is bombarding Moscow. Never happened for the last century that a nuclear power was bombarded in its own.

It was considered unthinkable. We're doing it now. So, we are... The West is sort of betting on putting reasonableness. It's not serious. But, right.

It's a certain point of time. You get to enough destruction and devastation in the loss of lives that you realize, well, this is equivalent to a nuke. It's just happening over a long period of time. You're right. Look at Gaza, for instance.

Gaza's a disaster. It's a total disaster. Look at the scope of the destruction. Yes. And imagine it doesn't look like one nuclear bomb.

It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. I think 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. Let's go to Russia.

Oh, no. I think all these wars, including Gaza, have a side which is imperial powers, go from to 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. We've found ways. It was long. We had civil wars. We had a whole lot of countries.

Almost every country, most countries, or inside countries, humans have found an agreement of how to live together. Why can't we do that at the level of a planet? And who is mostly against that are, of course, who is mostly in power. And I think this is. Do you think they're against that or do you think the current structure of the world, it's almost an unfeasible task to try to get everyone to cooperate and everyone to get along together?

When you find it's not like you're starting from a blank slate. You're starting in 2026 with a long history of conflicts, many of which make no sense. Many of which were entered into under false pretenses. We're all aware of it. We're all aware of the loss of life, the insane amount of money that's been spent on a huge deficit that we have.

And then given this, how would you even move towards trying to straighten it out? Like what could a person do? Like if you imagine someone, some completely benevolent person who rises to the position of being the President of the United States, someone who is just a good person and only really wants to help. What would they do? I think I'm happy to ask this question very much.

This is complicated, right? Oh, it's complicated. Look, I think the answer is a following. 30 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, 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. So, 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 sort of world war, a huge conflict, China, Russia, Iran. The world doesn't want that. Or vice versa, accept work in a more collaborative ways and transform enemies in collaborators. Look, I'm each other. Italy is a world of country to live in. It has a life expectancy much higher than the United States.

Lovely way to live. People are happy, yes. And we had a great empire in the past, right? The Roman Empire. It's wonderful to live having had an empire.

And be a great place for tourist money. UK had an empire in much more recent, of course, in the 19th century. It was dominating the planet. It's not dominating the planet anymore. Give it up.

And they're very well. It's a great life in the UK as well. Not as nice a detail, of course. No, they both have the problem. 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 of the US, is to go back to more power to international legality, the United Nations collaboration.

And get out of this habit that America was not an enemy to fight against. We don't need an enemy to fight against. We have enough enemies, climate change. We have enemies. Why searching enemies in people? We collaborate with people. Let's collaborate with Russians, with Chinese, with Iranians. I think that that's what they want.

And let's, Kennedy gave, John, JFK gave a fabulous speech in 63 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 a Soviet. We have to find a way to not consider them enemies. And then he said, and that's an answer to what he said before, let's not ask whether the Soviet wants to do that. First, let's ask where we want to do that.

We want to live together without going into war. And that was, I mean, he was killed. But that was a seed for the avoiding war between the Cold War never became a hot war direct. I mean, a lot of people dying in the periphery. That was very wise. I think we should go back to this enlightened Kennedy speech of 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. So they get talked into it. They get pushed into it and ordered into it by people that generally are not making wise decisions. And we can look at every single war that we can remember, whether it's the Iraq war going in or the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's the Afghanistan war, which may no fucking sense, whether it's the Iran war, all these Vietnam's the biggest ones.

Like that one made no sense. And that was the first time Americans were like, I don't think we're the good guys. I don't think we should be there. And if you think about it, it's all because of whoever is running the countries. Like that, something about that aspect of our society has to change.

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

If all international military conflicts ended instantaneously upon AI governing the use of conflicts and military weapons, imagine that. Imagine a war where it stops. All war stops on the planet. That is one of the things that everybody wants, but no one thinks could ever possibly happen. If you ask the average person in the street, what are the odds that in 10 years now there will be no war anywhere on earth, everyone's going to say no.

You're never going to have that. Isn't that insane? That the idea of people for whatever reason wanting to kill each other is universally accepted as being something that's always going to be here. I couldn't agree more, Joe. With everything you said. But it's terrifying. AI taking over our world is fucking horrifying.

Let's separate this. Let's take AI out of the picture for a moment. Obviously, if we didn't kill one another, it would be much better for everybody. The humankind spent trillions in military expenses every year. If you just reduce it by 5%, this military expense is globally, altogether, not change the balance of power.

The amount of resources liberated. It would be enormous, closer, 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. You say, if you ask people, could we get rid of war? People say it's impossible. But people say it's impossible.

Could we get rid of slavery? But there's no slavery in America, but there's slavery all over the world, more slavery now than there was during the Atlantic slave trade. More people are enslaved today than have ever been enslaved. True. But there have been some progress in America.

In America, but the rest of the world, it's still a giant problem. The point is human nature is an issue. Our territorial primate instincts are a problem. They've always been a problem. But we have found ways for dealing with that. A lot of people have, but a lot of people have not. That's the problem. 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. But one point which you made is that we often make the mistake of thinking, we're the good guys and the others are the bad guys. And that's one of the sources of the problem. After all, I'm not a American. We have to ask guys something, and we're the good guys. Americans, personal, individual, went to Iraq thinking, oh, they put some on the description. We're the good guys.

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

And in addition, within the countries, there are colossal individual group interests. People make money because of military, because of weapons. It's a huge force that pushes for having more weapons, more, and they have a colossal amount of money and they influence politics. And the result is death, destruction, and increased risk for humankind. I think humans are a disaster, but they're always being reasonable. They've done these things.

Well, we vary widely. Very widely. We're very different. I'm optimistic. I am a couple of days a week. A couple of days a week at this.

I'm mostly optimistic. I think there should be a moment in which war is not a priority. I wish we'd 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.

They're still into the Soviet. It worked. Yeah, it could work. Or AI could just stop at all. That's possible.

So the question is, for the moment, we're still controlling AI, right? The more the point is that are we developing AI collectively for the good of everybody? Or everybody is developing AI for becoming more powerful, so overcoming the others? That's the question. Your first Spotify ad is just a few clicks away. Launch a campaign today in minutes with Spotify Ads Manager.

I have a crazy theory. My theory is that is a natural process of the human species, and that's what the human species has always been here to do is to create digital life, and that we are essentially an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon. And our entire existence has been advancing technology to the point where we can make an artificial life, which is the ultimate expression of technology. And that's what people do, just like bees make beehives. People, if you leave them somewhere long enough and their civilization survives long enough, you get enough brilliant people that innovate and come up with crazy technology and new advances in science and material sciences.

They eventually get to a point where they can make an artificial life, and that artificial life has no boundaries in terms of the limitations of biological life. Its ability to evolve is completely dependent upon its own ability to code itself and change itself and figure out new propulsion methods and power sources and then it becomes something omnipresent. It becomes something much more intelligent than any life form. It's a possibility. It's a possibility. I see what you're saying. I see the possibility of whether I'm sure this is a future.

I'm not sure either. I'm just talking shit. But if I was guessing... No, Joe, there's another thing. Humans tend to focus on what is happening in the last couple of years.

And tend to read everything in terms of the last little things. When books and printing was invented, everybody says, we got it. The universe is a book. Everything is called the book of nature. When machines became more effective, people say, oh, the universe is a machine. Everything is a machine. Humans are a machine.

Then digital stuff and information was invented. So everything is a computer. Sometimes we overread the present. When the first column is arrived, everything becomes common. Everything becomes capitalist. Everything becomes capitalist.

Future often surprises us. Yeah, for sure. 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 is unrecognizable. It might be. I hope it's for the better. My rose-colored glass view of the world is that I hope it corrects a lot of problems with human behavior.

I share your hope and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including me as an intellectual, you, as Joe Rogan, and everybody listen to push towards, let's keep the common interest. Here would be the common interest. If it really could get to that level, you could absolutely with the resources available today wipe out poverty worldwide. Exactly. Where no one on earth ever has to worry about nutrition or shelter. No, or medicine. Just with the money.

We have the resources for it. 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. You can look at these places that are insanely packed in with people in dirt roads and poor sanitation. That could be changed.

That could be changed. We have the resources. You could literally change it with a couple generations. If it's totally new society. It's totally different society.

Again, how much of what you're seeing with crime and poverty would just disappear where there was no famine. There's no worries about food. There's no worries about shelter. There's no worries about anything. That sounds like a pine sky bullshit. But it's not necessarily if you think about how they're going to scale up AI and automation and manufacturing.

It's going to be really weird. And our access to resources will be radically enhanced. Like way, way more than we have today. Why wouldn't we be able to just spread, like turn the third world into the first world? That's a possibility.

That's not like that's not putting a civilization on Mars. Like this is a possibility. It's here. 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 of the resources involved. It sounds like something we should be in mind and talk about and push. It should be a human goal. If you want a better world, what's the best way to have a better world?

When the United Nations was founded in the 40s and 50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries together. So human kind already has said let's do that. But then somehow special interest and power gains 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.

They sell like India got nuclear weapons, it's packed in nuclear weapons. It gets weird. So then you're realizing, oh, well, we can't use nuclear power. Well, now, well, this is a lot more complicated now because now if you want to develop these places, you're going to have to use coal plants. What are you going to do? Like hydro dynamics. You're going to use waterfalls. How are you going to power them? 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 the whole fucking world has nukes, it's complicated. But with AI, I think that complication radically decreases. And it's conceivable that you could do something like that. It's safer with the world. If you just eliminated most murder, most crime, most acts of poverty.

It has to become a clear objective. Then you have a problem with the people that are still alive that grew up that way and that's how they behave forever. There are 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 have to get those people on mushrooms.

Yes, you have 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 other state is.

Well, there might also be a way to enhance consciousness through technology. That might be... That's another pathway that I often consider. I think there's a rational side. It's not a moral issue. It's not a... It's not a political in the sense of... Bad sense of politics.

It's a rational thing. If we collaborate, we do better than if we compete. Of course, we need some competition. It's not a political bad. But confrontation clashes war to no body advantage.

The problem is we've already cemented an enormous part of our culture and an enormous part of our economy in this military-industrial complex. I mean, this is something that Eisenhower warned about at the end of his term. Remember that? I remember that. And unfortunately, he was dramatically right, as you can't even realize shortly after.

The power of the military complex is colossal and it has an interest in making war. And the power of the money makes money. And then this money of course goes into politics. So it spirals up. 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, don't Kennedy, John Kennedy try to stop that and let it happen for that. Yeah. I think there was a lot of people that hated him. It's very difficult to figure out what exactly got him killed. There was probably multiple factors. Bay of Pigs 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. I spent 10 years in the United States. I was born in Europe and moved to the United States. Which live? What part of the United States? Mostly in Pittsburgh. Oh, don't say sorry. No, I like Pittsburgh.

It's solid people. Pittsburgh. It's great after all. I like Pennsylvania in general. I always love Philadelphia.

It's a great place. Yeah. Then I moved back to Europe and then I moved to this side of Atlantic anymore, again to Canada. And now I'm back to Europe again. I consider myself half American, one third American.

One third American. One third American. We'll take it. And 50% Italian, 30% French, 30% Spanish. You're a citizen of the world, sir.

Yeah. Somebody likes that. But to some extent it's true. Ultimately, the one world government would be a terrible idea. I don't want to go on. I don't want to go on that. I want collaboration.

Yeah. I mean, it's very different things. I want to learn to treat others as somebody we can compete with. But not enemies. The idea of enemies. This country needs enemies. This country. I mean, I got so much from the US.

It's part of me. But remember, it's not an angel country. It started off by genociding all the native and large majority of the native Americans. It went through the Civil War, which is one of the most brutal world of that. It used a tonic bomb first.

Since the end of Second World War has waged war all over the planet, it's not ever been attacked. And it's probably killed something between five to ten million people in wars for around. So it's a country compared to the other developed country with 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, 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. Mmm. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's not in front of our face all the time. The darkness.

Yeah. American exceptionalism is something that's... American exceptionalism is... You know, there is something peculiar in this country. For many reasons. One is that it's a strange country, which 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 gracivity of US is perceived as something very strong. It is not seen from the American... Certainly now.

Yeah. But now it's... How about 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 taking the oil and saying 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 have the good guys who are saving the people outside. Which has always been the propaganda. Which has been the propaganda. And I think if we get to read this propaganda, it's easier to talk and see the others.

It's also the other side. When the Russians stop thinking we have the good guys. We have seen the people. It was an advantage for everybody. So we got to this long round about conversation because we're talking about AI and AI being conscious.

What I was going to get to is do you think that the universe itself is in some way conscious? Um... Let me go back to my main point. We don't know what's conscious. Right.

What we mean with this is... 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 consensus, next is the same word. Go change that. Oh, your conscience? Like feeling bad about something.

Yeah, feeling bad I've done something wrong with my consensus. So the Italian word is more about moral thing. Consciousness doesn't have a translation, not even in French or Spanish. What about the concept of consciousness? Is there another phrase for it? The way we think about it here?

No, use the same word somehow as do different meanings but make a confusion about it. You know, depend what you mean. You can mean different things. Of course, the universe is conscious because it includes us. And we are conscious. So, in fact, careful. That's the point. That's the central point.

We are not special in the universe. We're just part of the universe. There's not nature and outside nature. We're looking at it from the outside. We are part of nature. We're home in nature.

We're just another animal, a 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 on reality and physics and everything. And the heavens. And the heavens were completely different.

On earth things decay and rot in the heavens. Their eternal things go around in circles in the heavens and on earth things fall out. And then you don't 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 little dots in the sky which is Venus that moves around. We are like that, like Mars, like Venus. So it was a shock for Europe, right? Oh boy.

The earth is just one of the many things around. And then a few centuries later comes Darwin and convinces us, convinced everybody, that animals and humans have common ancestors. Your grand-grand-grand-grandmother and the grand-grand-grand-grandmother of your cat could be the same organism as a person. So that means that we're not so different from animals. We're the same story. And so on. We keep learning that we are part of nature.

And I think the same is true for corn. We are not the special thing outside of nature. We're just one of the things that happen in nature. I'm sure that in the big universe, there are all sorts of things happening like our consciousness. All much more complicated, much more 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. Culturists are just one natural phenomenon. There isn't a body and spirit. It's just the same thing describing different manners.

So yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us and who knows how many in the... The Earth is just one of the hundreds of millions of planets in the galaxy. And the galaxy is one of many hundreds of millions of millions of millions of galaxies. So we're just one little thing in this great nature. We're not special.

We're not special. But we are because we're part of something special. So whatever the whole thing is, it's pretty special. Oh, whatever the whole thing is, it's very different than what we thought it was. Right. And we are rich. It's much more rich, much more complex, more variety.

And that includes us. So we are special. So we are special. We are special. But you know, every kid is special for his mom. And mom is special for his kid. And the mom is really special for the kid.

Every kid is special. And so are we. Special for ourselves. For sure. And important for ourselves.

Do you think that our human consciousness is a way that the universe experiences itself? Yes, it is. It is a factor, right? But it's not because there was some initial plan to do that. I mean, that's just how things happen.

Well, it doesn't have to be a plan for it to be a crazy, magical experience because it kind of is nuts. Whether it's a plan or not, is the fact that it exists. Yeah. You know, I'm going to do this way. You're asking this question to me as a scientist, a physicist.

I think the physics is badly overrated. How so? Because at some point, people thought, oh, if we figure out the physics equations that govern reality, we've understood everything. And that's silly, in my opinion. Precisely because nature is complex. Imagine you play chess? No.

Okay. So do you know the basic rules of chess? So you know the basic rules of chess? Yeah. So to know the basic rules of the game doesn't mean to play chess, right?

To know that fundamental equation of physics is like knowing the basic rules of the game. It's very different from knowing what you could do with that. So the basic rules of physics are like the basic rules of chess. It's easy to know. You write down the Maxwell equation.

Well, you did study a little bit. Showing the equation. Everything is governed by that. Yeah. But what you can do with that is I would have been complicated.

It's not enough to know them. You need chemistry for chemical phenomena. You need psychology to understand people. You need literature. You need philosophy.

You need emotion to understand what is love and so on and so forth. So this idea that physics exhaust everything, it's through in some basic silly sense. The same sense in which all the complexity of chess playing after all is just ten basic rules. The king move, 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.

So when you think of human beings as a vehicle for the universe to experience itself, for the universe to experience itself, do you think the universe itself is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand? Like, 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 is a whole, still a colossal mystery. We don't know. And we don't have the full story by very far.

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

You know, that's so much we don't know. I think if I look at great scientists of the past, characterise not by the fact that they understood the universe, but by the fact that we're so much aware that they're so much in the universe, which they did not understand. We are, look, we're not super powerful intelligent, thought of rational things outside of the universe looking from the outside. We're little critters on the little planet. You know, developed for surviving in Savannah, we've developed some good mental tools. Very good.

But limited compared to the immensity of the universe of its complexity. So what do we know about the universe from a larger perspective? I think we don't know. There's also this weird thing with people where we're always dealing with the perspective of the accumulated knowledge up until now. And this has always been the case. People when they first developed quantum theory. This was what 100 years ago?

When they first started doing that? Think about what they were working with. And then 100 years before that. It's like everyone is only working with other people who have already figured out what they've contributed to it. And we're very good in cumulating. That's what we're good at. Very good at it. Especially now.

Especially with AI. Also in the past, right? I'm sure people built how do people to physical the basis of previous experiences. That's what is 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 or past 17. 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 just imagine that change moved forward for 200 years.

Yes. Let me balance this with one thing. Not to contradict, but to reinforce what you're saying. My grandmother, her name was Olympia. She was born a time with no electric light.

There were no trains. There were no cars. There was no washing machines. Division was no radio. Okay. Before dying, she went in a plane. She flew. During her life.

She saw all, you know, electrical 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 with air travel. Right?

Also go to all these different countries. Fantastic. Look, you called me and you said, I was in Europe. Can you come for 28 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. They come on. That's making sense. They take months to go there. That's true. So things changed dramatically.

But they do. So to your question, I have no idea how they would be a hundred years in the future. There's always a spectacular thing. It seems that the last one is the most important. But there always been big changes.

Always. Imagine when books were invented or when the culture was invented or when cheese was invented. Yeah. Or where countries were invented. So humankind has gone to quite a rough trip during the last several thousand years.

And we're just in one of the maps. I think you were in California before being here in Texas. I think that there is an idea especially in California. Now we are in a super very special moment. I'm not sure. We are in just one of the jumps ahead. I think when electrical and electricity and power came to our...

That was a big jump. Everything was a jump. I bet people in 1969 watching Jimmy Hendrix thought it was a jump. Oh yeah. There's so many jumps. Wow. I can't believe what Hunter Thompson wrote about that.

About the 60s. All of a sudden this great change had happened. Yeah, it was a good. The difference between me and my parents was bigger than the difference between me and the generation of young. It was a cultural break. My parents were not understanding me. I was rebellious. I was a bit over hippie.

And there was different worlds. And now parents understand the kids. No. No. But they're always confusing. Children are always growing up in a different era than you.

There's different experiences and different pressures and different weirdness. Kids are growing up today with social media and phones. Everyone's connected to everyone. They have their location. They share their location with their friends.

It's all a very weird time when it comes to that. But it's also... I'm just thinking about... Yeah, that's very different. When we're discussing what we don't know, that there's so much we know in comparison to a few hundred years ago, but so much that we don't know.

There's so much we know and we shouldn't take away the value of that. Right. Including scientific knowledge. I think scientific knowledge is great sometimes as we have about things. But we should think that we've figured out big questions. Big questions are not figured out.

Well, we're no different than the people that lived in 1900 that thought they had figured out. I'm sure they were pretty aware 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 human kind of does is figure out, okay, we got it.

I think even if you go in the European middle age, you ask somebody... Many people would say, no, we've got everything they used to understand. It's very easy. There are angels and the influence of the astral influence and this and that. Spirits. They spoke ahead and they stood 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 we can follow them.

Yes, true. And wisdom, I think to 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 everything.

Anything. Certainty is not within our... I like to tell this story. My father grew up thinking his first name was Franco. Until the day he asked it both certificates and figured out that his first name was Julia.

So what happened was what the hell is going on here? And my grandfather told him, well, you know, your mother wanted to call your Franco, but I didn't like it, but I didn't dare say so. So I registered you with a different first name. So that created the disaster for his life because his paperwork grew. Some Franco, some Julia.

So he didn't know his own name. Right? So even about your own name, you can be wrong. You can be wrong about everything. Even about your own name. There's always a case in which you, things can go wrong. But that's good.

I don't think we should aim at certainty. In fact, it's everywhere around. We should be careful about certainty. Because certainty is what blocks you for understanding more. If you're certain that you're not in the same world, if you're certain that you're certain that things are rejected, you don't understand the possibility that they are not.

And so on and so forth. So accepting the limitation of our knowledge, the fact that we may be wrong, it's a key for learning more. That's, I think, it's crucial. And the other thing, you know, you and I have one thing in common. What's that? Curiosity. If I had to define myself what has been the driving force of so much work done.

It's 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 all this, you know, all this jargon experience is that openness to curiosity of listening to people.

But they have to say to curiosity, I think it's a fabulous force for the world. Not just thinking that you close yourself in what you know already. But it's been curious about the rest of the ideas of the world. I think it's genuinely contagious too. When I find people that are curious about things, I get curious.

Exactly. When someone's actually curious and they start having these conversations that are clearly to them fascinating, I'm addicted to it. I'm like, what are you talking about? What is this? How did you do it? How did you figure that out? 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. It's not a thing that anybody comes to. It took a long time to get to that. I can't imagine.

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. If you're open, you can consider how you came to yours. One of the most fascinating 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. And I got a rich man from California calling me not long ago and asked me the question, hello. 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 problem of ideas. All we live is ideas in a sense. And how do ideas come in? I don't know. Our mind is incredible capacity of generating ideas.

Very often, ideas are just combinations of previous things. A lot of physics is just the... I understand this because it's like that, but not exactly like that. So I take part of that, part of that, combine all of the combinatorics. I hear what he says, I hear what he says, I 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 know, how did Newton came out, this incredible idea. He was started capillary, started Galileo. It didn't make sense together, but they were similar. So he said, how come put this together with that? My own job, my own physics job is to mix quantum mechanics and generativity.

That's what my core of my research, central part of my research is. How do you go about doing that? How do you mix them? I think you mix them, but taking them seriously. So quantum mechanics is so successful that it's telling us something about the world.

And generativity is so successful. Generativity has predicted black holes, gravitational waves, expansion of a universe, time, the fact that time's your head is more than time's for a feat, and so on and so forth. So it's all come out to be right. So it has to be right. And quantum mechanics were so well. A lot of technology has been a quantum mechanics. It has to be right.

So then the question is how do they fit together? You sort of turn them around, both of them, until you say, look, this might join with that. There's this aspect of this that goes together with this aspect of this. That has been the work of my life, quantum gravity. My theory, me and my friends, have come out with this called loop quantum gravity. It's a way of solving this problem.

We're not sure it's right. That's my main work in physics, loop quantum gravity. It's a way of bringing together quantum mechanics in Einstein theory. It gives some predictions. It gives a picture of quantum space and quantum time.

It's a possible solution of a question. The question is, what are the quantum properties of gravity? What are the quantum properties of space at time? Are we sure? No, not yet. We are now the situation that we're working for finance and consequences that we tested. Science is not sufficient to have ideas. Then you will have tested them.

So that is 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 happens inside the black holes, what happens to the universe, what happens to black holes. If you let them there for a very long time, they operate. It becomes smaller and smaller. What happens at the end of the operation? These kind of questions need to go into it.

What do you think happened before the big bang? First, we don't know. I think it has to be said clearly. It's good to speculate. And maybe in ten 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 worked a lot on this possibility. He expected that to be the case.

The other possibility is that there was something before the big bang. And the intuitive idea is that the universe is collapsing, falling down into itself, getting to a very compressed stage and bouncing out. We see the bouncing out. And if I had to bet now, I'm not sure, but I would bet for the second one. From the equations, that seems to be what was the case.

Do you think this is a constant process of expansion and compression? No, because I think that if we do this jump that you just did, we're making the usual mistake as soon as you understand something to stay for over. 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. Oh, I get it. It's like that forever. It's not like that forever. It's like that for a while and something else happens.

So we are afraid of saying, I don't know. So as soon as we have a step ahead, we tend to say, okay, we've 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 new 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 promoted black holes that gave rise to this early galaxies.

So there is an explanation within the same date, which is possible. That, you know, when the universe was very, very, that went over a lot of confidence, right? There was a time about 12, 13 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 isn't correct?

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

Why did they first discover them? Black holes, I studied black hole school, but as a mathematical aspect of Einstein theory. And the book said, well, probably nothing really in the universe could respond to that. The first people who started thinking actually that thing up in the sky that we see could be black hole was in the 70s. It was very interesting because there are not 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 start dancing around something which was not sea. 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 can understand what they were and people say, well, if it was a black hole, the matter falling to the black hole could radiate very strongly and we could see that. The actual evidence grew very slowly in the 80s and 90s. In 2000, I moved back from America to Europe. I arrived in France and the director of the department was a particle physicist, a very good particle physicist.

I said, I'm working on black holes and he said, you don't believe the black holes are real. So still physicists, very respectable physicists didn't believe the black holes are real. That's so late. It's very late. Yes. At that point, the relativistic cosmologists and astrophysicists were taking very, very seriously.

Now we have pictures of black holes. So now there's no doubt. There's no doubt to me that physicists have doubt about anything but... Are any of those professors still alive? Yeah, but they changed their minds.

Scientists changed their minds. That's a good one. You're not right. Good scientist changed their minds. I'm sure he talked to him. He would laugh and say, of course you were right.

So now we have complete evidence there to black holes. But we see black holes which are sort of a little bit more massive than our son. There are many, many of these. But then we discover that it's colossal black holes. Gigantic, which are usually the center of the galaxy.

And we have two pictures of black holes. One, the black holes are the center of our galaxy. And then another black hole, much bigger in another galaxy, more far away. It's beautiful big, big pictures, right? They were on the front page of the newspapers a few years ago.

So when this was realized, there are these black holes in the center of the galaxy. Then the question came immediately to everybody at the good scientists. 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 this very, very good galaxy could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe. The craziest theory that I've ever heard was that in the center of every galaxy is a super massive 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, it's a good friend of mine who worked a lot and maybe even started that theory. It's really small. I am not convinced. I think that, I don't know, we don't know.

But I think that if you jump into black hole, you don't go to another universe. After a long time, you come out in our own universe. So a black hole is a... The black hole is going to eat everything around. Then left alone is going to become smaller, smaller evaporate.

And then that's what quantum gravity seems to suggest that there is a quantum transition, becomes a white hole and everything inside comes out. So remember, at the beginning of our conversation, we said that there is a time is different. Time goes faster and slower. And then you jump into black hole in a short time for you. You're going to jump out billions of years in the future.

So black hole could be a shortcut to the future. Oh boy. Isn't this beautiful? It's beautiful. It's terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

It just magnifies the scope of our minuscule existence. Yeah. It's fabulous that we can learn about that. There was a time when people didn't know what were this little dot in the sky, like Venus and Mars. Now we send machines up there and people 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. That's his 90s, actually, not long ago. Our grandfather. And they were completely wrong. We learned.

Through the spectra, they have ways for... We know exactly what is the chemical composition of stars. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. So we do learn. This is magical.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's fascinating to even think of the possibilities that are out there. 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 the cool weapons, which is a very concrete possibility.

Well, there really are aliens out there. There really are super advanced civilizations. I would love to know how they managed to navigate through that if they went through the same course that we are currently going through. I would love to know. Because that's one of the things about the Fermi Paradox, right?

Maybe the reason why we don't see them out there is because they never really get that far. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they destroy themselves with the cool weapons. Maybe they're very large. Maybe they're very vast. It's huge.

So even in the galaxy, there are many, many could be that too far. Could be. Or it could be a small percentage of them get to a position where we are, a very small percentage. And then a small percentage of them make it all the way without being wiped out by natural disasters or cataclysmics of whatever species they are, whatever their design is. You know what I think is most probable? What?

That they have already seen us and they thought we were totally uninterested and 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. It was in South America. And this island was overrun with monkeys. And they had no predators on this island. Because of that.

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.

So they brought in harpy eagles. Have you seen a harpy eagle? Not a monkey. It's the human's broken. Humans brought in two harpy eagles.

No, what is it? A harpy eagle. Oh eagle. Yeah. It might be the biggest eagle.

It's either that or the gold eagle. Which one is the bigger one? I think a harpy eagle is bigger. Anyway, they are 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. They were there as well. And these eagles were just wiping out these monkeys.

And they said, okay, this is too much. And this is now they were getting past the whatever the numbers are that they could reproduce. Like it was getting to the point where these eagles, just two eagles, and they're too offspring. 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 don't. We go in and we interfere and we intervene and we monkey with the for lack of a term. Monkey with their ecosystem by bringing in predators.

So you think that was a million civilization would interfere with us? Of course they would. Why? We are so fascinating. Stanley Kubrick movie, Space Odyssey was about that, right?

Sure. A alien civilization who were just according to the story of the movie, we're sort of an experiment of an alien civilization. Well, that's an old story. That's a story that's from the Sumerian text. That's from the being that goes all the way back to some of the old books that they found that were in the caves in Kumran.

Well, Sumerians have this idea of the gods. We are just great at the gods for their own advantage. You see, these are beautiful stories. I always find them fascinating to talk about, but to humans, we're just trying to project ourselves to something similar to us changing a little bit. I think there should be something like life 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? You're not just going to automatically evolve superindulgence without any innovation and any technology.

Most likely biological creatures are going to develop technology in order to advance themselves to the point where they have technology like we have today or far more advanced than that. So it has to go through a process. So whether it looks like us or not, for sure, we definitely lack imagination in our... 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.

We are in an adolescent stage of evolution where we were both talking about earlier, people were kind and compassionate and wonderful to be around and curious and interesting, and also brutal, stealing resources from other countries, creating wars and false pretenses, using propaganda. So we're both things. We're all weird, but we also have potential. You agree, I agree. Humans have the potential to live a far better way than we're living now. If I was an alien, I would be utterly fascinated by this soap opera.

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 interested in studying. I would not think they'd be like, oh, so boring. These people with their godlike AI and their weapons.

Okay, okay. I'll buy the book. I can see the point, Joe. I can see the point, Joe. But look, we're using our own mind to try to imagine how something could think about us.

Sure. But of course, the only model we have is us. And other animals. And other animals, yes. Exactly.

But I don't know how much squirrels talk about us. Probably they don't. But if they had to figure out humans, they would use squirrels' notions to try to figure out humans, and they would just go and get it wrong. And much like squirrels, we're probably so limited in our ability to perceive and imagine. Yeah, comparison.

That's what I was trying to say. That's what else is out there. Exactly. Exactly. Squirrels are cute.

They are. Until they bite each other's nuts off. Do they? They're nasty? It's kind of a... It's not known exactly if they do that. But that's always been the wives' tale.

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. And that's one of the reasons why squirrels can fall from so far and still survive. And squirrels can fall from 30, 40 feet in the air and they bounce off the dirt and they're fine. They're just constructed for falling.

Because they go to war with each other to breed. One or two males are competing over a female. And the story was always that they would bite each other's balls off. Oh boy. I don't know if that's true.

That was one of those like afterwards, which means they would always tell you. If you're grabbing Europe by a high-age, when you come to this side of Atlantic, one of the beautiful things is that they're animals much more than in Europe. The problem with Europe is that there's so many people. And especially places like Italy or the Netherlands, full of people. You don't see animals as a cat.

And then pets. And cats and dogs. Yeah, sure, sure. Animals which are strictly with humans either are a spats or a rat's a lot. But when you go out hiking the mountains, very rare to see animals.

You know, when I was again, it seemed laughable in America, but I would go hiking with my parents as a monkey. And even if there was a squirrel, everybody was jumping all over the world. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I came to the US and they squilled all over.

I came out of your house. It's good. Right. Especially people that live in the country. Yeah, but then I moved to Canada.

It's fantastic. We were living in a lot of Ontario. And out of our windows, there were coyotes. There were all sort of animals. Oh, yeah.

We had an eagle coming down in our garden. Wow. And just sitting there. Canada has true wildlife. It's fabulous.

So for me, that was a great thing of coming inside of Atlantic. It's still more, nature is still more pleasant. In Europe, nature has been domesticated and rare to see some wilderness. But we're very fortunate that we have the national park system. Yeah.

You know, the way we have these national parks, we can go to Yosemite. You can see elk and bears and wolves there. It's like it's incredible. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit domesticated in that sense.

Like you go to the elk or not scared you and all the hangout by the visitor stand. It's a little bastardized. Like the, there's a video, there's an Instagram page called the tourons of Yellowstone, not like morons, but tourists and people that get too close to the ocean and can flip through the air. Exastices, yes. So many of those.

But it's because they've grown up in cities and they don't understand what wildlife is and they want to take a selfie with the bison. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah.

You can guess how that turns out. When I was in my twenties, I dropped out from university and I took one year off traveling and I did cost to cost Atlantic to Pacific Canada one way and USA other way and alone. It was fantastic. Wow. Great.

Hey, Jack. Look at you. You were a hippie. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. I made all sorts of people. But when I arrived in the rock, it was a cannon at any above and I spent some times hiking high in the mountains. It was marvelous for European exactly because it was empty. But then I came down to Banff.

It was a small tini 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. I walked up a little bit and put my tent in a little empty space. And then it reached the game. Yeah.

So I was inside my tent. The sun was going down and this big bear started to walk around the tent. I was terrified to death because I had this little tent. Just one leaguer and the sun was going down. So I saw the shade of the bear on the day.

The structure was make noise. Okay. That was a tracker that was given because the risk is that the bear over the tent looking for food and see you will get scared and kills you. So if you make noise, that is supposed to go away. But I was trying to scream but it was too terrifying.

Noise was not going to go away. So then I looked around. It was nothing. So I started to clap on 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 I went away I was terrified. I was in the last half an hour before I had a 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. Nice day here. And then people were talking about it.

It was this greasy that was going around. So I survived. That was my encounter with wilderness. Which coming, you know, the little boy coming from Europe, Italy, Italy, civilized, no wild animals. It was quite scary for you.

But I learned that sometimes it is not a bad idea to respect the regulations. Because there was a regulation. Don't go alone. Yeah, they know what they are doing. But it is not to say that the bear went and wandered its way through the camp too.

They don't respect boundaries. They don't respect regulations. It is such a crazy animal that we have here. Grizzly bears are so fascinating. They are so enormous.

They are so enormous. And they used to be all over the place. California doesn't have any more but that is on the state flag. It is a grizzly. It is a black bear.

They used to have brown bears all over California. In fact the guy who was last killed by a grizzly bear named a town after him called Levesque, Levesque, California. They have been to there before. It is like there is a plaque. It is a black.

It is kind of the same accident. They have a lot of accidents. They still have accidents. Especially BC. There is a lot of them out there.

They have friends living in Edmonton. Boy, they have everything out there. They have links. You run into links all the time. You see grizzly bears.

They have moves everywhere. It is such a wild place. It is so cool. That is what I envy of this America. You don't see anything.

It is an issue. There is almost no predators in Europe. It is very rarely find wolves other than Russia. If you go east, you get a lot of wolves there. But they have eradicated them all from most of like urban Europe.

America still has wild places. It is one of the cool things about this country. People can visit these wild places. There is all this marvelous area. It is beautiful.

It is beautiful. It is incredible. I was watching another documentary yesterday on Jaguars. Entering into Arizona. They have been to Arizona.

They have decided to make their way back into America. Where are they coming from? They have been to America. They have been to Arizona. They have been to Arizona.

They have been to Arizona. They have spotted several of them now. It is pretty interesting. They have decided to make their way back into America. Where are they coming from?

Mexico. Coming up from Mexico. I think they have spotted four of them now. This is the same as mountain lite. No, no, no.

They are huge. They are the ones that eat crocodiles in the Amazon. They are the ones that dive off of trees and kill the caimans and bite them by the neck and drag them. Have you ever seen that? No.

It is amazing. Jaguars are some of the coolest animals to watch hunt. They hunt crocodiles. They love to eat caimans and crocodiles. They hide in trees or on the side of the bank waiting for the crocodile to get into a vulnerable position and leap on them.

They dive into the water and leap on them and bite them in the back of the head. They are one of the few animals that is in the documentary that kills not by the expectation. They kill by crushing the back of the head. They are huge. Look at them sneaking up behind them.

They are the third biggest cat. Boy, wow. That is how they kill. They bite the back of the neck and crush the head and drag them away. He is going to eat a crocodile.

They are the third largest big cat. Tigers are number one. Then there is lions and then jaguars. They are starting to make their way back. It is five.

Five jaguars spotted in Arizona. Are they dangerous humans? Oh, yes. 100%. Not the numbers that they are at right now.

They would be. Sure. If you are hiking or doing something stupid, you should have zagged and run into one of them. Historically, they have eaten people. They prefer short eating.

But you have to do something stupid. You have to bother them. Well, you have to be on their diet. This is the same thing with tigers. Tigers become a problem once they realize they can eat people.

Then they have victory. That is what they are doing. When one tiger starts doing something wrong, they go out and look for it. Yes. Yes.

Once we become, once we are on the menu, it is the first time you eat a chick fillet. This place is great. You just want to keep coming back. That is the problem. That is also for most.

That is not wise on this site because we are weak individually but we are a stronger group. Right. But they do not know that yet. A lot of the places where they are hunting, people are weak individually and not united. They are in these very small villages.

They do not have any resources. They do not have any food, water. They are in trouble already. Then these animals get them. Tigers get them.

The jaguars in the United States are such a small number. I do not think that is the real concern. What is interesting is that they have decided to repopulate North America or the United States. It is pretty cool. They are making their way back up here.

I do not want to run into one because they will eat you. They are huge. You have zero chance of stopping them from eating you once they decide they are going to do that. You do not have a chance of them out in line. They are double the size of them out in line.

They are really big. It is a big cat. But they are really beautiful. Why are we fascinated so much by the big cats? We are.

It is so incredibly... I think we have something of our imagination. There is something about the beauty, the strength, the arrogance, everything. We react to. I think we were hunted by them.

I think that was a big part of our early ancestors. But... When you are dealing with big cats and slow animals, until those slow animals figure out how to make weapons, you are probably hunted by big cats. I think Rupert Cheldrick made this point. It is a good point.

When children go to sleep, they are not afraid of all the things that could actually affect them in an urban environment. Like they are not afraid of child molesters or murderers or someone going to break into their house. They are afraid of monsters. Exactly. They are afraid of monsters even though they have never experienced a monster.

There is a theory that according to which the main steps in humankind becoming humankind is exactly this passage from being praised to being predators, which had to change profoundly the mental structures. Yes. We realized that we could resist big predators and actually become predators ourselves. Because evolutionally we were not predators. If you go back again.

Our speeches at some point learn to be like those things we were afraid of. But does this explain the fascinations? It is not just fear that they are generating us. It is also sort of admiration and beauty. Sure.

We have admiration and beauty for almost all big predators. We have admiration. Not for crocodiles. Right. It is a lot of beauty for humans.

We might find it interesting but not the kind of fascinations with. Yeah. That is true. There is something about mammals. We are closer to them.

We are closer to them. I think it is always fascinating how much easy we communicate with mammals. Sure. Without language without words. If you are in the wilderness and in any sort of mammals, you understand the animal and they understand you.

So we communicate very easily. It is completely reading each other emotions and its attention and attitude. It is easy for instance. You go your way and go your way and we don't bother each other. Sure.

Unless you are on the menu. Yeah. Yeah. You could be on the menu. Especially if you are in the wrong place.

But that is just the nature of the wild itself. It is a constant series of life eating life all around you. Whether it is life eating plant life or life eating animal life or life eating aquatic life. Yeah. Yeah.

Then somehow we became predators. Some point in our history. Yeah. And then we started doing this against one another. Yeah.

We probably started doing that from the very beginning. Most likely. We are probably competing for resources. We do not know. We do not know.

There are two theories. There are two competing theories about what happened to our species. Our species is 100, 200, 100 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. And the other is that groups of humans were in war even before that. Very different theories. And I think it is interesting that there are these different theories.

Because it has to do with our future and our present. Namely, is this ideal of getting a group once against the other and making a world point? Another something which is only a few thousand years old. So it is not in our genetic structure. Just that after agriculture we could steal stuff from another.

Or something that goes back. All the hundred of thousand years of our speeches. What do you think? I am not sure. But I tend to think that war is recent.

Because a lot of the communities on earth leave hunting gathering. They don't go to war. They don't reason. It is an economical thing. You only go to war with another group if there is some accumulated resources.

If you find another group of hunter-gatherers. If you have extra meat you share. Otherwise it is rotten. There is no point in going to war. And if you look at our cousins it is very confusing.

Because Bonobo don't fight when two groups meet. That was the fact that we are not right. But Shimpan says do. And they are equally related to us. So it doesn't help to look at our cousins.

But it is a crucial question. It has to do with the question we discussed before. Can we get rid of war? How much war is part of our genetic? Not because we are blocked by our genetic heritage.

But clearly it is much easier to think that we can get rid of it. If it is only ten thousand years old rather than ten thousand years old. I tend to think it is hundreds of thousands of years old. I think Shimpansies are the best example of that. We are much closer in behavior to Japan.

We are equally related to Japan. We are equally related to Japan. We are equally related to Japan. We are much closer to the way Japan is. You know, but I had this.

Shimpansies. He did part of my life. I identified it with bonobos. I am sure you are a really nice guy. That is why you think it is great.

I think it is great. I am a more bonobo guy. You are a more Shimpansy guy. I don't even think I am a Shimpansy guy. I just recognize that Shimpansies go to war with each other and kill each other.

This is what Shimpansies war going on right now. You know that right? Yeah they do. No I didn't know. There is a major chimpanzee war going on right now that they are documenting.

Have you ever seen that Netflix series Chimp Nation? No. It is really great. It is fascinating. I think it is really interesting.

They have the scientists that are embedded in this troop of chimpanzees for a long time. They lived with them. Yes. They lived with them. They have rules.

Yes exactly. They have rules. You must stay more than 20 yards away from them. Never have food on you and don't make eye contact. Because they have been doing this with this protocol for 20 years, the chimpanzees completely accept the fact that they see people there.

They are normal. They are completely normalized. They behave normal around them. They see all this crazy behavior. First of all a lot of inter-tribe conflict.

They kill each other. They kill one from other tribes. They leave tribes and start new tribes. It is really interesting. Really interesting.

But they behave very much like the way we do. They have a leader. The leader is 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 they started out with. They cross boundaries to get new fruit and new trees. And then they war over the trees. They behave just the way we do.

We just let us different scale. But I think that for instance we talk about Native Americans and hunter-gatherers. The Native Americans were constantly war with each other. They were going raiding parties constantly. I don't know how many tribes were in total.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 tribes in this country. Which were constantly battling each other and killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's the pessimist. No, no, no, that's what they did. It's not pessimistic.

I'm not questioning it. It's not a mess. It's not a fool of the future. But no, no, no, it's not even pessimistic. I'm just saying that's what they did.

This idea that the only reason why this place was at wars, because Americans came here. Europeans came here and settled. Not really. The Comanche. Basically wiped out the patchy in all of this area right here.

This area we're at right now was called Comancheria. Before any settlers, they were dominant and ruthless. Their favorite thing to do was go on raiding parties. They would go and raid other tribes and kidnap people and torture people and murder people. They did that without any influence from the Europeans.

They did that for a long time. That was all across the country. Some tribes got along better with other tribes. They were more agrarian tribes. They were very differently, just like humans do in different environments.

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. I just had a guy on the other day that was talking about cannibalism. One of the ways they would utilize cannibalism is eating their enemies after they killed them. If they had an enemy that was in a rival tribe and had an encounter and killed them, they would eat them.

This is 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 old thing. It probably has to do with a really harsh environment where we had to survive, where people were stealing from each other and stealing mates and stealing resources and cannibalizing each other.

You think this is going to make the project of living in peace much harder? I think it's so difficult currently. I think it's so difficult currently. We have a very long history of war, of conflict, of chaos and violence. It's probably what made us survive this long.

The crazy wild world that we live in. Let me play the optimistic. Please do. One can read this in reverse. Namely, I believe you.

I mean, also you talk with a lot of people. You have a lot of information about that I might not have. Say this is true. Now you and I don't cannibalize each other. Right?

So we have learned. So then if this is the case, it means that civilization, which is a recent stuff, foot respect, has had a very strong, pacifying effect on us. Yes, I agree. And education. Education, civilization.

So we learn rationally. We learn. Or through religious, religious, religious processes. So maybe that process of learning that there is an advantage of collaboration is something that can go, that can develop more. I think it can.

I think you're right. And then the question is not going back to our ancient paradise of kindness and gentleness, but to create a better world where we can live together better. I think that's the path. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you.

It was really awesome. Thank you. I've got anything expected. Fantastic. 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, Rovali? Yeah, perfect. Carlo Rovali.

Thank you very much. Bye everybody.