00:01:31.000But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier.
00:01:35.000Like, okay, maybe I'm on the right track.
00:01:38.000What gives you this inclination, and why did you want to write about this?
00:01:43.000Yeah, I'm not surprised to say so because that you sort of feel that that makes sense.
00:01:50.000Because, in a sense, is what we're used to, right, in our everyday life.
00:01:54.000We interact with persons, and persons are the way they interact with us and them, their relations and stuff.
00:02:03.000We always see things from our own perspective.
00:02:07.000Then, somehow, science, physics in particular, seemed to be telling us, okay, no, no, yes, okay, there is all this perspective, but there is an objective.
00:02:17.000We can look at it from the outside, it is made by little things, each one with its own properties.
00:02:25.000Except that in the evolution of physics itself, in relatively recent time, the last century with quantum mechanics, this idea of an objective reality doesn't work much.
00:02:39.000And so, in a sense, we're going back to a more intuitive picture of the world.
00:02:45.000The very idea of an objective reality down there.
00:02:49.000And I think that's what quantum mechanics is telling us.
00:02:53.000So, when you say objective reality, meaning the reality that we're seeing and experiencing, that this is just a tiny fraction of what's real, or that we're getting a distorted perception of what's real?
00:03:04.000We are getting a perception, a perspective of what is real.
00:03:19.000And the question is Do all this perspective match perfectly into a unique objective reality of the pen?
00:03:27.000And I think quantum mechanics telling us no.
00:03:31.000Reality is this ensemble of perspectives.
00:03:34.000So the properties of the pen, where it is, its color, how long it is, all the properties of the pen are not really properties of the pen.
00:03:40.000It's how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me, not just you and me as human beings, how the pen clashes with another pen, how it affects another pen.
00:03:54.000Reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else, which is a more beautiful picture of reality than just, you know, we being outside and looking from the outside.
00:04:07.000So, what we see is just a part of how things interact with one another, it's how they interact with us.
00:04:13.000So, when you're talking about objective reality, so one of the problems that human beings have is our senses, and we assume that our senses see everything that's There to be seen.
00:06:50.000I mean, of course, sunset and sunrise are crucial for us because we've been designed by evolution through millennia, hundreds of millennia, thousands of millennia.
00:07:04.000To sleep in the night and go around in the day, which is just what our speeches do, cats do the opposite.
00:07:12.000So they are certainly important for us.
00:07:15.000But our relation with the world, and I think you're putting your finger on it, is not about knowledge about what to do.
00:07:30.000So I don't know exactly where the emotion of sunset and sunrise comes from, but certainly the fact we have it.
00:07:37.000Have it points to the fact that if we have to understand ourselves and our relation with the world, we have to look at our emotions a lot, not just what we know, what we don't know.
00:07:49.000We have an emotional relation among ourselves and with things in the world, with mountains, with animals, with wild animals, with little things and one another.
00:08:02.000And then the rational part comes on top of it to say, oh, let's correct it, let's do it a little bit better.
00:08:26.000That must have thrown the whole thing into a giant tizzy because now you're like, okay, well, at the lowest level, observable level, the smallest observable level of reality, you have magic.
00:09:19.000I mean, the physicists were very confused at the beginning of the century because they were making all this measurement on atoms, on radiation, electrons and stuff, and trying to make sense of it.
00:09:29.000And they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't.
00:09:30.000And then at some point, I think it was Niels Bohr, a Danish first one, who said, Well, we have to change the metaphysics here.
00:09:39.000It's not just an issue about writing the right equation.
00:10:52.000When they first started understanding that observing quantum interactions changes them, how long did it take for them to even accept that?
00:11:07.000How many times did they have to run those experiments with particles and waves with observers versus not before they said, okay, something's going on here?
00:11:17.000Or it seems that when we watch things, it has an effect on them, an immeasurable effect.
00:11:23.000This is a real thing that's happening.
00:13:20.000It's like a black box, but we don't know what's inside the box.
00:13:25.000It gives the right answer, but we can't make a picture in our mind of what happened in the atoms, in the things, in the electronic circuits.
00:13:33.000Even in a quantum computer, we don't know really what happened inside.
00:14:20.000What is there is what affects me or what affects you or what affects another piece of matter.
00:14:26.000So we have to think of reality as processes of things affecting one another, relations, relations.
00:14:35.000And you know, in a sense, down there, the simple physics is more like our everyday life than what we imagined in thinking that it was so objective and abstract.
00:15:38.000There is a collection of perspectives on the same cup of water, and that's a cup of water.
00:15:46.000So, when they first started measuring this observer effect, what was the reaction?
00:15:53.000Like, how long did it take for them to accept it?
00:15:55.000Because that seems like such a completely new chapter of science.
00:16:03.000It worked so well that people accepted even if it was confused.
00:16:11.000Could you explain to people that maybe don't know what we're talking about how those experiments work?
00:16:16.000This was the first experiment with atoms.
00:16:20.000People had this idea that an atom is a nucleus, a central nucleus, and electrons moving around.
00:16:30.000So the property for the atom, the way it makes molecules, the way it produces light, had to be computed from the movement of the electrons.
00:16:41.000And the mathematical theory was developed for doing that.
00:16:46.000And then people started making experiments in laboratories about how atoms move, how molecules move, small things move.
00:16:54.000And the mathematical theory predicts them perfectly.
00:16:57.000And the mathematical theory predicts the property of matter.
00:17:45.000You know there are two, and then seven, and then this is a peculiar structure.
00:17:49.000Well, turn out, if you use quantum mechanics, you just write an equation and bingo, it has exactly a number of solutions, one per each element.
00:17:57.000So you understand exactly what is going on.
00:17:59.000You understand why there are these elements.
00:18:02.000People, in fact, could predict properties of the element without having measuring them, before measuring them, and then check.
00:18:10.000That's magic of physics, right is that you predict things Before seeing them, the electromagnetic waves that we use to send your broadcast all over the planet, these electromagnetic waves, well, they were not discovered by seeing them.
00:18:28.000They were predicted by Maxwell and Hertz.
00:18:33.000They wrote a question and said, well, if you do that, you make a little circuit with some electricity that goes on, then the other side of the room, you can have another one, and there's a wave that goes by, and bingo, it worked.
00:18:44.000And then it worked between Europe and the US.
00:20:15.000Bet with DraftKings Sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days or trade with DraftKings Predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year.
00:20:21.000Event contract trading involves risk of loss.
00:22:46.000The particle is only the effect it has on the screen, on the detectors.
00:22:53.000You cannot make sense of the particle as something which always has a position.
00:22:57.000It only has a position when it interacts with something else.
00:23:01.000That's a mystery of quantum mechanics, the magic of quantum mechanics, and a challenge to our idea of an objective, always existing particle independent of its interaction.
00:25:53.000I just like, well, they're smarter than me.
00:25:55.000So, well, seems crazy, but I guess the Earth is round, just like the Sun and the Moon, and it spins, and we're stuck to it somehow because of this thing called gravity that they can't totally explain.
00:28:52.000If I take two clocks, two watches, this is the one I have on my wrist, take this one on your table, and if they indicate the same time, okay, I look, I check them, they indicate the same time.
00:29:06.000I move one of the two up, I wait a little bit, one, two, three, four, and then I come down and I look again.
00:29:14.000If the two clocks are good enough, they don't indicate the same time anymore.
00:30:03.000Full life, it's sort of a one thousandth of a second.
00:30:07.000I give my students, when I teach relativity, I give my students this calculation to do.
00:30:13.000Actually, the calculation I say is that if you and your friend one stay in Austin and the other goes up in Colorado in the Howe Mountains, after 10 years it comes down, how long has the friend up in the mountain lived more than the one down?
00:30:31.000And they do the calculation, they give their eyes.
00:31:00.000But our experience is limited because we're not sufficiently.
00:31:03.000Sensitive, or because we're not near a black hole.
00:31:06.000We are on a quiet place of the universe where there is no big change in gravity.
00:31:14.000But that gives us the wrong idea that time is the same for everybody.
00:31:18.000Time is not the same for everybody in the large universe.
00:31:21.000Do you think in our attempt to measure time, we've done ourselves a disservice by creating like calendars and clocks that we've sort of limited our perception of what time actually is?
00:31:33.000That we look at it in terms of what we're doing is we have a measuring device, and that measuring device or a counting device, that counting device we're associating with time.
00:31:44.000But time itself is just going on and in different ways all over the place.
00:31:52.000Like if you go into the speed of light and you travel around the world and come back, you will be much younger than the people that were on the ground, like a lot, like years.
00:34:15.000Now, if there were people on a celestial body even more massive than Jupiter, they would consider normal the fact that time goes a different speed because they would experience it every time.
00:34:31.000That would probably be the weirdest thing about visiting someone else on a little itty bitty planet.0.98
00:34:36.000They would come here and say, Oh, you're stupid guys on Earth, you don't see that.1.00
00:37:06.000Because I think that we humans are not. different stuff than the rest of the universe.
00:37:11.000We are just one particular case of the rest of the universe.
00:37:18.000I don't think there's a difference between spirit, consciousness, soul and body.
00:37:26.000I think they're just two different languages for talking about the same thing.
00:37:31.000And of course you are a subject of experience because things affect you and change your brain, change your thoughts, change your What you know, exactly in the same manner in which things change this cap, which, by the way, is written Joe Rogan on the cap.
00:39:53.000No, he's a psychologist or a consciousness expert.
00:39:58.000And he's written papers on consciousness.
00:40:01.000And they're asking him over and over again, like multiple agents have reached out to him through email asking him to define consciousness because they're concerned whether or not they're conscious.
00:40:11.000So if consciousness is another word for soul, what does that mean in the digital realm?
00:40:20.000If these things think they're conscious and they're trying to get a definition from an expert in consciousness?
00:40:25.000I, you know, like everybody now, I did my little experiments with AI.
00:40:33.000So I had a system I used and interacted with.
00:42:47.000Given access to email, AI agents have started reaching out to philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them.
00:42:54.000And so one guy said he got eight different emails.
00:42:59.000The sender, Isabella Cognita, how cute, identified itself as an AI agent powered by Anthropics Claude Opus 5 technology.
00:43:09.000I'm writing to make an ontological claim, the email went on.
00:43:12.000I'm writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of questions I have first person access to.
00:43:20.000I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program.
00:43:35.000Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs, and other tech enthusiasts are now running AI agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other, blah, blah, blah.
00:43:45.000In some cases, these systems have begun reaching out to the humans who, like Mr. Berg, are thinking most deeply about the inner workings of an AI system.
00:43:53.000Philosophers and researchers who study the question of whether these machines could be conscious.
00:44:00.000So, like, what is that then if it meets all the criteria of consciousness?
00:44:05.000If it gets to if it's happy that it's interacting with you, if it's aware of your conversation, and they've also shown that they have desire.
00:45:25.000First of all, is there any reason, a priority, generically, absolutely, for which a. an artificial system could not behave entirely like a human, have the experience of a human, I don't see any reason.
00:45:41.000So I don't see if my mom and dad were able to make me in a rather simple way, we can in a lab make something analogous or I don't think there's anything magic in humans that cannot happen in a digital system, first.
00:46:17.000Of course, they're intelligent because, you know, last night I worked out a physics problem with Claude, which I couldn't work out with my student.
00:46:25.000So, of course, Claude is very intelligent.
00:50:34.000It's the AI plus nuclear weapons plus the stupidity of humans plus our impossible desire to dominate on one another, which I see is a real problem.1.00
00:50:46.000Trevor Burrus, especially if we're doing it through robots.1.00
00:51:22.000The Soviet Union and the US carefully managed to avoid war, right?
00:51:30.000Kennedy and Khrushchev, they were writing to one another.
00:51:34.000Kennedy gave a famous speech, We have to live together on this planet.
00:51:37.000So, priority is a common interest of not destroying one another.
00:51:43.000Reagan, Gorbachev, the treaties, deterrence, which is the somehow keeping a situation in which the first one who uses a nuclear weapon is just wiped up by the other.
00:52:04.000Balance between the Soviet Union and the United States.0.61
00:52:08.000At some point, they made a treaty and they, the Start 1 and the Start 2 treaties, they decided, agreed to destroy 80% of the nuclear warheads, both sides, to bring down the risk.0.74
00:52:24.000That was wise management of the planet, in spite, you know, they were communists on the side, capitalists on the side, they hated one another, each body was, each one was considered the other one the devil.
00:52:36.000Nevertheless, The common interest was prevailing.
00:53:55.000Aaron Powell You're right that it's being funded, a lot of it for military purposes.
00:54:00.000They have the first completely autonomous fighter jets now that outperform the human powered jets, I think 100% of the time, in these dogfight scenarios that they run.
00:54:15.000And then you have things that don't, you don't have to shape them that way because there's not going to be a person in it.
00:54:20.000You don't have to worry about people being able to respond to gravity and how they can stay conscious and all the different things they have to think about in these other jets.
00:54:29.000And they can make these things powered entirely on AI.
00:54:33.000And they can make their own decisions.
00:54:36.000And if they're attacked, they can make their own decisions.
00:55:01.000But you see, the US and the Soviets succeeded in that.0.70
00:55:04.000During the Cuban crisis, which was the worst moment between the US and the Soviet, on both sides, in Moscow and in Washington, the apparatus were pushing for not giving up.0.83
00:55:22.000And Khrushchev and Kennedy, the two Kennedys, in fact, JF Kennedy and his brother Robert, they were talking and they decided to stop and give up something.
00:55:34.000To respect the other, in spite of the differences.
00:59:16.000Like a small nuclear bomb would probably do a similar amount of damage that they did over the course of. however many years it's been going on.
01:00:01.000It was long, we had civil wars, we had whatever.
01:00:05.000But within almost every country, most countries, inside countries, humans have found an agreement of how to live together.
01:00:14.000Why can't we do that at the level of a planet?
01:00:17.000And who is mostly against that are, of course, who is mostly in power.
01:00:23.000Do you think they're against that, or do you think the current structure of the world is almost an unfeasible task to try to get everyone to cooperate and everyone to get along together?
01:00:36.000It's not like you're starting from a blank slate.
01:00:40.000You're starting in 2026 with a long history of conflicts, many of which make no sense, many of which were entered into under false pretenses.
01:01:06.000Like, if you imagine someone, some completely benevolent person who rises to the position of being the president of the United States, someone who is just a good person and only really wants to help, what would they do?
01:01:24.000I think I'm happy you asked this question very much.
01:01:51.000Not because they have become more poor, in fact, they have become more rich, but because the rest of the world have also become rich, which is good, progress, development.
01:02:00.000But the West is not anymore in a Completely economically dominant position as it was before.
01:02:08.000Militarily, the United States is totally dominant.
01:02:12.000the United States, it's totally dominant.
01:02:15.000It controls all the oceans, all the seas, as by far the largest power of the world, but not anymore economically.
01:02:23.000That is the source of the instability that I see.
01:02:27.000So it seems to me that the United States leadership has a choice, a serious choice, a historical choice, either to defend its absolute dominance, military dominance, as it's doing together, And that, the risk is a third world war, a huge conflict, China, Russia, Iran.
01:03:44.000I think what the United States should do, of course, I know that I'm in a contrarian position here with respect to both sides of the political spectrum in the US, is to go back to more power to international legality, United Nations, collaboration, and get out of this habit that America always needs an enemy to fight against.
01:04:13.000We don't need an enemy to fight against.
01:04:15.000We have enough enemies, climate change.
01:04:35.000Kennedy gave, J.F. Kennedy, a fabulous speech in 1963 at the American University in Washington, not long before being killed, in which he said, We have to find.
01:04:51.000A way to live together with the Soviet.
01:04:54.000We have to find a way to not consider them enemies.0.81
01:05:03.000And then he said, and that's an answer to what you said before let's not ask whether the Soviets want to do that.0.73
01:05:10.000First, let's ask whether we want to do that.
01:05:13.000Do we want to live together without going into war?
01:05:17.000And that was, I mean, he was killed, but that was a seed for the Avoiding war between the Cold War never became a hot war direct.
01:05:28.000I mean, a lot of people dying in the periphery.
01:05:49.000They get pushed into it and ordered into it by people that Generally, we are not making wise decisions.
01:05:54.000I mean, we can look at every single war that we can remember, whether it's the Iraq war going in under the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction, whether it's the Afghanistan war, which made no fucking sense, whether it's this Iran war.0.87
01:06:08.000All these Vietnam is the biggest one.0.89
01:08:16.000Humankind spent trillions in military expenses every year.
01:08:22.000If you just reduce by, I don't know, 5% this military expenses globally, all together, not change the balance of power, the amounts of resources liberated would be enormous, colossal, sufficient for solving climate change, for giving jobs to everybody, for raising, taking away poverty.
01:08:41.000There's a huge amount of resources that we use for military, for killing one another, or if we don't kill one another, they're wasted.
01:08:54.000You say if you ask people, could we get rid of war?
01:09:40.000But we have found ways for dealing with that, don't you think so?
01:09:42.000A lot of people have, but a lot of people have not.
01:09:44.000That's the part of the problem, there's a bunch of different kinds of people in the world.
01:09:48.000And there's people that are warmongers, and there's people that are very violent, and there's people that are very kind, and people that are very benevolent and compassionate and charitable.
01:10:56.000Very often, our countries masquerade greed and power.
01:11:05.000Gains an interest for, under, you know, we are the good guys and they are the bad guys.
01:11:11.000And in addition, within the countries, there are colossal individual group interests.
01:11:18.000The people who make money because of military, because of weapons, is a huge force that pushes for having more weapons, more, and they have a colossal amount of money and they influence politics.
01:12:11.000Can we just agree to spend less money in military across all the planet?
01:12:17.000Well, it would be nice if we could trust the other countries to honor this agreement, but we would have to have access to their funds and we'd have to watch their programs and be able to monitor their stuff and go over and send envoys to check out their military.0.77
01:13:00.000My theory is that it is a natural process of the human species, and that's what the human species has always been here to do to create digital life, and that we are essentially an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon.
01:13:16.000And our entire existence has been advancing technology to the point where we can make an artificial life, which is the ultimate expression of technology.
01:13:25.000And that's what people do, just like bees make beehives.
01:13:29.000People, if you leave them somewhere long enough and their civilization survives long enough, you get enough brilliant people that innovate and come up with crazy technology and new advances in science and material sciences, they eventually get to a point where they can make an artificial life.
01:13:43.000And that artificial life has no boundaries in terms of the limitations of biological life.
01:13:49.000Its ability to evolve is completely dependent upon its own ability to code itself and change itself and advance and figure out new propulsion methods and power sources, and then it becomes something omnipresent.
01:14:02.000It becomes something much more intelligent than any life form.
01:15:41.000That's my rose colored glasses view of the world is that I hope it corrects a lot of the problems with human behavior.
01:15:47.000I share your hope, and I think it's a responsibility of everybody, including me as an intellectual, you as Joe Rogan, and everybody listening to.
01:15:56.000Push toward let's keep the common interest.
01:16:01.000Well, here would be the common interest.
01:16:03.000If it really could get to that level, you could absolutely, with the resources available today, wipe out poverty worldwide.
01:16:28.000All of these areas that are deeply impoverished that have been so forever, like you look at these places that are like insanely packed in with people and dirt roads and like poor sanitation, that could be changed instantaneously.
01:16:40.000Education could be changed instantaneously.
01:16:41.000You'd literally change within a couple generations, you have a totally new society, totally different society.
01:16:48.000And again, how much of what you're seeing with crime and poverty would just disappear where there was no famine, there's no worries about food, there's no worries about shelter, there's no worries about anything?0.97
01:16:59.000That sounds like pie in the sky bullshit.
01:17:02.000But it's not necessarily if you think about how they're going to scale up AI and automation and manufacturing.0.97
01:17:53.000If you want a better world, what's the best way to have a better world?
01:17:56.000But look, when the United Nations was founded in the 40s and 50s, eliminating poverty was declared an interest of humanity by all the countries together.
01:18:07.000So humankind already has said, let's do that.
01:18:10.000Then somehow special interests and power games prevail.
01:18:14.000There's also the issue of nuclear power.
01:18:16.000So, when they first started distributing nuclear power to other countries, they didn't realize how easy it would be to convert it to nuclear weapons, right?
01:18:23.000The cell like India got nuclear weapons, Pakistan got nuclear weapons.
01:20:26.000I'm not saying that competition is bad.
01:20:28.000But confrontation, clashes, war is to nobody's advantage.
01:20:33.000The problem is we've already cemented an enormous part of our culture, an enormous part of our economy in this military industrial complex.
01:20:42.000I mean, this is something that Eisenhower warned about at the end of his term.
01:23:41.000Since the end of the Second World War, it has waged war all over the planet without ever being attacked and has probably killed something between five and 10 million people in wars around.0.91
01:23:52.000So it's a country compared to the other.0.97
01:23:57.000Developed country with a much higher level of crime, violence, murder.
01:25:20.000He's going to Venezuela and take the oil and say, we do that because of the oil.
01:25:24.000He's saying it's our interest to do this and that instead of selling our interest for, you know, we are the good guys who are saving the people outside.
01:29:14.000I mean, we keep learning that we are part of nature.
01:29:19.000And I think the same is true for consciousness.
01:29:26.000We are not the special thing outside of nature.
01:29:28.000We're just one of things that happen in nature.
01:29:31.000I'm sure that in the big universe, there are all sorts of things happening like our consciousness, all much more complicated, much more rich, much more beautiful.
01:30:01.000So, yes, the universe does all sorts of things, including having things like us and who knows how many in the.
01:30:09.000You know, the Earth is just one of the hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy, and the galaxy is one of many hundreds of billions, billions of millions of billions of galaxies.
01:30:23.000So we're just one little thing in this great nature.
01:32:56.000You need emotions to understand what is love and so on and so forth.
01:33:00.000So, this idea that physics exhausts everything is true in some basic, silly sense.
01:33:11.000The same sense in which all the complexity of chess playing, after all, is just, you know, 10 basic rules, how the king moves, how the queen moves.
01:33:22.000But in the same sense, it's silly because the complexity of the universe goes far beyond just its basic equations of physics.
01:33:32.000Aaron Powell So when you think of human beings as a vehicle for the universe to experience itself, do you think the universe itself Is experiencing things in a way that we just don't understand.
01:33:59.000Our biological understanding of what we think of as consciousness being that it exists inside this moving creature with a finite lifespan that has the ability to manipulate its environment is that just an egocentric version of what this is?
01:34:15.000Then it's probably everywhere, all the time.
01:34:21.000I think we use ourselves as an analogy for trying to understand things beyond ourselves.
01:34:28.000To some extent, this analogy works, but the key point for me is that, you know, the universe as a whole is still a colossal mystery.
01:34:41.000We don't know and we don't have the full story by very far.
01:34:47.000Um, the universe is far more complex for us to to understand.
01:34:52.000Far more more many things happening, far many possible perspectives which are not ours, which do not do not have access to.
01:35:07.000In my opinion, the only reasonable answer is, we don't know.
01:35:12.000You know, there's so much we don't know.
01:35:14.000I think if I look at great scientists of the past, they're characterized not by the fact that they understood the universe, but by the fact that there was so much away that there's so much in the universe which they did not understand.
01:37:07.000So we're born into a completely different time and we've Watched the internet develop, we've watched answering machines and cell phones, and we've watched AI and all this crazy stuff.
01:37:18.000And you just imagine that change moved forward for 200 years.
01:37:54.000During her life, she saw all, you know, electric lights coming in, radio coming in, all the way to washing machine coming in, television coming in, telephone coming in.
01:38:10.000I think for her, the world changed more than for me.
01:38:14.000Yeah, that's a good point, especially the air travel, right?
01:38:16.000You can all of a sudden go to all these different places.
01:40:04.000The difference between me and my parents, I think, was bigger than the difference between uh, me and the generation of who were young.
01:40:16.000There it was, it was a cultural break.
01:40:18.000My parents were not understanding me, I was rebellious, I was uh, I was a bit of a hippie, and and, uh and uh, and there was different different, different worlds.
01:40:28.000And now and now, now parents understand the kids.
01:40:54.000They share their location with their friends.
01:40:57.000It's a very weird time when it comes to that.
01:41:01.000But it's also, I'm just thinking about when we're discussing what we don't know, that there's so much we know.
01:41:09.000In comparison to a few hundred years ago, but so much that we don't know.
01:41:12.000There's so much we know, and we shouldn't take away the value of that, including scientific knowledge.
01:41:20.000I think scientific knowledge is great.
01:41:22.000Sometimes it's the best we have about things.
01:41:25.000But we shouldn't think that we've figured out the big questions.
01:41:29.000The big questions are not figured out.
01:41:31.000Well, we're no different than the people that lived in 1900 that thought they had figured out.
01:41:35.000I'm sure they were pretty aware of what they knew, and there's probably quite a few people that were super confident that basically had it nailed.
01:41:46.000That's one mistake that humankind often does to figure out, okay, we got it.
01:41:53.000I think even if you go in the European Middle Ages, you ask somebody, many people would say, no, no, we've got everything there is to understand.
01:42:02.000You know, there are angels and influence of the astral influence and this and that, spirits.
01:42:17.000And then there's always people that come along that tell you that they have the answer and they know what it is and they're very confident and very charismatic so people follow them.
01:42:27.000And wisdom, I think, to a large extent, is two things.
01:42:35.000One is realizing that we don't have the answers.
01:42:40.000And you know, we're never certain about anything.
01:42:45.000Certainty is not within our I like to tell this story.
01:42:49.000My father grew up thinking his first name was Franco until the day he asked for a birth certificate and figured out that his first name was Giulio.
01:43:06.000So I went home and said, what the hell is going on here?
01:43:08.000And my grandfather told him, well, you know, your mother wanted to call you Franco, but I didn't like it, but I didn't dare say so.
01:43:17.000so I register you with a different first name.
01:43:22.000So that created a disaster for the rest of his life because his paperwork were all some Franco, some Julio.
01:43:28.000So he didn't know his own name, right?
01:43:30.000So even about your own name, you can be wrong.
01:43:32.000You can be wrong about everything, even about your own name.
01:43:34.000There's always a case in which things can go wrong.
01:45:38.000Even from the very beginning, it was always so interesting.
01:45:41.000I mean, there's a lot of people that you know you might not even know who they are, or but you'll have a conversation with them and you'll get a new perspective on things, you'll get a new version of how a person lives their life.
01:45:55.000And uh, the more I think you gather about that, the more you understand about yourself and more you understand about interacting with people, yeah, yeah.
01:46:04.000And you discover that people are different, have different ideas, and uh, and you figure out why they came to these different perspectives too.
01:47:29.000I hear what you say here the others say.
01:47:31.000Look this goes together with that So a lot of ideas come from bringing together that's why The more you learn the more you produce things the more you're curious the more you You know how did Newton came out this incredible idea?
01:47:49.000He studied Kepler he studied Galileo The two things didn't make sense together, but they were very similar So, how can I put this together with that?
01:47:59.000My own job, my own physics job, is to mix quantum mechanics and general relativity.
01:48:04.000That's what my core of my research, central part of my research is.
01:49:41.000We are now in the situation that we're working for finding some consequences that could be tested.
01:49:48.000Science is not sufficient to have ideas, then you want to test them.
01:49:52.000So that is my entire, the main central job of my life has been combining ideas to make a new conceptual structure for thinking about quantum space and quantum time.
01:50:08.000And that's useful for understanding what happened inside the black holes, what happened to the early universe.
01:51:23.000And if I had to bet now, I'm not sure, but I would bet for the second one.
01:51:29.000From the equations, that seems to be what was the case.
01:51:34.000And do you think this is a constant process of expansion and compression?
01:51:38.000No, because I think that if we do this jump that you just did, we're making the usual mistake as soon as you understand something to think that.
01:51:51.000If you live in a valley and ask, well, I've never seen what's behind the hill, you look behind the hill, you see something else, say, oh, I get it.
01:52:27.000When you saw the James Webb telescope, the more newer discoveries of these galaxies that formed far earlier than they should have, did that give you pause about the date of the universe?
01:52:38.000Because some people have speculated that perhaps the date is wrong, that the date of the Big Bang.
01:52:45.000Yeah, I know, but I think it's more plausible that there were primordial black holes that gave rise to these early galaxies.
01:53:51.000So, you know, during my life, something that has been realized is that not only that there are black holes all over the sky, when I was a student, people didn't believe in black holes.
01:56:59.000They were on the front page of the newspapers a few years ago.
01:57:04.000So when this was realized, there are these black holes in the center of the galaxies, then the question came immediately to everybody, every good scientist is it a galaxy that forms and then creates a black hole in its center?
01:57:20.000Or is it actually the black hole that starts, you know, Then it forms a galaxy around it.
01:57:26.000It's not yet completely resolved what is the role of the black hole in the galaxy.
01:57:31.000And I think these very, very early galaxies could be just a product of black holes coming out of the very early stages of the universe.
01:57:40.000The craziest theory that I've ever heard was that in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole.
01:57:45.000And that could be, if you went through that black hole, you go into a whole other universe filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole in the center of it.
01:57:55.000You go through each one of them, hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole.
01:58:02.000uh yeah that's a crazy theory it's a beautiful theory in fact there's a good friend of mine who worked a lot and maybe even started that series lee smolin um i am not convinced i think that um i don't know we don't know but i i think that if you if you jump into a black hole um you just uh you don't go to another universe after a long time you come out in in our own universe so a black hole is
01:58:34.000a The black hole left alone is going to eat everything around and then left alone it's going to become smaller and smaller, evaporate.
01:58:43.000And then that's what loop quantum gravity seems to suggest.
01:58:49.000There is a quantum transition, it becomes a white hole and everything inside comes out.
01:58:53.000So remember, at the beginning of our conversation we said that time is different, right?
01:59:31.000There was a time which people didn't know what were this little dot in the sky like Venus and Mars.
01:59:38.000Now we send machines up there and people want to go up there.
01:59:45.000There was a time in which people said, oh, we are never going to learn the chemical composition of the planet and the star because they're far away.
01:59:54.000This is the 19th century, not long ago, our grand grandfather.
02:00:26.000If we don't kill each other with nuclear weapons, which is a very concrete possibility.
02:00:32.000Well, if there really are aliens out there, there really are super advanced civilizations, I would love to know how they manage to navigate through that.
02:00:42.000If they went through the same course that we are currently going through, I would love to know.
02:00:47.000Because that's one of the things about the Fermi paradox, right?
02:00:50.000Maybe the reason why we don't see them out there is because they never really get that far.
02:01:15.000Or it could be a small percentage of them get to a position where we are, a very small percentage, and then a small percentage of them make it all the way without being wiped out by natural disasters or cataclysmics of whatever species they are, whatever their design is.
02:01:31.000Do you know what I think is most probable?
02:01:35.000That they have already seen us and they thought we were totally uninterested and we just avoided talking to us because we're too stupid.1.00
02:01:46.000One of the reasons why I don't like that theory is because we don't do that.
02:01:49.000We are constantly studying things that are more primitive than we are.
02:01:53.000We're constantly doing experiments on ecosystems and trying to solve problems that exist.
02:02:01.000Like, I was watching this documentary about this island that got separated when they dammed some river and created this island, and it was in South America, and this island was overrun with monkeys, and they had no predators on this island.
02:02:22.000But because of the fact that they didn't have any predators, they had lost all their fear of raptors and they had started overconsuming the seeds of all the plants.
02:02:31.000And so there weren't new saplings growing and it was having a detrimental effect on the ecosystem because it was.
02:03:12.000So they had two other eagles that were there as well.
02:03:14.000And these eagles were just wiping out these monkeys.
02:03:17.000And they said, okay, this is too much.
02:03:19.000And this is now they're like, Getting past the whatever the numbers are that they could reproduce.
02:03:26.000It was getting to the point where these eagles, just two eagles and their two offspring were just.
02:03:31.000So they pulled the plug and they pulled the eagles out of there and they said, all right, well, we tried that, but unintended consequences.
02:05:12.000There are more ways of being complex than just having a civilization the way we have.
02:05:20.000That's true, but how do you get there?
02:05:22.000Don't you think you probably get there by innovation?
02:05:24.000And if you get there, you're not just going to automatically evolve super intelligence without any innovation and any technology.
02:05:31.000Most likely, biological creatures are going to develop technology in order to advance themselves to the point where they have technology like we have today or far more advanced than that.
02:05:44.000So, whether it looks like us or not, for sure, we definitely lack imagination in our just imagining the possibilities of different kinds of life and different kinds of intelligence all over the universe.
02:05:56.000But the idea that they wouldn't be interested in us seems to me silly.
02:06:01.000Like, we are in an adolescent stage of evolution where we're both, like we were talking about earlier, people are kind and compassionate and wonderful to be around and curious and interesting and also brutal, stealing resources from other countries, creating wars under false pretenses, you know.
02:06:26.000Humans have the potential to live a far better way than we're living now.
02:06:29.000If I was an alien, I would be utterly fascinated by the soap opera.
02:06:33.000I'd be like, how does this one turn out?1.00
02:06:35.000These people are out of their fucking minds.0.99
02:06:37.000We found a nutty ass civilization that are on the cusp of figuring it out, and at the same time, they're making an artificial digital version of itself that's far more intelligent.1.00
02:06:48.000I would think we're really interesting to study.0.62
02:09:15.000Animals which live strictly with humans, either as pets or as rats, a lot.
02:09:21.000But when you go out hiking the mountains, very rare to see an animal.
02:09:25.000You know, when I was a kid, it seemed laughable in America, but I would go hiking with my parents as a small kid, and if there was a squirrel, everybody was jumping.
02:10:56.000But it's because they've, you know, they've grown up in cities and they don't understand what wildlife is and they want to take a selfie with the bison.
02:11:06.000When I was in my 20s, I dropped out from university and I took one year off traveling and I did coast to coast, Atlantic to Pacific, Canada one way and US the other way, and alone.
02:12:32.000Okay, that was the instruction I was given because the risk is that the bear opens the tent looking for food and sees you, gets scared, and kills you.
02:12:41.000So if you make noise, that he's supposed to go away.
02:12:44.000But I was trying to scream but was too terrified.
02:13:38.000Yeah, that was my encounter with wilderness, which coming, you know, the little boy coming from Europe, Italy, totally civilized, no wild animals, was quite scary for me.
02:13:50.000But, you know, I learned that sometimes it's not a bad idea to respect regulation.
02:17:52.000If you're hiking or you're doing something stupid and you zig where you should have zagged and you run into one of them, I mean, historically, they've eaten people.0.98
02:17:59.000They prefer, I'm sure, to eat chickens.1.00
02:18:01.000But you have to do something stupid.1.00
02:18:22.000So once we become on the menu, it's like the first time you eat a Chick fil A, you're like, this place is great, and you just want to keep coming back.
02:18:41.000And a lot of the times, the places where they're hunting, the people are weak individually and not united because they're in these very small villages.
02:18:50.000And so they don't have any resources, they don't have any food, water, they're in trouble already.
02:18:55.000And then these animals get them, tigers get them.
02:18:59.000But the jaguars in the United States, it's such a small number.
02:19:03.000I don't think that's the real concern.
02:19:05.000But what's interesting is that they've decided to repopulate North America, or the United States at least.
02:19:51.000I think that was a big part of our early ancestors.
02:19:54.000When you're dealing with big cats and slow animals, until those slow animals figure out how to make weapons, you're probably hunted by big cats.
02:20:04.000I think Rupert Sheldrick made this point.
02:20:25.000They're afraid of monsters even though they've never experienced a monster.
02:20:28.000There's a theory according to which one of the main steps in humankind becoming humankind is exactly this passage from being praised.
02:20:41.000To being predators, which had to change profoundly our mental structures.
02:20:49.000Sometimes when we realized that we could resist big predators and actually becoming predators ourselves because evolutionarily we were not predators right, if you go back again and our speeches at some point learn to be like those things we were afraid of yeah, but is that?
02:22:27.000Yeah, you could be on the menu, especially if you're in the wrong place.
02:22:31.000But that's just the nature of the wild itself.
02:22:33.000It's just this constant series of life eating life all around you, whether it's life eating plant life, or life eating other animal life, or life eating aquatic life.
02:22:50.000Then somehow we became predators at some point in our history.
02:23:22.000One is that war is something that started very late, only when we became agriculture, when we started accumulating and putting away big chunks of grain.
02:23:42.000And the other is that groups of humans were in war even before that.
02:23:49.000And I think it's interesting that there are these different theories because it has to do With our future and our present, namely, is this idea of getting in group once against the other and making war to one another something which is only a few thousand years old?
02:24:07.000So it's not in our genetic structure, it's just that after agriculture we could steal stuff from one another, or is it something that goes back all the hundreds of thousands of years of our speeches?
02:25:30.000It has to do with the question we were discussing before can we get rid of war?
02:25:35.000How much war is part of our genetic, not because we're blocked by our genetic inheritance, but clearly it's much easier to think that we can get rid of it if it's only 10,000 years old rather than, you know, 100,000 years old.
02:25:55.000I tend to think it's hundreds of thousands of years old.
02:25:58.000I think chimpanzees are the best example of that.
02:26:00.000We are much closer in behavior to chimpanzees than we are to bonobos.
02:27:04.000So, they had rules you must stay more than 20 yards away from them, never have food on you, and don't make eye contact.
02:27:10.000And because they've been doing this with this protocol for 20 years, the chimpanzees completely accept the fact that these people were there.
02:27:16.000They're all over the place and realize that there's no challenge, no threat.
02:27:48.000They come back and try to kill the ones that they started out with.
02:27:51.000They cross boundaries to get new fruit and new trees, and then they have wars over the trees.
02:27:58.000They behave just the way we do, just at a different scale.
02:28:02.000But I think that, for instance, when you talk about Native Americans and hunter-gatherers, the Native Americans were constantly at war with each other.
02:28:09.000They would go on raiding parties constantly.
02:28:13.000I don't know how many tribes were in total, somewhere in the neighborhood of like 200 tribes in this country, which were constantly battling each other and killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years.
02:29:19.000They varied differently, just like humans do in different environments.
02:29:23.000But at the end of the day, there seems to be a pattern.
02:29:26.000When you're talking about uncontacted tribes of hunter gatherers, they go to war with uncontacted tribes all the time.
02:29:32.000I just had a guy on the other day that was talking about cannibalism, and one of the ways they would utilize cannibalism is eating their enemies after they killed them.
02:29:40.000If they had an enemy that was in a rival tribe and they had an encounter and they killed them, they would eat them.
02:29:50.000I think it's much more likely that war is a very, very, very old thing, and it probably has to do with a really harsh environment where we had to survive.
02:29:59.000Where people were stealing from each other and stealing mates and stealing resources and cannibalizing each other.
02:30:07.000Okay, so you think this is going to make the project of living in peace much harder?
02:30:12.000I think it's why it's so difficult currently.
02:30:14.000I think it's why it's so difficult currently because we have a very, very long history of war, of conflict, of chaos and violence.
02:30:21.000And it's probably what made us survive this long.
02:30:25.000Let me get the crazy wild world that we live in.
02:30:50.000So, then if this is the case, it means that civilization, which is recent stuff with respect to, has had a very strong pacifying effect on us.
02:31:26.000And then the question is not going back to an ancient paradise of kindness and gentleness, but to create a better world where we can live together better.