#1829 - Bobby Azarian

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] First of all, thanks for coming, man. Thank you for having me. Well, when I got the request and I read the title and the subject of your book, I was immediately hooked.

[4] I was like, dude, I got to get this guy in it quickly.

[5] The Romance of Reality.

[6] How the universe organizes itself to create life consciousness and cosmic complexity.

[7] Yep.

[8] How do we know this?

[9] How do we know how the universe organizes?

[10] Is this, are you guessing?

[11] First of all, tell people what you do.

[12] I mean, I think it was an intuition that I had.

[13] Can you tell people like what you do, like what your field of studies?

[14] But yeah, so, you know, this is all backed by complexity science.

[15] And when I say complexity science, that's really not one field.

[16] It's an integration of all of the sciences.

[17] So physics, biology, cognitive science, computer science.

[18] And, yeah, from those sciences, we're getting a new picture of the universe and cosmic evolution and the role that life may play in the process.

[19] So my background, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.

[20] I got my Ph .D. from George Mason University.

[21] I was really interested in the problem of consciousness.

[22] So how does the brain create consciousness?

[23] what is the connection between consciousness and complexity and cosmos.

[24] So, yeah, it was sort of an intuition that I had when I guess I was an undergraduate and I started taking like all of the basic science courses like physics course and you learn about the second law of thermodynamics and the kind of popular interpretation of that law is that.

[25] the universe tends towards disorder and that didn't completely match up with you know my observations and you know what we understood about how after the big bang you had the formation of planets and stars and then on this planet we see organization all around us um so most of the popular books at that time like that was like you know I graduated high school in like 1999 and so popular books were like stephen hawkins a brief history in time um and those books uh kind of painted life as this improbable kind of statistical fluke not a regularity and um so you know some of those ideas didn't seem quite right to me and I was really interested in this increase in complexity and so i started like looking up these sorts of topics and i found out about the uh research being done at the santa fe institute which is kind of like the uh mecca for complexity science and then uh there was this emerging worldview that the universe is becoming more and more complex and it doesn't violate the law of second uh the second law of thermodynamics at all can we get you to turn your phone off or just shut the it dinged Just shut that, just put it on Do Not Disturb or something like that.

[26] So somewhere along the line, the idea was that the universe tends towards chaos.

[27] Like, why do you think they were thinking that?

[28] Like, what was the philosophy behind that?

[29] So, yeah, it's kind of complicated.

[30] The second law of thermodynamics started off being about heat flow.

[31] Thermodynamics is the science of energy, or energy flow.

[32] And so originally the law said that heat will flow from a hotter to a colder body.

[33] So there's this just natural tendency for heat to kind of spread out and for energy to kind of disperse and dissipate.

[34] And this had to do with steam engines.

[35] And steam engines basically convert energy from heat flow to mechanical energy that can power locomotives.

[36] So Saadikarno and Rudolph Clausius two European scientists, we're trying to understand this in the 1800s, and they found out that this energy conversion process wasn't always 100 % efficient, that some of the energy, some of the useful energy, would get dissipated, basically, when this physical process creates heat.

[37] And so what the second law said originally was that the useful supply of energy in the universe was always dwindling because every mechanical process requires energy to do work and it creates some heat and heat is basically like you creating body heat right now you eat food you metabolize that and then that energy is dissipated as heat and you can't extract the energy that was dissipated as heat again so it becomes useless It's still there.

[38] There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is about conservation of energy.

[39] You can convert one type of energy into another type, but this useful supply is getting turned into entropy.

[40] And entropy was originally a measure of the quantity of energy no longer available to do work.

[41] It wasn't until later that there was a statistic.

[42] interpretation of this law by a scientist named Ludwig Boltzmann, and he basically tried to understand the second law in terms of the, I guess, the evolution of a mini -particle system, and what he saw was that if you had an ordered system, there would be this natural tendency towards disorder, simply because there's many more ways for a system of many components to be mixed up and spread out compared to ways to be ordered.

[43] So then the law became about this order to disorder transition, and we hear about that all the time.

[44] The popular examples are rooms get messier.

[45] They don't organize themselves.

[46] But the paradox, that emerged from that was that life seems to defy this tendency.

[47] And so the question is, if systems tend towards decay, what's going on with the biosphere and all this organization we see?

[48] And Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, actually wrote a very influential book on biology called What is Life?

[49] And he explained this paradox.

[50] He explained that basically the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and open systems have energy coming in.

[51] So the Earth is an open system.

[52] We have a sun, and it's beaming down energy on the planet, and that systems can evade this tendency toward decay if they can extract useful energy from the environment for plants, it's sunlight, For us, we need to eat food.

[53] As long as we can continue to do that, we can sustain order against this second law tendency towards decay.

[54] So you were looking at this idea of the universe tending towards chaos, and it didn't sit right with you.

[55] Like, how long did you theorize about this?

[56] Like, what led you to write a book about this?

[57] So, as I mentioned, I was really interested in this mystery of consciousness because it seemed like, you know, kind of the last frontier of science.

[58] Now we know there's lots of mysteries to be solved.

[59] There's like dark matter and dark energy, all types of stuff.

[60] But in the 90s, people were thinking that physics had essentially solved all the major problems.

[61] but really it's because physics, it was reductionist physics.

[62] And basically that approach doesn't think about life and consciousness and human civilization.

[63] So it sort of leaves those things out of the picture.

[64] But, you know, you can have a physics of those things too, and that's what complexity science is.

[65] So, yeah, I was interested in consciousness, but what happened was I found out to really understand how consciousness emerges and intelligence, it really starts with the origin of life.

[66] I'm not saying the most simple life forms are conscious, but what I understood was, you know, you can think about a bacterium performing a process called chemotaxis.

[67] And that's kind of a scary word, but all it means is that the bacterium swims towards chemical food and away from toxins.

[68] So it has this very rudimentary intelligence.

[69] And if you're trying to understand the brain and consciousness and intelligence, it seemed to me that you have to understand life as well.

[70] And so at George Mason, there was a professor named Harold Morowitz.

[71] And he came from the Santa Fe Institute.

[72] So he's a big complexity guy and one of the premier origin of life researchers.

[73] And he was doing this work that, you know, got into the stuff I was just talking about thermodynamics because to understand life, you have to understand it as a phenomenon that does evade this tendency towards decay.

[74] And to do that, it has to extract energy from the environment.

[75] And so he had a book called The Emergence of Everything, which was like looking at the big picture because life is one emergence, consciousness is another emergence.

[76] As the universe gets increasingly complex, new phenomena emerge with surprising properties.

[77] And this is a lot different than the other approach that I mentioned, reductionism, which is focused on how nature's simplest components like particles act in isolation.

[78] So complexity science cares about, about how more complex systems, their dynamics, their evolution, and you see that systems experience are display properties like consciousness that aren't there when the components exist in isolation.

[79] So meaning like the amino acids, what do you mean?

[80] Yeah, not conscious.

[81] So yeah, so.

[82] Well, do we know that, though?

[83] No, I know you had on a guest, Philip Goff, who is a panpsychist.

[84] Yeah.

[85] And those people believe that there's a little bit of consciousness and everything.

[86] And I don't think that's right.

[87] But you can look at the universe itself as this kind of computational machine, and it's doing information processing.

[88] So it's understandable to think about, like, everything in terms of information.

[89] information.

[90] But consciousness, when I use that word, I'm talking about subjective experience.

[91] So you're having a unified conscious perception of the world.

[92] There's a light that's on.

[93] And I don't think there is a perspective, a subjective perspective for an amino acid.

[94] What is the argument against that?

[95] Like, what is the argument that there is a subjective experience of everything?

[96] Yeah.

[97] So, consciousness is kind of mysterious still and there's the hard problem of consciousness which was put forth by a philosopher named David Chalmers in the 90s and it basically said we can explain all of the physical processing in the brain in terms of mechanical processes and interactions.

[98] But how does the interactions of these physical things give rise to the qualitative world of experience and sensation?

[99] And since that's such a hard problem, how does experience arise?

[100] One solution to that was thinking that it doesn't emerge and suddenly like poof into existence, that there must be a little bit of consciousness in everything and that consciousness is fundamental and that when those things come together to form these more complex systems, the little bits of consciousness kind of add up and create more richer conscious experience.

[101] So you don't believe that, but you do, well, we can all agree that human beings have consciousness.

[102] Everybody agrees on that.

[103] That's like pretty simple.

[104] Yeah.

[105] But like at what?

[106] Well, no, actually.

[107] No?

[108] Some people don't believe that?

[109] So, yeah, it's kind of funny.

[110] I mean, so the materialist position is like pretty much opposite of panpsychism.

[111] So materialism is the idea that there are only material things in the world.

[112] And that would seem to exclude consciousness because consciousness seems to be this immaterial thing.

[113] But is it just immaterial because we can't measure it?

[114] I mean, there's obviously something going on.

[115] There's some process going on.

[116] So whatever that process is that enables creativity and communication, self -awareness, correction, like all those different things that there's obviously something happening.

[117] So the idea that you can't measure it is that just because we don't understand what it actually is?

[118] Yes, I think so.

[119] Right, because consciousness is a thing, right?

[120] We're talking about it.

[121] Even if it's theoretical.

[122] It is a thing.

[123] So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily right to call it immaterial.

[124] Right.

[125] So it has to be, there's something going on.

[126] So is it just that we lack the tools to measure it or the understanding of how to quantify it?

[127] We're starting.

[128] Yes, we did.

[129] We did.

[130] And that's kind of why those philosophies got big.

[131] Well, actually, our tools and our theories that are being used to start to quantify it, One of those theories interpreted in a certain way seems to support the pan psychic view or a sort of modified version saying that not everything is conscious, but that you can have very, very simple systems that are conscious as long as they're integrating some amount of information.

[132] So what I was going to ask you is if we agree that humans are conscious, what is not?

[133] Is a single cell organism conscious?

[134] So I mentioned materialism.

[135] So since it was thought that consciousness was immaterial or kind of defined that way, going back to René Descartes, they wanted to ignore it altogether.

[136] And so that position is called illusionism and the idea is that consciousness is an illusion.

[137] And so when you said everybody agrees that we're conscious, yeah, everybody does when they're pressed, but they have this kind of a lot of materialist or physicalists, is kind of the modern term for that position.

[138] They say consciousness is an illusion, and it's not even really clear what they mean by that.

[139] I mean, they explain it, but at the same time, they say they do have experience.

[140] So, yeah, it's...

[141] They do have experiences, meaning they have consciousness.

[142] Yeah, they have consciousness.

[143] So, like, what is their definition of what consciousness is?

[144] It's like, so the thing that we're calling conscious, for consciousness.

[145] If they're saying it's an illusion, like what do they think the process of creativity is, the process of cognitive function, there's something going on.

[146] Yeah, it's interesting.

[147] It's kind of double talk because they will admit they have it.

[148] But when they say it's an illusion, I think what they mean, they mean a few different things by it, but there is no point in the brain where you can, you know, locate consciousness.

[149] It's a global phenomenon.

[150] So it's something that emerges from this, harmonized collective activity of, you know, 80 billion neurons interacting.

[151] And they also mean that consciousness doesn't have any causal power.

[152] And by that, I mean, they don't think that your conscious thoughts actually do anything in the world.

[153] Like when you decide to raise your arm, they think it's just the brain is getting sensory input and there's algorithms encoded in the brain and then that's creating a behavioral output almost like this reflexive machine like an automaton.

[154] So how are you aware of this output?

[155] What is that?

[156] So basically they say consciousness is what's called an epiphenomenon.

[157] And that means that it's there, but it's not doing anything.

[158] So then they admit that we have conscious experience.

[159] But if they're saying it's there but it's not doing anything, it's still there.

[160] It's still there.

[161] It's real.

[162] So, like, if you're moving because of an algorithm, but you realize that you're moving because of an algorithm, isn't that conscious?

[163] Yes, so it's kind of a ridiculous thing that they call it an illusion, and then other materials might say it's not illusion, it's an epiphenomenon.

[164] So, yeah, there's lots of confusion there.

[165] But the question about, like, you know, so let's say we all accept consciousness in the practical way of talking about things.

[166] Let's say we accept consciousness as in human beings.

[167] without the double talk.

[168] If we go back to single -celled organisms, do we believe that they were conscious?

[169] So it's a really complicated topic, and I argue in the book that single -celled organisms probably are not conscious, but they are these information processing systems, these computational systems.

[170] So they do have some type of intelligence or cognition.

[171] you see a difference in the way any living system behaves compared to an inanimate system like a rock or a trash can.

[172] Those things don't do anything.

[173] If you see a rock move, it's because, like, a gust of wind pushed it.

[174] Right, but couldn't the same be said for trees?

[175] Except you're looking at slow motion, you actually do see the move.

[176] Well, so...

[177] row.

[178] Trees, so I'm arguing that the difference between life and non -life is that living things are these information processing systems, and that would apply to trees too.

[179] So they're doing photosynthesis, and yeah, they might not move the way like a mammal or some other organisms do.

[180] They're very slow.

[181] But plants will perform something that's analogous to what I explained about.

[182] bacteria doing chemotaxis.

[183] They swim towards food and away from toxins.

[184] So that means grow towards water.

[185] Exactly.

[186] It's called heliotropism.

[187] So a plant will track the sun in the sky.

[188] So it has some sort of abstract model of its environment, some sort of statistical mapping of the environment is encoded in organisms and it gives them this quality that, philosophers call agency and so agency is kind of the defining characteristic of life living systems pursue goals intrinsic survival goals while inanimate systems don't so consciousness is an integral part of living systems yes but you can have living systems I'm arguing without consciousness that consciousness probably emerges with brains.

[189] Hmm.

[190] What do you say about the way plants react to things, the way they react to predation, the way they react to even the sound of predation?

[191] Do you know about those studies?

[192] So, yeah, they're definitely intelligent.

[193] They're definitely communicating using electrical signals and chemical signals.

[194] But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're having a context.

[195] this experience.

[196] So do you think that plants have this actual subjective perspective?

[197] Is there an observer?

[198] They're experiencing something?

[199] Or is it a system that philosophers call a zombie system?

[200] And basically you will have like intelligent behavior without actually having subjective experience?

[201] Is that just a guess though?

[202] That they don't have it?

[203] Yeah.

[204] So what I argue in the book is that basically to have a self, to have an observer or an eye, some sort of witness to this experience, it's not good enough to just store some sort of model of the world.

[205] The model has to start modeling itself.

[206] And that brains create mental models of the world, but in that process, the individual, and the brain is part of that world.

[207] So then it starts the model itself.

[208] And it's this phenomenon of the system kind of looking back on itself that creates a witness to experience, an observer.

[209] So to answer your question, yeah, it's kind of a guess.

[210] You know, maybe someone could argue that very simple life forms do do a very simple form of self -modeling.

[211] the biologist Michael Levin would argue that, and that could be right, but I think we can reasonably agree that it at least starts with life.

[212] But I do think it probably, you know, requires some more sophisticated uh information processing modeling machinery and that it's most likely uh to be in systems with brains and when we're talking about consciousness where we're talking about consciousness when we're first of all we're talking about consciousness in terms of the way human beings view consciousness but when you get into other animals at what point?

[213] I mean, is it a function of avoiding predation or becoming predators?

[214] Is it a function of foraging for food?

[215] Like, what is it that enables consciousness to emerge?

[216] Yeah, so it's all those things.

[217] So an organism must be able to anticipate events in the environment if it's going to survive.

[218] And it must be able to, as we said, like capture energy.

[219] if it's going to evade this tendency towards disorder.

[220] And so it has to model the world.

[221] Right.

[222] And consciousness is a mental model.

[223] So if you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself in this room.

[224] You can zoom out and you can see the whole building.

[225] You can zoom out and imagine how Earth looks from outer space.

[226] You can imagine your friend and what kind of personality they have.

[227] what jokes they tell.

[228] So you've modeled all of these things in the world, and you've even modeled other modelers, and it's this modeling that is necessary that leads to the phenomenon of consciousness.

[229] So when you're talking about consciousness in the universe, do you think that consciousness is a problem, of the universe that enables things to happen do you think that there's a reason why we have this incredibly advanced version of what we accept as consciousness like are we designed for something are we building towards something as the universe gets ever and ever come more complex are we a part of that because this is like a part of the whole system yeah so uh i guess it depends on what scale you want to talk about um you can talk about the brain emerging and consciousness emerging to model the world to find solutions to these survival problems.

[230] But if you zoom out and you look at the big picture, you see that basically the universe and the matter in the universe is starting to wake up when life emerges and you have conscious agents, it's the matter in the world that's starting to experience the world.

[231] So you could look at this process of increasing complexity, that is this sort of cosmic scale evolutionary process, as the universe itself coming to life or even waking up.

[232] So Carl Sagan has this famous quote.

[233] He says, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

[234] and this book takes that statement very seriously.

[235] It says it's not just poetry.

[236] Literally, the universe is coming to life.

[237] Not in this pan -psychic view that, you know, kind of says the universe is already conscious.

[238] I don't think that's as interesting.

[239] It's kind of reducing consciousness to something trivial if you think it's in everything already.

[240] I think it's way more, you know, way more interesting, way more kind of psychedelic.

[241] that the universe starts to wake up as a result of this evolutionary process.

[242] And so that would say that life is an essential part of the increase in complexity, and life actually becomes the driver of this evolutionary process.

[243] So this worldview, if you're to accept that, says life's not an accident.

[244] It's not transient.

[245] life has this larger cosmic significance, and it's basically assisting the universe in coming to life.

[246] When you say the universe coming to life, that means, like, this trend of ever -increasing complexity is a part of the design or a part of just how the universe functions, and that we are, in fact, like, the way we structure life, the way we structure civilization, we constantly move towards greater and greater levels of complexity with our electric.

[247] electronics with the sophistication of our societies and our cultures.

[248] If you go back thousands of years to today, it's a very clear trend.

[249] Yeah.

[250] So do you think that's a function of the universe itself?

[251] Like that is how the universe operates.

[252] And we would probably find that.

[253] If we could travel to other galaxies, we could probably find that all over the place?

[254] Absolutely.

[255] So it's something that emerges from the laws and constants of physics and the evolutionary dynamics that naturally emerge from those laws.

[256] So it is built in to the design of the universe.

[257] When you use the word design, you know, some people could think that you're getting at something maybe like spiritual or religious.

[258] And so that's like another conversation as to why there seems to be this apparent fine -tuning of the laws to allow for life.

[259] And if you believe in this paradigm, I'm describing, that the laws don't just allow for life, that they necessitate life, and they necessitate intelligence and consciousness.

[260] And so, yeah, it does seem to be baked into the fabric of reality.

[261] What do you think is going on?

[262] Like when you're saying it in this way, you're saying it almost like as if you're hinting that there's some sort of a design behind it all.

[263] So, yeah, it sounds like it when I say that.

[264] There are all these different options as to why there could be this fine tuning.

[265] But while the story I'm telling in the book is purely mechanistic, so you can describe this process, which I think is very spiritual and psychedelic, it's also something that, you know, you can describe and articulate mathematically in computational terms.

[266] so there's no mystical force pushing this.

[267] It's just basically components in nature interacting and evolving and adapting.

[268] But there does seem to be this larger design.

[269] So, for example, I know Elon Musk is a friend of the show.

[270] He believes in this simulation theory that we're not in base reality and that there could be a base reality that sort of like encompasses this, and we are maybe a simulated world the way we can create computer simulations and video games.

[271] Those agents aren't conscious yet, but could it be possible?

[272] Maybe, maybe not.

[273] But that idea that we are living in a simulation, to me, is not that different from any sort of intelligent design theory of religion.

[274] So you could see a sort of general version of the world's religions as being something similar to a simulation theory that says that this, you know, reality is created by some other intelligent agent.

[275] I'm not sure I follow you.

[276] So simulation theory is similar to intelligent design?

[277] Yeah.

[278] So the simulation theory is, well, it depends.

[279] Okay, so there's the intelligent design movement, which says that life is like a product of God being like, okay, I'm going, there's a universe already.

[280] For lack a better word, God.

[281] Yeah, and I'm going to, I'm going to create life right now.

[282] Okay.

[283] And that violates like the causal closure of the universe, basically the idea that things can happen in the world that aren't caused by other physical causes.

[284] So that's a bad theory.

[285] It doesn't, it's not a scientific theory.

[286] But the idea that the universe is a simulation created by intelligent agents that are somehow outside of this reality is very similar to deism.

[287] And a lot of our most famous physicists and scientists of history were deists.

[288] So the difference between deism and theism is that deism imagines a creator that set the laws of physics and then let the system evolve according to those laws.

[289] So many of our greatest physicists, Newton later, even more modern, you know, ones that came after him like Maxwell and Sir Arthur Eddington was a proud mystic.

[290] were men of science.

[291] Kurt Goldel, the mathematician, was religious.

[292] So the idea that this universe has some sort of design created by an intelligent agent, I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm saying people who are considering simulation theories, there's not much of a functional difference between those models.

[293] You're talking about an intelligent agent.

[294] that designed this process, here's the thing.

[295] That agent, even if you're saying it's something like a god, could have been created by an evolutionary process as well.

[296] So all we're doing is acknowledging that this level of reality might not be base reality.

[297] I see what you're saying.

[298] So even though it is a biological thing, like evolution created life, but life created a simulation theater.

[299] That could be possible.

[300] This is what people think.

[301] They think that if we are right now currently able to make things like virtual reality and Oculus Rift and all that stuff, that one day we will be able to create something that's indiscernible from reality itself.

[302] Yes.

[303] So how do we know if we're not in that already?

[304] Exactly.

[305] We don't.

[306] And so when they, the laws of probability theory, that's when this comes into play.

[307] When they take into account all of the potential life out there in the universe, all the potential intelligent life where we're going what we will 100 % eventually attempt, at least, to create, which is some sort of an artificial environment.

[308] I mean, that's what Facebook is doing with meta, right?

[309] All those commercials where they're jazzing you up for this idea that you're not going to have to live in reality anymore.

[310] The metaverse.

[311] Yeah.

[312] This is the baby steps when, you know, I'm sure you've seen that commercial, right?

[313] Where the kids are at the, they're at a painting and the painting comes alive.

[314] Have you seen it?

[315] Yeah, I haven't.

[316] It's very compelling.

[317] But it's also interesting because you're watching it and you're like, wow, like, is this a good thing?

[318] Like, what are we saying?

[319] Like, you have these kids.

[320] So watch this.

[321] So they're at an art gallery and they're looking at this painting and they all step towards this painting.

[322] And then the painting comes alive.

[323] Pretty cherry.

[324] This is the dimension of imagination.

[325] The sudden the environment around them becomes just like this painting and they're dancing and having the best time ever.

[326] Look, they're bobbing their head like they're at an awesome concert.

[327] This is going to be fun.

[328] Is it fucking really going to be fun?

[329] I'm not sure.

[330] Yeah.

[331] I don't know what that is.

[332] Like that's a weird commercial, but it's almost like...

[333] Makes it look fun.

[334] Yeah, it's like it's a little honeypot trying to drag you into this weird world that they're about to create.

[335] It looks cool.

[336] I want to be there, but it's a little scary.

[337] That's Facebook.

[338] Well, it is a little scary because the amount of people that use and how quickly it will be adopted.

[339] Yeah.

[340] Yeah.

[341] And what is that?

[342] Like, what are we doing?

[343] And is that inevitable?

[344] Like, if we're talking about increasing levels of complexity that seem to be inevitable, it seems to be, like I've said this before, but this is my thought about people and technology that I am fascinated by how we don't think.

[345] about what we're doing, we just do it.

[346] Like, if you looked at the earth, you looked at the human civilization from afar, if you had no context, you had no cultural connection to it, but you watch the way people interact and move, you'd say, oh, this is a life form that creates better and better stuff.

[347] Yeah.

[348] Because that's what we do.

[349] So what, and also, there's this tendency towards materialism.

[350] Like, what is materialism?

[351] Well, it's this obsession with objects.

[352] and this romantic idea that those that's futile and you should be out there in nature and you don't need much and yeah but what is why is it intrinsically why is it like it's inexorably connected to humans that they want more stuff they want better stuff well i feel like because that is the engine that fuels innovation if you constantly want newer and better things there has to be a desire for that and one of the desires for that is materialism yeah materialism is almost like a built -in instinct that enables innovation.

[353] And if you look at where that goes, it goes to some sort of symbiotic interaction and connection with electronics.

[354] Because that's our number one creation.

[355] That's the thing that we make that's better than anything else.

[356] If you think about all the stuff that we make, the one thing that's been most transformative over the last few decades has been technology and electronics, our connection to the cyber world, our connection through phones and computers and watches.

[357] I mean, there's something going on.

[358] And we're in the middle of it.

[359] And the way I liken it, I say that we are like some caterpillar that is becoming an electronic butterfly.

[360] And we don't even know why we're making the cocoon.

[361] We're just doing it.

[362] I've heard you describe that idea before.

[363] I don't know who you're talking to if it was like Roger Penrose or Sean Carroll, but you alluded to that.

[364] And I was I was like, Joe sees it.

[365] Like, that's exactly what's happening.

[366] It's this process that we're not aware of, and, you know, nature is carrying that out.

[367] But we're at a really interesting time because we're at a point in the process.

[368] We're actually becoming conscious that we're part of the process.

[369] Yeah.

[370] And there's, there's, yeah, some of us.

[371] So the idea is if we become conscious of it, and that's part of the process also, becoming aware of this, we can start to shift society in the direction that we want to see.

[372] So this materialism, all these like desires to have like more and more and more.

[373] It's a natural part of this, but evolution occurs because life is always adapting and it's correcting its errors.

[374] It's self -correcting.

[375] So this march toward progress is in a straight line.

[376] Life basically progresses because it's faced with constant existential challenges and these challenges force us to come up with solutions and that's the engine of progress.

[377] So do I think like all this technology with like these like the metaverse all this stuff is inevitable?

[378] Yeah you can't really stop that that's part of the process but it doesn't mean that we're just supposed to go along with it, or supposed to go along with all it.

[379] It's like consumerism, like what Facebook is, like, telling us to do and buy.

[380] I don't think that we can slow it down and have this kind of, you know, Luddite civilization where we just get rid of all of our technology and try to live in some, you know, natural utopia.

[381] That won't work.

[382] So we can't, like, stop the train, but we can try to, push it in the right direction.

[383] So we might want to go away from certain things.

[384] So there is a trajectory that the book argues does, argues is inevitable.

[385] And that's really what it's trying to articulate is all the mechanisms that make progress inevitable.

[386] Because for a long time, uh, biologists were against that idea of progress mostly for like cultural reasons, um, cultural war was going on inside science.

[387] But, um, Yeah, it's an inevitable process, and we have to try to steer it in the right direction.

[388] And if we don't, it could be the end of our civilization.

[389] So when I say there's progress that's inevitable, I don't mean our civilization has to succeed, but those who come after us will learn from our mistakes.

[390] So when you say it'll be the end of civilization, like what do you mean by that?

[391] You know, I'm more of an optimist.

[392] I don't think there's going to be this end, but I mean.

[393] I mean, nuclear war could destroy a lot of the population and kind of, like, put us into, like, something like a dark age again.

[394] Yeah.

[395] But I don't think that's going to happen.

[396] There are all these, like, checkpoints along the way preventing people from doing that.

[397] I mean, it does—world War II happened.

[398] It was terrible.

[399] Lots of people died.

[400] But at the same time, that time period spawned the computer and all kinds of technology that we didn't have.

[401] And so if you, like, look at, like, this kind of trend line of, like, you know, social and technological progress, like, it didn't really slow down by World War II.

[402] There seems to be this exponential trend towards greater complexity.

[403] So what do you think is stopping World War III, though?

[404] I don't understand.

[405] Like, why do you think that that's not going to happen?

[406] What checks are in place?

[407] It could happen.

[408] But, I mean, to become a president, I mean, it's not.

[409] Well, this is a funny example.

[410] I was going to say, like, you can't be totally crazy, but, like, I mean, lots of people would argue with that.

[411] Yeah, no, of course.

[412] Yeah, no, no. You'd be a dead man and be president.

[413] Look at Biden.

[414] Yeah, yeah.

[415] So, I guess the point would be that they know that if they do that, they're going to harm their people.

[416] So they're, I mean, he hasn't done it so far, right?

[417] What has stopped him from doing it?

[418] So that's not to say he won't do it You mean Putin?

[419] Yeah.

[420] So there's, I mean, we have all of these He doesn't want to see.

[421] He has a family.

[422] He's supposedly dying of cancer.

[423] Yeah, well, so someone in that kind of position could do something totally crazy.

[424] Yeah.

[425] It could definitely happen.

[426] But what would happen was a lot of people would die and then we would put greater checks in place to make sure that crazy people like Putin don't become president.

[427] Boy, I don't know if you're right about that.

[428] I wish you were.

[429] But what about Jijing Ping?

[430] Like, what about the way that he runs China?

[431] This is after the disasters would already happen.

[432] Yeah, but then China would be running the world the way they run China.

[433] Like, that's a real possibility.

[434] It's a possibility for an amount of time, but I don't think it's sustainable because, so one thing I talk about in the book is complexity is kind of a function of a couple of things for a system to be like.

[435] optimally complex it has to have a lot of parts and those parts have to be connected so the more parts with the more connections the more complex something is but you also want a diversity or variety uh amongst those parts so all of so when i'm saying parts you could be thinking about um a civilization a society like chinese society or american society it's composed of all these people.

[436] These people, uh, basically form something like a social organism or, uh, something like a brain.

[437] And because we're exchanging information in much the same way, cells in a body or neurons in a brain, uh, communicate through chemical and electrical signals.

[438] So, uh, basically, yeah um uh chinese um ideology uh it has one good aspect they believe in this concept of the interdependent whole so people should kind of uh care about like society as a whole um you should put you know the greater good uh before your individual good but um so so that will allow the emergence of something like this social organism which is a natural part of revolution, but China specifically doesn't allow criticism of the government and new ideas.

[439] So there's not a diversity of ideas in that culture.

[440] And so the social organism that is that nation can't evolve optimally.

[441] It won't be sustainable.

[442] you need this diversity of ideas to have the most functional productive society.

[443] That doesn't mean in the short term, China can't be super productive.

[444] But when something happens, when shit hits the fan, like we saw with the pandemic, I don't know if you saw those videos of people just like screaming out of their apartment buildings, when they had all these lockdowns, when their freedoms are taken away.

[445] and like there's some sort of existential threat looming, then the system gets chaotic.

[446] Yeah, but it's just people yelling.

[447] I mean, I don't, the system's been around for a thousand years.

[448] I mean, China has been functioning in one form or another as a dictatorship for a long, long time.

[449] Well, so with a society, you want this optimal balance of like top down and bottom up control or centralization and decentralization.

[450] We hear about decentralization with the crypto and blockchain movement.

[451] So China has this, like, top -down control, and they don't allow people to express opinions and criticism.

[452] So they're not having that bottom -up influence of ideas that's necessary for this balance.

[453] Yeah.

[454] To steal ideas from.

[455] Yeah.

[456] Yeah, which is another problem.

[457] Which is fascinating.

[458] Yeah.

[459] I mean, it's a big thing that they do in intellectual property theft.

[460] Yeah, yeah, I know.

[461] So with, you know, these sorts of authoritarian governments, you can get a lot done quickly because people at the top are making decisions and sometimes, you know, those decisions will be good for the people.

[462] But in the long run, I would argue that it's not a sustainable model.

[463] And you think this is because of the access of the information also seems to exponentially be increasing.

[464] I mean, if you go back to the invention of the printing press, to what we have going on today, one of the things you see consistently is that the access to information increases.

[465] And as a society expands, the access to information increases, technological innovation increases, and all of these things work functionally together.

[466] And what China's trying to do now is they're trying to create a bottleneck, right?

[467] They're trying to stop that and lock things down.

[468] They're trying to keep people from accessing the full internet and people are getting around that through VPNs and all sorts of different things.

[469] They're trying to, you know, hide things about Tiananmen Square and all the atrocities of the CCP and they're doing their best to try to keep everybody scared and locked down.

[470] But you think that, like, ultimately this is only, they don't have short -term success in doing this, but the system itself is just far too complex and expanding, and they won't be able to, like, keep all the water in the net.

[471] That's what I think.

[472] I mentioned that, you know, there are these two aspects to complexity, where you want a diversity of parts and you want connections between those parts.

[473] And so us becoming connected through the Internet, through blockchain systems, it's basically like creating like synapses that are in the brain.

[474] You have like this structure of the brain where you have 80 billion neurons and every neuron is connected to another neuron by 10 ,000 connections.

[475] And so everything is connected So that's kind of what the Internet is doing and social media and blockchain, and it's allowing for greater information exchange among individuals.

[476] And so when you try to cut people off from the Internet, you're basically, like, cutting these connections off that the system really needs to do computation.

[477] And like collective computation is what nations do.

[478] They're very similar to standard biological organizations.

[479] which are communities of cells working together in an integrated fashion.

[480] So one thing that I talk about in the book is how basically we can look at evolutionary principles because evolution is really optimizing systems to be as robust and energy efficient and stable as possible.

[481] We can look at these systems.

[482] We can look at how brains work and we can try to model society after those principles.

[483] And so you think that this is a process that is leading towards what?

[484] Do you extrapolate?

[485] Do you really think that, like, do you wonder, like, what humans are actually doing, what consciousness is actually doing, why the universe has this as a tendency or as a law?

[486] Yeah, no, it's, I think it's the most mysterious question there is.

[487] So is there an ultimate goal?

[488] Right.

[489] So what I do think is that this increase in complexity is inevitable, but like I said, it's not this straight march of progress.

[490] There's like constantly these challenges, there's massive existential challenges, and that is the only thing that pushes us to create solutions.

[491] So there's this principle in the book that I call Popper's principle named after a philosopher of science Carl Popper.

[492] and the idea is that, yeah, so that our challenges are what force us to find solutions.

[493] So if progress is going to always continue, that means the challenges won't stop.

[494] So even if we do attain some, like, globally unified state, I would like to see, like, some sort of agreement among nations that says, okay, we're all going to demilitarize.

[495] and we're going to put this money into like medicine or technology, whatever else, you know, all the other things that, you know, we could be funding that could help, you know, human society.

[496] And, you know, we could have something like that, but there could still be like pandemics.

[497] There could still be someone crazy that takes over and starts to, you know, try to reverse that.

[498] So the point is you can never reach a utopia.

[499] and even if we did, it wouldn't be a utopia for a long time because the world is always changing.

[500] It's this, you know, reality is this noisy, thermally fluctuating thing and there is chaos.

[501] Chaos is needed for complexity too.

[502] Actually, when a system transitions to a state of higher order, you need some chaos in the system.

[503] So that's because, like, if a system is too rigid and to um so you could think of like things seemed we had democratic presidents like you could think about um just like how things were under obama for a while you know we didn't there wasn't the craziness that we're seeing today so you might think like oh well whatever that system was it was a good thing or it was better than what we have now but no system no model no way of doing things will work forever because the external world is always changing.

[504] So we're always going to be going through these cycles and phases where we have temporary stability, but then the system needs to change.

[505] And I think right now when we're seeing all this chaos, it is indicative of what complexity scientists call a phase transition.

[506] And so basically, the chaos is basically the system screaming for change.

[507] So you see all of this chaos and that provides, it creates flexibility within a rigid system that allows the system to transition into something new and higher.

[508] So you think that this is a function of the universe.

[509] that the universe has a tendency towards complexity and that we are one of the driving forces of this.

[510] Yes.

[511] So we're a biological driving force of a greater law of the universe.

[512] Yeah.

[513] But what do you think the universe wants?

[514] What's the ultimate goal out of this?

[515] So, you know, when you talk about what the universe wants, we're already getting into like a little language trap because are we saying that the universe is conscious, that it has a conscious intent?

[516] I don't think so.

[517] Well, let me ask it in a different way.

[518] Where do you think this is going?

[519] Well, no, so it's good to kind of break that down and be like, does the universe have a conscious intent?

[520] So I don't think it does, but I think it has sort of design.

[521] And when I say design, it's something that's not mystical.

[522] I'm saying that the laws of physics are such that complexity increases, and the universe does have something like a goal.

[523] So it may not have a conscious intent, but life emerges inevitably and that the laws of physics play something analogous to DNA in an organism.

[524] So the laws and constants of physics are sort of cosmic DNA that ensures that this evolutionary program plays out.

[525] So maybe the universe is moving towards.

[526] something like a cosmic attractor.

[527] And an attractor is a term that physicists used to describe a state of order.

[528] So, for example, when you take the stopper out of your bathtub, you will get the formation of a whirlpool.

[529] So you get this spontaneous order.

[530] Gravity is attracting the water down the pipe.

[531] Yep.

[532] So you have these attractors, which are basically kind of this goal state of a system in living systems.

[533] attractors are basically states of stability that the system, that the living system is trying to maintain against this second law of thermodynamics.

[534] And so it seems like cosmic evolution is a process of generating increasingly complex attractors.

[535] So when I say that, there are these evolutionary transitions, which are versions of phase transitions that I just explained.

[536] So if you look at the story of the universe, it's a story of nature's simplest parts coming together to form larger functional holes.

[537] So atoms come together to make molecules, which come together to make cells, which come together to make multicellular organisms, which come together to form societies.

[538] And now we have something like the emergence of a global brain, which is the network of humans connected by the internet as well as AIs.

[539] And so when humans leave the planet, like people out there like Elon Musk with SpaceX are trying to get humans off the planet, I'm saying that that's part of this natural evolutionary process.

[540] It wasn't just like a decision someone made or, you know, something that we decided to do because we're clever or something.

[541] It's actually baked into this process.

[542] And that's because if life is going to continue to persist, it has to get off the planet before its star dies.

[543] So it creates like a game clock that forces life to spread.

[544] What is the end state?

[545] Maybe something like this cosmic attractor where some very legitimate scientists have speculated people like Paul Davies, Ray Kurzweil, you know, as a technology guy may seem, you know, futurist may seem a little bit more out there, but there's this idea that, you know, the universe is evolving and waking up and that there could be this integrated state where something like a cosmic mind emerges from this process.

[546] Is it an egocentric way of looking at consciousness to think that the universe is waking up?

[547] I mean, we are this tiny speck that's riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe.

[548] Yeah.

[549] For us to say, oh, one day the universe will catch up with us.

[550] Yeah.

[551] Be conscious like us.

[552] Isn't that kind of goofy?

[553] Like, but isn't it like, if you think about it, isn't it kind of an egocentric biological function, the idea that consciousness, the way we term it, thinking about all our problems and the way we fit in with the universe and coming up with solutions for, you know, We have to deal with.

[554] We think that's so amazing.

[555] But the universe is literally, they have stellar nurseries out there.

[556] They're creating stars.

[557] Yeah.

[558] We have hypernovas.

[559] Stars are exploding.

[560] They create carbon, which is literally the building blocks for all carbon -based life.

[561] That's all that stuff is happening.

[562] We're like, yeah, one day they're going to catch up.

[563] It's going to be conscious.

[564] Why is consciousness even important?

[565] Well, first of all, you need stars and planets to have consciousness.

[566] Right.

[567] that's part of the process too.

[568] The first ordered structures that were created by this cosmic evolutionary process, which includes life, are those ordered structures.

[569] And so, well, one point you made was that, you know, we're on this small planet.

[570] What the book argues and what a lot of origin of life researchers are arguing is that life isn't improbable.

[571] It's probably not only here.

[572] That where you have the right condition, life emerges inevitably.

[573] So if you have the right ingredients, it'll cook something up and that will be life.

[574] So there are estimated to be something like, you know, billions to maybe trillions of earthlike planets out there that life may have emerged on and maybe intelligent life.

[575] To assume that we are the only intelligence out there is to say that what happened on this planet is extremely, almost infinitely improbable.

[576] And I don't think that's the case.

[577] People like Richard Dawkins have argued that life emerging on other planets will evolve according to Darwinian mechanisms and these new processes of self -organization that we're describing.

[578] And so if the universe is waking up through life, and so when I say that, I want to be very clear that I'm not talking about panpsychism, when I'm saying the universe, is awake, I'm talking about just, you know, conscious agents like us are awake, and the universe used to be all inanimate matter prior to life.

[579] So in a very literal sense, the matter in the universe is waking up.

[580] So if there is this process, and we find ourselves on this planet at this point, it's, of course, going to look, you know, like there's not much other life out there, and that consciousness doesn't have this cosmic significance, but that's just how it looks right now at this stage and we're already starting to see how technology can bring life off the planet I mean a couple hundred years ago people thought it was impossible to fly actually I learned this from a friend there was a New York Times article that came out something like 10 months before the Wright brothers created the plane that said it would take like 10 million years some ridiculously long amount of time for humans to invent like you know aircraft um so we can already see that this process um basically has no limits uh and um so the the other thing you said was that you know is it kind of like anthropocentric uh to like you know people think we're projecting human qualities on the universe when you say like maybe like the universe is waking up.

[581] But I think that's a mistake to talk about humans as if we're not part of the universe.

[582] We're part of that physical system.

[583] So I don't think it's right to be like, oh, consciousness is something that only, you know, applies to humans and it's this, like, quirky thing.

[584] We are part of the cosmos and you can't strip away consciousness from the description of the universe without taking away one of its most interesting aspects.

[585] Interesting to us but why is it interesting to the universe?

[586] Like if the universe doesn't care if stars blow up and like if there's no consciousness to the universe other than ours why is consciousness even critical?

[587] So I do believe there is an intelligence to the universe in the sense that there is fine tuning of parameters that allow for this.

[588] So So oak seed evolving into an oak tree, I don't think many people think that seed is conscious.

[589] It doesn't have any experience, any subjective experience, but there's still an intelligence there that ensures that the seed develops along this trajectory into this complex thing.

[590] So you can look at the laws of physics as serving as something like cosmic DNA that's leading to something greater and if that's true uh it means that reality is fundamentally purposeful or goal oriented and philosophers use this term teleological and uh for a long time it was you know it was it was considered like wrong thing for for scientists to talk about teleology but now it's coming back in a big way because of this story of complexity science and us trying to understand the physics and mathematics of biological agency.

[591] We, you know, we move with purpose, where we are, you know, material systems that have acquired information.

[592] So it's starting to seem like reality is intrinsically purposeful.

[593] Now, what sort of spiritual implications you might, you know, take from that, you know, that's very subjective.

[594] But let me give you one example.

[595] of a theory that would explain this design and this movement towards something conscious that is not religious in nature.

[596] Okay.

[597] So there's a theory called cosmological natural selection by a physicist named Lee Smolin.

[598] And he put this out in like the 90s.

[599] And string theorist Leonard Suskin, he said this theory should, you know, should get a lot more.

[600] more attention.

[601] It's kind of strange that it doesn't.

[602] People like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett like this theory.

[603] So basically it says, what if our universe is not the first universe in this model, basically, so we have singularities, right?

[604] We know about the big bang.

[605] That's the beginning of the universe, but we also have black holes that are singularities.

[606] This is a little bit complex, but I promise it's going to be simple in a second.

[607] So the idea is that when a black hole forms in this universe, it creates a baby universe.

[608] So it creates like this, you know, there's this pocket of universes that evolve through this process.

[609] Now, the baby universe will inherit the laws and constants of physics of the parent universe, but with a slight variation.

[610] Because nature is fundamentally noisy.

[611] It's not going to give rise to the exact same thing.

[612] So now you have a picture of a universe that gives rise to offspring universes, and those universes, the ones that are good at creating black holes, will thrive the way organisms that are good at reproducing thrive.

[613] And so then you're going to have this.

[614] gradual cosmic cosmological natural selection process where universes that reproduce are the ones that are favored and the conditions that favor black holes also happen to be the conditions that favor stable universes that produce life so over time even though you start with this lifeless universe you will get this tendency to create universes with order that are stable, and then you can take the theory a little bit farther and say that an intelligent, technologically advanced civilization can create new universes by creating black holes with something like a particle accelerator, cosmic inflation, theorists like Alan Goose, people have talked about how it could be possible theoretically to create a universe.

[615] The idea would be that since life, technologically advanced life, could create universes, you get this natural tendency towards life, not only life -friendly universes, but these universes that become increasingly complex over time.

[616] So now you can explain the fine -tuning of the laws and all this design in terms of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.

[617] So the idea is that consciousness ultimately leads to the birth of the universe.

[618] Or a universe.

[619] Yeah, so it's interesting, you know, it depends on the sort of language you use because now it's starting to sound like pan -psychism again, right?

[620] No, no, not necessarily.

[621] Look, I used to have a joke about this that, you know, the Big Bang is one of the great mysteries of science, right?

[622] They don't know why it creates.

[623] And my thought was that if you get enough time and people get more complex and develop more more technology and you develop people that are socially disconnected and maybe on the spectrum and the super geniuses and one guy makes a big bang button and uh and he just goes i'll fucking press it and he hits it boom and every 14 billion years people get smarter and to the point where they can create a big bang well it sounds like you already have this theory yeah like a control alt delete reset for the universe yeah we need to create a wiki page and show you as the of this brilliant theory.

[624] I think, no, I think it makes sense, but the question is, where did they come from?

[625] Right.

[626] Well, yeah, what came first to chicken or the egg?

[627] Yeah.

[628] And why, but the thing I'm getting at is like, why is if ultimately stars die and ultimately they consume all the gases around them, the planets around them, like what is so important about biological life?

[629] And I guess the answer could be if biological life leads to further and further complexity to the point where further and further competency, the ability to actually restart a universe or create a universe or create the kind of power.

[630] I had Michio Kaku on yesterday.

[631] I heard, yeah.

[632] It was really fun, really interesting conversation.

[633] But one of the things we talked about was the different types of civilizations, that we are about 07 to 10 in terms of like a type one universe.

[634] That car to show at scale.

[635] And that a type 1, excuse me, type 1 civilization, type 1 civilization has the ability to control the weather.

[636] We have the ability to stop natural disasters and ward off asteroids and that as you get to type 2 and then type 3 civilizations, which could take, but what was the timeline you gave us?

[637] I believe it was millions of years, right?

[638] It was 1 ,000.

[639] To get to type 2.

[640] 2.

[641] We had 100 to get to type 1 ,000 and 2, and I think maybe it was 100 ,000.

[642] So in type three, if we can keep it together, yeah, until we get to type three, we will be able to control black holes.

[643] We'll be able to transmit our consciousness throughout the universe, we will be able to transport physically from one place to another instantaneously, and then we're going to be able to have powers beyond our wildest imagination.

[644] And this is what you're talking about, when you're talking about something that can actually create a black hole or create a universe.

[645] Like, I remember there was a prevailing theory that inside, I think it's actually true, that inside every universe, or like every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in the center of it.

[646] And that supermassive black hole is one half of one percent of the entire mass of the galaxy.

[647] You could scale it, right?

[648] But that the idea was that if you got inside of that black hole, you would find a whole other universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one with a supermassive black hole in the center of it, you go through those, you find hundreds of billions of galaxies.

[649] And the idea was that that's real infinity.

[650] And that it's not just infinite in terms of the amount of galaxies, the space in the universe itself, but the amount of universes.

[651] Like, it's impossible for anybody to comprehend the scale of this thing.

[652] Yeah, you know, I'm not really familiar with that model.

[653] It sounds pretty cool and trippy.

[654] And it may be right in some way.

[655] Um, but the idea is that, uh, life is this robust, uh, phenomenon that, uh, evolves and it learns almost like an AI program, like, like, let's say a chess playing AI program and you invented and it's not very good at first.

[656] And it loses to human players, but it keeps storing those patterns, storing all that information.

[657] Right.

[658] So knowledge just accumulates.

[659] That's what the biosphere is.

[660] Evolution is a learning process that accumulates knowledge.

[661] knowledge gets stored in different forms of memory.

[662] So it starts off of just genetic memory, and then brains emerge, and you have neural memory.

[663] Then you have human civilization, so you have, like, collective memory in people's brains, but then you get books, and then you get the Internet, and you get wiki pages.

[664] And so it's all of these memory systems storing knowledge about how to survive and evade this tendency towards disorder.

[665] They say how to stay far from thermodynamics.

[666] equilibrium so you have all this complexity growing you have life getting smarter more robust and better at manipulating the world around it and so the idea is that this process doesn't end yeah and so um this kind of challenges the heat death narrative but so the idea is that maybe uh life uh isn't destined uh for death and that um by using the uh free energy supply in a universe that's expanding, that that could potentially power life forever.

[667] If that is not possible, it's possible that life could propagate life into other universes.

[668] I'm sure Michio has a bunch of kind of far -out ideas about how life can continue to exist inside this universe or outside this universe.

[669] But yeah, the idea is that reality is, in some way, biocentric, even if this model that I mentioned cosmological natural selection is true, and kind of, you know, some atheists might think, oh, well, that explains the fine -tuning and the design, the apparent design in our universe.

[670] You have this process where, you know, the laws are getting more and more fine -tuned for life.

[671] You still have an existence where life has to emerge inevitably, and then it starts to take over the whole structure of the cosmos.

[672] So that's why I call the book the romance of reality.

[673] There's this intrinsic mystery.

[674] And we're not talking about anything supernatural or talking about natural processes, but the fact that it's not just life friendly, the universe doesn't just support life.

[675] It seems to necessitate life.

[676] And then life is potentially propagated forever.

[677] I think that's just like the trippiest, like most mind -blowing thing possible.

[678] And it has spiritual implications to me. And when you're looking at it this, way.

[679] If you're looking at this is a function of life, you, the way we know of, at least is, we are the most advanced thing in terms of our ability to manipulate our environment that we're aware of in the cosmos.

[680] And if you look at how we got to where we are, we got to where we are by solving problems and avoiding conflict.

[681] So without those problems, without conflict, there would really be no incentive for innovation.

[682] There would be no reason.

[683] Like if we all achieve some sort of oneness and spiritual enlightenment and we had no desire to make better cell phones, where would we go?

[684] Like what would we do?

[685] And also the problem of natural issues, whether it's super volcanoes, asteroid impacts.

[686] Pandemics?

[687] Yes.

[688] All sorts of crazy things that can happen that are natural.

[689] They create the need to innovate and to create create the need to advance society to avoid potential catastrophes like this in the future.

[690] Problems create progress.

[691] Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why you kind of need the chaos.

[692] You need the yin and the yang.

[693] Yes, yes, that's order and disorder, life and entropy.

[694] So there's this like kind of dualistic aspect to nature.

[695] When you look at it in this way, that's super interesting and probably the reason that the whole, you know, Taoism thing exists.

[696] Well, the Chinese figured it out so long ago.

[697] It's like, it's really interesting when you look at that yin -yang, like that, they knew that this, all this, and if you look at the yin -yang, like, what it's fascinating about that symbol is that it looks like it's in motion.

[698] It's not as simple as like there's a circle and one half as black, one half as white.

[699] No, it's like it is a, it's almost like it's in motion.

[700] Yeah, yeah, no, that's really cool.

[701] I didn't think about that.

[702] Pull up the image of the yin -yang.

[703] One of the things that I also love about it is there's a little bit of both in each one.

[704] There's a tiny dot of black in the white.

[705] Look at that.

[706] And a dot of white and the black.

[707] That's what's so interesting.

[708] It's unfortunate that that is on so many stoner's walls that it's become trite, you know?

[709] Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, maybe that's not unfortunate.

[710] That's on their walls, but that's become trite.

[711] Yeah, and cliche, I think, yeah.

[712] It is because it's deep.

[713] It's cool.

[714] It's super deep.

[715] And the designs, like, minimalist and beautiful.

[716] And I have some ideas about, you know, why they.

[717] came up to came up with this but um what are your ideas so i think um you know humans are information processing systems and we are natural manifestations of the laws of physics and of the evolutionary process and our brains are computing all of these things you know things all the time that's what intelligence is um there's a lot of computation that's going on uh like below like our conscious thoughts like the subconscious mind and so I think um a lot of times especially maybe like eastern cultures that were you know big on like meditation and reflective practices that uh they sort of uh through those practices um we're having very deep intuitions about like the structure and the organization of the world um and so that you know our brains as complex information processing systems might be, you know, picking up on patterns that now science is starting to explain.

[718] They were articulating that in simple language back then because they had this intuitive understanding of it.

[719] What do you think, but where is that intuitive understanding coming from?

[720] Do you think it's just coming from introspective thought, self -reflection, examination of the natural world around them, examination of culture?

[721] Like what do you think?

[722] Yeah, all those things.

[723] But I guess kind of like the kind of like magical aspect of that is that the brain is this computational system that is this product of four billion years of evolution and that there's a lot of knowledge in there that we may not be consciously aware of that are, you know, creating insights.

[724] Like when intuition is still really mysterious to people.

[725] Like, where do mathematicians come up with these ideas?

[726] There's, I forget which physicist it was, but it was like, you know, physicists were maybe 100 or 200 years ago having this moment where, like, they stepped off a bus or not about, you know, whatever train, whatever it was.

[727] And that instantly some deep mathematical insight came to them.

[728] So I think what is going on is that the brain's doing a lot of computation that is below the threshold for consciousness and that our subconscious minds have a lot more intelligence than we think and that these ideas that are correct about nature are just kind of spontaneously emerging from complex computational machinery shaped by, you know, eons of evolution.

[729] What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we are in contact or have been observed by extraterrestrial intelligence?

[730] So I recently wrote an article on this, and, you know, it's really hard for me to say whether, you know, we're in contact or anything like that.

[731] But so I will talk about that, though I won't dodge that.

[732] But I will say that I do think there's intelligent extraterrestrials.

[733] And Richard Dawkins would agree with that.

[734] Basically, the idea is that on these other planets with sufficiently earth -like planetary chemistry, we get life inevitably.

[735] And then the book really argues that there is this.

[736] that the evolutionary process creates this statistical tendency towards more intelligent life forms.

[737] Now, that was, in the 20th century, there was an evolutionary theorist named Stephen Jay Gould, who was very influential, and he tried to kill this idea of the evolutionary process, being this progressive process.

[738] And that's for a couple of cultural reasons.

[739] So one thing, people weren't comfortable with it because it was.

[740] was this kind of Christian seeming process that said the process inevitably gives rise to humans and that, you know, we're super special and that it's all about us.

[741] First of all, yeah, that's not right.

[742] It didn't necessarily have to give rise to humans, but that's not what most of the evolutionary biologists who do believe in this, you know, narrative progress we're saying.

[743] They're just saying it has to lead to higher intelligence.

[744] It doesn't have to be a human made in God's image or anything like that.

[745] The other reason, he was so against the idea of progress, and I didn't know this at first.

[746] I thought it was mainly, you know, this war between science and religion, where science basically was forced to kind of take the opposite stance of religion.

[747] So if religion said reality has meaning and life has purpose, then science kind of had to assume this.

[748] opposite stance which doesn't seem very scientific yeah no and that that's what's so scary no it's it's it's not and and and we are pretty blind to how uh culture and social norms things like that have like really shaped science at the time um so uh yeah what i learned was that uh he and it was from a book called complexity by roger lewin uh exposed that gould uh was so against it because the nazis use this idea of progress towards something higher, this sort of ladder of progress to justify ideas about their being like superior and inferior races.

[749] Oh, okay.

[750] And this theory that, you know, I describe in the book is definitely not saying there's anything like that.

[751] It's actually very important that we understand that, like for this global superorganism that's emerging, that is human civilization, you need diversity.

[752] Diversity is super important.

[753] So, yeah, this idea that there was this progressive evolutionary process for a long time, scientists were just like we shouldn't talk about that.

[754] Actually, evolutionary theory was sort of banned from every field other than biology because there was this scare of that.

[755] So, for example, Herbert Spencer, who is a contemporary of Darwin's, he actually was more popular than Darwin in his time, thought that society was evolving towards something higher.

[756] And he talked about social evolution.

[757] But his ideas, which were actually really good, got appropriated by the Nazis and this idea of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest.

[758] and it really hurt evolutionary theory for a long time because people thought, okay, we shouldn't talk about culture as a whole as evolving towards something higher or more complex.

[759] And it's only been recently that this idea of progress has been revived.

[760] A lot of it has to do with the work being done at the Santa Fe Institute and, you know, complexity science in general.

[761] And so now we're seeing that those ideas, is where probably, you know, the ideas of Herbert Spencer, he was on to something, seeing the universe as getting more and more complex.

[762] This process would occur on other planets, so you would get something like intelligent aliens because more complex niches emerge.

[763] So life starts out simple, and it has a simple energy extraction task.

[764] Plants get sunlight.

[765] Bacteria can live off like chemical molecules, like that's their source of food.

[766] It's pretty easy to capture that.

[767] But a random genetic mutation will cause a change in an organism's design that will unlock a new source of energy.

[768] So, for example, suddenly life will be able to eat other things.

[769] Life, the earliest forms of life were autotrophic, meaning they could survive off like inorganic inputs, but then more complex life emerged.

[770] that eats other organisms.

[771] Now, when you have that, now your food source isn't just like, you know, plants.

[772] We talked about tracking a sun in the sky.

[773] That's a pretty simple energy extraction problem.

[774] But if your food source is smart like you and it's trying to outrun you, then you have to have a lot more sophisticated, predictive model encoded in the brain.

[775] And basically, life gets increasingly complex because we have a complex world around us.

[776] So you should see this trajectory where on alien planets you would get a more intelligent system that has more mental states, more computational states, because they can respond to more challenges in the environment.

[777] and so they may be out there, but they maybe haven't been able to get here yet because it's possible that everything is emerging sort of according to the same timeline.

[778] So maybe they're not just here.

[779] Maybe they are, though.

[780] Right, but our planet is only, what, four point whatever billion years old, whereas the universe is 13 plus billion years old.

[781] So the concept of, it's not like we're on the same starting point as every other planet.

[782] No, we're not on the same.

[783] same starting point, but you still need like stellar and planetary evolution.

[784] So you're not going to have like life emerging elsewhere in the universe like 10 billion years ago because you could have a 10 million years ago easily.

[785] Yes, that's true.

[786] But the universe is a big place.

[787] Right.

[788] But think about life on Earth, right?

[789] Yeah.

[790] Life on Earth, you know, if it wasn't for the giant asteroid that hit the Yucatan, we would be dominated by giant lizards.

[791] I mean, that would be what was running the planet.

[792] Maybe not.

[793] Maybe there would be some.

[794] some sort of catastrophes such that dinosaurs wouldn't make it.

[795] And basically a lot of the organic material that comes from like dead dinosaurs like create.

[796] But listen to this.

[797] Imagine if that didn't take place.

[798] Imagine if the world that existed post -Yucatan was the world that emerged from scratch.

[799] So there was no dinosaur period.

[800] So the mammals and the intelligent mammals that ultimately became primates, it ultimately became human beings evolved far earlier, 100 million years ago.

[801] Yeah.

[802] Like that's what we could be looking at in terms of the sophistication of alien life on other planets.

[803] Totally.

[804] But do you think that they have contacted us?

[805] Do you think that they have visited us?

[806] Do you think that all this UAP, UFO nonsense and all the stuff that you're seeing the Pentagon talk about and the front page of the New York Times from 2017, do you think that's real?

[807] Like, what do you think that is?

[808] So I absolutely think you have a good point about it.

[809] potentially happening earlier, intelligence happening earlier elsewhere in the universe.

[810] There's so many potential models that could have taken place.

[811] Yeah, so they could have developed like, you know, that intergalactic traveling technology earlier than us such that they could have made it here.

[812] Totally possible.

[813] And so they may be among us, but then you have a lot of questions like, why haven't they made themselves known to everyone?

[814] You have a lot of good answer to that, too.

[815] Maybe it would be too shocking.

[816] Maybe it has to be in this gradual way.

[817] Maybe this is how they do it.

[818] They kind of show these little signs.

[819] They let, you know, the government release, like, these videos of their existence as to not, like, create total panic.

[820] So I'm not one of those people that says it's not possible, but we have to consider other theories.

[821] We have to consider that it's advanced military aircraft.

[822] I heard some things from a friend who kind of, like, follows.

[823] Oh, I think it was a recent guess you had.

[824] It was a, I think it was a, I didn't watch it so I don't know for sure, but I think it was a transgender woman from the military and maybe talking about.

[825] Yeah, Kristen Beck.

[826] Yeah, so, and did she say something about that like there are like ideas that the government has like created these videos using like drone technology to make it look like.

[827] that these are aliens, but it's actually, like, some sort of, like, sci -op or something.

[828] Jamie?

[829] Maybe she didn't mention that.

[830] Maybe it was like...

[831] There was something she was talking about about projecting things in the sky or something like that.

[832] Right, like holographs or something like that, yeah.

[833] But so could it be a sci -op?

[834] I mean, there are sci -ops.

[835] Yeah, but there's other things.

[836] There's other things that are undeniable proof of advanced technology that we don't understand.

[837] Yeah, technology, yeah, so I'm with you there.

[838] I just was throwing that out there because, you know, we want to consider all possibilities like this is some sort of siop.

[839] It's just kind of strange that the government suddenly, it's like, it's coming out with this and like, if it was true, like, would they be coming out with it in this way?

[840] So I'm not saying that's not true.

[841] I'm saying there's a bunch of weird shit going on.

[842] The only way to get to the bottom of it is to consider all possible theories.

[843] It's kind of a Bayesian approach.

[844] And we need to lay out the evidence for each theory, and so we need to rate how likely each is to be true, given what we know.

[845] Then we need to make predictions with those theories about if one was true, what would we expect to see, and then we need to go out and investigate, and then we need to update the probabilities of each of those being true after we've done more investigation.

[846] One of the interesting things about the conversation that I had yesterday with Michi Okaku was that at one point in time he thought that it was preposterous that the idea of us being in contact with alien life, it was silly, it was one of those things, a physicist, he said, would roll their eyes at.

[847] But the preponderance of evidence, that there's so much evidence in terms of the video evidence that shows things behaving in a way that is not in line with our understanding of physics in terms of propulsion systems that don't exhibit any sort of heat signature they move in a way that we can't understand how something can go from 60 ,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in a mere second or two.

[848] We don't know what that is.

[849] Yeah.

[850] And he was explaining how these are sophisticated tracking systems that have found these things.

[851] And then multiple points of evidence, video, eyewitness accounts, tracking systems, and that all these things point to something that is a phenomenon that is clearly real.

[852] There's too many different points of evidence that point to something actually taking place, but something that we don't understand, something that exists in a technological realm that has not been, in his eyes, has not been explored currently on Earth.

[853] Yeah.

[854] So I think we're at, you know, the most interesting point in history because assuming that the kind of conspiracy theory that I just mentioned isn't true that these videos are somehow faked, then we have two possibilities, which both are mind -blowing.

[855] Either it is aliens and they're here, or there's advanced military aircraft so advanced that it's stuff that our world -leading physicists don't know how to explain because we didn't know that those kind of exotic physics existed right so who could do that though that's the real question well okay here's me going into kind of like you know conspiracy theory territory but um so because any any possible explanation we go with they're all far out and that's what's so trippy about this whole thing like they're all crazy like the military advanced military aircraft that can kind of defy the laws of physics as we know them um or actual aliens like those are too crazy options.

[856] So if I'm not going to aliens route, which I'd like to talk about in a minute, and we're going with the theory that it's advanced military aircraft, I would think it would be something that was a product of something like the Manhattan Project.

[857] So we had the Manhattan Project.

[858] We had this research facility in Los Alamos, and we brought the best scientists in the world over here to solve the problem of creating an atomic bomb before the Nazis did.

[859] That was the impetus for doing that.

[860] We had brilliant people like Einstein, Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, who were working on this project.

[861] And it's obvious to me that once that project ended, it's not like the military was just going to let go of all of this stuff.

[862] They're going to try to do more advanced projects in the name of, national defense mostly so john von noyman genius uh pretty much the inventor of the modern computer architecture um some people say he's the smartest guy that ever lived we don't hear his name much but uh his colleagues would say that like his ability to do calculations in the head in his head would just like dwarf einstein's ability um so So John von Neumann died from a sickness.

[863] I can't remember what it was, but he wasn't that old.

[864] And on his deathbed, this is a side fact, but he did convert to, he had like a priest come in and he was made a Catholic or something like that.

[865] Probably did that for his mom or something.

[866] Maybe or maybe he was scared.

[867] Yeah, I thought he was just like freaked out and like, you know, because.

[868] Maybe it's a good way to hedge your bets.

[869] It's, yeah, there's, what's that called?

[870] It's the wager.

[871] I forget whose wager, but it was basically the idea that if you go with God, that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

[872] So, yeah, but so he had, like, intelligence, you know, military officer, someone outside of his room when he was on his day.

[873] deathbed making sure that he didn't say anything didn't give out secrets spill the beans um so i have this kind of idea that you know maybe uh military has taken the work of geniuses that has been classified for you know all this time and that maybe that it could be something like super advanced military aircraft, not defying the laws of physics, but using some sort of exotic physics that we're not aware of.

[874] I've thought that as well, because I don't see any incentive for the government to openly state that we don't know why these things are here, where they're from.

[875] Why would they even say that?

[876] They're not that transparent normally.

[877] About anything.

[878] Yeah.

[879] Why would they even broadcast the fact these things exist?

[880] Yeah.

[881] Why would they?

[882] Why wouldn't they just ignore the videos, just like they ignore videos of Bigfoot.

[883] Yeah.

[884] I have leaned back and forth and back and forth and also in both directions.

[885] I think certainly it's possible that there is an advanced species from another planet that's observing us and making sure that we don't fuck everything up.

[886] Because if we are on that critical breakthrough point, like a little baby chick knocking on the egg and opening it up, something came along and stomped that egg.

[887] right there, it would fuck it all up.

[888] And what we could do with our nuclear weapons and our crazy desire to conquer, we could fuck up the whole thing and start from scratch and nuke ourselves back to the Stone Age.

[889] And then, you know, it's another 100 ,000 years before we come back around and figure out life again.

[890] And that, unfortunately, might have happened in the past.

[891] You know, we don't know.

[892] And on other planets, it could be that, you know, civilizations have gotten to the point where we are right now and then moved towards thermonuclear war, nuke themselves.

[893] So maybe the aliens go, oh, we know what happens here.

[894] Let's make sure these idiots don't ruin this like they did in awful centauria or wherever.

[895] Like, that is possible.

[896] I think it's a cool theory.

[897] But it also could be that the government wants to cover up for the fact that they have some super advanced technology that has some new propulsion method that violates what we understand about the laws of propulsion.

[898] and physics, and they can use some gravity in some unique and novel way and make things go faster than we could ever possibly imagine.

[899] Well, a scary thought is that it is a military weapon, but it's not ours.

[900] It's Russia's or China's, and that they don't know what it is because they don't know how it works, and then they're putting this out there because they're truly stumped and maybe they're being transparent about this.

[901] Well, that's also, like, the big, the big siding was off the coast of the Nimitz.

[902] That was the Tick -Tac UFO from Commander David Fravor.

[903] The reason why that's big is because multiple jets saw it.

[904] They had, they used the data from the Nimitz, so they were using tracking devices.

[905] That's the thing that they saw that went from above 50 ,000 feet to 50 in a second or so.

[906] Whatever that is, they're right near San Diego.

[907] They're right near all those military bases.

[908] They're right near the Nimitz.

[909] It's like if you were going to experiment with advanced propulsion systems and advanced drones, that's where you would do it.

[910] Yeah, I think it makes sense.

[911] So I guess the other possibilities that it truly is intelligent aliens, and I like your theory.

[912] Why would they care about us?

[913] That's a big question.

[914] Well, why wouldn't they?

[915] Well, yeah, yeah.

[916] That's how I feel about it.

[917] Neil deGrasse Tyson is goofy.

[918] I was going to bring him up because he's the one who says that we would just be like ants, like, He would come here just to see stupid little ants.

[919] Well, he said that.

[920] I mean, I don't know what's going on with him.

[921] He was talking the other day about why would people care about eclipses?

[922] Why do they care about solar and lunar eclipses?

[923] It's just an alignment of the planets and it happens all the time.

[924] Because it's fucking interesting, Neil.

[925] Like, why do you care about constellations?

[926] Why do you care about the northern lights?

[927] Why do we care about any of these things?

[928] Because they're fascinating because we live in a beautiful, complex, nuanced, bizarre universe.

[929] and it's interesting to observe these phenomena.

[930] And when something like a lunar eclipse happens, the idea that, like, this famous astrophysicist wouldn't understand why people would be interested in that.

[931] Yeah, I would have to hear the context, but that seems very unlike the kind of things he usually says because he's talked about, like, you know, this cosmic perspective in that we are, you know, imagining, just thinking about that we're part of this whole big story.

[932] So it seems pretty weird that he would...

[933] I don't know.

[934] He's the kind of person who would be interested in eclipses.

[935] Like, he's the kind of nerdy person who would love that stuff.

[936] So I can't really speak to that.

[937] But his point about...

[938] Here it is, right here.

[939] Lunar eclipses occur on average every two or three years and are visible to our billions of people who can see the moon when it happens.

[940] So, contrary to what you may have been told, lunar eclipses are not rare.

[941] No, that's not all.

[942] No, no, no, no. That's not all.

[943] Okay.

[944] No, he said something where he was joking around about it.

[945] This is it.

[946] I think he's just response.

[947] Lunar eclipses are so unspectacular that if nobody told you what was happening to the moon, you'd probably not notice at all, just saying.

[948] I don't know about that.

[949] That's what I'm talking about.

[950] Like, this is some weird cynicism that I've noticed from him over the last few years, and I don't understand.

[951] I think he's reacting to, like, stuff in the news, and he's trying to make, like, like a viral tweet, but I think he's just kind of talking about, like, you know, just something happens and everyone's like crazy or some phenomenon.

[952] Like, maybe people don't care about things that are really interesting, but for eclipses, like, everybody just, like, loses their shit over him, so.

[953] Well, it's, it's interesting, too.

[954] Yeah, maybe he's saying, maybe he's saying compared, like, people, like, compared to the other stuff that they don't make a big thing about.

[955] Yeah, but he's not comparing it.

[956] Yeah, I don't.

[957] That's the problem.

[958] He's only being cynical.

[959] Yeah.

[960] I think it's social media.

[961] and people trying to just say something that, you know, is kind of contrarian.

[962] Well, I also think he's on social media too much.

[963] And those people that are on social media, I think they gravitate towards negativity.

[964] Yeah.

[965] Which is another thing that I wanted to bring up to you.

[966] Like, what do you think that is?

[967] If you're talking about emerging intelligence and emerging complexity and how it keeps moving into these greater and greater forms of complexity, there seems to be a pitfall socially.

[968] that's connected to social media where I feel like in some way it allows us to exchange information at a greater rate than ever before in human history.

[969] It's unprecedented.

[970] But in another way, it's almost like we're handling raw uranium.

[971] I was going to say it's like giving a child a gun.

[972] Or it's like their early nuclear explosions.

[973] I'm sure you've seen those tests that they did with the government where they had these with the military rather where they had these soldiers in a ditch and they blew up these nuclear bombs and had them run towards the blast.

[974] No, I haven't seen that.

[975] You haven't seen that?

[976] Oh, we need to show you this.

[977] Because it's, because this is how I look at it because, you know, when you talk about emerging technologies and the dangers of them and how it almost, we have to have disasters in order for us to recognize it.

[978] And I think it took for the bombs to be dropped during World War II for us to realize, like, hey, don't fucking do that ever again.

[979] Yeah.

[980] And we haven't luckily done that since then, but there's been, there was a lot of tests that they did, which are fucking insane with our understanding today of the dangers of nuclear radiation and blast exposure.

[981] But pull up one of these videos.

[982] They had these poor fucking soldiers, and they had them in a ditch, and they blew up this bomb.

[983] Watch this.

[984] This is the same thing, but they put five guys specifically right on the double.

[985] nation site and told them to like hang out what's yeah that's what it says right here hang out what do you mean uh five men agree to stand directly under an exploding nuclear bomb under it so they blew it up in the sky yeah oh my god they weren't crazy they weren't being punished all but one volunteered to do this which makes it all the more astonishing well that's not what i'm talking about What I'm talking about is some stuff they did.

[986] It was black and white footage before 57.

[987] So this is something.

[988] I want to watch this, though, because it's just so crazy.

[989] Oh, so they blew it up in the sky.

[990] And these guys have to cover their eyes.

[991] One guy's got sunglasses on.

[992] People in the 50, oh, so they blew this up in the fucking sky.

[993] God, people are so nuts.

[994] They really are so nuts.

[995] Well, just stand here, boys.

[996] Congratulations.

[997] We did it.

[998] We're all going to die of cancer.

[999] This guy's smoking a cigar.

[1000] He doesn't give a fuck about cancer.

[1001] Cancer, look at them.

[1002] Hey, shake my hand.

[1003] So I was looking for that.

[1004] A lot of videos are popping up, but I was trying to find the one we've played before.

[1005] Yeah.

[1006] Atomic test in Nevada.

[1007] 55.

[1008] I don't know if that's it.

[1009] Yeah, that might be it.

[1010] Or it's one of them.

[1011] There's more than one of these videos that exists.

[1012] So they blew up some building, and then these guys jump out of the ditch and run towards this explosion.

[1013] Why?

[1014] What's the point of the running towards it?

[1015] I think the idea was you would drop a bomb on the enemy, and then once the bomb was detonated, then you would run towards them in the middle of their confusion, and you would catch them with their pants down.

[1016] Isn't the bomb supposed to kill them?

[1017] Well, the bomb kills a lot of them, but I mean, I don't think you killed everybody.

[1018] See if you can atomic bomb test soldiers in ditch.

[1019] I typed in running towards the thing.

[1020] That wasn't it, so.

[1021] So what about atomic bomb soldier in trenches?

[1022] Try that.

[1023] Because these soldiers were in a trench and the blast.

[1024] You could see the dust and everything go across the top of their heads.

[1025] It's crazy.

[1026] But, you know, they would do stuff like this to these fucking soldiers, and we didn't understand the ramifications.

[1027] We didn't understand the dangers.

[1028] And this could be it.

[1029] Someone up high may have, but didn't care.

[1030] Maybe.

[1031] That's even more horrible.

[1032] I think this is it, right?

[1033] So, okay, so back it up a little bit.

[1034] So the blast happens.

[1035] These guys go down in the ditch.

[1036] And then, yeah, here it is.

[1037] Boom.

[1038] So there's the blast.

[1039] And these poor guys are in the ditch.

[1040] And like, okay, the blast happened.

[1041] The fucking thing is, it's a mile away.

[1042] Yeah.

[1043] And these guys are going to run to it.

[1044] They're looking, they're literally staring at a nuclear explosion.

[1045] I mean, it's this fucking insane.

[1046] Same.

[1047] Either they were completely ignorant or the kind of conspiracy theory side of me is saying maybe they wanted to, uh, the people higher up, find out like the, uh, results of like radiation exposure.

[1048] Look at these people ducked down as the waves of explosion.

[1049] And then they run towards it with their guns.

[1050] We'll get them now, boys.

[1051] But I wonder.

[1052] I wonder what happened to them.

[1053] It'd be interesting to see.

[1054] Yeah.

[1055] Well, they're probably all dead anyway.

[1056] But I wonder if like this, the chaos that we're seeing in terms of like government upheavals, all the exposure of corruption and the infighting and the polarization of America.

[1057] It's, which is so, not just America, the world itself, it's so radical and so different in the way people are at each other's throats, that this is almost a form of like what they were doing back then when they were testing nuclear bombs.

[1058] Yeah.

[1059] It's like we don't understand the dangers of this new technology.

[1060] We don't.

[1061] So when we develop technology as a society, we're not always ready to deal.

[1062] with that technology.

[1063] We kind of catch up later as far as, like, ethics.

[1064] So the argument I make in the book, which I explained a little bit ago talking about, like, these phase transitions, that you do have a period of just widespread chaos before these transitions to higher order.

[1065] And it's specifically because, yeah, we do have to learn from those mistakes.

[1066] a guy named Peter Turchin, he actually predicted the age of unrest that we're experiencing right now in 2010.

[1067] He said 2020 was going to be an age of unrest that we haven't experienced for a long time.

[1068] I don't remember if, like, he was comparing, like, the previous age is, like, World War II.

[1069] But his work basically shows that there are these predictable evolutionary cycles where just, things get totally crazy.

[1070] Well, like the Hindus have the yugas.

[1071] Like, they predicted that we are in Kaliuga.

[1072] Which is, like, see if you can pull up something on Kaliuga.

[1073] But this is, uh, that civilizations go in these cycles.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] They called them the Ugas.

[1076] That's very cool.

[1077] And Kaliuga is like the most confusing and chaotic.

[1078] And that it's, you know, just a general function of, you know as societies grow and advance and they become more complex and they have more access to food and life becomes easier and then they create harder and harder worlds because of that like things get more fucked up because of that yeah that goes back to what i was saying about this you know kind of magic of insight i think these people did have these intuitions i'm sure they um i'm sure they had things going on in their times, which kind of led them to these, like, theories.

[1079] It's understanding of human nature and how it plays out over long stretches of time.

[1080] Yeah.

[1081] So what did this guy in 2010, when he predicted this, what was he basing it on?

[1082] Just past historical trends.

[1083] So you look at the data and you see that, like, every so often, kind of, like, semi -predictably, you will have this period of chaos.

[1084] And what I think is really interesting is that you, you know, it's not just that you can explain it in terms of past data, but I think it's really this evolutionary story that I try to describe where you do have these periods of phase transitions, phase transitions, social phase transitions, and that basically a system that's too rigid needs to have a certain amount of flexibility, a certain amount of chaos or noise introduced to the system to allow it to be able to change into something new.

[1085] Do you get anything about Kali Yuga?

[1086] Pull it up.

[1087] It was getting deep.

[1088] I was trying to find something good to bring up.

[1089] I didn't know if you wanted an article or pictures.

[1090] Yeah, an article.

[1091] So the four stages of Kali Yuga, too.

[1092] There's like...

[1093] Yeah, so I was trying to find one that it was explaining it quickly, and I got lost.

[1094] And it wasn't explaining it quickly at all.

[1095] Okay.

[1096] Well.

[1097] No, it might, it actually might be too complex to explain quickly.

[1098] What happens in Caliuga?

[1099] So, the maximum duration of life for human beings in Caliuga will become 50 years.

[1100] Men will no longer protect their elderly parents.

[1101] In Caliuga, men will develop hatred for each other, even over a few coins, giving up all friendly relations.

[1102] They will be ready to lose their own lives and kill even their own relatives.

[1103] and this is, that's not like the best explanation of it.

[1104] That's not good either.

[1105] That's okay.

[1106] But, you know, it's obviously that people recognize that there are patterns to civilization itself and that as you were saying before is that you need problems because problems create solutions and solutions they empower or at least motivate innovation.

[1107] Yeah, exactly.

[1108] And interestingly, this guy, Peter Turchin, who predicted these things, his father was named Valentin Turchin, and he had this concept of the metasystem transition.

[1109] And I think I saw a video of you and Ben Gortzel.

[1110] I'm saying his last name right.

[1111] I think he mentioned Turchin.

[1112] But yeah, it's basically this process that I talked about earlier of evolutionary transitions of things coming together to make larger things or organisms coming together to make larger adaptive systems or superorganisms.

[1113] And so in Peter Turchin's work, I haven't seen him like reference his dad, but I think his dad actually gave a more, like a deeper explanation of why this happens other than just like there are these like social, you know, there are these patterns to history.

[1114] It's actually about these transitions.

[1115] Now, when you apply that to alien civilizations, do you think that it's possible, whether it's through technology or just through some sort of an evolutionary process, that we recognize these pitfalls, these yugas or whatever they are, and that this is a part of the solution of the greater intelligence of these advanced beings that they work their way through this.

[1116] figure out that this is a this is an actual patent that does occur and that they solved it.

[1117] Yeah, I think if there are intelligent beings that they've gone through this same evolutionary trajectory of things being okay and then things sort of shit hitting the fan and then having to deal with it, but I don't think that ever ends.

[1118] So I think they're, let's say you do have the technology to like leave your planet and maybe your civilization has achieved.

[1119] some sort of peace?

[1120] What if you bump into another civilization that doesn't have the same philosophy?

[1121] There's going to be a period of war, maybe, and then some sort of integration under some, like, you know, larger worldview.

[1122] But I do think there's a tendency towards worldviews for any civilization where the civilization starts to understand the importance of cooperation.

[1123] Don't you think we could get to a point, or life, I should say, intelligent life could get to a point where war is no longer even possible because the power that they possess would be far beyond what we're thinking about when we're talking about nuclear war.

[1124] When you get to a type three civilization, something, a civilization that has control of the very power that makes black holes, like, they can't go to war.

[1125] So maybe it could get to the point where it's just intelligence plus ability.

[1126] It makes all those things inevitable.

[1127] One of the things that I discussed with Michi Okaku yesterday is that the things that motivate us to innovate and to conquer and to achieve material success, a lot of that are these primate instincts.

[1128] And we may one day find that that's the bottleneck to progress is that our biological need to breed and to be recognized and the ego and all these different things.

[1129] things that we think of as just an integral part of just being a human being in human society, that that might be a bottleneck to progress and that the solution to that might be some sort of an integration with technology, a symbiotic integration with technology, that we become some sort of cyborg and it eliminates all of these biological problems that stem from survival of the fittest, natural selection, competition, all these things that led us to get to this point, but we may realize, like, those things that create this, I mean, we've never had a point ever in human history where there's no war, right?

[1130] If we could get to that, we might be able to say, like, hey, one of the things that's fucking us up is we're still monkeys.

[1131] Yeah.

[1132] And we can get out of that.

[1133] Yeah, I think that's probably a good way to look at it, but when you mentioned this, like, you know, kind of primitive way of being that is more like concerned with the individual, there is also this, I would say it's part of nature to also be part of a society and to want to cooperate rather than compete.

[1134] And I guess you've had on the show a friend of mine, Howard Bloom, he has a book called The Global Global Brain.

[1135] And it's all about how, you know, in certain instances, animals will, like, for example, sacrifice themselves, even when it isn't, you know, to the benefit of propagating their genes.

[1136] That was sort of the selfish narrative that Richard Dawkins made famous.

[1137] So I think evolution is about these two processes.

[1138] It's about competing and it's about cooperating.

[1139] And basically, both of them really.

[1140] have a point.

[1141] So when you're competing, when you have Darwinian evolution, a sort of survival of the fittest, that's a learning process because basically the ones that lose or that die out, the organisms that die out or the societies that die out, basically that's a filter, that's a natural selection filter.

[1142] So nature is weeding out the dysfunctional suboptimal designs.

[1143] And so competition will create progress.

[1144] It will create learning.

[1145] So, you know, there's a lot of people who don't like capitalism right now and, you know, people are considering like socialist models, even communist models.

[1146] But capitalism is very much natural because it's when you have these different corporations, which are also superorganisms, they're collectives of people working towards a goal and you have them competing, that's good because it drives progress and it brings down prices and all these good things.

[1147] The problem with capitalism is when the people at the top start changing the rules of capitalism to benefit themselves.

[1148] Right.

[1149] So competition's good, but cooperation is even better because basically what cooperation is is you align interest with, the other agents that you're competing with.

[1150] And from a thermodynamic perspective, just going back to this theme of life trying to evade disorder and it needs to extract energy to do that, working together always makes any sort of task like that easier for each individual because there's a division of labor.

[1151] and with the division of labor, you have to, you don't have to use as much like work and energy to accomplish the same goals.

[1152] Right.

[1153] The competition is good.

[1154] Corruption and collusion is bad.

[1155] The problem is we equate all of those with the same thing.

[1156] We always think corporations are evil, but it's only because they violate the actual rules that are established because people have this.

[1157] That the most important thing is success and the best way to measure success is financial success So you can abandon ethics, you can abandon morals, you can abandon principles and rules if you can get away with it and you'll achieve greater and greater financial success and If you can get to an escape velocity, you can then avoid the ramifications of the things you've done Yeah, so I think that's that that kind of primal instinct that you were talking about like at work.

[1158] So there's like there's good and bad and it creates problems and the problems create solutions right yeah yeah billionaires like Elon Musk you know like I think income inequality is a massive problem and I'll explain why in a second but at the same time you need really wealthy people to create things like SpaceX right you need those resources right so evolution is kind of this balance of like centralized power forming because when you have centralized power like you have this like top down system uh the people at the top who are maybe really smart creative innovative people can tell society what to do and kind of achieve these big goals but you always get the problem of those people bending the rules to benefit themselves and they are kin and um and all isn't this all because of their primate instincts yeah so uh we have to be aware of that and uh when we're talking about like billionaires the reason i say it's a problem is if you imagine human society as this social organism, as this integrated organism, which I'm saying that's how we should look at it.

[1159] These are complex adaptive systems.

[1160] Our organisms, that's like, you know, the more technical name for these systems, these things can be realized at these different scales.

[1161] So a social organism is very similar to a biological organism.

[1162] But so when you have wealth that's concentrated so much like we have today, there's like billionaires, like the amount of wealth that's concentrated at the top is just far more than it's been in America.

[1163] It's like having an organism where the resources aren't flowing throughout the whole system.

[1164] So it's like having blood that's cut off from reaching like your hand or your leg, you're going to get festering limbs.

[1165] You're going to, the superorganism isn't going to be healthy overall if all of the resources are in one place.

[1166] So that's what the decentralization, like kind of like crypto blockchain movement, as far as like the people who are, you know, I mean, there's big governments trying to like take over that technology and turn it into something that is against the spirit of like what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned at first.

[1167] But the idea is that we need to sort of spread out this centralized wealth and power and control because it makes for a healthier superorganism.

[1168] When you write a book like this, how do you know when you're done?

[1169] This seems like...

[1170] I got a good answer for that.

[1171] You're done when your publisher says if you take any longer, you've got to give the money back.

[1172] how long did you take to write this um so uh yeah what happened was um uh you know i got my phd and then i was doing science journalism but really just to build up my credentials like saying oh i've written for the new york times in the atlantic now you know i should be able to get a book deal so i was doing that and um but i really wanted to write this book so i was covering like politics from like a scientific aspect things that were like relevant to the news but uh i felt like i was at a point where i could pitch this and i had actually written a novel that was sort of about this like crypto decentralization movement but i think it was like too early like no one knew what blockchain people thought it was like a fad that bitcoin was going to come and go so uh when my agent pitched that and it didn't get an offer um i was like okay i'm not giving up i'm going to write the nonfiction book that i've kind of wanted to write my whole life.

[1173] And I pitched that to Benbello, which is my publisher.

[1174] And they were really interested in it and gave me a decent enough advance for me to decide to do it.

[1175] And I was supposed to have a year.

[1176] And then a year came and went and I turned in what would be like the first third of the book.

[1177] And I was just like here.

[1178] I knew it wasn't complete.

[1179] And like I was just giving them something to buy me time.

[1180] They were like, yeah, this isn't the book that you pitched.

[1181] It's just like a part of it.

[1182] And I'm like, I know now let me have a little bit more time and they did.

[1183] And so it was just like intense focusing like in a room the pandemic started.

[1184] It was like super crazy, super unhealthy like just in the whole time working on this rushing so that I could get it done within two years instead of one year, but it still doesn't feel like it's done.

[1185] There's things I see about it.

[1186] I'm like, oh, you know, I want to go back and like revise some stuff.

[1187] But I do feel like I've told a complete story and it's the whole story.

[1188] I mean, you know, most of it focuses on like evolutionary mechanisms that create like, you know, towards intelligence on like Earth.

[1189] But the last chapter gets into all the cosmic stuff, the bigger pictures, is there fine tuning, is their design, quantum mechanics what does that mean you know interpretations of quantum mechanics so i felt like i covered as much as i could uh you know what what was humanly possible um and yeah i i i hope people think it makes sense i hope people think it makes sense too thank you very much for coming here man and uh for everybody that wants to get this book the romance of reality did you read the audiobook?

[1190] When you asked for it, I didn't know it was finished, but so I listened to the first chapter and I loved it.

[1191] The narrator was great.

[1192] Another narrator.

[1193] Somebody narrated it.

[1194] Yeah, this guy who did, Deepak Sherper wrote a book with a physicist, Menace Kofatos, and the guy, it's called You Are the Universe, and we got that guy, and he's a pro, so.

[1195] You didn't want to do it yourself?

[1196] I was going to.

[1197] At first, I wanted to.

[1198] Um, and, And then I heard the guys, like the few people that they were suggesting, and I listened to it.

[1199] And it was like, this is like watching one of those National Geographic shows where they have someone fancy like Morgan Freeman narrating.

[1200] And I was like, there's no way I can compete.

[1201] So.

[1202] Well, it's your book.

[1203] Either way.

[1204] Is available now?

[1205] Yeah.

[1206] So you can pre -order the book.

[1207] And it's out on the 28th.

[1208] And I also have Road to Omega.

[1209] substack and a YouTube channel that basically takes the paradigm in this book and tries to turn it into something like a social or political movement using these principles to think about how we can optimize like social systems, economic systems, political systems, and yeah.

[1210] Beautiful.

[1211] All right.

[1212] Well, thank you, Bobby.

[1213] Appreciate it.

[1214] I enjoy talking to you.

[1215] Thank so much.

[1216] This was the most fun conversation I've ever had.

[1217] Awesome.

[1218] I really appreciate it.

[1219] Appreciate you.

[1220] All right.

[1221] Bye, everybody.