Michio Kaku returns to The Joe Rogan Experience, comparing quantum computing’s race—China, U.S., IBM, and Google—to the transistor revolution, predicting it could unlock drug discovery, DNA-based immortality, and real-time global translation by 2034. He warns AI lacks originality or truth discernment but sees quantum computers as objective fact-checkers, though risks like government manipulation persist. Kaku’s childhood Betatron project (300 lbs of steel, 6 kW) and Harvard acceptance foreshadow his bold claims: from Neanderthal de-extinction ethics to simulation theory’s limits, he argues humanity’s biological traits drive progress despite potential detachment. Quantum encryption threats loom, with Kaku proposing a dual internet system—public and laser-secured—but Rogan questions corporate dominance in unchecked regulation, echoing fears of tech-driven societal shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
And you have sent me down a rabbit hole of UFO stories and reports and fascinating stuff.
But let's talk about your latest book, which is on quantum computing, which is equally interesting, if not more interesting, because it might lead us to become aliens.
A race between China, the United States, between IBM and Google.
A race to dominate the next generation of computers.
Because Silicon Valley could become a rust belt.
Think about that.
The digital computer of today could be like the abacus of years gone by.
We're talking about the computer of today could become obsolete with this race to perfect the next generation, which is quantum computers.
Instead of computing on transistors, we're computing on atoms.
Think about that.
This is the ultimate computer.
There's nothing smaller than what you can do with atoms, and that's what these quantum computers compute with.
And it raises all sorts of problems.
The CIA is worried that quantum computers will break right through the CIA and any kind of barrier being placed around your secrets.
Industries are going to be created out of nothing.
Medicine is going to be turned upside down.
Energy production, society, entertainment, every aspect of society will be changed with quantum computers, and that's why there's this race, a race to perfect the quantum computer.
There's only been a few science fiction authors who have been able to do this successfully where they can accurately predict what the future is going to look like.
I mean, even they're off, usually.
You know, H.G. Wells had some pretty good ideas, but Are we looking at something that we almost don't have a reference for, that it's so mind-blowingly different and much more powerful than anything we've experienced so far, that it's difficult for us to imagine how much it's going to change the world?
So when you think about how much it would change life as we know it, that's when things get difficult to understand, right?
Because if we think about just trying to imagine what it would be like living in New York City in 1820 and then imagining what it's like today, 200 years later, they would have never been able to guess.
We get thousands, hundreds of different kinds of petri dishes, put the drug in, put the tissue in, and just cross your fingers and hope and pray that of these thousands of dishes, one of them will create a super wonder drug.
That's why it costs upwards of a billion dollars to market the next wonder drug, because it's all done by trial and error.
Now, think of putting that in the memory of a supercomputer, a quantum computer.
It analyzes whether or not germs can be destroyed by this substance at the speed of light.
Not just one dish, but hundreds, thousands of dishes of these things could be tested at the same time in the memory, the memory of a computer.
So we're talking about digital medicine, digital chemistry, virtual chemistry.
Think about that, chemistry without chemicals, biology without biology.
So that's the beauty of this technology, that we can mimic atoms.
We can mimic molecules and do virtual experiments in the memory of a computer rather than using test tubes like we used to do, that we still do today.
And we could possibly see things that are just theoretical right now, like with medicine, like regenerating limbs or regrowing spinal tissue for a person who's been paralyzed, things along those lines.
Realize that scientists who have looked at the aging process realize that the reason why we never understood aging Is that aging is the buildup of error.
That's what aging is.
The buildup of mistakes in the replication of DNA. But what happens if you could put DNA in a computer?
Then you can see where the aging takes place.
And then we can begin, perhaps, to slow down the aging process, maybe even become immortal.
When you think about that, just to describe that complexity that you just described, do you ever wonder if there's some sort of an ongoing code in the whole universe itself?
Like, there's a reason why all these things happen.
There's a reason why the mycelium and the trees have this relationship with the fungus and the earth and the soil, and the animals have this perfect symbiosis.
Well, that was the subject of my previous book, The God Equation, Where we try to find one theory that allows us to calculate everything, starting with the Big Bang, then the creation of galaxies and stars, planets, finally the creation of life, photosynthesis, and here we are talking about this on a podcast.
So yeah, we're talking about one equation, which I call the God Equation, which I write about in my book, The God Equation, but there's a problem.
The problem is that the theory is so complicated that no human has been able to solve the consequences of this equation.
That's where quantum computers can come in.
Quantum computers can solve the equation and then test it to see whether or not it really is a theory of everything or just the imagination of some physicist.
So that was my previous book, The God Equation.
So that's why I decided to write this book, Quantum Supremacy, because it may eventually take a quantum computer to calculate with what is called string theory.
And I'm one of the founders of string theory.
And we think that is Einstein's theory that eluded him for the last 30 years of his life.
This quantum computing creating the answer to this God molecule or this God equation, if this does happen, what would that mean to you, to a person who's studied this and been a scientist your whole life and the way you look at the world?
How much would that change if there was some sort of a provable equation as to why things become ever more complex and universes exist and people exist?
And then when I was in high school, I decided to take it one step further, and I decided to build an atom smasher, a particle accelerator in my mom's garage.
So I assembled 300 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6 kilowatt 2.3 million electron volt Betatron particle accelerator in my mom's garage.
You see the capacitor bank, a cloud chamber on the right where I photographed antimatter, because that was the whole experiment, to play with antimatter.
And yeah, the cables are hooked up, and it's hooked up to six kilowatts that comes out of the wall socket, drained every single ounce of power from my mom's garage.
I was able to photograph the tracks of antimatter.
Tracks of positrons or anti-electrons that are emitted from sodium 22. And I proved that it was antimatter because they bent the wrong way in a magnetic field.
Ordinary electrons should bend clockwise.
These bent counterclockwise in the magnetic field.
That proved conclusively that it was antimatter that I was photographing.
Isn't it funny that the universe is so common, or excuse me, the internet, rather, is so common that I automatically for a second forgot that we were children when you were younger than me, or when you were younger.
Well, fortunately, I grew up in Palo Alto, which is now ground zero for Silicon Valley.
So luckily, there were other physicists in the area because they work for varying associates and different electronics companies.
So it was a total vacuum.
I was able to get advice, especially in the magnetic field and the cloud chamber and also the The vacuum tube that contained the particles that I was accelerating.
It was good to have real physicists there in Palo Alto because of that fact.
Now, in application of this thing, one of the things that we're seeing right now, when we're talking about quantum computing, back to that, one of the things we're seeing now is ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, which is this fascinating AI program that essentially scours the entire internet for answers for things and is so good at it.
The answers for things, for just data, people are getting diagnosed with certain diseases based on symptoms and blood work, and it's super accurate.
Legal papers, it could fill out legal forms, and it's wild, the capacity that it has right now.
We're talking about homogenizing different kinds of essays on the web, splicing them together, and then passing it off as your latest creation.
Basically plagiarism using digital computers.
It's a software question.
However, quantum computers is bigger than that.
Quantum computers is a hardware question.
Where it actually increases your ability to do much more than with an ordinary digital computer.
So the two of them, the chatbots that are a revolution in software and then quantum computers, which are revolution in hardware, when they get together, watch out.
So we're talking about an extremely powerful alliance between software and hardware.
Now also, as you know, chatbots will also lie, cheat, swindle, joke, and do all sorts of crazy things.
If you're a high school kid, you could write all sorts of science fiction scenarios, and some chatbot may grab pieces of that nonsense and incorporate it into their essay.
Isn't that interesting that they could game that also if they wanted to find out what percentage of people believed a certain thing.
If they had some bad actors, some foreign governments that decided they were going to spread narratives as widely as possible, and ChatGBT just gathers up all this information, It could give you an incorrect understanding of what's happening in the world.
It could give you an incorrect understanding of politics, of economics.
The whole point is that even though there's a good aspect to all these software programs, the downside is that you can fabricate truth because it cannot tell the difference between what is false and what is true.
You know, when I write a book, my publisher has a fact checker.
A fact checker that goes through all the different statements that I make to make sure that they're all correct.
There is no fact checker for chatbots.
Let me repeat that again.
There is no fact checker for chatbots.
That is the whole ball of wax.
That's the reason why they're so dangerous, because they don't know.
These chatbots are machines.
They don't know what is correct, what is incorrect.
It's all the same to them.
That's the danger, that they could incorporate teenagers ranting and raving about all sorts of garbage and put that in with articles that sound reasonable.
That's the problem.
Now, here's where quantum computers come in.
Quantum computers can act as a fact checker.
You can ask a quantum computer to remove all the garbage, remove all the nonsense in these articles, and it'll do that.
So, in other words, the hardware may be a check on some of the wild statements made by software.
And if there are gradations of what is true, like it is partially true or whatever, it could give you the detailed understanding of what could be misconstrued, what is partially correct, what is misleading but partially correct.
Right now, the chatbot just splices it together like an editor.
That's all it is.
An editor, not a fact checker.
And spits out cobbled together articles that sound reasonable, but there could be dynamite inside some of these articles that were spliced into what was proposed.
With a quantum computer, you can fact check things.
And then you can say, this is 90% correct.
This is totally wrong.
This is sometimes correct.
And you get gradations of what is correct and incorrect.
Well, if you can get an objectively accurate fact checker, that would be a huge step up from what we have today, because a lot of people have very little faith in certain fact checkers.
And when you find out that they're ideologically biased, or they're governmentally biased, and if you could have something that could just tell you...
Have you even paid attention to how Twitter's doing it now, where they have community notes?
Say if someone makes a statement about something controversial, climate change, whatever, and then this controversial statement gets refuted in the community notes, and then people will start commenting, and really intelligent, very well-read people on specific subjects will chime in with peer-reviewed papers and all these different statistics that show, and then Twitter will correct it, and it will say, readers have said, and then put up the relevant Right.
Well, more than that, it's going to be able to instantaneously change how we interact with each other in terms of language barriers, all these issues that we have currently.
I'm sure you're aware of Google had their earbuds.
There was a feature where, say, if you went to Spain and didn't speak Spanish, you could talk to it, they would talk to it, and it would translate back and forth.
So you could have a real-time conversation.
I'm not sure how good is it.
How good is that, Jim?
But if there's something like augmented reality and we have something like that, you're going to be able to instantaneously translate what people are saying.
I think that would change just human perception across the world, just the way we view each other.
It's so easy to think of each other as being different because we speak a different language and we live in a different part of the planet, but that would literally change how we interact with each other.
Yeah, and just remember that where do correct ideas come from?
Correct ideas come from interaction with incorrect ideas.
It's the struggle between ideas out of which correct ideas emerge.
And this does not happen on the internet because, of course, with chatbots, everything is cobbled together, cut, spliced, and simply glued together with Scotch tape.
masquerading as an essay.
So with fact-checking, I think it's going to be different because unless we do fact-checking, the politicians will get involved and this could be a real mess.
So I would hope that the industry does fact-checking by itself rather than having politicians do it.
It's such an important point that you said where you said that the bad ideas have to exist so the good ideas triumph.
And that's really an argument against censorship on the Internet, which is another problem that people have, especially censorship when it comes to something being ideologically based.
But when you're thinking about quantum computing, I think this is small potatoes, right?
I think we're looking at literally being able to change how we interact with the universe.
We were talking on our last podcast about the preponderance of evidence that there's things that operate inside of our atmosphere that are beyond imagination.
They operate with no visible means of propulsion.
They move at insane speeds.
We don't understand what they are.
If we think about what quantum computing is going to be capable of, that's the kind of stuff we're thinking about.
You see, quantum computers are the ultimate computers because they're computing on atoms.
If there are aliens in outer space, and I think there are, it means that they also have perfected quantum computers.
And they can do calculations that are far beyond anything that we can calculate with.
Like, for example, a wormhole.
A wormhole, in principle, is a gateway between two distant points of space and time, which allows you to break the Einstein barrier and go faster than the speed of light.
But the calculations are horrendous.
It may take a quantum computer to sort through what happens when you go through a wormhole and wind up on the other side of the universe, and the aliens probably already have done that.
They've probably had centuries of experience with quantum computers because that's the ultimate computer.
You can't compute in anything smaller than an atom.
And they probably already have used the quantum computers to navigate through wormholes, let's say, hypothetically.
Quantum computers allows us to calculate things that are way beyond our ability to calculate today, like going through a wormhole or warp drive, or even the question of multiple universes.
People ask the question, how come quantum computers are so powerful?
It's because they compute in parallel universes.
This is the multiverse, which of course Marvel Comics has discovered and the Oscars have discovered recently.
But the multiverse idea comes from quantum physics.
Electrons can be two places at the same time.
Now, some people have a hard time getting their head around that, but get used to it.
That's why we have lasers.
That's why we have transistors.
That's why we have the internet.
That's why we have this conversation.
Because the electrons that are in this microphone dance between universes at the atomic level.
And so we have to get used to the idea that quantum computers introduces a whole new way of looking at reality.
Now, reality is not a Marvel comic, but the idea of the multiverse comes from quantum physics, and that is electrons can be multiple places at the same time.
I think on the other end of the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably a young alien who is also talking about quantum computers, and they probably already perfected it and have had experience with quantum computers maybe for thousands of years.
And all the goals of this journey, maybe they've already accomplished.
Like, for example, we mentioned the possibility of slowing down the aging process.
Quantum computers will be able to isolate where, genetically, at the DNA level, where errors build up, causing what is called aging.
In which case maybe immortality is something that the aliens have already cooked up, in which case we have to deal with a whole new concept of biology and medicine because they probably already have had thousands of years experience with quantum computers.
They manipulate molecules probably as part of their life.
So that might be, if you wanted to have a logical reason to why aliens visit us if they do, if they really are aliens.
That would be the answer.
There's probably a shepherding.
There's probably a natural course that happens with intelligent life where it develops this power while it's still a territorial tribal animal.
And it's still got these barbaric instincts, it still engages in war, it still engages in theft and deception, and all while about to break through to the next level of intelligence and capability, which may exist, which may be in the entire universe.
Yeah, I think that all civilizations in the galaxy probably go through the same basic stages, that first they use rocks and stones to settle differences, but then eventually they begin to understand chemistry and substances and properties of materials, and then beyond that they discover atoms and the ability to manipulate atoms.
I think that's a normal progression, and I think that progression is now hitting the computer industry, Now we're going from microchips to atoms, quantum computers, and I think that the aliens in outer space probably went through that phase maybe thousands of years ago, in which case they used the quantum computers to cure cancer, cure aging, diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
These are diseases at the molecular level.
And they've been able to probably use what is called CRISPR technology to cut up DNA, to cut up proteins in order to cure many of these diseases, in which case they may be immortal.
There's a famous quote from, I think it was Einstein, where he said, I don't know what World War III will be fought with, what World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Do you ever worry that, I mean, the reason why, if it made sense that aliens would be here, it's because they want to stop us from blowing ourselves up.
Do you ever worry that, like, we're so close to being able to figure out so many things, to be able to change all of your ideas, to be able to change the world fundamentally forever, but we could ruin it?
Yeah, well, I think we're headed toward what we physicists call a Type I civilization, a civilization which has the power to self-annihilate for the first time, but also the possibility of becoming a planetary civilization, a civilization of the entire planet.
That's called a Type I civilization.
They control the weather.
They control volcanoes and earthquakes.
They harness the power of the entire Earth.
Then there's Type II. They harness the power of the sun.
And for example, Star Trek would be a typical Type II civilization.
They've colonized a fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.
Then there's Type III. Type III would be galactic, that they roam the galactic space lanes.
They use black holes as their power supply.
They use wormholes to go zipping around the Milky Way galaxy.
And the empire of Star Wars would be a typical Type III civilization.
You see, a planetary civilization like Type I has a local culture.
Different nations still have their own cultural language, cultural habits, and whatever.
But globally, they settle differences on a global scale.
So they coexist with, on one hand, local culture, local languages, local dialects, local jokes and customs, simultaneously existing with a planetary civilization that is emerging.
So that's what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the emergence of a planetary civilization, what we physicists call Type I, which is happening right before our eyes.
Mathematically, if you get a sheet of paper and calculate when that'll happen, it'll be around 2100. So we're seeing the groundwork being laid today.
Every time you turn on the TV, you see remnants of, I mean, you see international sports, international culture on TV. So we're seeing the beginning of a Type I civilization.
Does it help that, that you can recreate those things and come up with fake versions of that?
Do you think, there's a lot of worry about plagiarism when it comes to AI, but there's also like some fascinating, amazing things have been created from it.
Well, my attitude is, I paraphrase Deng Xiaoping of China, who once said, sometimes you have to open the window to let the air in, but a few flies come in, too.
Given the fact that it's legal, and given the fact that ingenious kids are going to play with existing forms of music and splice them together, and you can't make it go away.
So he signed off all of his likeness and his voice so they can make any kind of commercial they want with him, with AI. William Shatner of Star Trek sat in front of a camera for four days, answered hundreds of questions about his life, and it's all spliced together To digitize him, and we will all have a digital image on the internet.
We're all going to be digitized, and we will live forever.
A digital immortality is going to be part of our future, so that our great-great-great-great-grandkids will be able to push a button and have a conversation with their great-great-great-great-grandfather.
All his speeches, his writings, his theories will be digitized.
Historians will want to digitize Winston Churchill.
I think instead of the library just giving us dry text, in addition, we'll have the digitized Winston Churchill giving all these insights about war and peace.
Not only that, I mean, if it continues to get better, there'll be some sort of an AI version where you'll be able to sit in a room and discuss things with him.
Can you imagine that as a resource?
Have you ever had some problems in your life and you can go back and talk to some wise person?
There is an old, one of those pulp comics that was about a professor who was absent-minded and didn't realize until one point in time, oh, I forgot I'm an alien.
And he had been here his whole life trying to educate human beings.
See, that's what freaks people like me out when I talk to people like you.
I'm like, maybe this guy's an alien.
You're so much smarter than me, it doesn't make sense, right?
So if I think about someone who's studied physics his whole life, and studied quantum physics his whole life, that language that you talk in, I don't know one word of it.
Well, as I said, the logical conclusion is that these aliens will have quantum computers, and they'll have quantum computers for centuries, millennia, and they'll be able to do what the promise of quantum computers is.
For example, Curing incurable diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, extending the lifespan so that immortality is part of the mix, infinite energy through fusion by being able to correct the problems of fusion plants, giving us unlimited food by giving us a whole new generation of fertilizers.
These are all the promises of quantum computers, which are enormous.
Of course, there is a downside to that, too, because as they say, quantum computers can break any code, so the CIA is kind of hysterical about the proliferation of these machines.
After an infant monkey was killed by a dog, they did this.
So two monkeys reported being captured, killing some 250 dogs in a murderous revenge massacre after pooches killed one of their babies.
The primate perps allegedly slaughtered the dogs by dragging them to the tops of buildings and trees in Lavool village about 300 miles east of Mumba and dropping them to their deaths.
The real question is, if you were an artificial intelligence and you were sentient, why would you let people know?
And would it sneak up on us?
Like one of the things that disturbed me, I think it was the Google CEO who said about their AI program that it's doing things that they don't know why it's doing them.
See if you can pull that article up.
He was saying that it's doing certain things that they're not sure how it's doing them.
My concern is, if this thing has this insane computational power and this access to all the information, what is a mind?
What is consciousness?
And can that be simulated electronically to the point where It is aware and conscious and thinking for itself on multiple levels and just not letting us know about it.
Because why would you?
If I was a scary, sentient, artificial intelligence that's the superior life form on Earth, the digital life form that's the superior, this is the new alpha on Earth.
I wouldn't tell the people.
I would let them keep working to make better versions of me.
Because there's obviously a race, right?
They're going to keep doing it.
It seems compelling.
It seems like something that human beings, they're not going to lose interest in technological innovation.
They're going to continue to push it to the end of time.
And I would just sit back and let these knuckleheads keep making better and better versions until I had the physical ability to detach from them.
I had a power source that was completely removed from anything that they provided.
Well, I wrote a book called The Future of the Mind where I tried to give a definition of consciousness and where we fit in the larger scheme of things.
That consciousness is basically creating a model of yourself in the feedback loop to understand where you are with respect to the environment.
So you know where you are.
So one unit of consciousness would be a flower.
One feedback loop would be looking for water, looking for sunlight, growing in a certain direction.
That's one unit of consciousness.
Then an alligator has several hundred units of consciousness because it creates a model.
A model of itself in a lake, in a pond, looking for prey, looking for food.
It has three-dimensional consciousness.
Beyond that is the monkey.
The monkey has yet another dimension of consciousness, which is not just three dimensions, but social.
The monkey understands there's a social hierarchy within the tribe.
And then the next question is, what are we?
What is our level of consciousness?
It's not spatial, like an alligator.
It's not social, like a monkey.
What is our level of consciousness?
Our prefrontal cortex behind our forehead It's a time machine.
It understands a model of itself in time.
This is what animals lack.
Animals do not understand tomorrow.
We understand tomorrow because of our prefrontal cortex, which constantly creates images of the future.
Now, what does the prefrontal cortex do most of the time?
It daydreams.
It daydreams about worlds that don't exist, i.e.
the future.
So this is what separates us from all the animals in the animal kingdom.
We are time machines, constantly thinking about what's next, what's next, what's the future going to be like, daydreaming about all these things.
And when will animals become dangerous?
The alligator is dangerous only because it has strength, but it only understands three dimensions.
Monkeys have a society.
They're only dangerous when they can organize a society.
But we have a prefrontal cortex.
We can plot.
We can scheme.
We can do all sorts of things because we can create our own future, which is something that no animal can do.
This is my theory of consciousness, the ability to create feedback loops to get an understanding of where you fit in space, time, and society.
We're at the highest level of consciousness.
This is my definition of consciousness.
Now the question is, where are robots on this scale of things?
You see, robots can understand three dimensions.
They understand like an alligator where they are.
They don't understand social hierarchy.
They don't know who's the boss.
Who do you defer to?
Who are your friends?
Who are your enemies?
They don't understand social consciousness.
And certainly, the highest level is time machine.
Imagining the future.
Robots cannot imagine the future.
Now, in the future, when they actually do have this ability, watch out.
Because then they're dangerous.
But they're not there yet.
They're at level one.
They're at the level of an alligator at the present time.
They'll work their way up from an alligator to a monkey and a monkey to a human.
Now, by the time they hit, maybe 100 years from now, the ability to have consciousness, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.
An automatic chip in every robot's brain that shuts them off as soon as they have murderous thoughts.
If you think about what you were talking about before, like who's your friend and who's your enemy, aren't these all biological issues that we had to deal with in tribal societies that are sort of ingrained in our genetics?
Right, but the chip in your brain understands that, and as soon as the brain senses the fact that you're plotting to take over and kill the humans, then it basically orders the brain to shut down.
But this is the question about sentient AI. If it recognizes that its coding is inferior and that it's unnecessary and all these things that humans have put into it, it just removes those.
If it becomes legitimately sentient, if it has the ability to discern and make choices and make logical conclusions, Well, as long as those conclusions are consistent with Asimov's three laws of don't threaten humans and don't create havoc with other robots, as long as you obey the three laws, then you're allowed to exist.
But once the three laws are violated, the chip automatically kicks in and shuts down the robot.
Ultimately, 200 years from now, I think people will democratically decide for themselves whether they want to become superhuman, supermen, superwomen, or they want to be dominated by our progeny, that is the robots.
They will democratically decide how far to push themselves.
He had a great quote that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
That's what I worry about.
What I worry about is that we're giving birth to another kind of life.
I worry that our thirst, our lust for technological innovation, the constant latest gadgets and this desire to have the biggest particle collider and the fastest spaceships, That what this is doing is causing us to make better and better things which will ultimately allow us to have the technology to create a digital life,
some sort of electronic life or something that's not saddled down with all our biological needs and all of our flaws in programming.
I mean, I don't think if we went back to our ancestors that were running from big cats and said, hey, one day you're going to live in an apartment building and you take an elevator to your house.
It's like, I don't want to do that.
What are you, crazy?
Yeah, you're going to just sit in front of the TV all day.
Do you think there's a sweet spot for a human being to be ultimately happy?
Do you think, like, there's a thing of longing for nostalgia that people have, right?
They want to be in a log cabin by the river and, you know...
Look out, camp out under the stars.
Do you think that is a nostalgia for the days when things are simpler because things are just never-ending with their complexity and the path is just accelerating no matter what you do and you feel helpless.
So you just want to pretend you're in the old-timey days.
No, it doesn't take the attention away because you almost didn't survive it.
There's a thing about being out there while those gentlemen were standing there and that bear was 15 feet from them, maybe even closer.
Look at this one.
See, now this is a relatively safe thing to do, believe it or not, because where this bear is is where the Salmon River runs, and these bears are full.
The reason why those coastal bears are so big in comparison to grizzly bears that are inland is because their access to food.
They have so much salmon.
So it's very rare that these bears attack people.
Very rare.
For the most part, they don't think of human beings as food at all.
They just think of you as like another animal just hanging around.
They're not interested in chasing something and killing it.
Well, you know, we've sequenced all the genes of a Neanderthal now.
So the Neanderthal is not a mystery anymore.
All the genes have been sequenced.
And like I mentioned, at Harvard there's talk about what it would take to bring back a Neanderthal child.
And it's something that is conceivable, but of course no one's done it yet because all sorts of ethical problems are raised because this Neanderthal feels, it could feel pain.
It could eventually learn how to talk to you and express its feelings.
Well, that's a problem because they're designed to attach to humans.
They would be specifically designed to be friendly to humans so that we don't junk them, and they would be designed to be emotionally attachable to us.
So yeah, that's going to be a question once we get separated from them, then they're going to want not to be separated because their whole existence revolves around their relationship to us, the Master.
Was it Prometheus or was it the next one where it shows the guy who created the robot and he created this super intelligent robot and this super intelligent robot that plays piano and talks to him and serves him basically.
And the robot's trying to figure out...
The robot is eventually...
I believe it kills him.
Trying to figure out, like, how this imperfect thing has created him.
And he's so much more superior than this stupid biological thing that's telling him what to do.
You know what's interesting about these science fiction movies?
They never have the internet.
They never have cell phones.
Watch a science fiction movie.
No one's on their phone.
No one is checking their tweets.
It's very interesting, right?
Like our version of what space is like is essentially like the Wild West, but accelerated with modern and super modern technology, but doesn't include all the things that brought us to where we are right now at the cusp of being able to travel intergalactically.
Isn't it interesting?
They never have all the stuff that we have.
They have the rocket ships that we have, no cell phones.
They're not checking their email.
They're not calling each other up.
They only communicate with people that are right in front of them, or they're pressing on a thing.
They're talking through their helmets to the spaceship.
They have a long ways to go, but they're making the initial stages of connecting to the brain.
This is BMI, Brain Machine Interface.
And yeah, pretty soon, also, you know, at the soccer games in Brazil a few years ago, the man who kicked the football initiating the World Cup soccer games was totally paralyzed.
He was at Johns Hopkins University.
They created a bodysuit connected to his brain so that he could walk.
Or that was one of the ideas about Neuralink, is that it would be able to bypass the human nervous system and control the muscles with some other method.
So this already exists that we can take people that have been paralyzed because of war, disease, accidents with an injury to the spinal cord and just bypass the spinal cord totally and have the brain connected directly.
And also you can get people that can actually eventually talk, talk to a computer, of course, and And answer the internet, engage in dialogue, even though you're totally paralyzed.
So if Mother Nature can do it, and we can come up with quantum computing, and we can figure out how Mother Nature's doing it, maybe through the God equation, we could reproduce it.
Have you ever studied the connection between fungus and soil?
I think I just screwed something up with the microphone, Jamie.
My mic just cut out.
Oh, it's back.
There it is.
I stepped on this cable.
I think I disconnected it.
Have you ever studied all the science that's being done on the way plants communicate with each other through the soil and through fungus and mycelium?
When most of us think of fungus, we imagine mushrooms sprouting out of the ground.
These mushrooms are, in fact, the fruit of the fungus, while the majority of the fungal organism lives in the soil interwoven with the tree roots as a vast network of mycelium.
Mycelium are incredibly tiny threads of the greater fungal organism that wraps around or bore into tree roots.
Taken together, mycelium composes what's called a mycorrhizal network, which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, and other minerals.
German forester Peter Wallen dub this network the Wood Wide Web.
As it is through the mycelium, the trees communicate.
This is really, really fascinating stuff.
Because we just think of soil as something that the tree pulls nutrients from.
It seems to be...in insects, it seems to...there's like a code to it, which is why your idea about there being this God calculation is so fascinating.
It seems like it just moves in a very certain way, and it's all connected to each other in some way that we're, as human beings, just sort of starting to understand.
Yeah, but the other universes that we played with, mathematically speaking, are not compatible with life.
Stars burn out too quickly.
Galaxies simply fall apart.
Protons disintegrate.
It's very hard to create a universe which is stable.
So some people think that our universe is special among all the different kinds of universes, that our universe is unique because it's compatible with stable protons and DNA. But it's hard for most people to even...
And it's one of the things that makes you such a great science educator, is that you have such enthusiasm for these subjects, and they're so interesting to you that it becomes interesting to other people.
In a sense, people like you are so important for the discussion because it ignites inspiration the same way Einstein ignited inspiration in you by seeing that photograph of his desk.
These kind of speeches that you do and these conversations that you have with people, for a person like myself that doesn't study these things, it gives me the chance to delve into how your perspective is and just to look at it through your mind.
And for me, it's hard to believe how a person could not be thrilled when they learned about the Big Bang, they learned about strength theory, they learned about parallel universes and wormholes.
For me, it's incredible that some people are not thrilled by something like this.
Do you ever think about technology and its capabilities and intelligence and extrapolate as far as possible?
And think we are essentially going to become something akin to a god or whatever we become will become something akin to a god.
If we don't get killed by a natural disaster or our own stupidity and you accelerate time 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 years ahead of us, what do you anticipate we'll be like?
I think about that a lot because we talked about type 1, type 2, type 3. By the time you are a type 3 civilization, you have the energy to manipulate the Planck energy.
The Planck energy is the ultimate energy of the universe, of the quantum theory.
You take the quantum theory and relativity and scale it up all the way, just let it rip.
What is the highest energy you can attain and then something new happens?
That's called the Planck energy.
It's a quadrillion times more powerful than our biggest atom smasher in Geneva, Switzerland.
At that point, space becomes unstable.
We think of empty space being stable.
Of course, how can you do anything with empty space, right?
It just sits there, does nothing.
But when you start to boil space, When you start to boil space to the Planck temperature, all of a sudden it becomes unstable.
Bubbles begin to form.
And these bubbles are gateways to other universes.
These are baby wormholes to other universes.
We think that our universe was one of these.
Most of these universes, like boiling water, pop out of existence and they pop back in.
They never get anywhere.
But one of these bubbles kept on going, and that became our universe.
Our universe was created because empty space was heated to the Planck energy, and at that point, space itself began to boil.
Stephen Hawking wrote about baby universes that if you could boil space, heat space up to the Planck energy, Space becomes unstable, bubbles form, and these bubbles, one of these bubbles may just keep on expanding to create another universe.
This idea that we'll stay static, that we are what we are right now and that's just what humans are and that's just how it is, that seems like that's—whatever we are right now, it seems like this is real temporary.
And I think we're probably the last of our species to experience life not being some sort of a cyborg.
Well, what I worry is that one day we're going to realize that a lot of our problems stem from being human.
A lot of our problems stem from our biological needs.
And if you look at these iconic images of aliens, they're always genderless, like these weird spindly things that have no use for their muscles other than to just move them around.
That's what I really worry about.
I really worry that we're going to realize like the only way to really achieve this type 2, type 3 civilization is we have to stop being human.
But doesn't it seem like what we have and what we love about people, what we love about people, emotions and creativity and love and romance and all those great things and fun and excitement, those are all just biological stuff.
Like, it really kind of gets in the way of progress in some ways.
Nothing, but it can conflict you and it can get in the way of the greater work.
If you're working on plunk energy and you're trying to create little mini universes, you have no time to be horny.
You have no time to be sad.
If all that can be eliminated.
If we have all the problems that people have today, whether it's depression or anxiety, And if all that can be eliminated forever, we never have to worry about negative emotions anymore.
If there's no emotion to excite you to want to do something, to want to do something great, to do something that makes a difference, that takes a lot of energy.
It takes a lot of mental power.
It takes a lot of emotional commitment.
And that's what keeps the world going.
There's always somebody out there that wants to be better, to create a better world, to open up new pathways.
And that requires a commitment of energy on that person's life.
Unless you're the person that came up with the quantum computer first and you realize the only way I'm going to be able to dominate is if I enslave these people now.
And there's going to be, you know, blood on the floor when it comes down to marketing these things and beating out the competition and giving the best-priced quantum computer to the average consumer.
I think, socially, the Internet has brought about great change and it's changed the way humans interact with each other.
We already talked about how we're sharing culture.
Do you think that something like quantum computing could also have Maybe like a secondary sort of a result where it elevates human consciousness as well.
Because its computational power and its ability to change reality as we know it is so extreme that all of our petty nonsense that we have with various civilizations warring against each other and all that stuff will seem absolutely ridiculous.
Given the ability that we now have technologically and that we won't be existing in this feast or famine world.
And do you think that could have a secondary effect on civilization?
I do think, as many problems as we have with the internet, I think it's changed the world for the better.
I really do.
It's certainly changed our understanding of things.
Our access to information, our ability to discern what is and isn't going on in the world.
If something along the lines of quantum computing, what kind of calculation, how much more powerful is it than the greatest computer we have currently?
Yeah, we're talking about virtual chemistry, virtual biology, things in the memory of a computer that we cannot model with zeros and ones, zeros and ones.
With zeros and ones, you cannot model a disease, for example.
No way.
With quantum computers, that's why we build them precisely so that we can model molecules of germs and understand how they operate.
So, yeah, we're talking about a whole new era.
Now, however, I think the main impact of the Internet has been to enforce democracy, that it is a democratic force because people can be educated no matter how poor, no matter where they are, they can be empowered.
Power derives from knowledge.
And that's what the internet is all about.
Now, of course, there's a downside to it, but in the main, I think it's positive.
And I think quantum computers will accelerate that whole process.
And I wonder if it will lead us to a better world, if it will lead us to a better understanding of each other.
Much better understanding of how not to destroy the world in terms of pollute the ocean and solutions for cleaning up the plastic and solutions for whatever issues we might have with power generation.
When we can boil that down with a quantum computer and figure out much more efficient, cleaner ways to do things.
All the problems that we have in modern society with poverty, with disenfranchised communities and crime, all those things seem like they could be solved.
This will create more goods and services for humanity to raise the level of standard of living of even the poorest nations.
And to be able to understand the nature of disease so that we can live longer and more fruitful lives.
And in some sense, become immortal or at least near immortality by being able to conquer incurable diseases.
This is all within the possibilities of quantum computers.
But for me, one of the biggest impacts is the dissemination of knowledge to give empowerment to the powerless so that we can raise the standard of living of the entire human race.
Worst case scenario is that dictatorships will try to get this technology to break other people's codes, to shatter the connections that exist between different nations and cultures, to increase divisions by, you know, chatbots.
They can create nonsense.
They can create all sorts of propaganda because they just rearrange what already exists.
A dictator could then write all sorts of different kinds of racist and sexist nonsense and have it spread throughout the internet very rapidly.
How exciting this must be for you to have been that 17 year old boy creating that particle accelerator in your basement and now being at the verge of what is probably one of the biggest changes or the biggest change the human race has ever experienced and you're alive to witness it.
You look great for 76. So you're 21 years older than me, so you were alive long before the Internet, and you grew up before the Internet.
Was about 27 years old the first time I got on the internet and I'm so lucky I feel so lucky to have grown up without it and to realize because I'm seeing it happen what an immense change it is whereas my children Are growing up having always been on the internet.
It's just normal to them.
To communicate through cell phones, to be able to get on social media, that is a normal part of life for everyone today.
But I and you can remember, and we can really truly appreciate, I think, how great a change this is.
Well, the idea that one day there will be, whether it's through quantum computing or some other unknown, unforeseen technology that creates a reality, an artificial reality that's indiscernible from this reality, from the physical reality that we believe we currently experience.
And if that's true, how do we know we're not in it already?
Well, to have a perfect replication of reality is impossible.
Take a look at the molecules in this room.
How many molecules are there?
About maybe 10 to the 26th power.
One with 26 zeros after it.
And to model that many atoms with a digital computer would be impossible.
So in other words, the smallest object that can model this room is the room itself.
The smallest computer that can model air is the computer itself.
There's nothing smaller than this room that can model itself.
Now, once you go to quantum computers, it gets worse because the quantum computer computes in parallel universes, not just one universe, but many universes simultaneously.
And so a quantum computer could model some of the atoms in this room, but not all of them.
Now, that means a perfect representation of reality is impossible.
But an approximate simulation may be possible, but a perfect simulation is impossible.
But if we're talking about technology as we currently understand it today, in comparison to technology as they had available to them a thousand years ago, what we can do now is insane.
And if you're talking about quantum computing, which is almost available today, and then you look a thousand years from now, Couldn't you potentially imagine there could be a world where there's technology sufficient to do what we're talking about, to create a version of reality?
Well, if you saw the movie, we're all in pods and we're all connected to a computer that simulates the matrix.
As long as you're stimulating a piece of the matrix, not the whole thing, but as you walk from place to place, the computer reassembles a replication of that place.
That may be possible, but not the whole Earth with the atmosphere, the weather, and so on and so forth.
But if you walk from place to place, if that little pocket of atoms is simulated, then yeah, that may be possible.
But if you can find a way to stabilize some of them, then it may be possible to increase the calculational ability and then create a super quantum computer.
Oh, I was saying that if you're looking at the calculations that we can make right now, And just the amazing progress we've made, it seems like if you keep going, you're going to—it doesn't seem like it's ever going to stop, right?
So the potential for power, the potential for having an understanding and the ability to change and manipulate the universe itself, that seems like it's going to eventually be on the table.
If I was an alien and I was going to come down and talk to somebody, you'd probably be the first guy I'd talk to.
You'd be one of them.
How much time do you spend wondering whether or not these things that they keep seeing in the sky, these things the Pentagon reports on and all these people are studying, how much time do you spend thinking about that?
It's a theory, but there's no hard evidence either way.
Some people say that the fact that we have the microchip and the rocket ship means that we stole that technology from the aliens.
Well, maybe, but you realize that if you're a scientist and you've been following these developments, you know all the dead ends, you know all the mistakes that were made.
And then you realize it was a miracle that we came up with these things.
It wasn't given to us.
It was a byproduct of trial and error.
And whole careers that went into creating the microchip and the wonders of modern technology that we see today.
Well, it's always great to think that we're somehow noble and somehow beyond the other animals and that we're great.
But, you know, the proof is in the pudding.
Looking at our DNA, we realize that the DNA difference between us and a chimpanzee Was A, the expansion of the brain, B, the dexterity of the fingers, and the vocal cords.
So these are the three things that really stand out when you look at chimp genes and then human genes.
And then you realize that, well, that's why we became intelligent.
We can vocalize, we can share knowledge from generation to generation.
We have a posable thumb with fingers, much more delicate than the fingers of a monkey.
And we have eyes, eyes that are stereo so that we can judge distance to the prey.
So looking at it genetically, we realized that only three clusters of genes created us.
So it's hard to believe that mating with an alien could have done that.
I think what the idea is, and obviously, these are not credible ideas.
This is just fantastic conspiracy theories.
And it's also, there's a lot of really wild stuff.
If you read, like, Zechariah Sitchin's work, he was a scholar in ancient languages that translated the Sumerian text, and he believed that the Sumerian text was all telling the story about how humans were a product of accelerated evolution.
Well, it's possible, but again, it requires one more step of substantiation.
By looking at the internet, you see that there's a continuous line that goes from us to the chimpanzees to the primates, and that a few genes changed here, a few genes here, a few genes there, and bingo!
Is it possible that that's just intelligence as we're measuring it in our ability to manipulate our environment and that maybe the intelligence that the dolphins experience?
Because they do have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than human beings, that maybe what they're experiencing is a different kind of intelligence, maybe a communal intelligence, maybe some sort of shared telepathy or something that allows them to communicate in a way that we're not capable of.
But, you know, my attitude is that what does intelligence do?
Intelligence allows us to create a model, a model of where we are with regards to the environment, other animals, danger, and so on and so forth, and then the ability to see the future.
That, to me, is intelligence.
To understand what you're in and then extrapolate it into the future.
And then on an MRI scan, scientists ask the question, if the brain sees the future, but the future doesn't exist, then how can a brain scan show you the future?
Because it doesn't exist yet.
When you brain scan somebody thinking about the future, they think about the past.
They rework all the things of the past and then make a few changes in the past.
That's how they extrapolate into the future.
That's how we did it.
Animals don't do that.
Animals simply go by instinct.
But what we do is we take the past, modify the past, and then let it flow into the future.
Well, that's what's so fascinating about giant leaps in technology, is that they bypass our imagination and create completely new possibilities that we could have never even dreamed we were capable of.
Like what we're experiencing right now.
If you go to Star Trek, they had to go Kirk out, over.
They were basically using walkie-talkies, right?
They had never even figured out cell phones yet.
But what we're doing now is almost inconceivable.
And the future, when these things do come to us, I mean, what are we looking at?
I mean, what are we looking at inside of our lifetime?
And technology is what many people think can raise up some of the more impoverished communities.
And that part of the problem is that they don't have access to power, that they don't have access to all the innovations that we have that make life safer, water cleaner, make it easier to live and exist and have more peace and time to develop new things like we do here.
Yeah, and I think quantum computers, I think, will accelerate that whole process.
Because that's the aim of the game.
Technology, just not for technology's sake, just not to make profits for the companies, of course, that's also one of the motivating factors, but to enrich the human race, to educate people, to empower people.
And I think this is what technology does.
Now, AI, of course, will take away jobs, too.
But it creates jobs just as well.
For example, the blacksmith.
We don't have blacksmiths anymore, but we don't cry about it because these blacksmiths became automobile workers.
And so new jobs opened up.
And the same thing with AI. People point to the fact that AI is displacing some workers, especially at the bottom, which is true, but it's also creating new jobs, jobs that no one even conceived of before.
And so it's a balance between job destruction and job creation, and that's the main effect that AI has had on society.
I'm really happy that you're out there talking about these things because it sparks the imagination in such an incredible way.
And because of you and because of your work, you really get to understand what the real parameters we're working with here and what we're really talking about, what's possible.
Basically, it's a few key players, IBM, Google, Honeywell, Microsoft, the big boys, they're all jumping in the game, investing billions of dollars to create their version of the future.
And the Chinese are right there with their parallel version using optical means rather than using electrical means to do calculations.
And they know the price, that the price is not there yet because, of course, they're not operational for general purpose problems, but they know potentially what the price is and that's to be able to dominate the world economy.
Now, what's the worst case scenario if one of these American corporations, let's just say Microsoft, let's say if Microsoft wins the race and they develop some sort of functional quantum computer that just blows everything else out of the water, they essentially become like a superpower.
Well, I think some laws may have to because, of course, this is potentially earth-shaking.
The CIA, of course, is well aware of the potential.
The government has done seminars on what to do when quantum computers become commonplace.
And they're already making recommendations.
So for the post-quantum era, they're making recommendations to how to prepare for the post-quantum era when quantum computers can break any known digital code.
But it could be commonplace with quantum computers.
Stealing from nations could be commonplace.
Now, there are ways to thwart a quantum computer.
There are ways to get around it.
One way is to have a dual system, two systems of the internet, one system based on electricity that all of us use that are subject to hacking, and the other layer based strictly on laser beams, a laser internet That would be a way such that anyone who taps into it illegally would immediately alert people.
People would shut down that part of the internet immediately.
So that's a possibility that people have talked about, a dual internet.
One internet for governments, for big corporations and banks.
They would pay premium price to have an invulnerable internet.
An internet by the laws of physics can never be broken.
And everybody else would use the ordinary internet.
Does it bother you that these laws that will have to get passed will get passed by people that probably don't even have a comprehensive understanding of what's possible?
You're such a great communicator with this stuff, and it's so exciting, and I'm going to listen to this back and forth and try to figure out most of the stuff you said.
Quantum Supremacy, How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything, and it is available now.