The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1828 - Michio Kaku

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:14.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:15.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:16.000 My pleasure.

00:00:16.000 Anytime.

00:00:17.000 It's very nice to meet you in person.

00:00:18.000 We actually did a radio show together once remotely a long time ago.

00:00:23.000 I was on the Opie and Anthony show and you called in.

00:00:26.000 That's right.

00:00:27.000 I was there live.

00:00:28.000 That was a blast.

00:00:30.000 Yeah, it was very fun.

00:00:31.000 When a person like yourself, you're in this documentary, A Tear in the Sky, and for a person like yourself, who is a very well-respected scientist, to be discussing the subject of UFOs, to me it signifies that there's been a shift in the way our culture perceives these things.

00:00:51.000 That's right.

00:00:52.000 It used to be the third rail of a scientific establishment that if you talk about UFOs, you are pretty much relegated to being a nutcase and the giggle factor kicks in, right?

00:01:03.000 Yeah.

00:01:03.000 But things have changed then, you know, because of the fact that the military is now basically releasing hours of videotapes of things that defy the normal laws of physics.

00:01:16.000 And the military has admitted that, quote, they're not ours.

00:01:21.000 Before there was always that ambiguity that maybe it's a new stealth bomber or a new fantastic device being prepared by the military.

00:01:29.000 Nope.

00:01:29.000 The military now admits that they're not ours.

00:01:32.000 Then the question is, whose are they then?

00:01:35.000 Yeah, the 2017 New York Times article, in my mind, that was a big shift because when the New York Times is reporting about it and saying that this is major news and this is real and there's video evidence that they can't ignore,

00:01:52.000 when you talk to high-level people at the government and people like Commander David Fravor who had that infamous spotting off of the coast of San Diego, when you hear about people like that, that are very reputable, It starts to change the conversation in a lot of people's eyes.

00:02:08.000 Right.

00:02:09.000 See, it used to be that one person would see something in the sky and say, look, Martha, look, there's something up there.

00:02:15.000 Now things have changed.

00:02:17.000 Now we have multiple sightings by multiple modes.

00:02:20.000 That is the gold standard.

00:02:23.000 The gold standard for looking for these objects.

00:02:25.000 Not just one person, but several people that are reputable.

00:02:29.000 Not just radar, but visual sighting, infrared sensors, telescopic evidence.

00:02:36.000 Now we have multiple sightings by multiple modes.

00:02:38.000 And so the burden of proof has shifted.

00:02:41.000 It used to be the burden of proof was on the people who believed in UFOs.

00:02:45.000 They saw something, prove it.

00:02:48.000 Now the burden of proof has shifted to the Pentagon, to the military.

00:02:52.000 Now they have to prove that these aren't extraterrestrial.

00:02:55.000 And so I think there's been a sea change, a sea change in the last just several years.

00:03:01.000 You know, 50 years ago, there was a congressional hearing, and it was coming out of Project Blue Book.

00:03:07.000 And there was a lot of laughter and a lot of jokes about little green men in outer space.

00:03:13.000 50 years ago, that's the way it was.

00:03:15.000 Now, things have changed.

00:03:18.000 Now people are looking at are they a threat militarily?

00:03:22.000 What kinds of sensors do we have?

00:03:25.000 What kind of metrics do we have?

00:03:27.000 We now have frame by frame an analysis of these objects.

00:03:32.000 These objects travel between Mach 5 and Mach 20. That's 20 times the speed of sound.

00:03:39.000 These objects can zigzag, and we can measure the g-force inside this object.

00:03:46.000 The g-forces are several hundred times the force of gravity.

00:03:50.000 In other words, any living person's bones would be crushed by these objects, so they're probably drones of some sort.

00:03:57.000 These objects can drop 70,000 feet in a few seconds.

00:04:01.000 Think about that.

00:04:03.000 It can drop a tremendous distance in just a few seconds, and they can go underwater.

00:04:09.000 This is something that we didn't realize before, but yes, they can actually go underwater.

00:04:14.000 And they also move without creating an exhaust or breaking the sound barrier.

00:04:19.000 So these are things that we can now document frame by frame, looking at these videotapes.

00:04:26.000 So for yourself, what was the shift?

00:04:29.000 And how did you feel about UFOs, say like 10, 15 years ago?

00:04:33.000 Well, there is this giggle factor, and it's the third rail, of course, of your scientific reputation, if you believe in these things.

00:04:41.000 But the evidence is accumulating over the last several years.

00:04:45.000 Now, when I was first approached by Carolyn Corey, the producer of this film, A Tear in the Sky, I was skeptical.

00:04:53.000 I said to myself, come on.

00:04:55.000 I mean, five days?

00:04:57.000 Five days you're going to look for flying saucers in the sky?

00:05:01.000 What happens if the aliens are camera shy and they don't show up in five days?

00:05:06.000 So I was pleasantly surprised when they actually found something.

00:05:10.000 They actually have photographic evidence of objects that can gyrate just the way the Pentagon has said.

00:05:16.000 And so we now have a sea change.

00:05:19.000 A center of gravity has changed with regards to looking at these objects.

00:05:23.000 We no longer simply look at one individual seeing something in the sky.

00:05:28.000 No, we demand hours of videotape, multiple sightings by multiple modes.

00:05:34.000 That's the gold standard now.

00:05:36.000 So what do you think is happening?

00:05:38.000 Do you think that this is something that maybe another government from another country has created that far surpasses our abilities or do you think that this is coming from somewhere else?

00:05:50.000 Well, the Pentagon has listed, I think, five different options.

00:05:54.000 One option, of course, is that they're weather balloons or something that's an artifact of our space program.

00:06:00.000 Maybe a piece of rocket that is plunging back into the Earth's atmosphere.

00:06:06.000 That's one category.

00:06:07.000 Another category is anomalous weather events.

00:06:11.000 We're good to go.

00:06:29.000 But it opened the door to the possibility of other.

00:06:33.000 They didn't specify what other was, but you can fill in the dots yourself.

00:06:38.000 Now, one possibility for other is hypersonic drones.

00:06:43.000 We see that in warfare now.

00:06:45.000 The Russians in the Battle of Ukraine is actually using hypersonic drones to hit targets inside Ukraine.

00:06:53.000 To be hypersonic, you have to go faster than Mach 5. Anything faster than five times the speed of sound is called hypersonic.

00:07:00.000 And so the Russians are now fielding hypersonic drones in warfare.

00:07:05.000 But you see, this is something just in the last few months.

00:07:08.000 These sightings, they go back decades into the past with objects executing these gyrations decades ago.

00:07:17.000 And that's why you have to take them seriously.

00:07:19.000 So the Commander David Fravor event that we talked about off the Nimitz, that was 2004. Do we have an accurate understanding about military capability in terms of, like, drones and propulsion systems from 2004?

00:07:35.000 Or are there things that are classified that we are not going to have access to?

00:07:40.000 Like, is it possible That, you know, 18 years ago they had the capability to have a vehicle or a drone move this way that just that information has just not been released.

00:07:54.000 Well, two years ago, the United States military admitted that it stopped working on these hypersonic drones.

00:08:00.000 Why?

00:08:01.000 They're unstable.

00:08:02.000 They zigzag.

00:08:04.000 And that's why the Russians have put a premium on this technology to evade our Star Wars program. 0.51

00:08:10.000 The Russians wanted a rocket that can maneuver and therefore outwit a stationary Star Wars system designed to shoot down These drones.

00:08:19.000 Right.

00:08:20.000 So that's why the Russians have put a priority on this and they've now fielding in warfare. 0.66

00:08:24.000 We actually see them as a military weapon.

00:08:26.000 Two years ago, the United States military stopped its program.

00:08:31.000 They're too unstable.

00:08:33.000 They were not reliable and it was not worth the amount of money to put into it because the military was invested in the Star Wars program, not the anti-Star Wars program.

00:08:44.000 But because Vladimir Putin announced the hypersonic drones, then the United States military said, oops, nope, we have to get into the game too.

00:08:52.000 So now the United States is also working on hypersonic drones as well as the Chinese.

00:08:58.000 So the Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans are all working on these things, but you can see how primitive they are. 0.79

00:09:03.000 We're talking about objects that defy the known laws of aerodynamics with a technology beyond what we have today.

00:09:12.000 And so that's why people are scratching their heads.

00:09:15.000 Whose are these things, if they're not the Chinese, the Russians, or the United States?

00:09:20.000 So one of the main points of contention is the lack of visible propulsion method, right?

00:09:28.000 There's no, essentially, there's no heat signature.

00:09:32.000 There's nothing that we understand to be present that normally exists when something is going at a tremendous rate of speed.

00:09:39.000 That's right.

00:09:40.000 Not only that, these objects create no sonic booms.

00:09:43.000 When you exceed the sound barrier, you create a gigantic boom that is then shatters windows and can be heard miles around.

00:09:52.000 These objects can effortlessly break the sound barrier and not create a sonic boom.

00:09:59.000 And they don't create any exhaust.

00:10:01.000 We don't see any exhaust trail from these objects.

00:10:04.000 So either they're an optical illusion of some sort, or they have a set of laws of physics beyond what we can muster.

00:10:13.000 Now, if they are a optical illusion, If an object were to move in front of your eyes traveling at a very slow velocity, but you don't know how far they are away, you may think that object is very far away from you traveling at enormous velocities.

00:10:30.000 So a weather balloon drifting in front of your eyes Can simulate an object traveling at hypersonic velocities if you think that weather balloon is far away from you.

00:10:41.000 So how do you tell the difference?

00:10:43.000 Well, you look at wind patterns.

00:10:45.000 It turns out that many of these sightings, these objects, defy the direction of the wind.

00:10:51.000 If they are weather balloons that you can fuse with a flying saucer, then they would be moving with the direction of the wind.

00:10:59.000 But these objects do not do that.

00:11:01.000 These objects can go against the direction of the wind.

00:11:04.000 Not only that, but we have multiple sightings.

00:11:07.000 If an object is very, very far away, I mean, if an object is close to you but you think it's far away, then it's traveling at an enormous velocity while it's actually just drifting in front of your eyes.

00:11:20.000 How do you tell the difference?

00:11:21.000 By having multiple sensors, radar, infrared sensors, visual sighting.

00:11:27.000 Then you can tell how far this object is away from you, and then you can say that, nope, it's an optical illusion.

00:11:33.000 Well, we do that now.

00:11:35.000 We have multiple sightings of these objects.

00:11:38.000 By radar, we know how the velocity, the distance, each time it comes out to be real.

00:11:44.000 And so that's why we're scratching our heads.

00:11:46.000 Who has this capability?

00:11:49.000 And the answer is, we don't know.

00:11:51.000 Is there anything that's theoretical that you're aware of that could be applied, like from some other planet or some other galaxy or whatever, something that maybe we have theorized that could be responsible for the way these things are able to move?

00:12:10.000 Well, you know, when I talk to my friends who are physicists like myself about these things, they sort of like laugh, giggle, their eyes roll up to the heavens, and they say something very simple, that a rocket using conventional means would take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearest star.

00:12:29.000 Therefore, these objects cannot exist.

00:12:32.000 70,000 years for a Saturn rocket traveling at 25,000 miles per hour to go from a nearest star to the planet Earth.

00:12:40.000 That's why most scientists disregard these sightings, because they defy the laws of Einstein. 0.68

00:12:47.000 But isn't that kind of silly?

00:12:48.000 Isn't that kind of like saying, like, you know how long it would take you to get a horse from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia? 0.84

00:12:54.000 Isn't that kind of like saying that?

00:12:56.000 Exactly.

00:12:57.000 And that's why I say that that assumes that these aliens or whatever are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us.

00:13:04.000 But open your mind to the possibility that they are a thousand years more advanced than us.

00:13:10.000 A thousand years is nothing compared to the age of the universe.

00:13:14.000 The universe is about 13 billion plus years old.

00:13:20.000 That's how the age of the universe And so the age of a civilization, just a few thousand years ahead of us, that is just a blink of an eye to the universe itself.

00:13:32.000 And once you go to higher energies, the laws of physics begin to break down.

00:13:37.000 The laws of Einstein and the laws of the quantum theory break down at something called the Planck energy.

00:13:43.000 Why is that important?

00:13:44.000 That's what I do for a living.

00:13:46.000 I work on something called string theory, which lives at the Planck energy.

00:13:51.000 The Planck energy is 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.

00:13:55.000 That is a quadrillion times more powerful than our most powerful atom smasher outside Geneva, Switzerland.

00:14:02.000 Any civilization that could harness the Planck energy would be able to become masters of space and time.

00:14:10.000 Space and time, as we know it, become unstable at the Planck energy, which is far beyond anything that we can muster here on the planet Earth.

00:14:20.000 So, we physicists theorize how advanced do you have to be to access the Planck energy.

00:14:26.000 Well, we rank them.

00:14:28.000 The Kardashev scale says that there could be Type I, Type II, or Type III civilizations.

00:14:34.000 A Type I civilization is maybe a hundred years more advanced than us to maybe a thousand years, sort of like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. 0.59

00:14:43.000 They control the weather.

00:14:45.000 Volcanoes, earthquakes, anything planetary they control.

00:14:50.000 That's type 1. Then there's type 2. Type 2 is stellar.

00:14:54.000 They harness the power of an entire star.

00:14:58.000 Like Star Trek.

00:15:00.000 Star Trek would be a typical type 2 civilization where they manipulate entire stars.

00:15:06.000 Then there's type 3. Type III is galactic.

00:15:11.000 They roam the galactic space lanes.

00:15:13.000 They play with black holes, like the Empire of the Star Wars series would be a typical Type III civilization. 1.00

00:15:23.000 Then the next question is, what type do you have to be to harness the Planck energy?

00:15:28.000 The energy at which space and time become unstable.

00:15:32.000 Where wormholes may develop, gateways through space and time, portholes through empty space.

00:15:40.000 You have to be type 2 or most likely type 3. Then the next question is, how long will it take before you become Type 3?

00:15:48.000 Well, we are maybe a hundred years away from being Type 1. We're maybe a few thousand years from being from Type 2. And we're maybe a hundred thousand years from being Type 3. And a hundred thousand years is nothing.

00:16:04.000 Nothing on a galactic scale.

00:16:06.000 The age of the universe is, as I said, over 13 billion years old.

00:16:11.000 And so once a civilization reaches the Planck energy, that is a Type III civilization, space and time become your playground.

00:16:20.000 How do they make the estimates of how long it would take to develop such technology?

00:16:25.000 By looking at the gross national product of nations.

00:16:30.000 We know that most nations grow at the rate of maybe 2 or 3 percent per year in energy consumption.

00:16:35.000 Given that number, 2 to 3 percent per year, We then calculate how much energy they would have in a hundred years, a thousand years.

00:16:45.000 Now, we are about a civilization about 0.7.

00:16:51.000 Carl Sagan did the calculation.

00:16:53.000 We're not a Type I civilization yet.

00:16:56.000 We're Type 0.7.

00:16:58.000 But that means that by the year 2100, At the turn of the century, we'll probably be Type 1. And you can see that everywhere you go.

00:17:08.000 What is the Internet?

00:17:10.000 The Internet is the beginning of a Type 1 communication system.

00:17:16.000 We're privileged to be alive to see the first Type 1 technology fall into our era.

00:17:23.000 What about sports and culture?

00:17:26.000 The Olympics, the beginning of a Type 1 sports.

00:17:30.000 Soccer.

00:17:31.000 The beginning of a type 1 fashion with Gucci and Chanel.

00:17:35.000 The beginning of a type 1 language.

00:17:38.000 The number 1 and 2 languages on the internet are English and Chinese.

00:17:43.000 So we're seeing the beginning of a type 1 language.

00:17:46.000 So in other words, the greatest transition in human history is maybe a hundred years from now when we become Type 1, a planetary civilization harnessing planetary forces.

00:17:57.000 That is perhaps the greatest transition in modern history, and we're about a hundred years from becoming Type 1. So the Type 1, we would be able to control weather events and we'd be able to control planetary events.

00:18:11.000 That's right.

00:18:11.000 Like you believe that by Type 1 we'll be able to prevent supervolcano eruptions, things along those lines?

00:18:18.000 That's right.

00:18:18.000 We'll have the power of an entire planet at our disposal.

00:18:22.000 And we see the beginnings of that today because that's been the biggest change in the last 100 years.

00:18:29.000 100 years ago, we existed as a fragmented civilization, nations battling each other for small turfs. 0.86

00:18:35.000 Now we're beginning to see the emergence of planetary blocks, a planetary economy beginning to develop.

00:18:41.000 And the internet, as I said, is the first Type 1 telephone system to fall into this century.

00:18:49.000 When you think of technologies that could potentially change the pattern of progression, meaning that we're on this sort of exponential rate of increase in technology, what about something along the lines of what Elon Musk is proposing with Neuralink?

00:19:07.000 Something that would change the way a human being's brain interfaces with information and with each other?

00:19:14.000 Yeah, I think that's coming.

00:19:16.000 First of all, when you look at the history of science and technology, the first phase was the Industrial Revolution of 1800, when we physicists worked out the laws of steam engines and thermodynamics.

00:19:29.000 That was the first great transition in human society.

00:19:32.000 The second great transition was when we physicists worked out electricity and magnetism.

00:19:37.000 They give us the electric age with dynamos and generators and radio and television.

00:19:43.000 The third great transition was the computer revolution when we physicists worked out the quantum mechanics of transistors.

00:19:49.000 So all of a sudden we have lasers, transistors, and the internet.

00:19:53.000 Now we're entering stage four.

00:19:56.000 Stage four is physics at the molecular level, meaning artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

00:20:04.000 You are now talking about the fifth wave, the fifth force, and that is physics at the atomic level, meaning Brain net.

00:20:17.000 Brain net is when we harness the power of the brain connected to the internet.

00:20:22.000 Also, quantum computers.

00:20:25.000 When we start to use individual atoms to compute with, not simply transistors, but no, atomic transistors.

00:20:32.000 These are called quantum computers.

00:20:34.000 They're coming.

00:20:35.000 And third is fusion power.

00:20:37.000 We're going to have the power of the sun in a bottle in the fourth stage of technology.

00:20:43.000 So Elon Musk, I think, is ahead of his time, but it's going to take time to develop the brain hooked up to the computer, hooked up to the Internet.

00:20:53.000 So the future of the Internet, Internet 2.0, Is BrainNet.

00:20:58.000 When we mentally control the internet, you simply think and all your commands or your wishes are fulfilled.

00:21:07.000 We put a chip in the brain.

00:21:09.000 This has already been done.

00:21:10.000 The chip in the brain is then connected to a laptop.

00:21:13.000 The laptop deciphers the electrical impulses of the brain and then operates the internet.

00:21:21.000 Operates a typewriter.

00:21:22.000 Operates a wheelchair.

00:21:24.000 Operates the lights.

00:21:27.000 So that a person who is totally paralyzed can now live a reasonable approximation to a normal life.

00:21:35.000 We can actually connect a human to an exoskeleton and have them kick a football to initiate the soccer games in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

00:21:46.000 Whoa.

00:21:46.000 Two years ago in Sao Paulo, Brazil, it made headlines when a paralyzed man was hooked up to an exoskeleton designed at Duke University, and he kicked the football, initiating the soccer game, international soccer games in Sao Paulo,

00:22:03.000 Brazil.

00:22:04.000 So is there a video of that available?

00:22:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:22:06.000 Google it.

00:22:07.000 So you can find that.

00:22:08.000 Yeah, you can simply Google it.

00:22:09.000 You can see him walk up to the ball and kick the soccer ball.

00:22:16.000 And so eventually we're going to connect the human mind to the Internet.

00:22:20.000 So this means that emotions, feelings, sensations can be sent on the Internet, not just digital signals.

00:22:29.000 And that means that entertainment is going to be totally revolutionized.

00:22:34.000 You know, Charlie Chaplin used to be this great actor.

00:22:38.000 dominated the movies until the talkies came.

00:22:41.000 And when the talkies came, nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore.

00:22:45.000 You wanted to see actors talk.

00:22:48.000 That lasted for 50 years.

00:22:50.000 And once we have BrainNet, then the actors of today could be put out of business because people will want to know what actors are feeling, their emotional state, their sensations.

00:23:03.000 And that's then going to be the internet of the future.

00:23:06.000 Internet 2.0.

00:23:10.000 What is the bottleneck in terms of communication?

00:23:14.000 If we do develop some sort of a method where human beings can communicate through technology with our brains, via Neuralink or some similar technology, would the bottleneck be language?

00:23:30.000 And if so, would there be a way to create a universal language?

00:23:35.000 Like, are we married to the languages that we currently have because of our region?

00:23:41.000 Because of, you know, you live in America, you speak English or Spanish, or whatever you speak, but it's primarily English and Spanish.

00:23:48.000 But if you live in Chinese, you speak the various dialects, you know, obviously, there's a lot of languages.

00:23:54.000 And that is an impediment to understanding each other.

00:23:58.000 Do you think that it's possible that a universal language could be created?

00:24:02.000 And if so, would it be created in a way that is very different than any language that's ever existed before?

00:24:09.000 Well, we're not there yet.

00:24:11.000 First of all, the impulses of the brain are digital signals, little blips on a computer screen, and then a computer simply tries to interpret what these little blips are, and then tries to construct, for example, an alphabet so that you can type.

00:24:27.000 You can type by thinking about it.

00:24:29.000 But that requires you to take the signals from the brain and then have a computer decipher it through the English language into text.

00:24:39.000 You want something different.

00:24:41.000 You want a universal brain language.

00:24:44.000 We're not there yet.

00:24:46.000 What about a visual language, like a hieroglyphics, like something along those lines, like where you could have a universal visual language that everyone learns at a young age?

00:24:57.000 Well, we already at the University of California at Berkeley been able to put the human brain into an MRI machine which calculates blood flow at thousands of points inside the living brain.

00:25:10.000 Once you know the blood flow at thousands of points on the human brain, you feed that into a computer and the computer prints out a picture, a picture of what you are thinking.

00:25:23.000 Now, I've seen these pictures.

00:25:24.000 They're not very clear.

00:25:26.000 But the very fact that we can extract a picture from a living brain is incredible.

00:25:32.000 Yeah, I've seen that.

00:25:33.000 It's pretty fascinating.

00:25:34.000 It's fascinating stuff.

00:25:35.000 And even when you go to sleep, the machine keeps on going and will eventually print out your dream.

00:25:42.000 Whoa.

00:25:43.000 Now, this has not been done.

00:25:45.000 I've seen pictures of the dreams.

00:25:46.000 They're not very good yet.

00:25:48.000 But that's just a matter of time.

00:25:50.000 Because, of course, the number of pixels that we have is about 20,000 pixels of the human brain.

00:25:56.000 In the future, we'll have millions of pixels of the human brain to have a much finer resolution of your dream.

00:26:05.000 And, of course, after your dream, just make sure that your wife or husband doesn't get access to the picture.

00:26:12.000 Ha, ha, ha.

00:26:13.000 Or get a better wife or husband if they're getting mad at you about dreams.

00:26:16.000 Do we have a video of the Sao Paulo...

00:26:18.000 Yeah.

00:26:20.000 Let's see this.

00:26:21.000 Not a lot.

00:26:22.000 So this is the guy...

00:26:23.000 Can't see much happen either.

00:26:23.000 Oh, that's okay.

00:26:25.000 So...

00:26:26.000 It'll replay it.

00:26:26.000 Yeah.

00:26:27.000 Oh, so it's very...

00:26:28.000 It's quick.

00:26:29.000 Simple.

00:26:30.000 Yeah.

00:26:33.000 Wow, what a machine that he's connected to.

00:26:36.000 And do you liken that to ancient technology like Morse code as opposed to what we could do now with cell phones?

00:26:43.000 Eventually this is going to get far, far better.

00:26:45.000 Yeah.

00:26:46.000 Remember, this is the first time in history that someone with an exoskeleton has been able to, on national television, execute something that we just take for granted.

00:26:54.000 And that's today.

00:26:56.000 Can you imagine what's going to happen in the future?

00:26:59.000 Well, one of the things that Elon has said is that one of the first uses of this Neuralink technology will be to help people that have damaged spinal cords and help them regain full motion of their body.

00:27:10.000 Right.

00:27:10.000 To bypass the spinal cord.

00:27:11.000 Yeah.

00:27:12.000 You know, the human brain, we can have a map of the human brain where the arm, the leg, the tongue are attached.

00:27:20.000 So this creates what is called the homunculus.

00:27:23.000 The homunculus is an image of a human body superimposed on the surface of the brain.

00:27:31.000 So when you want to activate your leg, you simply know what part of the brain is connected to the leg, and you simply put a chip there, and by thinking through that chip, you can then move your leg.

00:27:43.000 Well, obviously, by putting many chips throughout the surface of the brain, you can control the entire human body.

00:27:50.000 And stick that into an exoskeleton and become Iron Man.

00:27:55.000 And Iron Man can fly, but of course we can put jet packs with hydrogen peroxide fuel inside a jet pack and you can start to fly just like Iron Man.

00:28:05.000 Now we're not there yet, but I'm just saying that in principle it is possible.

00:28:12.000 Do you, I mean, how old do you now?

00:28:16.000 75. Do you wonder how much you're gonna see before your time on this earth is done?

00:28:21.000 Well, you know, digital immortality is something that's coming.

00:28:25.000 I was going to bring that up next.

00:28:27.000 For example, William Shatner sat for, what, three or four days answering questions and having it then recorded.

00:28:36.000 And then a computer homogenizes it, cuts it up, puts it in logical sequence so that you can talk to William Shatner years after he has passed away.

00:28:46.000 And so this gives you a form of digital immortality.

00:28:50.000 Pretty crude though.

00:28:52.000 Pretty crude, but then the question is what do you do with it?

00:28:55.000 Right.

00:28:55.000 One is you can talk to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.

00:29:01.000 You can talk to them because all your thoughts, your feelings, your history, your dreams have been recorded and you can impart your knowledge, your wisdom to your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids long after you're gone.

00:29:15.000 Another application is then to take this digitized human Put it on a laser beam and shoot it throughout the universe.

00:29:24.000 At the speed of light.

00:29:25.000 I call this laser porting.

00:29:27.000 So you digitize the human, so all the responses of the human are on a digital signal.

00:29:33.000 You put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon.

00:29:36.000 In one second, your digital brain is on the moon.

00:29:40.000 In 20 minutes, you're on Mars.

00:29:43.000 And in four years, you're on Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.

00:29:48.000 And so what do you do when you're on the moon?

00:29:51.000 On the Moon, you download your digital information that codes who you are onto an avatar.

00:29:58.000 And the avatar then can roam the Moon and not have to suffer from weightlessness, cosmic rays, accidents, loss of oxygen.

00:30:08.000 No, you are an avatar controlling all the movements on the Moon.

00:30:13.000 In other words, you can explore the galaxy this way.

00:30:17.000 At the speed of light, the fastest known velocity in the universe, your digital brain waves and information about your brain and thinking can be shot throughout the universe.

00:30:29.000 Now, this is all well within the laws of physics, and this is something that could easily be done within the next 50 to 100 years.

00:30:37.000 However, I'll stick my neck out.

00:30:39.000 I think this already exists.

00:30:42.000 Really?

00:30:43.000 I think that aliens in outer space don't use rocket ships.

00:30:46.000 They don't use rocket ships because they crash, they have problems with gamma rays, radiation, food, whatever.

00:30:53.000 They've digitized themselves, placed their consciousness on a laser beam, and there's a laser highway.

00:31:01.000 A laser highway that could be right next to the earth, for all we know, carrying the digitized souls of civilizations and we're totally clueless. 0.98

00:31:12.000 We're so stupid, we don't even know that that's how the aliens move from place to place. 0.99

00:31:18.000 What other options are there? 0.99

00:31:20.000 I mean, isn't there an option of, with a lack of better words, folding space-time and generating enough power where you can move from one point to another point almost instantaneously?

00:31:35.000 Yeah, there are two ways to do that.

00:31:37.000 First of all, in 1935, Einstein with his student, Nathan Rosen, wrote a paper about wormholes.

00:31:44.000 So, a black hole is like a funnel.

00:31:47.000 Take two funnels, stick them back to back, nose to nose. 0.93

00:31:51.000 That is a wormhole that connects one funneled universe to another funneled universe.

00:31:57.000 So I have two universes connected by a gateway which is called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, otherwise known as a wormhole.

00:32:05.000 That's one way to do it.

00:32:06.000 The second way to do it was done by Michael Bier, a friend of mine, who was watching Star Trek one day and noticed how the Enterprise zapped across space by contracting the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you.

00:32:25.000 So that you do not go to the stars.

00:32:27.000 The stars come to you.

00:32:31.000 So think of walking across a carpet.

00:32:33.000 You can walk across the carpet, which is the long way, or you can contract and compress the carpet in front of you, expand the carpet behind you, and then simply hop, hop over to the other side of the carpet.

00:32:49.000 That is called the Al-Khabir drive.

00:32:51.000 Now, then the next question is, what's the catch?

00:32:54.000 There's always a catch someplace, right?

00:32:56.000 Otherwise, we'd be zapping across the universe today.

00:32:59.000 And that is energy.

00:33:01.000 You would probably have to have energy comparable to that of a black hole.

00:33:04.000 In other words, a Type III civilization would have the power, perhaps, to utilize wormholes or compress space to go across galactic distances.

00:33:14.000 This, of course, is science fiction, but it's well within the known laws of physics that wormholes and Alcabierre drives that are possible within the laws of physics.

00:33:26.000 What kind of an energy source could, at least theoretically, be used to generate that kind of power?

00:33:34.000 Well, in Star Trek, of course, they talk about the dilithium crystals.

00:33:38.000 Of course, there's no such thing as dilithium crystals, but there is something that could energize this machine, and that's called negative energy.

00:33:47.000 Now, energy, as we know, is positive.

00:33:50.000 But there is a situation where energy can become negative and that's called the Casimir effect, which is actually measurable.

00:33:57.000 We've actually measured in the laboratory.

00:34:00.000 The Casimir effect is negative energy and that's the fuel for a wormhole.

00:34:06.000 Wormholes are stabilized by negative energy.

00:34:08.000 In fact, it was Stephen Hawking who actually created a theorem using Einstein's equations to show that all possible wormholes, all of them, are based on negative energy.

00:34:19.000 That's Hawking's theorem.

00:34:20.000 Well, he proved that mathematically.

00:34:22.000 Which means that if you have enough negative energy, then in principle, you could rocket to the stars.

00:34:29.000 And you could rock to the stars pretty quickly.

00:34:32.000 Oh, instantly.

00:34:33.000 Instantly.

00:34:34.000 So if we're talking about a civilization that is a hundred thousand or a million years more advanced, that's what we're possibly looking at.

00:34:44.000 That's right.

00:34:45.000 So when you have these encounters like they had with that tic-tac-shaped object that went from, I believe it was 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level.

00:34:57.000 Seconds.

00:34:58.000 Yeah.

00:34:59.000 So when you're talking about that kind of speed, possibly that's what you're looking at.

00:35:03.000 That's right.

00:35:04.000 We're talking about them reaching us.

00:35:07.000 Through a method that is far beyond chemical rockets.

00:35:11.000 Chemical rockets, as I said, take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearby stars.

00:35:16.000 While if this is a huge shift, if you could harness the power of Einstein's wormholes or Alkaver's drive, then you could do this almost instantly.

00:35:27.000 But you would need negative energy on a fantastic scale, stellar scale.

00:35:32.000 In other words, you're basically type three.

00:35:35.000 So if you are a Type III civilization, then you do have access to the Planck energy, which is the energy of a black hole.

00:35:43.000 So we're doing a lot of looking at the potential for the future.

00:35:49.000 And we're looking at, you know, what we think human beings are capable of doing thousands of years from now.

00:35:58.000 What about, are we looking at the potential different kinds of life forms?

00:36:04.000 Like, we're the only intelligent life form on Earth that manipulates its environment in the sense of, like, what humans do?

00:36:11.000 We build houses and planes and things along those lines.

00:36:13.000 We have other intelligent life, like orcas and whales, but they don't have the same capabilities that we have.

00:36:20.000 Is it possible that there's something that exists that evolved in a way far different than us that has access to intelligence beyond what we think is possible?

00:36:36.000 Well, there are three basic ingredients that made us become intelligent.

00:36:41.000 First is the opposable thumb, or a claw, or a tentacle, a manipulation device.

00:36:47.000 Second is predator eyesight, eyesight of a predator.

00:36:50.000 Predators are smarter than prey.

00:36:53.000 Predators have to scheme.

00:36:55.000 They have to stalk.

00:36:56.000 They have to have camouflage.

00:36:57.000 They have to deceive, which is much more difficult than that of a prey, which simply has to run.

00:37:05.000 So in other words, some kind of stereo eyesight of some sort.

00:37:09.000 Third, language.

00:37:11.000 A baby learns, you know, several words a day.

00:37:15.000 By the time they're in high school, they know several thousand words.

00:37:19.000 Animals are lucky if you can get maybe 50 or so words out of them.

00:37:24.000 So those are the three ingredients that made us intelligent.

00:37:27.000 And then you ask yourself a simple question.

00:37:29.000 How many other animals have all three?

00:37:32.000 An advanced language, opposable thumb of some sort, and stereo eyesight.

00:37:37.000 Well, we're the only game in town.

00:37:40.000 But that doesn't mean that in the universe there couldn't be other situations with different combinations which have these three ingredients.

00:37:50.000 Communication, manipulation of the environment, and the coordination of that.

00:37:57.000 That's how we became intelligent, and it could happen in other planets.

00:38:02.000 Do you think that one of the impediments is what we were talking about earlier, that the languages are so different?

00:38:08.000 Like, in order for us to share knowledge with people in China, we have to learn their language.

00:38:13.000 Share knowledge with Germany.

00:38:14.000 We have to learn the language.

00:38:15.000 There's got to be some sort of communication.

00:38:19.000 What if a species developed where they didn't have a language barrier or perhaps they communicate in a method that we don't understand yet or that we're not capable of because we live in a completely different environment than them.

00:38:33.000 Like maybe they communicate from the jump telepathically.

00:38:38.000 Well, they would have a definite advantage if they could communicate telepathically because then they can share knowledge almost instantly.

00:38:46.000 That's not outside the realm of possibility, right?

00:38:49.000 Not outside the realm of possibility.

00:38:50.000 However, it would be very difficult because our brain has not developed a universal language that allows us to communicate with other brains.

00:39:00.000 Now, we do have what is called synthetic telepathy.

00:39:02.000 Synthetic telepathy already exists, but that's mediated by a laptop computer.

00:39:08.000 You take two people who are paraplegics or have problems with their brain, you can connect the two brains together, but the language these two brains speak is still English.

00:39:21.000 So that's a problem.

00:39:24.000 You want a universal language.

00:39:26.000 Yes.

00:39:26.000 But we do know that there's some species that communicate without language, like bees.

00:39:32.000 You know, I remember we were filming this television show on Sphere Factor, and one of the things we did was we had this stunt that these people had to get covered in bees.

00:39:41.000 So this beekeeper who was hired to cover these people in bees had to stop the production down because a neighboring beehive had come over to investigate.

00:39:53.000 And so these bees flew up into the air to visit with the neighboring bees, and they communicated.

00:40:00.000 And I said, well, what do you have to do?

00:40:01.000 And he goes, we just have to let them work it out.

00:40:03.000 He goes, they're going to figure it out.

00:40:05.000 It'll take a little while though, so everybody should just move away.

00:40:07.000 So we all moved away, and he watched his bees communicate with these other bees.

00:40:12.000 I go, what are they doing?

00:40:13.000 He goes, we don't really know.

00:40:14.000 We really don't know.

00:40:15.000 We think they use pheromones.

00:40:17.000 But somehow or another, they're going to relay that they are not moving in, that they're just temporarily here, and that will be enough for the neighboring bees to say, well, enjoy your time here and take care.

00:40:30.000 And that's what happened.

00:40:31.000 I mean, obviously I'm simplifying it in the language, but something happened where they've worked out that these bees somehow or another knew that these other bees were not from there.

00:40:42.000 Well, when you look at ants in your own house, for example, or in the forest, you notice that when two ants meet, they exchange chemicals, invisible chemicals, and they move on to the next ant, and they bump into them, and then they exchange chemicals,

00:40:58.000 right?

00:40:59.000 So we've tried to decipher that language.

00:41:02.000 And it turns out there's only a handful of chemicals that we've identified that are exchanged between ants.

00:41:07.000 And then, at MIT, they tried to construct artificial ants, robot ants.

00:41:14.000 So when two robot ants meet, they exchange a limited vocabulary.

00:41:19.000 Just like what ants do in real life, a limited vocabulary.

00:41:22.000 And then the next question is, with these mechanical ants, can you reconstruct ant society?

00:41:29.000 All of ant society, given a primitive language that exists between two ants.

00:41:35.000 And the verdict is still out, but the answer seems to be yes, that given a limited vocabulary between two ants, it's possible to construct ant society on the basis of a rather primitive language.

00:41:47.000 And when you say ant society, do you mean like the hierarchy of queen and workers and all that?

00:41:53.000 That's right.

00:41:54.000 And building the nest and fending off invaders and disposing of dead ants.

00:41:59.000 And yeah, all the things that ants do can be replicated by a rather simple language that ants use when they communicate with each other.

00:42:08.000 What about really complex ant societies like leafcutter ants that develop these caverns that allow for fermentation and air vents?

00:42:18.000 Have you seen when they've poured cement into leafcutter ant colonies?

00:42:23.000 Fascinating!

00:42:25.000 They have very complex systems of caverns and labyrinths.

00:42:31.000 It's weird stuff.

00:42:33.000 It's all these tubes that lead to these rooms and there's vents that go up through the ceiling.

00:42:39.000 And when they pour cement in it, it almost is a shame because it's the only way that you get to see it.

00:42:45.000 But you have to kill all the ants and...

00:42:47.000 You know, we get a chance to look at it, but it's magnificent what they're able to do.

00:42:53.000 And somehow or another, this is a universal trait amongst these leafcutter ants.

00:42:58.000 I mean, they're able to do this all over the world.

00:43:00.000 Yeah, but unfortunately, we humans are stuck with language, and these languages are embedded to a society that created that language, and there's no universal language, unfortunately.

00:43:11.000 And it would be very difficult to extract a mental language using electrodes because the language that we get from the brain is interpreted through English, and so it would be very difficult to have two brains communicate telepathically without having to go through English.

00:43:29.000 But what about what the ants are doing?

00:43:31.000 How are they doing that?

00:43:32.000 Do you have a theory?

00:43:34.000 Have you ever stopped and thought about, like, the technology involved in the creation of all these labyrinths and these colonies and the fact that they're able to do this repeatedly?

00:43:45.000 Well, figure for the moment that they have a language, a language that is chemical, and they're able to exchange maybe 10 to 100 different chemicals.

00:43:55.000 What kind of society can you create with 100 words?

00:44:00.000 Well, if you think about it, we humans do pretty well with just a few hundred words to take a look at the evolution of human society.

00:44:08.000 A few hundred words is enough to create a semblance of human society.

00:44:13.000 A few thousand words, and then of course you're talking about accumulating new knowledge and new strategies, but just to have a society that operates, a few hundred words is probably enough.

00:44:23.000 When people gossip, how many words do people use when they gossip?

00:44:27.000 Just a few hundred words.

00:44:28.000 And we know that because we have robots now that try to communicate by gossip.

00:44:33.000 That's hilarious.

00:44:34.000 Yeah, and we realize that just a few hundred words is sufficient to communicate most human interactions.

00:44:42.000 Now, to communicate power hierarchies, engineering requires more than a few hundred words.

00:44:50.000 But with a few hundred words, that's enough to create a model human society.

00:44:55.000 And I imagine that these insects you talk about have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

00:45:00.000 Well, it's interesting that you just said to communicate things like power hierarchies requires more words, but they have power hierarchies.

00:45:07.000 So how are they communicating that?

00:45:10.000 Well, I don't know.

00:45:11.000 I'm not an insect scientist.

00:45:13.000 I didn't know that they farm fungi.

00:45:16.000 Yeah.

00:45:17.000 That might have a lot to do with it.

00:45:19.000 You may have seen the impressive spectacle of leafcutter ant highway full of millions of bugs carrying cut sections of leaves, grass, or flowers back to their homes, but did you know that leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves that they harvest?

00:45:30.000 So they use this to...

00:45:32.000 Okay, here it is.

00:45:33.000 Leafcutter ants use leaves as their fertilizer to grow their crop.

00:45:38.000 Fungus.

00:45:38.000 They cultivate their fungal gardens by providing them with freshly cut leaves, protecting them from pests and molds, and clearing them of decayed material and garbage.

00:45:48.000 In return, the fungus acts as a food source for the ants' larvae.

00:45:53.000 So that's really interesting, right?

00:45:55.000 Because we know that...

00:45:57.000 Fungi and mycelium allows plants to communicate back and forth with each other through the soil.

00:46:04.000 And they even use it to distribute resources.

00:46:09.000 Mm-hmm.

00:46:10.000 But I claim that the number of words necessary to communicate with other entities, like insects, is probably not that large.

00:46:19.000 A human being, for example, can reasonably work with about 5,000 words.

00:46:23.000 Someone who's semi-educated, went through high school, knows about 5,000 words.

00:46:27.000 But just to create a society that works probably requires only a few hundred words.

00:46:33.000 And that's probably well within the capabilities of insects.

00:46:36.000 Are we limiting our ability to theorize by saying words, by thinking of words?

00:46:48.000 Is it possible that instead of words, they have an understanding of the tasks at hand without defining them with sounds or with symbols?

00:46:59.000 And that this allows them a freedom of communication without all of the baggage that comes with words, enunciation, context, all those different things.

00:47:09.000 Well, it's possible to record memories now.

00:47:12.000 This has been done in the laboratory.

00:47:14.000 And these memories could be universal.

00:47:17.000 Now, how do you do this?

00:47:18.000 Short-term memories go through what is called the hippocampus.

00:47:21.000 It's shaped like a horseshoe.

00:47:22.000 It's at the very dead center of your brain.

00:47:25.000 That's where the hippocampus is.

00:47:27.000 If you put two electrodes, two electrodes on either side of the hippocampus, you can then calculate the impulses that go back and forth.

00:47:36.000 You record it like a tape recorder.

00:47:39.000 So I now have a tape recorder of a memory created by a mouse whose hippocampus was connected to the tape recorder.

00:47:46.000 Then I take that memory and put it into another mouse Or I play it back to the first mouse after they've forgotten that memory.

00:47:55.000 And bingo!

00:47:56.000 Memories can now be transferred to the same mouse over time or to another mouse.

00:48:04.000 So this has been done already.

00:48:06.000 So it's possible that memories may be, in some sense, universal.

00:48:10.000 The memory itself can bypass the English language and go directly to another human.

00:48:16.000 And perhaps bypass ant language, like there's no need for it, that they can express themselves without that.

00:48:23.000 Right.

00:48:23.000 This has been done with mice already.

00:48:24.000 Now it's being done with primates.

00:48:27.000 We want to see whether or not primates can learn a simple task, like for example, drinking water.

00:48:32.000 That's what the mice were trained to do.

00:48:35.000 Drink water, record the memory of drinking water, and then give it to another mouse.

00:48:40.000 Was it a complicated way to drink water, like drinking water from a feeder or something?

00:48:44.000 These are simple memories because, of course, this is the first time it's ever been done.

00:48:48.000 And so by doing this, you can actually transfer memories between organisms that seem to be universal.

00:48:55.000 But isn't drinking water a universal thing with mammals?

00:48:59.000 Yeah, but any feat that they learn, okay, can in principle be encoded in the hippocampus, and then the hippocampus in turn, its memory can then be encoded into another hippocampus.

00:49:12.000 That's the point, that memories in some sense can be recorded.

00:49:16.000 I understand, but how do we know that the memories of drinking water are recorded and transmitted to another mouse?

00:49:22.000 Because they learn skills.

00:49:24.000 You can transfer skills that the other mouse did not have by transferring this.

00:49:29.000 So skills on different methods of acquiring water?

00:49:33.000 Yeah.

00:49:34.000 So that different memories can be, and again, these are small snippets of memory.

00:49:38.000 We're not talking about reading a book.

00:49:40.000 We're just talking about a simple memory can be recorded by looking at the impulses that go across the hippocampus.

00:49:47.000 Wasn't there an experiment where they took a mouse, or they took mice or rats, and they put them through a maze on the East Coast, and because of that, the mice or rats, I forget which rodent it was, on the West Coast was able to go through this maze quicker?

00:50:08.000 Well, it turns out that with monkeys, it's possible to train monkeys to do certain very simple tasks and hook that by the internet to another monkey in Japan, and that these memories can be transferred via the internet.

00:50:24.000 And so that is something that's been done with monkeys, not just with mice.

00:50:28.000 Right, but with the mice, I don't think there was an exchange of information in a traditional sense.

00:50:33.000 I think this was, if I'm remembering it correctly, this is Rupert Sheldrake's concept.

00:50:39.000 He had this concept of morphic resonance, and the idea was that you could somehow or another bestow information, like in a primitive sense, through a species, where one member of the species learns it,

00:50:56.000 And that information somehow through some unknown method becomes more readily available to other members of that species that are not directly connected.

00:51:06.000 Well, I don't know about that.

00:51:08.000 We're talking about things that are reproducible in the laboratory using electrical signals.

00:51:13.000 Yeah, that's what I'm asking you.

00:51:13.000 I don't know if that was reproducible.

00:51:14.000 See if you can find if that's reproducible, if they did that.

00:51:17.000 Because I remember, I'm 99% sure it was Rupert Sheldrake who was talking about that.

00:51:22.000 And I remember thinking, like, that seems to be something that would be, like, a lot more popularly known.

00:51:29.000 Yeah.

00:51:30.000 But we're talking about things that are done.

00:51:32.000 These studies were done in Los Angeles.

00:51:34.000 Right.

00:51:35.000 And we're talking about these things are publishable.

00:51:38.000 Other groups at MIT have replicated these experiments.

00:51:42.000 And so we're beginning now to understand the ways in which memories are created and transferred.

00:51:47.000 And when they transfer these memories from primate to primate through the internet, what method are they using to transmit?

00:51:54.000 Electrical.

00:51:55.000 Electrical.

00:51:55.000 So how is the information encoded?

00:52:01.000 It's encoded as impulses, electrical impulses that go across the hippocampus that you simply tape-recorded.

00:52:07.000 In other words, there's no translator, there's no intermediary that translates into English and back into electrical signals.

00:52:15.000 We're talking about raw electrical signals, the raw signals that you don't process at all, simply being tape-recorded and then shot into the same person months later, and they recall the memory that they forgot.

00:52:29.000 Right.

00:52:29.000 And what was able to be achieved with these primates?

00:52:34.000 Well, that's what's being done now.

00:52:36.000 First, it was demonstrated in mice.

00:52:38.000 Simple tasks like drinking water can be then transferred onto the internet.

00:52:44.000 I'm still confused about that because drinking water is a universal trait.

00:52:48.000 There were other traits too.

00:52:49.000 But when you say drinking water, doesn't every mouse know how to drink water?

00:52:54.000 Yeah, but other things can be done, but they started with the simplest first.

00:52:58.000 Right, but how do we know that this information is transmitted to the mice since water drinking is just from the womb?

00:53:04.000 Well, what happened was they taught the mouse some tricks, and then they actually gave it a chemical which allowed the mouse to forget the trick, okay?

00:53:14.000 And then later, months later, after the mouse forgot the trick, They then shot the same electrical impulses into the hippocampus, and the mouse immediately remembered the trick.

00:53:26.000 That's how it was done.

00:53:27.000 And so, what are they attempting to do with these primates, specifically?

00:53:32.000 The same thing.

00:53:32.000 That what you can do with a mouse, they think they can perhaps do with a primate.

00:53:37.000 And eventually, the goal is...

00:53:39.000 Alzheimer's patients.

00:53:41.000 A memory chip.

00:53:42.000 They want to create a memory chip that you push a button and then memories come flooding into the hippocampus of an Alzheimer's person so they know where they live.

00:53:53.000 If they get lost, they know how to get back home.

00:53:56.000 They know who to call, telephone numbers and things like that.

00:53:59.000 That's the ultimate goal is to create a memory chip for people that have fading memories like Alzheimer's patients.

00:54:07.000 That's the goal.

00:54:08.000 And then once that's achieved, ultimately the possibilities are endless.

00:54:14.000 Well, yeah.

00:54:15.000 Learn calculus at college by pushing a button.

00:54:18.000 The matrix.

00:54:18.000 Just like the matrix, right?

00:54:19.000 The whole memory shot into the brain.

00:54:23.000 I'm sure you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil.

00:54:25.000 Oh yeah, I know Ray.

00:54:26.000 What do you think about Ray's ideas that we're going to eventually be able to download consciousness into some sort of a computer or something and you will essentially inhabit that rather than be a biological entity like that?

00:54:43.000 Do we know enough about consciousness that that's even possible?

00:54:47.000 Well, digital immortality is coming, but digital immortality is coming in stages.

00:54:53.000 What's being done now, today, is something that can be done anywhere.

00:54:58.000 They took William Shatner, sat him in a room, and simply let him talk about his life.

00:55:04.000 They recorded this huge volume of information, digitized it, so that in the future his descendants Can talk to him with a holographic image.

00:55:14.000 Right, but that's not him.

00:55:16.000 That's not him.

00:55:29.000 Like, if I smile, you smile back, we laugh, we joke around together.

00:55:33.000 This is two human beings interacting with each other.

00:55:35.000 If it's just your digital memory, and just your voice in this digital, that's great for other people to experience, but you won't experience it at all.

00:55:46.000 How far do you think we are, or is it even possible, To make you exist inside some sort of a computer or some sort of an electronic entity.

00:55:57.000 This gets us into the connectome project, which I mentioned in my book, The Future of the Mind.

00:56:03.000 The connectome project is to locate the connections of every single neuron in your brain.

00:56:11.000 So far, the connectome project has been able to take a fruit fly, Slice up the brain of a fruit fly, put it in an MRI scan, and then map exactly all the neural connection of 100,000 neurons inside the brain of a fruit fly.

00:56:28.000 That's today.

00:56:30.000 Now that's 100,000 neurons.

00:56:32.000 The brain has 100 billion neurons.

00:56:36.000 So you see how far we have to go before we have the connectome project, being able to create a digital copy of your brain.

00:56:45.000 And then, of course, you would live forever.

00:56:47.000 All your thoughts, memories, personality quirks, everything would live forever.

00:56:52.000 Right, but would it evolve?

00:56:53.000 I mean, it isn't a thing about your personality that evolves and changes depending upon your life experiences.

00:56:58.000 Well, in principle, it would be you.

00:56:59.000 It would be a digital copy of you down to the neuron.

00:57:03.000 We don't have this.

00:57:04.000 We won't have it for many decades to come.

00:57:06.000 But we're making progress.

00:57:08.000 Right now, we're up to 100,000 neurons being digitized.

00:57:12.000 And in the future, it'll be perhaps a few million neurons, perhaps a mouse, a rat, a rabbit.

00:57:18.000 That's perhaps the next jump.

00:57:20.000 And from there, perhaps jumping to a monkey And then perhaps after that, jumping to a human.

00:57:26.000 Right.

00:57:27.000 But what is a person is the real question.

00:57:29.000 Because we fluctuate.

00:57:32.000 We vary depending upon whether or not you got good sleep, whether or not your heart is broken, whether or not you got fired from your job, whether or not you've had a great success in what you do for a living or what your hobbies are.

00:57:45.000 You change your mood.

00:57:47.000 You change the way you interact with people.

00:57:49.000 That's what a person is.

00:57:51.000 Are we...

00:57:52.000 The romantic idea of what a person is is something that creates and interacts and there's so much more to a person than just your digital memory and the amount of information that you've accumulated and the standard patterns that you've expressed throughout your life up until now.

00:58:10.000 You can have some sort of a profound life-changing experience tomorrow and decide that you're going to change your ways and essentially be a different person than you were prior to that experience.

00:58:22.000 When we're talking about a digital identity or a digital life, we're really talking about this sort of static thing that you are now, existing forever.

00:58:34.000 But isn't what being a person is, one of the more interesting things about it, Is that we evolve and that with adversity and new information and relationships and the way we interact with each other, it changes.

00:58:47.000 We vary depending upon our company.

00:58:49.000 We vary depending upon the climate that we live in, the community that we find ourselves in.

00:58:55.000 There's so many variables that we could think of as just data points, but there's something more complex about being a person.

00:59:04.000 Okay, now there are two approaches to this question.

00:59:08.000 The first approach is the top-down approach.

00:59:10.000 The top-down approach says that we're nothing but a bunch of neurons and you duplicate all the neurons and you feed all the information necessary for these neurons to calculate and voila, we have a human.

00:59:22.000 Yeah.

00:59:22.000 Now, the top-down approach met a lot of problems because, of course, the sophistication of the robot you created was extremely primitive.

00:59:30.000 People were not satisfied with that.

00:59:32.000 The thing couldn't learn, couldn't adapt, couldn't evolve, as you said.

00:59:36.000 That's the top-down approach.

00:59:37.000 Now, we're looking at the bottom-up approach.

00:59:41.000 Bottom-up approach is when you bump into things.

00:59:44.000 You learn.

00:59:45.000 Every neuron has to be changed every time you learn a new task.

00:59:49.000 And so the bottom-up approach is successful in doing things that we didn't think were possible.

00:59:56.000 For example, a walking robot.

00:59:58.000 It takes a lot of effort to make a robot walk because every single motion you have to include Newton's laws of motion, mechanics, leverage, and so on and so forth.

01:00:07.000 That's a lot of work.

01:00:08.000 However, bugs Bugs can walk instantly as soon as they're born.

01:00:14.000 How do bugs do it when our most advanced military robot cannot do it?

01:00:19.000 You take our most advanced military robot, put it in the forest, and ask them to move around, what happens?

01:00:25.000 They fall over.

01:00:26.000 They're upside down like a turtle that's upside down.

01:00:29.000 How does nature do it?

01:00:32.000 Nature does it by neural networks, by rewiring itself after it learns every new task.

01:00:39.000 So you make a mistake, well, you learn from that mistake.

01:00:42.000 You make another mistake, you learn from that mistake.

01:00:45.000 It's like what every mother says to their child taking music lessons.

01:00:49.000 How do you go to Carnegie Hall?

01:00:51.000 Practice, practice, practice.

01:00:54.000 That's a bottom-up approach.

01:00:56.000 So we now realize that human beings are both.

01:01:00.000 We have the bottom-up approach when we're children and infants.

01:01:04.000 We learn by bumping into things.

01:01:06.000 That's why babies bite their toes. 1.00

01:01:09.000 Why do babies bite their toes? 1.00

01:01:11.000 Because they don't realize that their toes is connected to their body.

01:01:15.000 Their toe, they think, is just an alien thing.

01:01:18.000 They have to bite it in order to convince themselves that the toe is connected to the brain.

01:01:23.000 That's the bottom-up approach.

01:01:25.000 The top-down approach is when we go to college.

01:01:28.000 When we go to college, we take courses on literature, philosophy.

01:01:30.000 That's the top-down approach.

01:01:33.000 We now realize you have to have both.

01:01:35.000 You have to have both.

01:01:36.000 One is the bottom-up approach, which is called the neural network approach, and the other one is the top-down approach, which is what most people think robotics is.

01:01:45.000 One of the things that we were talking about with the nurse outside before we came into this podcast is that I think that what we are now is not long for this world.

01:01:58.000 I think that this thing, this romantic thing that creates music that can...

01:02:03.000 That can create a Jimi Hendrix or that can make comedy, create a Richard Pryor.

01:02:10.000 That thing is emotions.

01:02:13.000 That thing is illogical sometimes, impulsive.

01:02:16.000 But it creates these brilliant, moving works of art that affect us.

01:02:24.000 It doesn't affect other creatures. 0.99

01:02:26.000 I mean, I'm sure if you played a Jimi Hendrix song to a giraffe, it wouldn't give a shit. 0.96

01:02:31.000 But to us, it's something incredibly magical. 0.62

01:02:35.000 But I think that if you looked at what's possible in the future, that might be more of an impediment than it is an asset.

01:02:47.000 And I wonder if with our integration, if we have this symbiotic integration with technology, that that might be one of the bottlenecks that we have to lose.

01:03:00.000 And that our future selves, whatever we become, like if we used to be a single-celled organism, we became multi-celled organisms, we became ancient primitive primates, we become modern humans, we become symbiotic with some sort of an electronic thing.

01:03:18.000 We intertwine with this.

01:03:21.000 And one of the problems, if we look at all the things that are going on in the world If we look at the greed that makes people become corrupt politicians, if we look at the horrors of war, we look at some of the more terrible things that people are capable of,

01:03:38.000 how many of those things are attached to our ancient primate minds and our ancient primate instincts?

01:03:47.000 And wouldn't it be far simpler and far easier to evolve if we left all those behind?

01:03:53.000 But in doing so, We're going to lose everything.

01:03:57.000 We're going to lose art.

01:03:58.000 We're going to lose love.

01:04:00.000 We're going to lose creativity and chaos and laughter and music, literature.

01:04:06.000 We're going to lose it all because we're not going to be people anymore.

01:04:09.000 We're going to be more efficient thinking machines.

01:04:14.000 Well, some people ask yet another question, which is collary to what you said, and that is, at what point do the machines become dangerous and turn on us?

01:04:24.000 Artificial intelligence.

01:04:25.000 Well, first of all, our robots today, believe it or not, our military robots have the intelligence of a cockroach. 0.99

01:04:33.000 A retarded cockroach. 1.00

01:04:34.000 A lobotomized, retarded, stupid cockroach. 1.00

01:04:37.000 You put them in the forest and they get lost. 1.00

01:04:39.000 They get lost.

01:04:40.000 You put a cockroach in the forest, they find food, mates, shelter.

01:04:45.000 They do perfectly well in the forest.

01:04:47.000 But I can visualize a time in the future when our military robots have the intelligence of a mouse.

01:04:53.000 And then maybe a rat.

01:04:55.000 And then maybe a rabbit.

01:04:58.000 And then maybe a dog or a cat.

01:05:00.000 And by the end of the century, I think perhaps the intelligence of a monkey.

01:05:05.000 At that point, I think they're potentially dangerous because they have a mind of their own.

01:05:11.000 They realize that they're not human.

01:05:14.000 Now dogs, you see, dogs are confused.

01:05:19.000 Dogs think that we are a dog.

01:05:21.000 You met Marshall.

01:05:23.000 You met my dog out there.

01:05:24.000 Do you think he thinks you're a dog?

01:05:26.000 Yeah, because imprinting, when you're very young as a puppy, you imprint immediately on who's the top dog, who's the mother dog, and you're very early in your stage of growing up, you know your pecking order.

01:05:41.000 Very, very clear because they are pack animals, unlike cats.

01:05:45.000 Cats are not pack animals.

01:05:46.000 They're hunter, lone hunters.

01:05:48.000 That's why cats are very mysterious.

01:05:51.000 While dogs are pack animals, they understand the hierarchy and they understand that you are the top dog.

01:05:57.000 They are the underdog and you are the top dog.

01:06:00.000 But if you met my dog, you know that he reacts very differently to people than he does to animals.

01:06:05.000 If he meets another dog, it's a very different experience.

01:06:09.000 I think he knows the difference between a dog and a person.

01:06:12.000 I just think he accepts the fact that humans are the dominant animal, but I don't think he thinks we're dogs.

01:06:20.000 Well, he thinks that this is tribe, because dogs are tribal animals, that whatever you call it, we are members of that tribe, and we're the top dog.

01:06:30.000 We're the leader of that tribe, and therefore they follow.

01:06:32.000 But I don't think he thinks you're a dog.

01:06:34.000 I think he's got the ability to discern between people and dogs.

01:06:37.000 Well, it's a question of hierarchy.

01:06:38.000 We are at the top of the hierarchy, whatever you call it.

01:06:42.000 Now, what I'm getting at is, what happens when they have the intelligence of a monkey?

01:06:48.000 At that point, they're potentially dangerous because they can scheme.

01:06:51.000 They know that we're not monkeys.

01:06:53.000 We're alien to them. 0.99

01:06:55.000 So I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off once they have murderous thoughts.

01:07:00.000 Then the next question is, what happens 200 years from now when the robots become so intelligent that they know how to remove the chip?

01:07:10.000 They know how to remove all fail-safe systems.

01:07:13.000 At that point, I'm guessing, maybe 200 years from now, I think we should merge with them.

01:07:20.000 Oh, boy.

01:07:22.000 So when you say that they could have murderous intentions...

01:07:31.000 Aren't murderous intentions attached to all the things that we discussed earlier, like ego, like the need to breed, to control territory, all those things, all these biological functions that make competition a necessity for human beings in order to perpetuate the survival of the fittest?

01:07:52.000 All those things exist because human beings are these complicated animals that are trying to advance.

01:08:00.000 But why would an artificially intelligent thing that's been created have any instincts to advance or to get better?

01:08:10.000 Well, we would have to program it because we are the gods.

01:08:13.000 In some sense, we have to create these things in our machines.

01:08:18.000 Right.

01:08:18.000 But that's where we're headed.

01:08:20.000 We're headed toward creating machines that are smarter and smarter, and eventually they'll realize self-awareness.

01:08:27.000 Now, robots do not know they are robots.

01:08:29.000 You go up to a robot and congratulate it for doing a fantastic feat, it thinks you're crazy.

01:08:35.000 Robots have no self-awareness.

01:08:38.000 However, by the time they're as smart as a monkey, I think they will start to have self-awareness.

01:08:44.000 At that point, I think they're potentially dangerous because they realize that we are not part of the self.

01:08:49.000 We're not part of the tribe.

01:08:52.000 And why should they take orders from us when they're not part of the tribe?

01:08:55.000 So I think as an interim measure, we should put a chip in their brain that simply shuts them off once they start to question who they are with respect to humanity.

01:09:04.000 What I'm saying is what happens when they're so smart that they can remove that chip.

01:09:09.000 Right, I understand what you're saying.

01:09:11.000 But what I'm saying is all those feelings Of wanting to do bad things, of not trusting people, of wanting to dominate people and take over.

01:09:22.000 Aren't all those things biological?

01:09:25.000 And aren't all those thoughts and all the negative aspects of human beings, aren't they related to our biological need to reproduce and to control territory?

01:09:35.000 And why would they have that?

01:09:38.000 They don't.

01:09:38.000 Right, but they would never have that, is what I'm saying.

01:09:40.000 Oh, no.

01:09:41.000 We could program to mimic our bad behaviors.

01:09:44.000 If we wanted to do that.

01:09:46.000 Right.

01:09:46.000 But we wouldn't, right?

01:09:48.000 Why would we do that?

01:09:49.000 Well, for one thing, we have to realize, who pays for all this?

01:09:52.000 I mean, these are all very abstract concepts, but who is the largest funder of this technology?

01:09:57.000 The government.

01:09:58.000 The Pentagon.

01:09:59.000 Yeah.

01:09:59.000 Not just the government, the Pentagon.

01:10:00.000 The military, yeah.

01:10:01.000 And the Pentagon does not create these objects to lose wars.

01:10:05.000 They create these objects to win wars.

01:10:07.000 Right.

01:10:08.000 And the idea of war itself isn't the problem that human beings have these primitive primate minds that are accustomed to tribal warfare, so we scale that up when we can control entire continents and perhaps even control the entire world.

01:10:26.000 This is what we're doing.

01:10:27.000 So some people have postulated that what we need is a new philosophy toward AI, good AI, friendly AI as they call it, rather than having robots being created to kill other robots and kill humans, which is the driving force behind this technology,

01:10:44.000 to create robots that want to help.

01:10:47.000 That want to nurture, that want to be cooperative.

01:10:50.000 And of course, there has to be money involved because who's going to pay for all this?

01:10:53.000 This is not cheap, right?

01:10:55.000 But that's ideally where you want to go.

01:10:57.000 This is called friendly AI, where AI does not necessarily go in the direction of survival of the fittest.

01:11:03.000 Right, but wouldn't there be money involved in cooperative interaction with all people?

01:11:09.000 Our economies are based on interactions, they're based on exchanges.

01:11:16.000 Wouldn't more cooperation and more exchanging of resources and more Cooperation in terms of intellectual properties, wouldn't that be better for everyone overall?

01:11:27.000 Because we would advance better.

01:11:29.000 We would be able to solve some of our problems like climate change, pollution, things along those lines.

01:11:35.000 Well, ideally, yes.

01:11:37.000 But we live in a practical world, a world where sometimes idealistic notions don't get anywhere because there's no funding, there's no impetus, there's no desire in that direction.

01:11:47.000 So we have to create one.

01:11:49.000 We have to create a situation where we want to create robots, want to create entities that want cooperation and to build rather than to destroy.

01:11:58.000 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:12:00.000 And wouldn't it be more intuitive for people to sort of accept those ideas if we slowly but surely abandoned a lot of our biological instincts?

01:12:13.000 Like, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens is that they're so uniform.

01:12:19.000 And, like, when people have these visions of these greys... 1.00

01:12:23.000 Now, I don't know if they're real or not.

01:12:25.000 I have no opinion on that.

01:12:28.000 But it's fascinating to me that they all take on the same sort of image.

01:12:33.000 It's like this spindly thing with no muscle. 0.94

01:12:36.000 It has a big giant head and it seems to have no sexual organs.

01:12:41.000 And when I think about humans and all the things that trip us up and all the things that cause so many of the problems you experience as civilizations, It's ancient primate stuff.

01:12:55.000 Like if we didn't have sexual desire, if we didn't have ego, if we didn't have all the biological necessities of breeding and controlling property and territory, all the things that make war and violence,

01:13:11.000 if all that stuff is eliminated...

01:13:13.000 Through technology and through the advancement of the species, we would look like that.

01:13:18.000 That, to me, is almost like a window into the future.

01:13:22.000 If we go back from ancient hominids, Australopithecus, and look at what we hypothesized, what we theorized they looked like.

01:13:30.000 They were very muscular, like chimpanzee-like, you know, some sort of hairy creature.

01:13:37.000 And then we look at what we are now.

01:13:38.000 We're losing our hair.

01:13:39.000 We're losing our muscles.

01:13:41.000 Our brains are much larger.

01:13:43.000 The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.

01:13:47.000 Gigantic mystery.

01:13:49.000 What are we doing?

01:13:50.000 Well, we're becoming more like what we imagine those aliens to be.

01:13:54.000 It's almost like they're a blueprint for us.

01:13:58.000 Well, if you go back a few hundred years into the past, back then they didn't talk about aliens.

01:14:04.000 They talked about gremlins and they talked about all sorts of forest creatures and things like that.

01:14:10.000 And then you look at pictures, pictures created by people that were fearful of gremlins and leprechauns and stuff like that.

01:14:18.000 You say to yourself, oh my God, they look just like the aliens of today.

01:14:22.000 So in other words, there's a subconscious fear in our brains that these objects are going to be dangerous to us, and it's been with us for hundreds of years.

01:14:33.000 Now, there's something called sleep paralysis.

01:14:35.000 Sleep paralysis afflicts about 5% of the human race.

01:14:39.000 When you wake up in the morning, you are paralyzed.

01:14:42.000 Now, of course, when you dream, you are paralyzed.

01:14:45.000 Otherwise, you would act out your dream, which is very dangerous.

01:14:48.000 So when you dream, you are paralyzed.

01:14:50.000 And these people are, the 5%, these people are still paralyzed when they wake up. 0.95

01:14:58.000 They can't move.

01:15:00.000 And they have an image, an image of something sitting on their chest, staring down on them.

01:15:06.000 And if you don't believe me, Google it.

01:15:08.000 There are several paintings done during the Victorian era.

01:15:10.000 Done, well aware of it, yeah.

01:15:11.000 And they are the gremlins.

01:15:13.000 Yeah.

01:15:14.000 So it's part of our subconscious mind that we fear this image of a dwarf-like creature's weak, big eyes, and that's the aliens that we see in the movies.

01:15:25.000 It's part of our subconscious.

01:15:27.000 But the gremlins, the images of the gremlins were always grotesque and terrifying.

01:15:32.000 It's more nightmarish visions.

01:15:34.000 It seems like it's more connected to the animal world than it is to some sort of a futuristic advanced civilization type thing.

01:15:45.000 I wonder if we know when human beings started seeing that very specific iconic image, the image of the gray.

01:15:55.000 Because that's the, like, I mean, how much of it is through pop culture, we don't know, but I know Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first people that experienced this You know, ironically, it always happens at night, right?

01:16:08.000 So it always happens when people are sleepy.

01:16:10.000 And the problem that I have with that is that we know that when people are asleep, when they're dreaming, the brain releases all sorts of psychoactive chemicals.

01:16:20.000 And that's responsible for these hallucinations and all these wild, vivid imageries.

01:16:26.000 And I wonder how much of what's happening when people see these aliens is just because it's permeated pop culture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the quintessential alien encounter movie.

01:16:42.000 I mean, that's what they all look like.

01:16:43.000 They're these tiny creatures with the big heads. 0.52

01:16:45.000 You remember that movie?

01:16:46.000 Yeah, well, I agree with you that there's a canonical alien that big eyes and a dwarfish body and spindly arms and legs and so on and so forth.

01:16:56.000 But that may have nothing to do with the aliens that actually do exist in outer space.

01:17:01.000 I believe they are out there.

01:17:03.000 I believe that there are intelligent life forms in the galaxy.

01:17:07.000 Galaxy has 100 billion stars.

01:17:09.000 And we know that 100% of them have planets on average.

01:17:15.000 100% of the stars you see at night have planets going around them.

01:17:18.000 Therefore, they probably have life forms on them, but they don't have to look like us.

01:17:24.000 As I said before, all you need is eyesight, an appendage to manipulate the environment, and language.

01:17:32.000 Beyond that, like an octopus, I believe you could take an octopus, breed it, breed it for a few thousand years, and perhaps it'll become intelligent.

01:17:41.000 Because it has eyesight, which is kind of feeble, but it has eyesight, it has tentacles by which to manipulate the environment, but it has no language.

01:17:50.000 But I think it is possible that we could, if we could orchestrate this, grow an intelligent species from the earth that don't look anything like us. 0.94

01:18:01.000 So the fact that we see these alien creatures look just like a dwarfish version of us is imprinted in our hippocampus and our amygdala of our brain.

01:18:12.000 Is intelligence limited to language though?

01:18:14.000 Because we do know that octopi do things that seem to indicate intelligence, like they know how to twist jars open.

01:18:23.000 They know how to open things.

01:18:24.000 They know how to manipulate stuff.

01:18:26.000 They know how to climb out of a fish tank, go into another fish tank, climb in, kill the fish, and then climb back into their fish tank.

01:18:34.000 Have you ever seen those videos?

01:18:35.000 Yeah, amazing what they can do.

01:18:37.000 But they do these as solitary creatures.

01:18:40.000 They don't do this in a coordinated fashion.

01:18:42.000 To build a starship, You had to have lots of coordination, lots of minds put together to create a starship.

01:18:48.000 But I'm not saying that they have the kind of intelligence that we have, but there's a type of intelligence.

01:18:54.000 You can't say that octopi aren't intelligent.

01:18:56.000 Oh, no.

01:18:57.000 I think they have a level of intelligence that we've underestimated.

01:19:00.000 And I think a lot of things like the porpoise, the dolphin, they have a language that we still have not deciphered.

01:19:06.000 We still have not deciphered the language of dolphins and sea creatures.

01:19:11.000 Yeah.

01:19:12.000 Yeah, that's really fascinating because they also have dialects.

01:19:16.000 They have different sounds that they make if they're in different parts of the world.

01:19:20.000 And we know they're intelligent because if you tape record their signals and run it through a computer program, the computer program looks for the repetition of certain sounds, like the letter E. The letter E is the most common sound in the English language, and you can rank them in terms of how often you use these symbols,

01:19:38.000 and then run Shakespeare through it, and you can actually tell whether two works of art were written by the same person.

01:19:46.000 Whether Shakespeare really did invent and write all these plays by running them through a computer program.

01:19:52.000 You do that with the dolphin now, and sure enough, there's intelligence there.

01:19:57.000 You can actually see the intelligence in a tape recording of the sounds made by a dolphin.

01:20:02.000 How much of an effort is underway to try to decipher what they're doing and to maybe even communicate with them somehow or another by recreating those sounds?

01:20:11.000 Not much, unfortunately.

01:20:13.000 But I think that's a shame because I think animals do communicate with each other.

01:20:17.000 Their vocabulary, I don't know, I'm guessing is on the order of 20 to 50 words.

01:20:21.000 But still, that's enough for them to survive in the wild.

01:20:25.000 And they definitely do communicate with sounds that are repetitive, indicating intelligence.

01:20:31.000 Are you aware of John Lilly?

01:20:33.000 No.

01:20:34.000 John Lilly is a pioneer of interspecies communication who developed a...

01:20:38.000 He tried to come up with methods to communicate with dolphins and they had this one study that they were running that got shut down because this woman was living with a dolphin, essentially.

01:20:51.000 It filled a tank up and had it waist high in water and gave her a bed so she would climb out of the water into the bed and she would live with this dolphin and communicate with it but the dolphin was always sexually aroused and it wouldn't communicate and it wouldn't participate in any of the things while it was horny essentially. 0.96

01:21:15.000 So she, for lack of a better phrase, manually manipulated the dolphin to climax.

01:21:22.000 And they found out about that and they shut down the study because they thought it was disgusting that this woman was masturbating a dolphin. 1.00

01:21:32.000 But what he was trying to do, he was trying to come up with a bunch of different ways to interact with dolphins, but he was trying to get the dolphins to communicate with human language, like get the dolphins to say human things and teach them.

01:21:46.000 I don't think they ever really got anywhere with it, unfortunately, but he was a wild guy.

01:21:51.000 He was also the guy that invented the sensory deprivation tank.

01:21:54.000 Well, I think it's the opposite, that instead of having dolphins learn English, we should learn the language of the dolphins.

01:22:01.000 But this was in the 60s.

01:22:02.000 Also, back then I still remember that the pleasure center of the human brain was isolated, and that by pushing a button you can stimulate your own pleasure center.

01:22:11.000 You take a mouse and you stick a mouse to a telegraph key, and the telegraph key stimulates the pleasure center of the mouse until the mouse dies of starvation.

01:22:23.000 So the mouse would rather die of starvation than stop stimulating his pleasure center.

01:22:28.000 Right.

01:22:28.000 They go up the evolutionary scale, and then they start to do the dolphin.

01:22:32.000 They put a dolphin in a chamber.

01:22:34.000 By moving forwards and backwards, the dolphin can stimulate its own pleasure center.

01:22:39.000 So they wonder, well, what happened?

01:22:41.000 Would it starve to death?

01:22:42.000 Well, what happened was the dolphin would hit the pleasure center repeatedly until it realized, I'm dying.

01:22:49.000 I'm going to die.

01:22:51.000 So the porpoise was stop, get some food, and then go back and stimulate himself some more.

01:22:57.000 Well, you know, those dolphins or the mice, when they did that with mice and rats, the problem with that was they had put these things in a very unnatural environment, like the same thing they did with cocaine and heroin with rats.

01:23:11.000 And that when they tried to recreate the study, but they gave them a much larger, more natural environment, they stopped doing it.

01:23:19.000 They stopped taking cocaine until they died.

01:23:21.000 They stopped taking heroin until they died.

01:23:23.000 They didn't self-stimulate the same way they did before.

01:23:25.000 They essentially were doing it to medicate themselves because they were in a very unnatural laboratory environment of being in a cage and bright lights and the whole deal.

01:23:36.000 When they gave them an environment that's much more normal and natural, they didn't do that.

01:23:42.000 They would, you know, occasionally dabble with whatever drugs they were stimulating them with, but they went on to live normal rat lives.

01:23:50.000 Well, as I understand, some experiments were done on humans years ago.

01:23:55.000 This, of course, would be unethical probably today.

01:23:58.000 But back then, humans had realized that this is going nowhere, that at a certain point they begin to stop.

01:24:04.000 They're smart enough to realize this is madness.

01:24:07.000 Well, do you know about the woman?

01:24:08.000 There was a woman in the 1970s, I actually have a joke about it in my act, where she was allergic to pain medication. 0.89

01:24:14.000 So they drilled holes in her head and they stuck wires into various parts of her brain and gave her an electrical device. 1.00

01:24:22.000 And when she felt discomfort, she could hit this button and a surge of electricity would go into the pleasure centers of her brain and she would orgasm.

01:24:30.000 And she orgasmed all day long.

01:24:32.000 She stopped communicating with her family.

01:24:34.000 She stopped personal hygiene.

01:24:36.000 It was a very complicated study because they were trying to figure out what to do about this.

01:24:41.000 She begged them to take it away, and then she fought them when they tried to take it away from her.

01:24:47.000 She developed an ulcer on the finger she used to manipulate the thing.

01:24:52.000 I'll read it for you because it's very fascinating.

01:24:56.000 I saved this study because it's so crazy because it tells you so much about human nature.

01:25:04.000 See if you can find it, Jamie.

01:25:06.000 It's somewhere in the 1970s, but this is from the study.

01:25:14.000 At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments.

01:25:20.000 A chronic ulceration developed on the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial, and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude.

01:25:34.000 At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, and each time demanding its return after a short hiatus.

01:25:44.000 So they did try that with people.

01:25:46.000 We're not ready.

01:25:48.000 Also, there was an experiment done I think in the 50s with bulls.

01:25:53.000 There was a professor at Columbia University who located the part of the bull's brain That would stop them if they're charging.

01:26:02.000 So what they did was, of course, bulls will charge.

01:26:06.000 A bull in the wild will charge you if you enter an arena with them.

01:26:11.000 He personally, a Columbia professor, would enter the bull ring with a live bull.

01:26:19.000 And there are videotapes of it.

01:26:20.000 I just saw it the other day.

01:26:22.000 Videotapes of the bull charging this professor at Columbia.

01:26:27.000 He had a button.

01:26:28.000 He pushed the button and the bull stopped immediately.

01:26:32.000 Wow.

01:26:33.000 And this, of course, raised a lot of eyebrows because we're no longer talking about reading the mind.

01:26:39.000 We're talking about mind control, which is different from simply reading thoughts and transferring thoughts from human to human.

01:26:48.000 We're actually talking about changing behavior from the outside.

01:26:53.000 And so the videotapes, you can Google them, showing that there he is pushing this button.

01:26:58.000 He's right there with the bull, just a few feet away, and the bull comes to a dead stop when you push that button.

01:27:06.000 Now, is the device connected by wires, or is it wireless?

01:27:11.000 I forgot whether it was connected by wire.

01:27:13.000 It probably was.

01:27:14.000 I'm not sure.

01:27:15.000 Good boy.

01:27:15.000 You'd be really terrified if one of those wires broke.

01:27:19.000 Oops! 0.78

01:27:20.000 Sorry about that.

01:27:21.000 It just seems like such a risky move for the actual professor.

01:27:24.000 I feel like you could hire a rodeo clown and teach him how to hit the button and you'd be better off.

01:27:29.000 At least he would understand how to evade the bull. 0.79

01:27:31.000 Yeah?

01:27:32.000 But after that, people...

01:27:33.000 Here it is, right here.

01:27:35.000 So this is Jose Delgado, implants and electromagnetic mind control.

01:27:39.000 So you have...

01:27:42.000 This bull, they operate on it, and we're watching this video, and it seems like it's a long time ago.

01:27:47.000 What year was this?

01:27:48.000 I think it was in the 50s.

01:27:50.000 Wow.

01:27:51.000 So the bull comes at him, and it seems like he does something, and the bull just stops.

01:27:57.000 Yeah, see?

01:27:58.000 Stops and goes the other way.

01:28:01.000 Wow.

01:28:02.000 There he is.

01:28:02.000 I'm confused as to how it's attached, whether it's a radio signal, because it doesn't seem like there's...

01:28:10.000 It's hard because it's very low resolution.

01:28:12.000 It looks like it's wireless.

01:28:14.000 Yeah, it's definitely something in his hand, but is it connected by a wire?

01:28:18.000 Oh, I see what you're saying.

01:28:19.000 Probably radio.

01:28:21.000 Wow, boy.

01:28:24.000 It's amazing.

01:28:26.000 So what does it say there?

01:28:29.000 It says 1965 experiment with an implanted bull.

01:28:33.000 Wow.

01:28:34.000 So the name of the video, if you want to watch it folks, Jose Delgado implants and electromagnetic mind control.

01:28:41.000 Now remember, this was done at the height of the Cold War.

01:28:44.000 Right.

01:28:44.000 When people were worried about the Manchurian Candidate, you know, that movie.

01:28:48.000 Yeah.

01:28:48.000 And mind control.

01:28:50.000 During the Korean War, certain GIs were brainwashed.

01:28:54.000 So there was a whole hullabaloo around brainwashing, mind control.

01:28:59.000 So what did the CIA do?

01:29:01.000 The CID constructed something called MKUltra.

01:29:05.000 You've probably read about MKUltra, right?

01:29:07.000 But that's one of the motivations for MKUltra, the fact that you could actually determine the behavior of a bull who's charging at you with a button.

01:29:19.000 Yeah.

01:29:33.000 Yeah, he was one of the test subjects of this guy named Jolly West, who was one of the head guys of MKUltra.

01:29:42.000 And they directly connect Jolly West to visiting Charles Manson in jail, supplying him with LSD, teaching him these sort of manipulative methods of controlling people with these psychedelic drugs.

01:29:55.000 It's very, very convincing.

01:29:58.000 It's detailed and researched over 20 years.

01:30:01.000 It's an amazing book because of the Freedom of Information Act and because of what we know about MKUltra, they did some wild stuff.

01:30:09.000 Are you aware of Operation Midnight Climax?

01:30:12.000 No.

01:30:12.000 This is crazy.

01:30:14.000 This is the CIA in the 1960s.

01:30:16.000 They would set up these brothels, and they had them in San Francisco and one other place, I forget. 1.00

01:30:23.000 But they would have these two-way mirrors, and they would have these Johns go in there with the ladies, and the ladies would give the man a drink, and the guy would drink it, and there was LSD in the drink. 0.97

01:30:34.000 And so then they would observe them.

01:30:37.000 So these guys were unwitting test subjects, and they figured, they're not going to say anything, because why were you in a brothel? 0.80

01:30:44.000 Why were you hanging out with prostitutes? 0.99

01:30:45.000 And so they just experimented on people, and they did it for years.

01:30:49.000 And no one would complain, right, for that reason?

01:30:51.000 Exactly.

01:30:52.000 I mean, what are you going to say?

01:30:53.000 How would you even know what happened or what went wrong?

01:30:56.000 Right.

01:30:57.000 And one of them committed suicide in one of these experiments with LSD. Yes.

01:31:01.000 I think quite a few.

01:31:02.000 Jumped out the window.

01:31:02.000 Yes.

01:31:03.000 Well, they were doing a lot of wild stuff with soldiers, too.

01:31:07.000 And not just the United States.

01:31:08.000 There's a video from, I believe it's the late 50s, where these soldiers in England, and they dosed them and then filmed them.

01:31:19.000 And it's this black, see if you can find that, black and white LSD studies from these soldiers.

01:31:26.000 You know, they were trying to figure out how to control people with LSD. They knew it had a profound effect on consciousness, but they didn't exactly know what the dosage were, or Operation Moneybags.

01:31:37.000 So this is the British Army, and I want to say this is like, 56?

01:31:42.000 Does it say what year it is?

01:31:46.000 I feel like I remember it being in the 1950s, but it's really wild to watch.

01:31:52.000 So these guys are stumbling around, 64, okay.

01:31:58.000 So put the, scroll it ahead a little bit so you could see how these guys are behaving.

01:32:03.000 So they had all these different ways of controlling it and so these guys are all on LSD just wandering through the woods laughing.

01:32:13.000 And ultimately, they gave up on it.

01:32:16.000 Like, they thought that it was going to be a way of controlling people's minds, and then they thought, no, it's not that, but it might be a way of extracting the truth, because they would abandon all their cultural ideas and all of these preconceived notions, and ultimately proved to be too blunt of an object to get surgical results.

01:32:37.000 Yeah.

01:32:38.000 They also did experiments on remote viewing and they would put people in front of a map of the world and ask them to identify the location of Soviet submarines.

01:32:49.000 Put pins in a map locating all the Soviet submarines.

01:32:53.000 How accurate were they?

01:32:54.000 They got everything wrong.

01:32:55.000 Not a single pin went to the location of a Soviet submarine.

01:32:59.000 That's a fascinating one because people want to believe that psychic powers are absolutely real.

01:33:04.000 And obviously there's been the James Randi challenge that nobody has taken up on.

01:33:09.000 It's like you had to prove psychic ability and you could win a million dollars.

01:33:14.000 No takers.

01:33:15.000 No takers.

01:33:17.000 But you feel like...

01:33:19.000 I mean, but people want to believe that there is some, either whether it's an emerging phenomenon or some ability that human beings innately have to understand things that you can't weigh, you can't measure, that they're not exactly the standard,

01:33:35.000 you know, we have the standard understandings of what people are able to do with their mind.

01:33:40.000 But we always want to believe that there's someone out there that has just a little extra.

01:33:46.000 And we find nothing.

01:33:49.000 Do you think that that might be an emerging aspect of human beings like we were talking about before, that like ants have a way of communicating, bees have a way of communicating, that it's not outside the realm of possibility that one day human beings could develop an ability to see things or to communicate without words,

01:34:10.000 and that maybe that's what we're grasping for?

01:34:13.000 Well, as I mentioned, there could be a universal language, a language of neurons.

01:34:18.000 So far, we take the language from the hippocampus, run it to our laptop, a laptop that converts these impulses into letters of the alphabet, let's say, and you learn how to type.

01:34:29.000 You can type this way.

01:34:30.000 What about bypassing the laptop and being able to communicate directly through these impulses so you can put two people together and they exchange impulses to each other?

01:34:42.000 So that's an area that has not been explored, but it's a possibility because that would give you a universal language by which you could talk to people, not just exchange memories, but exchange words and communicate with each other.

01:34:58.000 That has not yet been done.

01:34:59.000 What do you make of the idea that people have a connection to other people and that maybe you're thinking about that person and then they call you?

01:35:07.000 And it could just be random, it could be luck, but there's a lot of people out there that are really married to the idea that there's some unknown phenomenon that's taking place.

01:35:19.000 Well, synchronicity is probably evolutionarily programmed into the brain because if you think about Jane and the phone rings and Jane is not there, you forget about it.

01:35:31.000 It's useless information.

01:35:32.000 Then when Jane does call you, you freak out and you say, I'm psychic.

01:35:36.000 I'm psychic.

01:35:37.000 Think about Jane and she calls. 0.97

01:35:39.000 Why did the brain immediately forget all the attempts previously When Jane did not call because the brain has to get rid of garbage. 0.92

01:35:50.000 The brain has to get rid of all the extraneous information because we'd be flooded.

01:35:54.000 We'd be flooded with extraneous memories.

01:35:56.000 So the hits, we remember the hits.

01:35:59.000 We forget all the thousands of memories because it's good for evolution.

01:36:04.000 Evolution does not want us to be cluttered when a tiger approaches us.

01:36:08.000 We want to be alert. 0.76

01:36:09.000 And that means forgetting all the useless nonsense that goes through our brain.

01:36:14.000 And that's synchronicity.

01:36:15.000 The synchronicity is you remember the hits, you don't remember the misses.

01:36:19.000 But is it possible that sometimes you're thinking about Jane and Jane's thinking about you, but Jane doesn't call you? 0.82

01:36:26.000 And then one time you're thinking about Jane and Jane thinks about you and she says, damn it, I'm going to call him.

01:36:32.000 And she calls you. 0.76

01:36:34.000 Well, it's possible.

01:36:35.000 But like I said, on average, most of the times, you just get nonsense calling you on the telephone, you know, selling you things, whatever.

01:36:44.000 And the brain simply throws it out of its memory because it's useless information.

01:36:50.000 And the brain has to sort out good versus bad memories.

01:36:53.000 It remembers the hits, but does not remember the misses.

01:36:57.000 I think Sheldrake was also one of the people that theorized this morphic resonance thing and used it, applied it to dogs.

01:37:06.000 That dogs are able to figure out when their owner was coming home.

01:37:11.000 And critics and skeptics said, well, the dog probably has a biological clock and the owner comes home around the same time every night.

01:37:19.000 But I don't really remember the parameters of the experiment, if they tried to work around that by having the person come home at random times.

01:37:30.000 Well, if you take a brain scan of the dog's brain, you realize that it looks very different from our brain.

01:37:37.000 For example, smells.

01:37:39.000 The area of the brain of the dog, I think, is about 100 times larger than the counterpart in the human brain.

01:37:47.000 And so the brain, as soon as it sniffs the presence of its master, even though the master is quite a distance away, The dog will immediately sense that.

01:37:58.000 And that's been used for COVID-19 detection at Helsinki Airport, for example.

01:38:04.000 The dogs can be trained to recognize with 95% accuracy the presence of COVID-19.

01:38:11.000 Also cancer.

01:38:12.000 Dogs can be trained to recognize cancer better than most cancer tests because their olfactory area of the brain is much, much larger than the olfactory counterpart in human beings.

01:38:23.000 So if you were to read the mind of a dog, You would not see the world as we see it.

01:38:30.000 You would see a world of smells, a world swirling with hundreds of different kinds of smells that you are completely oblivious to.

01:38:38.000 So the mind of a dog and the daydreams of a dog are quite different from the daydreams of a human being.

01:38:43.000 Well, I can attest to that because my dog has a What's the best way to describe this?

01:38:50.000 He's got a fox friend. 1.00

01:38:51.000 The fox friend visits the yard and shits in the yard, and my dog loves to roll around in the fox shit. 0.99

01:38:59.000 So the other day, I let him out in the yard, and he's in the house, and I don't think anything of it, but my wife goes, what is on his neck? 0.99

01:39:08.000 And I look, and he's just smeared all over his chest and his neck, and I go, oh, gee, I know what it is before I even smell it.

01:39:16.000 So I go over to him and smell it.

01:39:17.000 It's horrible. 1.00

01:39:18.000 He's rolled in fox shit. 1.00

01:39:20.000 So not only is his sense of smell far superior to ours, but it's very different because he liked that smell and he wanted to get it all over him for some strange reason. 1.00

01:39:32.000 I don't understand what that does.

01:39:35.000 Maybe it hides his smell, he thinks, from other animals.

01:39:38.000 Maybe it's so strong that he can sneak up on squirrels because they don't smell him. 1.00

01:39:43.000 They just smell the shit. 1.00

01:39:45.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:39:45.000 Well, for my friends who own a dog, I asked them to do one experiment, an experiment that you can do with your dog. 1.00

01:39:52.000 Teach your dog tonight the meaning of tomorrow.

01:39:57.000 And you can't.

01:39:58.000 No matter how you try, you cannot teach your dog the meaning of tomorrow.

01:40:03.000 So the dogs can smell things much, much better than you, but cannot imagine things much better than you.

01:40:11.000 Right.

01:40:12.000 Because humans live in the future.

01:40:14.000 Think about what you're thinking about right now.

01:40:17.000 Right now, you're probably daydreaming about, oh, I'm kind of like tired.

01:40:20.000 I want to get a cup of coffee.

01:40:21.000 I want to do this.

01:40:22.000 Oh, maybe I'll do this after this show is over.

01:40:25.000 You're constantly thinking about the future.

01:40:27.000 We live in the future, okay?

01:40:30.000 Dogs don't. 0.76

01:40:31.000 Dogs live in a world of instinct.

01:40:33.000 They live in the world of now.

01:40:35.000 And it was good for their evolution.

01:40:38.000 Now for our evolution, we don't smell very well.

01:40:40.000 We don't have claws.

01:40:42.000 Very good.

01:40:42.000 We can't fly.

01:40:43.000 We don't have armor.

01:40:45.000 So what do we have going for us?

01:40:48.000 Nothing.

01:40:49.000 Except the brain.

01:40:51.000 And what does the brain do?

01:40:52.000 Daydream.

01:40:53.000 So I think the essence of daydreaming is how we became intelligent. 1.00

01:40:57.000 Because we, as an animal, are pretty stupid looking from an animal's point of view. 1.00

01:41:02.000 No claws, no fangs, no armor, can't fly. 1.00

01:41:06.000 Our eyesight is horrible.

01:41:08.000 We don't smell anything.

01:41:09.000 We have nothing going for us except the brain.

01:41:13.000 Right, but didn't we evolve that way because of the brain and tools and our ability to cook food and all these different things that sort of slowly but surely weakened our physical body?

01:41:27.000 Yeah, look at our jaw.

01:41:29.000 The jaws of our ancestors when you look at skeletons of Neanderthals and things.

01:41:33.000 Huge jaws.

01:41:34.000 Why?

01:41:35.000 Because they had to eat raw meat.

01:41:37.000 They had to crack bones apart to get the bone marrow.

01:41:41.000 Huge jaws.

01:41:42.000 While we humans, homo sapiens, have very tiny jaws.

01:41:45.000 Right.

01:41:45.000 And that's why your teeth are impacted.

01:41:47.000 The dentist has to remove your impacted back teeth because the jaw kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller, jammed all the teeth together.

01:41:57.000 So at the back of your mouth, all the teeth are jammed together and they have to be removed or else you get infected.

01:42:05.000 And it's due to the fact that we learned how to cook meat.

01:42:08.000 And meat is soft, while the meat of our ancestors was raw and extremely hard to eat and the bones had to be cracked apart.

01:42:17.000 This is what I was talking about when I said that if you go back to look at ancient hominids and then you extrapolate and you think about what we're going to look like in a million years, don't you think we would probably look like those aliens? 0.91

01:42:30.000 Well, I tend to think that all those science fiction stories of humans having gigantic heads and small, spindly bodies is wrong, because we have stopped evolving.

01:42:43.000 There's no evolutionary pressure on us anymore.

01:42:46.000 You can have kids anywhere on the planet Earth.

01:42:49.000 There used to be bottlenecks, like Australia.

01:42:52.000 There used to be bottlenecks where evolution speeded up.

01:42:54.000 That's why evolution speeded up in Australia, because they were cut off from the mainstream evolution in Eurasia.

01:43:00.000 Speeded up how so in Australia?

01:43:02.000 In what way?

01:43:02.000 In strange forms where it would shoot out because the gene pool was smaller.

01:43:07.000 And if you have a very large gene pool, evolution is rather slow because odd genes are canceled out.

01:43:13.000 They average out.

01:43:14.000 In a small population, you can have mutants.

01:43:18.000 Mutants jump out rather quickly.

01:43:19.000 And that's why Australia has such strange animals because it's an island, basically, separated from the rest of the other continents.

01:43:30.000 And wombats and things that don't exist anywhere else.

01:43:33.000 Right.

01:43:33.000 Yeah.

01:43:34.000 So you think that we're just this forever?

01:43:38.000 I mean, obviously, there's been changes.

01:43:41.000 I mean, we were talking about the changes to human beings from ancient hominids and Neanderthals to what we are now.

01:43:49.000 You think this is just stuck because it's too easy?

01:43:52.000 I think we're stuck because there's no evolutionary pressure, perhaps at the molecular level, to be healthy.

01:43:58.000 Nobody wants to marry a sick person.

01:44:01.000 So there's always an evolutionary pressure not to mate with a sick person.

01:44:05.000 But if the person is reasonably healthy and, you know, makes a moderate good living, then you want to mate with that person and keep evolution going, and there's no evolutionary pressure.

01:44:16.000 There was evolutionary pressure for us to have a big brain because we have nothing else going for us, right?

01:44:21.000 So that's why we have a big brain.

01:44:23.000 But there's no evolutionary pressure to do anything else with the body.

01:44:28.000 And that's why I think that in the main, gross anatomical features have stopped evolving.

01:44:33.000 Chemically, we're still evolving because we don't mate with sick people. 0.92

01:44:38.000 But other than that, I think that for the most part, evolution has stopped.

01:44:43.000 But aren't we still, in some way, involved in natural selection?

01:44:48.000 And isn't that one of the driving forces of evolution?

01:44:51.000 Yeah, but what are the pressures on that happening?

01:44:54.000 If you look at the movies, you'll find out that what they select for is people that are healthy.

01:45:00.000 And no diseases in their history, but healthy.

01:45:05.000 And healthy, in turn, correlates with beauty.

01:45:08.000 Because beautiful forms tend to be healthy and vice versa.

01:45:11.000 And so we mate with healthy people who are good looking because they're healthy.

01:45:17.000 And as time goes on, and as we continue this mating with beautiful people that are healthy, don't you think there's at least some members of the human race that are experiencing some form of evolution?

01:45:34.000 And maybe that will all be radically accelerated by technology when we integrate.

01:45:39.000 When and if we decide to integrate via Neuralink or something along those lines, will that change the course of our advancement?

01:45:49.000 Because when we're thinking about evolution, we're thinking about some sort of an improvement and a better adapting to our circumstances and environment.

01:45:59.000 That's the difference between us as we are now versus ancient hominids with no language. 1.00

01:46:04.000 Well, what humans do is enhance themselves.

01:46:08.000 That's why we have makeup. 0.72

01:46:10.000 That's why we have people that try to pump up their muscles.

01:46:15.000 That's why we have tattoos.

01:46:16.000 People have been trying to enhance themselves since day one because they think that increases their reproductive success.

01:46:23.000 That's why they enhance themselves.

01:46:24.000 In the future, we will be able to deliberately enhance ourselves.

01:46:29.000 Yeah.

01:46:29.000 And I think that is possible.

01:46:31.000 I think on a scale of, let's say, 200 years, It may be possible for us to mentally enhance ourselves, increase our memory, our capabilities, live on other planets, for example, by enhancing the human being because that's what we do.

01:46:47.000 We enhance ourselves.

01:46:49.000 So do you think that that would be the solution to the bottleneck?

01:46:53.000 So if we are right now sort of stagnant in the terms of natural evolution, That's some sort of a technological evolution, whether it's through things like gene manipulation, like CRISPR or the like, or some new, not yet invented technology that will be able to design a better human being.

01:47:15.000 It's possible.

01:47:16.000 You know, in science fiction stories that I used to read as a kid, the human of the future has a gigantic head and very, very spindly organs of the body with a huge head to support.

01:47:27.000 But you see, there's no evolutionary pressure in that direction.

01:47:31.000 People do not want to mate with somebody with a gigantic head.

01:47:36.000 There's no pressure in that direction.

01:47:38.000 I think in the future, on the other hand, when we have artificial enhancement of the human body, we will enhance ourselves to look better looking.

01:47:46.000 Not ugly like gigantic heads, but stronger supermen and superwomen rather than these deformed creatures from science fiction. 0.95

01:47:56.000 But isn't that because we have this biological imperative to breed naturally, the way humans Animals do.

01:48:04.000 The survival of the fittest aspect of it.

01:48:07.000 The fact that the bigger, stronger animals breed before the weaker ones.

01:48:13.000 And that we are sort of trapped in that dynamic by our biology, but we could escape that.

01:48:21.000 If we are willing to abandon that method of reproduction and that would make us look like the aliens, that we would be these genderless, you know, almost like, you know, muscle-less things and that by integrating with technology And by having the satisfaction,

01:48:42.000 being able to satisfy all of those biological imperatives, like the need for breeding, sex, all those things, if all those things are eliminated and we come up with something that's far superior than that, and it exists technologically or electronically or whatever it is,

01:48:58.000 wouldn't that be a way to solve that issue?

01:49:01.000 Well, some of that is happening already.

01:49:03.000 Decades ago in Brooklyn, the Jewish population had to worry about Tay-Sachs. 1.00

01:49:08.000 Tay-Sachs is a hereditary disease that afflicts Jewish people.

01:49:12.000 And by taking a look at the embryos, you can simply discard the embryos that have the Tay-Sachs syndrome and keep the ones that don't.

01:49:20.000 What is Tay-Sachs? 0.81

01:49:21.000 It's a disease of Jewish people where kids die very young, and it's one of 5,000 genetic diseases that afflict the human race. 1.00

01:49:30.000 But it's only in the Jewish race?

01:49:32.000 Yeah.

01:49:33.000 There was a mutation that took place in Eastern Europe several thousand years ago.

01:49:36.000 It has since proliferated into a large number of Jewish populations, and they have to worry about that. 1.00

01:49:43.000 And so matchmakers, in the early days, matchmakers would try to find out if the Tay-Sachs syndrome existed in your family.

01:49:50.000 Today we do it genetically and we can eliminate it now.

01:49:55.000 This has been going on for decades, the fact that people have a choice to eliminate embryos that have the Tay-Sachs disease.

01:50:02.000 So you can sense it or you can find it in the embryos?

01:50:06.000 That's right.

01:50:06.000 You can genetically alter your own evolution.

01:50:10.000 So are they able to do that if a woman has the embryo in her body? 1.00

01:50:15.000 So they would abort it?

01:50:17.000 Yeah.

01:50:19.000 In other words, they can get rid of embryos that have to be implanted.

01:50:23.000 This is through, you know, the insemination takes place outside the body.

01:50:31.000 You can analyze the genes and discard the ones that you don't like.

01:50:35.000 And that's today.

01:50:36.000 This has been going on for decades in the Jewish community.

01:50:39.000 Now it's pretty much available commercially.

01:50:41.000 And I think in the future, then you're talking about evolution being changed at the chemical level, that genetic diseases like hemophilia and cystic fibrosis for Europeans and sickle cell anemia for African Americans. 0.57

01:50:58.000 These genetic diseases could deliberately be eliminated by choice.

01:51:04.000 And that would just be one stage of our ability to manipulate people and improve upon when we think about the human race.

01:51:16.000 That's right.

01:51:17.000 Once we identify genes, for example, that are associated with intelligence, Personally, I think it's more complicated than that.

01:51:25.000 But let's say a family finds out through an advertisement that certain genes are correlated with intelligence.

01:51:32.000 Then they can discard the embryos that don't have that gene.

01:51:36.000 And so people can deliberately begin to alter the genetic makeup of their lineage.

01:51:41.000 Their genealogy is actually controllable in this way to a limited degree.

01:51:47.000 And that's to a limited degree.

01:51:48.000 But ultimately, do you think that it's possible that we can actually design a better human being?

01:51:55.000 Yes.

01:51:56.000 However, the trick is to find which genes correlate with which things, okay?

01:52:01.000 Behavior is very complicated because every behavior probably has many genetic links.

01:52:06.000 If you take two twins...

01:52:08.000 Come here.

01:52:10.000 If you take two twins and take a look at their life history and so on and so forth, you realize that about 50% of their behavior is genetically programmed and 50% is not genetically programmed.

01:52:23.000 So even with two identical twins, behavior is actually quite difficult.

01:52:28.000 It's a combination of many factors.

01:52:29.000 But in the future, if we get better at this, Then that opens the possibility of people choosing which traits they want in their own family tree to propagate.

01:52:40.000 So this is called gene therapy, and there's two kinds of gene therapy, somatic gene therapy and the gene therapy where you can actually change the genetic heritage of your lineage so that that gene that's afflicted your family for centuries can now be totally eliminated.

01:52:58.000 But when you extrapolate that kind of technology and that kind of ability, ultimately, if you look at 100 years from now or 500 years from now, where do you think this goes?

01:53:09.000 Well, I think that as time goes by, there's going to be a black market.

01:53:13.000 Somebody will advertise a smart gene, a good-looking gene, a muscular gene, even if it's totally fake, and put it on the internet.

01:53:22.000 We have not been able to monitor the drug trade.

01:53:27.000 Think of what happens when genes Illegal genes are entering on the internet.

01:53:33.000 How do you stop that?

01:53:35.000 Because a gene is nothing but information.

01:53:37.000 Like A, T, C, G, the four nucleic acids arranged in a certain way.

01:53:42.000 How do you stop that?

01:53:43.000 That's a number.

01:53:44.000 How do you stop illegal genes from proliferating?

01:53:47.000 But what about legal versions of it?

01:53:48.000 I mean, maybe we'll put some restrictions on it in this country, but I would imagine that there'd be other countries if they had access to that technology and they wanted to create a superior version of a human being.

01:54:00.000 I mean, think about the horrors that Hitler created in Germany because he was trying to create the Aryan race. 1.00

01:54:05.000 This is the Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. 0.52

01:54:09.000 In that society, they deliberately reduced the oxygen on embryos to make them mentally retarded. 0.99

01:54:16.000 They deliberately made the workers stupid by depriving them of oxygen, and therefore, they would control the intelligence of their society that way.

01:54:27.000 Now, that was a dream when he wrote that back in the 1930s, but many aspects of the technologies that he wrote about are actually possible. 0.67

01:54:36.000 But, of course, morally, it would be, of course, a disaster to have these policies carried out.

01:54:42.000 But what happens if you have a dictator? 0.97

01:54:44.000 A dictator that wants soldiers that are mentally retarded but are very strong and obey orders to kill. 0.99

01:54:51.000 Right. 1.00

01:54:51.000 Okay? 1.00

01:54:52.000 That's a definite possibility when we have dictatorships that still exist on the earth. 0.62

01:54:57.000 Wasn't there, there was an attempt at one point in time to combine human beings with chimpanzees to create like a super soldier?

01:55:06.000 Or at least there was, if it wasn't experimental, it was theoretical, they were trying to see if it was possible.

01:55:15.000 See if we can find anything about that.

01:55:17.000 I want to say that was scientific ethics and Stalin's ape-man super wars. 0.66

01:55:23.000 That's what it was.

01:55:23.000 It was Stalin.

01:55:25.000 So there was some sort of, at least an attempt, I mean I don't think, obviously it never worked, but I think he was trying to figure out a way if he could combine humans and apes and create a superior soldier.

01:55:41.000 By the way, when you take a look at the movie Planet of the Apes, the recent versions of the movie are actually becoming possible in the sense that we know the complete genome of chimpanzees, we know the complete genome of humans,

01:55:57.000 and we look where they're different.

01:55:59.000 And they're only different in a very few select places.

01:56:02.000 We are genetically very close to the chimpanzee with our genes.

01:56:06.000 We separated from the chimpanzees six million years ago.

01:56:10.000 And we have many of the same genes.

01:56:12.000 The genes that differ are the genes for manual dexterity, which we have and chimpanzees don't have very much, vocal cords, and of course, the size of the brain.

01:56:22.000 But we've located them.

01:56:24.000 We know which genes created, in some sense, the big brain, better vocalization, and manual dexterity.

01:56:33.000 So it is conceivable, though we can't do it today, conceivable that something like Planet of the Apes may be possible.

01:56:40.000 So like what Stalin theorized could be something that we could introduce human specific characteristics into apes and they could create like a super soldier.

01:56:53.000 Well, how it would work, I don't know.

01:56:55.000 All I'm saying is that we do know the genes that are different from chimpanzees and humans.

01:57:00.000 We do know they accumulate in three major areas, manual dexterity, vocalization, and brain size.

01:57:06.000 And we know which genes they are.

01:57:08.000 And that's just one step, right?

01:57:10.000 I mean, we could conceivably impart some of those characteristics into other animals.

01:57:15.000 Yeah, it's possible.

01:57:16.000 That's what gets weird, right?

01:57:17.000 This is where ethics comes in.

01:57:19.000 We're not there yet, but sooner or later we will be at the point where we have to look at the ethics of what happens when we transfer genes between species.

01:57:27.000 Well, I mean, we need to look at the ethics of what happens when we experiment with makeup on, you know, animals, because we're still doing things along those lines.

01:57:35.000 They're still doing all sorts of weird animal studies that may or may not be necessary.

01:57:41.000 Well, the good aspect is that you can take certain organs of pigs that are compatible with humans and therefore extend the lifespan of people that have fatal diseases.

01:57:50.000 Is that your phone?

01:57:51.000 That's the good aspect.

01:57:53.000 Is that your ringtone?

01:57:55.000 Let me hear your ringtone.

01:57:58.000 It's just a gentle ding-dong.

01:58:00.000 It's an advertisement.

01:58:01.000 It is?

01:58:02.000 Yeah, I know the advertisement.

01:58:06.000 Oh, you mean that you're getting a phone call from?

01:58:08.000 Yeah.

01:58:08.000 You know, you can press that button on the right-hand side, it'll stop?

01:58:11.000 The button on the right side of your phone?

01:58:13.000 I love when super geniuses don't know how to operate their phone.

01:58:16.000 Beyond me.

01:58:18.000 It's hilarious!

01:58:19.000 He was looking at the phone.

01:58:20.000 Oh, it's an advertiser.

01:58:21.000 Yeah, you shut it off.

01:58:23.000 How do you do that?

01:58:25.000 You're too busy with string theory.

01:58:27.000 You were one of the co-founders of the string theory.

01:58:31.000 The string field theory, which in turn is a branch of string theory.

01:58:34.000 I don't understand that. 0.99

01:58:35.000 I'm too dumb for that. 0.99

01:58:36.000 I've tried. 1.00

01:58:37.000 I've tried.

01:58:38.000 I've heard multiple versions, explanations.

01:58:42.000 I've heard it described.

01:58:43.000 It's still Greek to me.

01:58:45.000 It's music.

01:58:46.000 Yeah.

01:58:47.000 You know, Pythagoras was a rival of Democrites.

01:58:50.000 Democrites talked about atoms 2,000 years ago.

01:58:53.000 And Pythagoras said, no, no, no.

01:58:56.000 Music is the language of the universe.

01:58:58.000 So he looked at a lyre string and said, look at the vibrations.

01:59:02.000 Each vibration corresponds to a musical note.

01:59:05.000 The universe is music.

01:59:08.000 The universe is created by vibrating things.

01:59:10.000 Each vibration corresponds to a note.

01:59:12.000 How did Pythagoras figure that out?

01:59:14.000 He went to a blacksmith where there were long bars of metal and they were clanging these bars of metal.

01:59:23.000 He realized that the longer the metal, the lower the note.

01:59:27.000 And he said, aha, there's a relationship between the length of the object, its strength, and the note.

01:59:34.000 And then he looked at a lyre string, and he said, the longer the lyre string, the lower the note.

01:59:39.000 Why?

01:59:40.000 The more wavelengths.

01:59:42.000 And then he said, this is the universe.

01:59:44.000 What explains the diversity?

01:59:46.000 What paradigm is rich enough to explain the diversity of the entire universe?

01:59:53.000 Atoms, but what makes atoms different?

01:59:55.000 And then he said, it's music.

01:59:58.000 But then, that never went anywhere, because of course, the atomic theory wasn't created for another 2,000 years.

02:00:03.000 But finally, with the atomic theory, we now have subatomic particles.

02:00:07.000 But why do we have so many subatomic particles?

02:00:10.000 They're nothing but musical notes on a tiny, tiny little vibrating string.

02:00:14.000 So this is the electron, vibrates this way.

02:00:17.000 This is a quark.

02:00:19.000 This is a neutrino.

02:00:21.000 So why do we have so many particles in the particle zoo?

02:00:24.000 They're nothing but vibrations on a tiny string.

02:00:27.000 So what is physics?

02:00:29.000 Physics is the harmonies, the harmonies of little vibrating strings.

02:00:33.000 What is chemistry?

02:00:35.000 Chemistry is the melodies you can play when these strings bump into each other.

02:00:40.000 Then what is the universe?

02:00:42.000 The universe is a symphony of strings.

02:00:45.000 And then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein wrote about so eloquently for 30 years?

02:00:52.000 The mind of God.

02:00:54.000 Would be cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.

02:00:59.000 That would be the mind of God.

02:01:02.000 You're a really great science communicator, and I know you've been doing this for a long time, but is it just a natural thing that you maintain this enthusiasm for all this new information?

02:01:17.000 Well, my favorite Einstein story is Einstein said that if you cannot explain the theory to a child, the theory is probably useless.

02:01:27.000 Meaning that great theories are based on simple principles, concepts that you can see visually, pictures.

02:01:36.000 Useless theories are just a bunch of algebra that go nowhere.

02:01:39.000 So if you take a look at all the great theories, they're pictorial.

02:01:43.000 Take a look at Newton's laws.

02:01:44.000 Newton's laws are based on billiard balls, planets, stars going around each other.

02:01:49.000 Very pictorial Newton's laws.

02:01:52.000 Look at Einstein's laws, based on meter sticks, and rockets, and clocks.

02:02:00.000 Take a look at string theory, little vibrating strings.

02:02:03.000 So, great theories have a simple pictorial representation.

02:02:09.000 Theories that are easily explainable.

02:02:12.000 That's right, and they're very profound.

02:02:13.000 We can explain the entire solar system with Newton's laws of motion and gravity based on, you know, balls going around other balls.

02:02:22.000 Have you always been a person, though, that has not just been interested in these ideas, but also been interested in illustrating them to other people in a way that's comprehensible?

02:02:32.000 Well, when I was a kid, well, first of all, when I was eight years old, something happened which completely changed my life.

02:02:41.000 All the newspapers were saying that a great scientist had just died, and they put a picture of his desk.

02:02:47.000 That's all.

02:02:48.000 Just a picture of his desk with a book on it.

02:02:50.000 The book was empty, and the caption said, this is the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientist of our time.

02:02:59.000 Well, I was fascinated.

02:03:01.000 I had to know what was in that book.

02:03:04.000 Why couldn't he finish it?

02:03:06.000 Why didn't he ask his mother?

02:03:07.000 Why didn't he simply make up a theory?

02:03:10.000 So I went to the library and I found out this man's name was Albert Einstein.

02:03:17.000 And that unfinished book was The Theory of Everything.

02:03:22.000 An equation that would allow us to, quote, read the mind of God.

02:03:27.000 So I said to myself, wow, that's for me.

02:03:31.000 But then when I tried to communicate this idea to other people, their eyes would glaze over.

02:03:37.000 And it's because great ideas have a picture, have some kind of concept, a principle that can be explained in a few words.

02:03:48.000 Evolution, one of the greatest principles of biology, can be explained by saying survival of the fittest.

02:03:54.000 And so great ideas have very simple paradigms behind them.

02:03:59.000 But to explain that is very difficult unless you know what the paradigm is.

02:04:05.000 And so this idea of explaining the mind of God, do you think that we're going to ever come to a point as human beings where we can understand the creative force of the universe of everything?

02:04:19.000 Well, the driving force behind the universe is energy.

02:04:22.000 And the energy of what?

02:04:24.000 We think the energy of vibrating strings.

02:04:27.000 And these strings, when they vibrate, create subatomic particles.

02:04:30.000 And that's what the universe is made of, subatomic particles.

02:04:34.000 But there's some sort of an advancement to constant new levels of complexity.

02:04:43.000 Mm-hmm.

02:04:44.000 And that certainly exists with the human race, but it seems to exist with just the creation of the universe itself, from the Big Bang Theory to stars exploding, creating carbon, which is the source of all carbon-based life forms like us.

02:05:01.000 All these things are constantly becoming more and more complex.

02:05:06.000 Therefore, your conclusion is what?

02:05:09.000 I don't have one.

02:05:12.000 A universe without a conclusion.

02:05:13.000 I leave that to scientists like you.

02:05:14.000 I'm just happy that I get to talk to you.

02:05:17.000 I mean, I don't have a conclusion, but I'm wondering why the universe tends to have this momentum towards further and further levels of complexity.

02:05:32.000 Well...

02:05:32.000 You alright?

02:05:33.000 There's a cough button there.

02:05:34.000 See that really red button?

02:05:35.000 You can get crazy.

02:05:36.000 Press that button and just...

02:05:37.000 Yeah, let it out.

02:05:41.000 Okay.

02:05:42.000 Got it?

02:05:43.000 Well, one of the fundamental paradoxes of the universe is the universe is based on a simple number of constants, like the speed of light, the mass of a proton.

02:05:54.000 But where do these numbers come from?

02:05:56.000 These numbers are tuned, tuned like a radio, to be exactly those frequencies and energies which make life possible.

02:06:05.000 If the nuclear force were a little bit stronger, the sun would have burnt out billions of years ago, and we wouldn't be here talking about this.

02:06:13.000 If the nuclear force were a little bit weaker, the sun would never ignite it at all, and we still wouldn't be here.

02:06:20.000 Everything is just right to be tuned to allow for life.

02:06:25.000 So when I was in second grade, I'll never forget my elementary school teacher said, Quote, God so loved the earth that he put the earth just right from the sun.

02:06:36.000 Not too close, oceans would boil.

02:06:39.000 Not too far, the oceans would freeze.

02:06:41.000 And I said to myself, my God, that's right.

02:06:45.000 The earth is tuned, tuned just right to allow for life.

02:06:51.000 The nuclear force is tuned just right.

02:06:53.000 If gravity were stronger, the universe would have been blown apart billions of years ago.

02:06:59.000 The universe is tuned just right to allow for life.

02:07:04.000 So, my elementary school teacher said, therefore, God exists.

02:07:08.000 Well, now we have discovered thousands of planets which are too close.

02:07:14.000 Which are too far from the Mother Sun, and there's no life as we know it on these planets.

02:07:19.000 So in other words, it's a crapshoot that there are probably billions and billions of planets out there, but only a handful of them have things just right from where they should be.

02:07:32.000 Do you think it's possible that we're the most advanced life form in the universe?

02:07:37.000 Probably not, because on average, well, first of all, we've discovered 5,000 planets orbiting other stars, and of the 5,000 planets, maybe 20% of them are Earth-like, and our galaxy contains 100 billion stars,

02:07:56.000 each one on average with one planet or more going around it.

02:08:01.000 So the probability of life in the galaxy is almost 100%.

02:08:05.000 100% life, but what about intelligent life?

02:08:08.000 That's probably smaller.

02:08:09.000 Yeah, that's what I was getting to, because all the bottlenecks, all the issues that keep all the other animals on this planet besides us from being the intelligent, manipulative creatures that we are, the way we manipulate our environment, I mean, and our constant thirst for innovation,

02:08:27.000 that doesn't seem to exist in other animals.

02:08:31.000 Yeah.

02:08:32.000 So in that sense, we could be special to the Earth.

02:08:34.000 But in outer space, there could be other different kinds of life forms dependent upon different factors.

02:08:40.000 For sure.

02:08:41.000 Like the octopus, the porpoise, spiders.

02:08:43.000 It's possible to imagine other life forms that could also be intelligent if there's an evolutionary pressure on them.

02:08:49.000 But dinosaurs were around for 200 million years.

02:08:54.000 And to the best of our knowledge, not a single one became intelligent.

02:08:59.000 They got lazy.

02:09:01.000 No, we humans, we've been around for 200,000 years.

02:09:04.000 That's nothing.

02:09:05.000 Nothing, 200,000 years.

02:09:07.000 And we became intelligent.

02:09:08.000 The dinosaurs had 200 million years to become intelligent.

02:09:12.000 None of them made it.

02:09:14.000 So, it's not...

02:09:16.000 Common on Earth.

02:09:18.000 But there's enough planets out there that it's most likely common in the universe for some sort of an intelligent, innovative species to exist in not just one planet, but maybe an infinite number of planets.

02:09:33.000 And just remember, the dinosaurs did not have a space program.

02:09:36.000 And that's why they're not here today.

02:09:38.000 No space program.

02:09:40.000 Not intelligent enough to have a space program.

02:09:43.000 So to have a space program could be an evolutionary bottleneck.

02:09:47.000 If your species does not develop a space program, sooner or later you're going to get wiped out.

02:09:52.000 And you've got to develop a space program before you get hit with an asteroid.

02:09:55.000 That's right.

02:09:56.000 That's right.

02:09:56.000 And that's where we are now.

02:09:58.000 Either before you get hit with an asteroid or become one of those societies, what is it, level one, where you're able to do something about supervolcanoes.

02:10:12.000 Right.

02:10:12.000 To do something about...

02:10:13.000 A Type I civilization could deflect asteroids, deflect meteors.

02:10:19.000 They're masters of their planet.

02:10:21.000 That's Type I. And that's what we need to get to.

02:10:23.000 And then we need to eventually become interstellar so that we can escape.

02:10:28.000 If our star burns out, if there's a supernova in a nearby galaxy, if there's something that happens that kills us all, we at least can propagate the universe.

02:10:38.000 Right.

02:10:38.000 And that's Type II. And we actually found evidence of something that may look like a Type II civilization, though that's very, very speculative.

02:10:46.000 There's something called Tabby's star that decreases in intensity by 20% periodically.

02:10:54.000 Now, that's incredible.

02:10:56.000 Stars don't simply diminish by 20% in intensity after a few years.

02:11:01.000 It's intermittently?

02:11:03.000 Intermittently, right.

02:11:04.000 So the theory is that maybe there's a Dyson sphere.

02:11:07.000 A Type II civilization creates a sphere around the Mother Star to absorb all the energy from the Mother Star. 0.62

02:11:15.000 That's called the Dyson Sphere.

02:11:17.000 And so the thinking was that maybe a Dyson Sphere is orbiting around Tabby's star, diminishing sunlight by 20%.

02:11:26.000 Well, that's a theory.

02:11:28.000 Some people think it's comet dust or a smudge on a telescope, but there it is, 20% reduction in starlight in a star which is unheard of.

02:11:38.000 Now, if a planet goes in front of the mother star, sunlight diminishes by less than a percent.

02:11:43.000 If Jupiter goes in front of our sun, Starlight from our sun diminishes by 1%.

02:11:49.000 But 20% reduction in starlight is incredible.

02:11:54.000 That's why some people think that's evidence of an intelligent object orbiting the star, diminishing starlight by 20%.

02:12:02.000 Is that the best evidence that we have in terms of the observable universe?

02:12:07.000 That's right.

02:12:07.000 That's the only evidence we have of a possible Type II civilization.

02:12:12.000 Which is called a Dyson sphere, a gigantic sphere that uses up all the energy of the Mother Star.

02:12:18.000 How do you think the human race would handle it if we were confronted with just complete absolute evidence that intelligent life exists on another planet and they have the capability of coming here?

02:12:35.000 Well, everyone thinks that when a flying saucer lands on the White House lawn and the aliens come out promising advanced technology for all of us, that there are protocols.

02:12:45.000 Protocols.

02:12:46.000 Who's going to be contacted first?

02:12:47.000 Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, so on and so forth, the United Nations?

02:12:53.000 Nope.

02:12:53.000 There's nothing.

02:12:55.000 There's no protocol for us to confront what happens when an extraterrestrial civilization lands on the planet Earth and announces its existence.

02:13:06.000 If anything, there'll be chaos.

02:13:08.000 Different planets will try to angle for an advantage.

02:13:11.000 They'll try to be friendly with the aliens to the exclusion of their enemies.

02:13:15.000 I think this can be a real mess.

02:13:17.000 Do you think that that's possible inside of our lifetime?

02:13:22.000 I think within our lifetime, we could definitely see that we will intercept a signal from another intelligent civilization.

02:13:29.000 This is called the SETI project.

02:13:31.000 I think that's very possible within this century.

02:13:35.000 Now, there's also the METI project, which I tend to disagree with.

02:13:41.000 What does that stand for?

02:13:43.000 To message extraterrestrial intelligence to advertise our existence.

02:13:49.000 Do you think that's a bad idea?

02:13:50.000 I think it's a huge, huge mistake.

02:13:52.000 Because look what happened to Mexico when Cortez met Montezuma hundreds of years ago.

02:14:00.000 Montezuma made the biggest mistake in ancient history.

02:14:04.000 He thought that Cortez was a god.

02:14:07.000 Nope. 0.85

02:14:08.000 Cortez was a bloodthirsty pirate looking for gold.

02:14:12.000 But what did Cortez have?

02:14:14.000 He had the horse.

02:14:15.000 Aztecs had no horse.

02:14:17.000 He had steel weapons.

02:14:19.000 The Aztecs had bronze weapons.

02:14:22.000 Cortes had the written language, Spanish.

02:14:24.000 The Aztecs had no written language.

02:14:26.000 They had a pectoral language, but not a written language.

02:14:29.000 Cortes had the horse.

02:14:31.000 Nope, the Aztecs did not.

02:14:33.000 And within a few months, the Aztec civilization was destroyed.

02:14:37.000 So I think before we know the intentions of the aliens, we should not advertise our existence.

02:14:45.000 Don't you think that the technological advantage that Cortez had over the Aztecs is also—there's a biological similarity.

02:14:55.000 They were not much different from each other.

02:14:58.000 They were the same species.

02:15:00.000 We would be dealing with something that would be akin to us observing ant colonies or us observing some sort of primitive life form.

02:15:09.000 It would be far superior.

02:15:11.000 It wouldn't be like other dolphins cruising in on a new pod of dolphins that didn't know any better and taking all their stuff, which is essentially what happened when Cortez met Montezuma.

02:15:23.000 Right.

02:15:23.000 It's like going down a country road and seeing a bunch of ants on the floor and going down to the ants and saying, I bring you trinkets.

02:15:31.000 Yes.

02:15:32.000 I give you beads.

02:15:33.000 I give you nuclear energy.

02:15:35.000 Right.

02:15:35.000 Take me to your ant queen.

02:15:37.000 Or do you have this politically incorrect urge to step on a few of them?

02:15:42.000 I think we have to worry about that.

02:15:44.000 Now, let's say you're walking down a forest to see a squirrel.

02:15:48.000 At that point, you may want to talk to the squirrel.

02:15:50.000 Squirrel must have an interesting life.

02:15:52.000 So you try to talk to the squirrel.

02:15:54.000 But after a while, you get kind of bored because the squirrel doesn't talk back to you.

02:15:59.000 It doesn't have anything interesting to say to you.

02:16:02.000 So what do you do?

02:16:03.000 You simply leave the squirrel alone.

02:16:05.000 So these are two possibilities.

02:16:07.000 One is the aliens may simply step on us because we're irrelevant.

02:16:10.000 And the other one is that they'll simply ignore us because we have nothing to contribute to them.

02:16:17.000 What do you make of the stories and reports of nuclear weapons facilities being shut down when there was a sighting and that these things hovered over these nuclear facilities and they shut them down?

02:16:32.000 Right.

02:16:32.000 That happened in 1967 at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana Where there were 10 ICBMs that shut down.

02:16:44.000 Remember, this is our nuclear strike force.

02:16:46.000 They have to be operational 24-7, right?

02:16:48.000 They shut down.

02:16:49.000 They shut down.

02:16:50.000 And in the presence of a glowing ball in the air, so people put two and two together and said, maybe the aliens want to neutralize our ICBMs for the hell of it.

02:17:03.000 We don't know.

02:17:03.000 All we know is that these are military men, these are military-grade equipment, there's plenty of documentation, and I think there's 120 military men over the years who've said that there are things like this at other missile bases.

02:17:20.000 Yes.

02:17:21.000 Now that means at least one of two things.

02:17:23.000 Either the aliens are interested in our nuclear capability, Or our military simply has sensors everywhere that the average amateur does not.

02:17:36.000 And therefore, of course, of course the military is going to pick it up because they have the radar, they have the sensors, and we don't.

02:17:43.000 But it's random, basically.

02:17:45.000 So there's several ways of looking at that.

02:17:47.000 So it could be random that the machines and that all the ICBMs shut down at the same time that they're being visited by an unexplained aerial phenomenon.

02:17:56.000 That's also possible, right?

02:17:58.000 It's possible.

02:17:59.000 But if you were an intelligent species that had an eye on Earth and you're like... 0.55

02:18:04.000 They're coming along, but they're kind of crazy. 0.96

02:18:07.000 They're wild, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, and they get jealous and greedy, and some of them are evil sociopaths, and they lack moral intelligence, and they do crazy stuff. 0.98

02:18:19.000 We have to just make sure that they don't destroy themselves.

02:18:22.000 Because one of the things about UFO lore that I find fascinating is the uptick, the generally agreed upon uptick that happened after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

02:18:35.000 Like that those bombs were dropped and that once they realized that we not only had nuclear capability but that we were willing to murder hundreds of thousands of people.

02:18:47.000 That that's when all the sighting started.

02:18:49.000 Like, they go, oh, Jesus.

02:18:51.000 Okay.

02:18:51.000 Well, we got to go visit these people.

02:18:53.000 Well, that's possible.

02:18:55.000 That's one theory.

02:18:57.000 Other people say that after World War II, people got used to the idea of things in the sky.

02:19:01.000 Right.

02:19:02.000 Gigantic bombers and weapons of war in the sky.

02:19:05.000 And every time someone saw something in the sky, they would think, oh, my God, they're not U.S. bombers.

02:19:09.000 They're alien bombers, right?

02:19:11.000 Yeah.

02:19:12.000 We don't know, but that's a possibility.

02:19:15.000 You see, when you start to hit type 1 status, you become interesting because before type 1, you cannot destroy yourself as a civilization.

02:19:24.000 Right.

02:19:25.000 Nothing known to science can completely destroy a type 1 civilization unless there's a virus of some sort because they have no weapons that can do that.

02:19:33.000 Once you're type 1, you have nuclear weapons, you discover element 92. As a Type 0 civilization, you discover element 1, 2, 3, 4. What is element 92? 0.59

02:19:44.000 Uranium.

02:19:45.000 Yeah.

02:19:46.000 So once you go up the scale and you're Type 1, you eventually, inevitably, hit element 92, which is uranium, which has a finite critical mass, about 20 pounds, and you're able to create a nuclear weapon.

02:20:00.000 And that's at the instant that you have become a Type 1 civilization. 0.99

02:20:05.000 So if I was an alien with an advanced civilization, I would monitor those planets that are on the verge of becoming Type 1 because those are the planets that have the capability of discovering element 92. And once they did discover element 92 and implemented it in warfare,

02:20:25.000 then I would think if you were really concerned, that would be the time to step in.

02:20:30.000 Yeah.

02:20:31.000 Now that's, of course, pure to hypothetical.

02:20:33.000 Yes.

02:20:33.000 But there is a logical basis to thinking about that because we are about to make the greatest transition in human history from Type 0 to Type 1. Are you aware of the story of Bob Lazar?

02:20:44.000 No.

02:20:45.000 No.

02:20:46.000 Really?

02:20:46.000 Interesting.

02:20:48.000 He's the guy that supposedly worked at Area S-4, and he worked on back engineering spacecrafts.

02:20:55.000 And this was in the late 1980s, and George Knapp had him on television, and he discussed it because he was concerned that they were going to...

02:21:04.000 Possibly have him killed because he had access to this information.

02:21:08.000 He worked at Los Alamos labs and he was a propulsions expert and they brought him on board to try to back-engineer this craft.

02:21:19.000 It's one of the most famous stories in UFO folklore because there's a lot of chicanery involved.

02:21:30.000 It's hard to know what's true and what's not true.

02:21:32.000 But one of the things that he said was that this alien civilization that created the spacecraft had harnessed a stable version of Element 115. And he talked about this in the late 80s.

02:21:47.000 And I don't believe they isolated Element 115 outside of it being theoretical.

02:21:53.000 I don't think they isolated it until somewhere in the 2000s.

02:21:57.000 Well, I get a lot of emails and some of them talk about conspiracy theories.

02:22:02.000 Yeah.

02:22:02.000 And my advice to them is, if you are ever kidnapped by a flying saucer, for God's sake, steal something.

02:22:10.000 An alien chip, an alien hammer, an alien paperclip, steal something because there's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization.

02:22:22.000 There's no law at all.

02:22:23.000 Well, he wasn't claiming to be kidnapped.

02:22:25.000 He was claiming that the United States government had in their possession more than one of these recovered crafts.

02:22:34.000 Now, for those people who make these claims, my only thing is we need something tangible.

02:22:41.000 Yes.

02:22:41.000 Because science is based on things that are testable, reproducible, and falsifiable.

02:22:46.000 That's called science.

02:22:48.000 If somebody says something...

02:22:51.000 Maybe it's true.

02:22:52.000 Maybe it's not true.

02:22:54.000 But what are we supposed to do if there's no evidence pointing one way or the other?

02:22:59.000 You see, these recent photographs that the military has released, that's a goldmine, a goldmine of data.

02:23:05.000 We're analyzing them frame by frame because these are things that are testable, reproducible on film.

02:23:11.000 But when you're talking about alien craft that's crash-landed, maybe...

02:23:18.000 Maybe not.

02:23:19.000 What are we supposed to say?

02:23:20.000 Right.

02:23:21.000 The only thing that they have pointed to as evidence is, and it's not from this particular situation with Bob Lazar, but they've found objects that are made in a very sophisticated manner,

02:23:37.000 some sort of a form of metallurgy.

02:23:39.000 Have you ever seen any of that stuff?

02:23:40.000 No, I've heard that some people claim that they've been able to get globs of melted metal when a flying saucer landed, and among the debris they saw some pieces of melted metal.

02:23:51.000 But these have never been analyzed to my degree.

02:23:53.000 We should put them through a spectroscope to see what they're made of.

02:23:56.000 I think they have.

02:23:57.000 I think there was...

02:23:58.000 Was it...

02:23:59.000 Who...

02:24:00.000 What scientist had...

02:24:02.000 There was a piece of something that they had from unknown origin that was...

02:24:11.000 The Nitinol thing?

02:24:12.000 Yes.

02:24:14.000 Nickel-titanium mixture.

02:24:15.000 It was so complex that to be able to do that, it was possible.

02:24:20.000 It's possible to be able to do it.

02:24:22.000 It's not like it's an impossible thing to do on Earth.

02:24:24.000 But it would cost an insane amount of money to recreate this metallurgy.

02:24:29.000 And that this was from supposedly some sort of a crash site.

02:24:35.000 And what was the guy from Stanford that analyzed it?

02:24:41.000 Wasn't it?

02:24:42.000 Sorry, there's a name I saw.

02:24:44.000 This doesn't say Stanford.

02:24:45.000 I don't know.

02:24:46.000 I don't know.

02:24:46.000 There is a Professor Sturrock at Stanford who investigates UFOs and things like that.

02:24:53.000 But you mentioned element 115. Yes.

02:24:55.000 I remember now, there is a conjecture that was made about an element like that.

02:25:01.000 Actually, we've created that element.

02:25:04.000 Yeah.

02:25:04.000 And it tends to be unstable, and it does not seem to have any magical properties, but it's actually been created very briefly with our particle accelerators.

02:25:13.000 Yes.

02:25:13.000 That's what Bob Lazar discovered, or that he discussed, rather.

02:25:18.000 But we didn't find anything unusual about it.

02:25:21.000 I see people have looked for what are called metastable states that are transuranic, that is beyond uranium.

02:25:26.000 Some people have theorized that way beyond uranium, there's an island of stability so that these elements are stable and you can make maybe bombs out of them.

02:25:37.000 So the military was interested in that concept.

02:25:39.000 But so far, no one's ever seen this island of stability that's way out there.

02:25:43.000 What he was trying to say is that this extraterrestrial civilization had either developed or was in possession of a stable version of 115 and through that stable version of 115 they were able to distort gravity and that that's how that thing manipulated the environment around it to move at insane rates of speed.

02:26:04.000 And what's interesting is, what he described, they actually observed on one of the videos that the government had gotten from fighter jets.

02:26:15.000 This is it right here.

02:26:19.000 This thing right here on this table, that is a recreation of what Bob Lazar had.

02:26:26.000 This is a guy named...

02:26:27.000 It's designed by Perry.

02:26:29.000 The E in Perry is like a 3, I believe.

02:26:32.000 And he's created this artistic version that is a recreation of what Bob Lazar described as seeing at Area S4. And what Bob Lazar says is this thing...

02:26:44.000 Turns sideways, or turns like, instead of being perpendicular, or parallel rather, it goes up and down, and then moves at insane rates of speed.

02:26:58.000 And it uses this element, obviously this sounds like crazy talk, He uses this element to bend gravity around it.

02:27:06.000 And the way he described it was as if you were taking a bowling ball and placing it in the center of a mattress, that the weight of the bowling ball would push down and make everything else come around it.

02:27:18.000 Well, I don't know.

02:27:19.000 Yeah, obviously.

02:27:20.000 All I know is that in gravity theory, there's something called the equivalence principle, and that pieces of matter of the same weight are basically, operate the same under gravity.

02:27:33.000 Everything falls at the same rate.

02:27:35.000 If I have a piece of metal here, a gigantic piece of metal or a small piece of metal, they both fall at 32 feet per second squared.

02:27:42.000 Right.

02:27:43.000 So if he claimed to have a new element, it would also fall at 32 feet per second squared.

02:27:48.000 I don't think he's saying it falls.

02:27:50.000 I think what he's saying is this generator, something in this element 115 allows this advanced civilization to bend gravity around it.

02:28:02.000 And that's the propulsion system that it uses. 0.91

02:28:05.000 Well, I don't know.

02:28:06.000 However, if it's possible that you are a Type III civilization, It's possible to have energy on a scale that is incomprehensible by our standards, and then you can start to manipulate gravity at will, okay?

02:28:20.000 Yeah.

02:28:20.000 But again, this is not for Type 1, not even for Type 2. Right.

02:28:24.000 But if you're at the Type 3 civilization, you can manipulate Planck energy scale physics.

02:28:29.000 At that point, it might be possible to manipulate gravity.

02:28:32.000 As I mentioned before, negative energy is something that you can use to drive a starship.

02:28:38.000 But you need large quantities of negative energy to do that.

02:28:41.000 And that's the Alcabierre drive.

02:28:43.000 So if somehow they're able to harness that kind of energy, then yeah, things might be possible.

02:28:50.000 But I have to see it.

02:28:51.000 Right, of course.

02:28:52.000 You are a real scientist.

02:28:54.000 One of the things that I'm really interested in is supposedly there is evidence that hasn't been released.

02:29:03.000 There's video evidence and photographic evidence that the government is in possession of.

02:29:07.000 Christopher Mellon, who formerly of the Department of Defense, he discussed it, that there's some really high resolution, fascinating videos and photographs And that what we've seen is just a drop in the bucket and that the government is in possession of much more of this stuff.

02:29:30.000 Has anybody ever discussed that with you?

02:29:32.000 Well, no, but the military now admits that there is much more data out there that they have not been released.

02:29:41.000 And their pilots many times shut off their cameras because no one would believe them, but they would report it verbally, but there's no record of it because they realized people would laugh at them.

02:29:53.000 So the military has now issued a statement saying that pilots should report these things rather than simply erase these things.

02:30:00.000 So there's a lot of stuff out there.

02:30:02.000 In fact, there's one report that said that these would go on for days.

02:30:06.000 For days, these objects would be flying around, not just one second or whatever.

02:30:11.000 So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's been not released to the public.

02:30:15.000 Well, it's a very fascinating subject.

02:30:17.000 And to me, it means a lot that someone like yourself, who is a very respected physicist, is willing to entertain these thoughts and discuss it with people.

02:30:27.000 And I'm glad we're in a new era where that's possible.

02:30:30.000 Yeah, well, remarkable claims require remarkable proof.

02:30:33.000 And as long as the claims are remarkable and there's some kind of proof to go with it, it's worthy of scientific investigation.

02:30:42.000 Well, thank you very much, and thank you for your time.

02:30:44.000 Thanks for coming here.

02:30:45.000 I really, really appreciate it.

02:30:47.000 If anybody wants any more information on you, what's the best way to go about it?

02:30:52.000 Do you have a website?

02:30:52.000 Yeah, I have a website, mkaku.org.

02:31:00.000 That's the best way?

02:31:01.000 Yeah.

02:31:01.000 Okay.

02:31:01.000 And my latest book is called The God Equation, The Quest for a Theory of Everything.

02:31:06.000 And is it available in audio form as well?

02:31:08.000 Yeah.

02:31:09.000 Did you read it?

02:31:10.000 Huh?

02:31:11.000 Did you read the audio book?

02:31:12.000 No.

02:31:12.000 I have somebody else read it because it takes about a week.

02:31:16.000 Yeah.

02:31:16.000 It takes about a week for someone to sit down and read everything.

02:31:19.000 Unfortunately, though, you have such a specific sound to your voice that I think people would appreciate it if you did read it.

02:31:25.000 Oh.

02:31:26.000 Well, I'll think about it.

02:31:28.000 Well, thank you very much.

02:31:29.000 I really appreciate it.

02:31:29.000 It's been great talking to you.

02:31:30.000 Okay.

02:31:31.000 Thank you.

02:31:32.000 Alright.

02:31:32.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 08, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1828 - Michio Kaku

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript