00:04:03.620And I went to the National Science Fair, where I earned the attention of a nuclear scientist,
00:04:08.660Edward Teller, who actually built the first hydrogen bomb.
00:04:13.380And so he arranged for me to get a scholarship to Harvard.
00:04:16.220So when I graduated from Harvard, he offered me a job.
00:04:19.840It was a job designing hydrogen bombs.
00:04:24.380So I said to myself, hmm, do I want to spend the rest of my life designing hydrogen warheads?
00:04:30.600So I respectfully declined his very kind, very generous offer, because I wanted to work on an even bigger explosion.
00:04:39.860I wanted to work on the Big Bang, the creation of the universe.
00:04:45.300Because that's what the God equation is all about.
00:04:47.600The God equation set the universe into motion, and we are all byproducts of that one equation that mesmerized my attention when I was eight years old.
00:05:25.760And I'm a big fan of Einstein as well.
00:05:28.640But what I'm curious about with you is, if I was in high school with you, obviously, I know you finished first in Harvard in your physics class.
00:05:36.120And, you know, you were the number one graduate.
00:05:38.420I mean, you've been at the top everywhere.
00:05:40.440But if I was 14, 15, 16 years old with you, I'm sitting right next to you, and I'm friends with you, who was Michio Kaku at 16 years old?
00:05:52.540Well, I had two role models when I was 16.
00:05:56.480First, of course, was to try to follow in Albert Einstein's footsteps.
00:06:00.400But second, I used to watch the old Flash Gordon series on television Saturday morning, and I was hooked.
00:06:08.280I mean, starships, aliens from other planets, ray guns, invisibility shields.
00:06:14.100And then later in life, I began to realize, hey, these two loves of my life, science fiction and theoretical physics, are really the same thing.
00:06:24.200Because if you understand deeply the laws of physics, then you know what is possible, what is plausible, and what is simply ridiculous and impossible.
00:06:35.700And so having a good foundation in physics made all the difference in the world.
00:06:40.540You know, all of biology can be explained in the language of chemistry.
00:06:45.660All of chemistry can be explained in the language of physics.
00:06:49.780But all of physics can be explained in the language of relativity, like the Big Bang, and the quantum theory, which gives us transistors and lasers and the internet.
00:07:01.020But these two hands of God don't communicate with each other.
00:07:08.500The goal is to merge these two great theories to create an equation, one inch long maybe, that would allow us to unravel the universe itself.
00:07:43.120Well, I did a lot of reading about aliens and out of space and the fourth dimension and parallel universes and black holes.
00:07:50.660But, you know, it was so frustrating because when I went to the library and I looked up hyperspace, parallel universes, higher dimensions, I found nothing.
00:10:10.340But right now, since we're talking about your book, were you raised in a certain denomination as like, what was the meaning of God to you when your parents spoke to you about it?
00:12:46.620What is your interpretation when you hear a pastor or a preacher of their religion get up and sell their faith with the kind of conviction that they have?
00:13:00.540Well, I like to quote Galileo, who once said that the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go.
00:13:08.660But the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven.
00:13:13.020So, in other words, science is about natural law, how the heavens go, how the planets move, how the galaxy moves.
00:13:22.500But religion is about how to go to heaven.
00:13:25.820That is, ethics, how to be a good person, how to obey the laws and help your neighbors.
00:13:32.360And so, as long as we keep these two separate, they are complementary.
00:13:36.620The problem occurs, however, when people who are in the natural sciences pontificate about ethics, or when religious people pontificate about natural law.
00:14:06.400So, in your eyes, what do you think happens when we die?
00:14:10.240Well, the short answer is, I don't know.
00:14:12.940But, you know, in my books and in my interviews with other scientists, I begin to realize that science is closing in on mortality.
00:14:21.100Genetic immortality is a possibility, and also digital immortality is a possibility.
00:14:28.980For example, everything known about us can be digitized, our credit card transactions, our e-mails, to give an approximation of, well, who we are, our digital soul.
00:14:41.140I would love, for example, to talk to Einstein.
00:14:46.920With everything known about his writings, his interviews, his inner thoughts, his letters, one day, we will be digitized.
00:14:55.980Meaning that our digital footprint will be digitized and live forever on the Internet so that we can talk to our great, great, great, great, great, great grandkids.
00:15:05.560And our great, great, great, great grandkids can talk to us because we've been digitized.
00:15:11.160And that's coming faster than you realize.
00:15:13.480Silicon Valley is already offering the capability of digitizing what is known about you now.
00:15:19.540Imagine what's going to happen in the years in the future.
00:15:23.360We'll have a very good approximation of who you are.
00:15:26.380And in that sense, we will live forever.
00:15:29.920So what a, and by the way, I fully see, I can only imagine you go to a vault and you're sitting in this vault and you have access to great minds to, you know,
00:15:39.100I want to interview with Einstein, have a conversation with him, I want to interview with, you know, some evil people in history to say what motivated you to want to, like, imagine you have a conversation with Hitler.
00:15:49.040Why are you, that would tell us a lot.
00:15:51.820And that would be very interesting to go on that angle.
00:15:53.640But do you think the opposite side, so digital immortality, I fully see that.
00:15:58.120I think it's already happened in any ways.
00:15:59.680People are creating content where even the element of documentation when I'm vlogging, that's a form of digital immortality because my great, great, great grandkids can sit there and watch me for hours and say, wow, that's my great, great, great grandfather.
00:16:14.240I can say that with you, do you think the element of, like, immortality itself of the flesh and the spirit, do you think we're going to get to a point where with advanced medicine and technology, we can live forever?
00:16:35.860We die because of the buildup of error.
00:16:38.480Error, error in our DNA, errors in our cells because of chaos, the second law of thermodynamics, things rust, things fall apart, things die.
00:16:48.580But if you add energy from the outside, you can get around the second law of thermodynamics.
00:16:54.560For example, with gene therapy, we'll be able to attack aging at three levels.
00:18:20.120They can either reproduce, or they can gut it out and go to senescence, hibernate, whatever.
00:18:27.780And then when there's food, flourish once again.
00:18:30.920So we now have isolated the genes that control this process of gutting it out during times of famine,
00:18:38.680which, of course, is very common for animals.
00:18:40.880And many people are looking at these enzymes, which slow down metabolism, because we want to live forever without having to live like a monk.
00:19:15.020We now know where errors build up in a cell, the mitochondria.
00:19:19.180And with gene therapy, with CRISPR technology, one day, I think that maybe our grandkids will hit the age of 30 and stop.
00:19:29.100They may like being 30 for many decades to come.
00:19:31.980I think that's well within the realm of possibility, given the rapidity with which we are now unraveling the question, why do we have to die?
00:19:43.340Listen, why couldn't you have been my teacher when I went to high school?
00:19:46.400Like, seriously, if I had you as a science teacher, I would have gone to school twice.
00:19:51.020I would have gone to school on Sundays if I had you as a school teacher.
00:19:54.100The way you're teaching is just something else.
00:20:00.780So do you think it is a good idea for us to live forever?
00:20:03.960Or do you think it's a good idea that we have a, you know, we eventually die and we're replaced and replenished by somebody newer that comes with better ideas, you know, more creative ideas?
00:20:13.100What do you think about the idea of actually being beneficial to the world for us to eventually die?
00:20:21.140And that is, on a societal level, you don't want to stagnate.
00:20:25.660You don't want ideas that are old, crusted, and obsolete to dominate young people who may think differently.
00:20:33.740So on one hand, you want to transport the wisdom.
00:20:37.360You want to get the wisdom of a generation and give the next generation that wisdom of life.
00:20:43.480Because life is more complicated than any simple formula.
00:20:46.040However, sometimes people begin to get, you know, old and tired, and they want the young generation to be just as old and tired as they are.
00:21:00.840That's why I say that in the future, when people live forever or live very long, when they hit the age of 30, that's a good age to stop.
00:21:09.120Because you're still young enough to have vibrant ideas, but you still have the wisdom, the wisdom of the first 30 years of your life.
00:21:18.380So I think if and when we have the ability to stop aging, that is, stop the second law of thermodynamics, then 30 is a good age to live forever.
00:22:50.820And then she doesn't know how to answer.
00:22:52.480And it's the mom, you know, which scene I'm talking about.
00:22:54.240It's in the house when that scene takes place.
00:22:56.520But she gets struck by a lightning due to a car crash and she can't age.
00:23:02.080And the way she started aging again is when she got struck in lightning because of the second car accident.
00:23:07.540She started aging because she got a gray hair.
00:23:09.520So she was celebrating getting a gray hair because that means immortality is not an effect for her.
00:23:14.820Or even back to the future where we can go on a time machine, right?
00:23:18.520How many of these movies that come out with these ideas are accidental ideas because somebody was smoking the right pot or they were on LSD or they were being delusional?
00:23:32.260And how much of this is a visionary envisioning a future that maybe the rest of the world hasn't yet envisioned and it's just an imagination?
00:23:41.040Is it accidental or is it something that's actually something someone believes that's going to happen?
00:23:46.060Well, when I saw that movie with Adeline, I was very curious about exactly how a lightning bolt would make her immortal.
00:23:55.460And the narrator actually lays out a scenario.
00:27:19.680Now that open system could be biochemistry.
00:27:23.260And so biochemistry could replace sunlight and speed up this process.
00:27:27.240Instead of waiting millions of years for evolution to catch up, we may be able to do it in one generation.
00:27:32.900Now, time travel, that's something that we physicists actually look into.
00:27:38.380And we realize that if you have a wormhole, there is a theory that you can go backwards in time.
00:27:44.400Now, in 1935, it was Einstein himself who postulated the existence of wormholes that I mentioned in my book, The God Equation.
00:27:52.820If I have two universes parallel to each other, and I create a bridge, a bridge between these two universes, then you fall into one and go into the other.
00:28:04.020Now, the energy to do this is the energy of a black hole.
00:28:07.840So in other words, if there's a white hole, a white hole on the other end of a black hole, it means that you can fall in and fall out someplace else in the universe.
00:28:19.660Now, this, of course, raises paradoxes.
00:28:21.920What happens if you go backwards in time and commit suicide?
00:28:25.340That is, you kill yourself as a young child.
00:28:28.200Then how can you live if you just killed yourself as a young child?
00:28:34.440And in quantum mechanics, there's something called the many worlds theory, that every time a measurement is made, the universe splits in half and keeps on splitting every time there's an observation being made.
00:28:47.620And so maybe when you go backwards in time, the river of time forks into two rivers.
00:28:55.260So if you go backwards in time to save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated at the Ford Theater, you've saved somebody else's Abraham Lincoln.
00:29:07.020Your Abraham Lincoln and your river of time died with an assassin's bullet.
00:29:35.900I feel like I'm high right now just listening to you.
00:29:38.280But by the way, what are your thoughts on drugs and, you know, LSD and, you know, taking certain drugs, scientists to see the world from a different element?
00:29:47.940You know, you hear the stories about Steve Jobs was tested with LSD a little bit just to kind of get his brain a little bit more creative.
00:29:54.080What are your thoughts about certain drugs helping see the world from a different lens that others don't see?
00:30:03.560And addiction will eventually kill you because you get addicted to a drug that interferes with the biochemistry of the body.
00:30:12.060Drugs that are mild, like marijuana, we can go back and forth, back and forth looking at the data.
00:30:18.320But hard drugs will mess up the brain and create an alternate reality.
00:30:23.860So people who are creative, artists and writers and people who make their living being imaginative, I can see why they would want to do it.
00:30:33.600But the pitfall is it could control you to the point that you get addicted and you're a slave.
00:30:40.120You become a slave to this drug, creating the drug industry, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, which paralyzes whole governments.
00:30:48.860Whole governments in Latin America are paralyzed because of the drug cartel, which makes money on people getting high.
00:30:56.780And so I think that there is a downside to this as well.
00:30:59.380Yeah, that's that's a very have you ever have you ever been curious about testing your own brain?
00:31:05.020Like, have you yourself gone and wanted to do MRIs and to study the difference between I had who's a guest I had on who was a brain?
00:31:17.020Daniel, Dr. Daniel Amen, Dr. Daniel Amen.
00:31:20.960And I brought him on and he said he has done.
00:31:24.500I don't know how many MRIs on the brain, you know, one hundred seventy five thousand, some major number that he gave.
00:31:29.180And he's looked at so many different things.
00:31:31.240Do you think there is a way to look at someone's brain to say this person's brain vibrates at a different level with ideas, the coloring, all that other stuff?
00:31:40.820Have you investigated that at all or no?
00:31:43.480Well, I've had my brain scanned several times.
00:31:46.080I posted a few documentaries for BBC television and they flew me down to North Carolina where they have one of the finest MRI machines.
00:31:56.880And you can actually see thoughts as they emerge in the brain.
00:32:01.140You can actually see centers of the brain light up like a Christmas tree.
00:32:05.180And so many of the secrets of the brain are being revealed.
00:32:08.400For example, the back of the brain is a so-called reptilian brain.
00:32:12.500It's the brain of hunger, balance, aggression, the brain that a snake would have in the back of the brain or an alligator.
00:32:20.520The center of the brain is more or less the monkey brain, the limbic brain, the brain of social structures.
00:32:28.160That is the brain of how to defer to your elders, how to be kind to people, the brain that involves pack mentality.
00:38:26.120Okay, so do you believe, because you've also said in the past that it's probably not a good idea to wake them up, just like Cortez, you know, was going against, you know, you don't want to let the enemy know that you are out there.
00:38:39.060It's better for you to stay quiet and not make a lot of noise and not let them know about you.
00:38:42.820Are you saying that because you don't believe they know of our existence yet?
00:39:22.080But for the most part, we're not interesting to them.
00:39:24.860But one day, if we advertise our existence and reveal how much we have, resources, minerals, perhaps things that are of value to an alien civilization,
00:39:35.780then, just like was mentioned, Cortez, well, Montezuma thought that Cortez was a god.
00:43:00.140If there are million years ahead of us, which is a blink of an eye, a blink of an eye because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
00:43:09.120Then think that their understanding of the laws of physics would be completely different from our understanding of the laws of physics.
00:43:18.100You see, our understanding of the laws of physics break down, break down at the instant of creation, the Big Bang, and the center of a black hole.
00:43:27.020We don't know anything about the center of a black hole or the instant of creation.
00:43:34.660Perhaps wormholes, gateways that allow us to go faster than the speed of light.
00:43:40.100And so get rid of all your prejudices that they can't reach us because they're only 100 years ahead of us.
00:43:46.940If there are million years ahead of us, new laws of physics begin to open up.
00:43:52.080Yeah, I'm trying to wrap my head around if there's a doppelganger, say it's a twin of ours, and they're a million years ahead of us, and they have feelings, emotions, opinions.
00:44:04.300They're thinking about the future and the past.
00:44:06.800There's probably going to be opposing beliefs, religions, technology, advancements, power, the temptation of wanting to rule the world and all that other stuff.
00:44:16.120I don't know about that because, and here's kind of where, again, I may be wrong, I'm not a theoretical physicist, but do you think the way we're going right now, we can exist 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now, 4,000 years from now?
00:44:32.760The reason why I'm asking this question is, one is from the advancement standpoint, okay, on how much we're advancing, right?
00:44:39.600It seems like right now, the level of acceleration of advancement is about to go in a different gear.
00:44:47.460We're about to downshift second gear, and it's going to go, and I think the separation is going to be further than ever before.
00:51:25.580So the reason why I asked the Hitler question is because what prevents, and again, this whole topic is about there's another doppelganger,
00:51:34.180you know, another civilization around the, you know, space that's like the Earth, that's, you said, maybe a million years ahead of us.
00:51:40.820As long as there's emotion and there's ego where someone can be offended, don't you think there's a likelihood that someone could pull the plug with the level of access to explosives that we have today,
00:51:54.420whether it's a virus, whether it's biochemical warfare, whether it's whatever else may be, to just finish everything up and boom, we have to start all over again?
00:52:04.200Well, there's a note of optimism here.
00:52:06.340First of all, realize that I think that technology has a moral direction.
00:52:12.200Now, that differs from what most scientists believe.
00:52:15.300Most scientists believe that technology is neutral.
00:52:18.520A sword could either cut against you or cut with you.
00:52:21.960It's that science is a double-edged sword.
00:53:23.200Democracy and democracies are more stable than dictatorships.
00:53:27.240Dictatorships on a whim can start a war.
00:53:30.340Democracies, it's very difficult to start a war in a democracy because you have widows, you have veterans, all these people with access to the media that may not want a war.
00:53:40.860And so I think that there are checks and balances.
00:53:43.900So I think that the smallest unit of history is the decade.
00:53:48.780Anything smaller than a decade, you get random fluctuations.
00:53:52.200And if you look at history decade by decade, think of where we were in the year 1900.
00:53:58.460It was a horrible year, 1900, with kings and queens and empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire fighting the Prussian Empire, all these empires fighting each other.
00:54:11.0201900 was not a very pleasant year to live in.
00:54:13.880And of course, that gave birth to World War I.
00:54:18.260Sure, we have nuclear weapons, but we have empowerment taking place with a middle class, with access to the means to get information instantly anywhere on the planet Earth.
00:54:32.540I mean, look, I'm an optimist and I'm leaning towards you, but I'm also a guy that subscribes to what Andy Grove years ago, the former CEO of Intel, who wrote the book, Only the Paranoids Survive.
00:54:46.500I think there's got to be an element of paranoia to make sure we can prevent madness from taking place.
00:54:51.780And when you're saying information and social media and, you know, Internet, what it's doing, how it's leaning towards democracy, do you think it is a good idea to constantly permit for opposing ideas to clash?
00:55:05.080And, you know, these virtual governments have a lot of power today.
00:55:08.200The Twitters, the Facebooks, the YouTubes of the world, they have a lot of power today.
00:55:49.940And as a consequence, you have people who harangue others, noisy people, people that want to beat their chest on the Internet, say also crazy things.
00:55:58.020But eventually, people will tune them out.
00:56:11.360And I think that when people mature, that's when the tone of the Internet is going to change from the Wild West to something that wants wisdom.
00:56:22.720Wisdom is what we need on the Internet.
00:56:28.140And I think that that wisdom comes from struggle with incorrect ideas.
00:56:32.880And it does mean that there's going to be a Wild West for a while until people, people get mature and simply tune out these crazy ideas because they say, well, that's nonsense.
00:56:48.960I mean, the Internet's, what, 20, 30, 40 years old, depending on when you start the Internet, you know, you kind of pick the time that it started.
00:56:55.560So for you, the idea of silencing a figure like a Trump is not a good idea.
00:57:00.160You've got to let him be on there and say what he's saying, whether you like him or not.
00:57:03.180Because, you know, Sanders, and the reason I'm asking this question is because, again, I'm going back to events, to what really irritated a guy named Adolf that he wanted to fly.
00:57:20.800And Churchill, if there's not a Churchill, you and I may be speaking German today.
00:57:24.360So what do we have to do from not offending the wrong person where their motives comes out to want to do something bigger to retaliate towards a potential civilization?
00:57:36.100So for you, we ought to allow people of opposing ideas to not be banned on social media, Twitter, Facebook, whoever they may be, because people will eventually become wiser and they'll tune those ideas out.
00:57:48.320Well, I think you have to let unpopular ideas out there, because once people have grievances, they act on these grievances.
00:57:59.180And there is a social movement behind many of these ideas.
00:58:04.260And if you bottle it up, it comes back in a more hideous form.
00:58:08.880And so I think that it's short-sighted.
00:58:10.920It's short-sighted to simply say we can tune out certain ideas just because we don't like these ideas.
00:58:27.780I learned through seeing people arguing, they debate, going back and forth, because you're sitting there saying, never thought I would agree with him.
00:59:18.980And so people who are astronauts, in the old days, they were pilots, Air Force pilots.
00:59:24.560They knew that every time they got into that capsule, there was a probability they're not going to come back.
00:59:30.020But then we begin to think of space travel as being a Sunday picnic.
00:59:34.740That, I think, was not a good idea, because reality catches up with you.
00:59:39.760That 1% of the time catches up with you.
00:59:42.240So when Elon Musk recently said that he expects some people to die on the mission to Mars, I think he's preparing the world public, preparing them for the possibility that, yes, some people may die, but don't have a backlash against the space program.
01:00:00.780You know, when the shuttle blew up and seven brave astronauts died on national television, there was a backlash, a backlash against the space program.
01:00:51.080And I think Elon Musk is right, priming the people, telling them that, yes, the mission to Mars, they're going to be heroes, heroines, but some of them will not make it back.
01:01:01.560How long before we have civilization on Mars?
01:01:40.120When's the last time we had a scientist as a president of America?
01:01:43.500I think the closest we came was actually Benjamin Franklin.
01:01:46.480Benjamin Franklin actually made scientific history with his kite experiments and many of his breakthroughs.
01:01:53.700But I don't think we've ever come close to having a scientist as president.
01:01:57.820Do you think the next phase is going to be us valuing the brain of a scientist to want to run the nation rather than the brain of a lawyer, military, entrepreneur, businessman?
01:02:07.680Well, you know, there's a danger having lawyers and professional politicians run the government.
01:02:13.840Because the question is, where does wealth come from?
01:02:16.480To a politician, wealth comes from taxes.