Joe Rogan Experience #1828 - Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it.

Michio Kaku 0:16 My pleasure.

Joe Rogan 0:17 It's-

Michio Kaku 0:17 Anytime.

Joe Rogan 0:17 ... very nice to meet you in person. We actually did a radio show together once, remotely, a long time ago.

Michio Kaku 0:24 Oh. Hmm.

Joe Rogan 0:24 I was on the Opie and Anthony Show, and you called in.

Michio Kaku 0:27 That's right, yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:27 And I was there live, yeah.

Michio Kaku 0:29 (laughs) Yeah. That was a blast. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:30 Yeah, it was very fun. To ta- when a person like yourself, you're in this documentary, A Tear in the Sky.

Michio Kaku 0:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 0:37 And, uh, for personally yourself, who is a, a very well-respected scientist, to be discussing the subject of UFOs, to me it signifies that there's been a shift in the way our culture perceives these things.

Michio Kaku 0:51 That's right. Uh, it used to be the third rail of a scientific establishment...

Joe Rogan 0:56 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 0:56 ... that (laughs) if you talk about UFOs, you were pretty much relegated to being a nutcase, and the giggle factor kicks in, right?

Joe Rogan 1:03 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:03 But things have changed then, you know? Uh, because of the fact that the military is now, uh, basically releasing hours of videotapes of things that defy the normal laws of physics. And the military has, has admitted that, quote, "They're not ours."

Joe Rogan 1:20 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:21 Before there was always that ambiguity that maybe it's a new stealth bomber or a new fantastic device being prepared by the military. Nope. The military now admits that they're not ours.

Joe Rogan 1:32 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:32 Then the question (laughs) is, whose are they then?

Joe Rogan 1:35 Yeah, the 2017 New York Times article, uh, in my mind made, uh, that was a big shift because when the New York Times is reporting about it and saying that this is major news and this is real and there's video evidence that they can't ignore when you talk to high-level people at the government and people like Commander David Fravor, who had that in- infamous, uh, spotting off of the coast of San Diego, when you hear about people like that, that are very reputable, it starts to change the conversation-

Michio Kaku 2:07 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 2:07 ... in a lot of peoples' eyes.

Michio Kaku 2:09 Right. See, it used to be that one person would see something in the sky and say, "Look, Martha, look, there's something up there." Now things have changed. Now we have multiple sightings by multiple modes. That is the gold standard, the gold standard for looking for these objects. Not just one person, but several people that are reputable. Not just radar, but visual sighting, infrared sensors, uh, telescopic evidence. Now we have multiple sightings by multiple modes, and so the burden of proof has shifted. It used to be the burden of proof was on the people who believed in UFOs. They saw something, prove it. Now the burden of proof has shifted to the Pentagon, to the military. Now they have to prove that these aren't extraterrestrial. And so I think there's been a sea change, a sea change in the last, uh, s- just several years. You know, 50 years ago, there was a congressional hearing and it was coming out of Project Blue Book and there was a lot of laughter and a lot of jokes about thing, little green men in outer space. 50 years ago, that's the way it was. Now things have changed. Now people are looking about- looking at are they a threat militarily? What kinds of sensors do we have? What kind of metrics do we have? We now have frame-by-frame an analysis of these objects. These objects travel between mach five and mach 20. That's 20 times the speed of sound. These objects can zigzag and we can measure the G-force inside the- this object. The G-forces are several hundred times the force of gravity. In other words, any living person's bones would be crushed by these objects, so they're probably drones of some sort. These objects can drop 70,000 feet in a few seconds. Think about that. It can drop a tremendous distance in just a few seconds, and they can go underwater. This is something that we didn't realize before, but yes, they can actually go underwater, and they also move without creating an exhaust or breaking the sound barrier. So, these are things that we can now document frame by frame looking at these videotapes.

Joe Rogan 4:26 So for yourself, what was the shift? And wha- how did you feel about UFOs, say like, th- 10, 15 years ago?

Michio Kaku 4:33 Well, there is this giggle factor, and, uh, it's the third rail, of course, of your scientific, uh, reputation if you believe in these things, but the evidence is accumulating over the last several years. Now, when I was first approached by Carol Ann Corey, uh, the producer of this film, A Tear in the Sky, I was skeptical. I said to myself, "Come on. I mean, five days? Five days you're gonna look for (laughs) flying saucers in the sky? What happens if the aliens are camera shy and they don't show (laughs) up in five days?" So, I was pleasantly surprised when they actually found something. They actually have photographic evidence of objects that can gyrate just the way the Pentagon has said. And so we now have a sea change. A, a center of gravity has changed with regards to looking at these objects. We no longer simply look at one individual seeing something in the sky. No. We demand hours of videotape, multiple sightings by multiple modes. That's the gold standard now.

Joe Rogan 5:36 So what do you think is happening? Do you think that this is something that maybe an- another government from another country has created that far surpasses our abilities, or do you think that this is coming from somewhere else?

Michio Kaku 5:50 Well, the Pentagon has, uh, listed, I think, five different options. Uh, one option, of course, is that they're weather balloons or something that's an artifact of our space program, maybe, uh, a piece of rocket, uh, that is, is plunging back into the Earth's atmosphere. Uh, that's one category. Another category is anomalous, uh, weather events. Uh, they happen and they have to be looked at very carefully. But the last option, the last option is other.

Joe Rogan 6:19 Mm.

Michio Kaku 6:20 That is not just the Russians or the Chinese, 'cause these objects apparently can gyrate (laughs) faster than what the Chinese and the Russians can, can, uh, muster. But it opened the door to the possibility of other. They didn't specify (laughs) what other was, but you can fill in the dots yourself. Now, one possibility for other is hypersonic drones.

Joe Rogan 6:43 Mm.

Michio Kaku 6:43 We see that in warfare now. The Russians, in the battle of Ukraine, is actually using hypersonic drones to hit targets inside Ukraine. Uh, to be hypersonic, you have to go faster than mach five. Anything faster than five times the speed of sound is called hypersonic. And so the Russians are now fielding hypersonic drones in warfare. But you see, this is something just in the last few months. These sightings, they go back decades into the past, with objects executing these gyrations decades ago. And that's why you have to take them seriously.

Joe Rogan 7:19 So the Commander David Fravor event that we talked about, off the Nimitz, that was 2004. Do we have an accurate understanding about military capability in terms of, like, drones and propulsion systems from 2004? Or are there things that are classified that we are not gonna have access to? Like, is it possible that, you know, 18 years ago, they had the capability to have a vehicle or a drone move this way, that just that information has just not been released?

Michio Kaku 7:54 Well, two years ago, the United States military admitted that it's stopped working on these hypersonic drones. Why? They're unstable. They zigzag, and that's why the Russians have put a premium on this technology to evade our Star Wars program. The Russians wanted a rocket that can maneuver and therefore outwit a stationary Star Wars system designed to shoot down these drones.

Joe Rogan 8:20 Right.

Michio Kaku 8:20 So that's why the Russians have put a priority on this, and they're now fielding it in warfare. We actually see them as a military weapon. Two years ago, the United States military stopped its program. They're too unstable. They, they were not reliable, and it was not worth the amount of money to put into it, 'cause the military was invested in the Star Wars program, not the anti-Star Wars program.

Joe Rogan 8:44 Mm.

Michio Kaku 8:44 But because Vladimir Putin announced the hypersonic drones, now the United States military said, "Oops, nope, we have to get into the game too." So now the United States is also working on hypersonic drones as well as the Chinese. So the Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans are all working on these things. But you can see how primitive they are. We're talking about objects that defy the known laws of aerodynamics with a technology beyond what we have today. And so that's why people are scratching their heads. (laughs) Whose are these things, if they're not the Chinese, the Russians, or the United States?

Joe Rogan 9:20 So one of the main points of contention is the lack of visible propulsion method, right? There's no, uh, uh, essentially, there's no heat signature. There's nothing that we understand to be present that normally exists when something is going at a tremendous rate of speed.

Michio Kaku 9:40 That's right. Not only that, these objects create no sonic booms. When you exceed the sound barrier, uh, you create a gigantic boom that is then s- shatters windows and can be heard miles around. These objects can effortlessly, uh, break the sound barrier and not create a sonic boom. And they don't create any exhaust. Uh, we don't see an exhaust trail from these objects. So either they're an optical illusion of some sort or they have a set of laws of physics beyond what we, w- w- what we can muster. Now, if they are a optical illusion, um, if an object were to move in front of your eyes, traveling at a very slow velocity, but you don't know how far they are away, you may think that object is very far away from you, traveling at enormous velocities. So a weather balloon drifting in front of your eyes can simulate an object traveling at hypersonic velocities if you think that weather balloon is far away from you.

Joe Rogan 10:41 Hm.

Michio Kaku 10:42 So how do you tell the difference? Well, you look at wind patterns. It turns out that many of these sightings, these objects defy the direction of the wind. If they are weather balloons that you confuse with a flying saucer, uh, then they would be moving with the direction of the wind. But these objects do not do that. These objects can go against the direction of the wind. Not only that, but we have multiple sightings. If an object is very, very far away... I mean, if an object is close to you, but you think it's far away, then it, then it's traveling at an enormous velocity while it's actually just drifting in front of your eyes. How do you tell the difference? By having multiple sensors, radar, infrared sensors, visual sighting. Then you can tell how far this object is away from you, and then you can say that, "Nope, it's an optical illusion." Well, (laughs) we do that now. We have multiple sightings of these objects by radar. We know how the velocity, the distance. Each time, it comes out to be real. And so that's why we're scratching our heads. Who has this capability? And the answer is we don't know.

Joe Rogan 11:52 Is there anything that's theoretical that you're aware of that could be applied, like some, from some other planet or s- some other galaxy or whatever, that, m- something that maybe we have theorized that could be responsible for the way these things are able to move?

Michio Kaku 12:10 Well, you know, when I talk to my friends who are physicists like myself about these things, they sort of, like, laugh, giggle, their eyes roll up to the heavens, and they say something very simple, that a rocket, using conventional means, would take 70,000 years to reach us from the nearest star. Therefore, these objects cannot exist. 70,000 years for a Saturn rocket traveling at 25,000 miles per hour to go from the nearest star to the planet Earth. That's why most scientists disregard these sightings, because they defy the laws of, of Einstein.

Joe Rogan 12:47 But isn't that kind of silly? Isn't that kind of like saying, like, you can't... You know how long it would take you to get a horse from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia? Isn't that kind of like saying that?

Michio Kaku 12:56 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 12:57 (laughs)

Michio Kaku 12:57 And that's why I say that that assumes that these aliens or whatever are maybe 100 years more advanced than us. But open your mind to the possibility that they are 1,000 years more advanced than us. 1,000 years is nothing compared to the age of the universe.

Joe Rogan 13:14 Right.

Michio Kaku 13:15 The universe is ar- about 13, uh, uh, 13 billion-plus years old. That's how the age of the universe. And so the age of a civilization just a few thousand years ahead of us, that is just a blink of an eye to the universe itself. And once you go to higher energies, the laws of physics begin to break down. The laws of Einstein and the laws of the quantum theory break down in something called the Planck energy. Why is that important? That's what I do for a living.

Joe Rogan 13:46 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 13:46 I work on something called string theory which lives at the Planck energy. The Planck energy is 10 to the 19 billion electronvolts. That is a quadrillion times more powerful than our most powerful atom smasher outside Geneva, Switzerland. Any civilization that can harness the Planck energy would be able to become masters of space and time. Space and time as we know it become unstable at the Planck energy, which is far beyond anything

Michio Kaku 14:17 that we can muster here on the planet Earth. So, we physicists theorize, how advanced do you have to be to access the Planck energy? Well, we rank them. The Kardashev scale says that there could be Type I, Type II, or Type III civilizations. A Type I civilization is maybe 100 years more advanced than us to maybe 1,000 years, sort of like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.

Joe Rogan 14:43 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 14:43 They control the weather. Volcanoes, earthquakes, anything planetary, they control. That's Type I. Then there's Type II. Type II is stellar. They harness the power of an entire star, like Star Trek. Star Trek would be a typical Type II civilization where they manipulate entire stars. Then there's Type III. Type III is galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes, they play with black holes, like, like, uh, the Empire of, uh, the Star Wars series would be a typical Type III civilization. Then the next question is, what type do you have to be to harness the Planck energy, the energy at which space and time become unstable, where wormholes may develop, gateways through space and time, portals through empty space? You have to be Type II or most likely Type III. Then the next question is, how long will it take before you become Type III? Well, we are maybe 100 years away from being Type I. We're maybe a few thousand years from being from Type II. And we're maybe 100,000 years being, uh, from being Type III.

Joe Rogan 16:01 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 16:02 And 100,000 years is nothing, nothing on a galactic scale. The age of the universe is, as I said, over 13 billion years old. And so once a civilization reaches the Planck energy, that is a Type III civilization, space and time become your playground.

Joe Rogan 16:21 How do they make the estimates of how long it would take to develop such technology?

Michio Kaku 16:26 Uh, by looking at the gross, uh, d- national product of nations. We know that most nations grow at the rate of maybe 2 or 3% per year in energy consumption. Given that number, 2 to 3% per year, we then calculate how much energy they would have in 100 years, 1,000 years. Now, we are about a civilization, about 0.7. Carl Sagan did the calculation. We're not point, uh, we're not a Type I civilization yet. We're Type 0.7. But that means that by the year 2100, at the turn of the century, we'll probably be Type I. And you can see that everywhere you go. What is the internet? The internet is the beginning of a Type I communication system. We're privileged to be alive to see the first Type I technology fall into our era. What about sports and culture? Uh, the Olympics, the beginning of a Type I sports. Uh, soccer-... the beginning of a Type I fashion with Gucci and Chanel, the beginning of a Type I language. The number one and two languages on the internet are English and Chinese. So we're seeing the beginning of a Type I language. So in other words, the greatest transition in human history is maybe 100 years from now when we become Type I, a planetary civilization harnessing planetary forces. That is perhaps the greatest transition in modern history, and we're about 100 years from becoming Type I.

Joe Rogan 18:04 So the Type I, we, we would be able to control weather events and we'd be able to control planetary events.

Michio Kaku 18:11 That's right.

Joe Rogan 18:11 Like, you, you believe that by Type I, we'll be able to prevent super volcano eruptions, things along those lines?

Michio Kaku 18:18 That's right. We'll have the power of an entire planet at our, our disposal and we see the beginnings of that today because that's been the biggest change in the last 100 years. 100 years ago, we existed as a fragmented civilization, nations battling each other for small turfs. Now, we're beginning to see the emergence of planetary blocks, a planetary economy beginning to dev- develop. And the internet, as I said, is the first Type I, uh, telephone system to fall into this century.

Joe Rogan 18:50 When you think of technologies that could potentially change the pattern of progression, meaning that, you know, w- we're on this sort of exponential rate of increase in technology, what about something along the lines of what Elon Musk is proposing with Neuralink, something that would change the way a human being's brain interfaces with information and with each other?

Michio Kaku 19:14 Yeah, I think that's coming. Uh, first of all, when you look at the history of science and technology, um, the first phase was the Industrial Revolution of 1800, uh, when we physicists worked out the laws of steam engines and thermodynamics. That was the first great transition in human society. The second great transition was when we physicists worked out electricity and magnetism. There you have us the Electric Age with dynamos and generators and radio and television. The third great transition was the Computer Revolution when we physicists worked out the quantum mechanics of transistors. So all of a sudden, we have lasers, transistors, and the internet. Now, we're entering stage four. Stage four is physics at the molecular level, meaning artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. You are now talking about the fifth wave, the fifth force, and that is physics at the atomic level, meaning brain net.

Joe Rogan 20:17 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 20:17 Brain net is when we harness the power of the brain, connect it to the internet. Also, quantum computers, when we start to use individual atoms to compute with not simply transistors, but no, atomic transistors. These are called quantum computers. They're coming. And third is fusion power. We're gonna have the power of the sun in a bottle in the fourth stage of technology. So Elon Musk, I think, is ahead of his time, but it's gonna take time to develop the, the brain hooked up to the computer hooked up to the internet. So the future of the internet, Internet 2.0, is brain net. When we mentally control the internet, you simply think and all your commands are, your wishes are fulfilled.

Joe Rogan 21:07 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 21:07 We put a chip in the brain. This has already been done. The chip in the brain is then connected to a laptop. The laptop deciphers the electrical impulses of the brain and then operates the internet, operates a typewriter, operates a wheelchair, operates the lights so that the person who's totally paralyzed can now live a (laughs) , a reasonable approximation to a normal life. We can easi- actually connect a human to a exoskeleton and have them kick a football to initiate the soccer games in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Joe Rogan 21:46 Whoa.

Michio Kaku 21:46 Two years ago in Sao Paolo, Brazil, it made headlines when a paralyzed man was hooked up to an exoskeleton designed at Duke University and he kicked the football, initiating the soccer game, international soccer games in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Joe Rogan 22:04 So was that a vi- is there a video of that available?

Michio Kaku 22:06 Oh, yeah. Uh, Google it.

Joe Rogan 22:07 See, see if you can find that.

Michio Kaku 22:08 Yeah, you can simply Google it. You can see him. You see him, uh, walk up to the ball and, and kick the, kick the soccer ball. And so eventually, we're gonna connect the human mind to the internet. So this means that emotions, feelings, sensations can be sent on the internet, not just digital signals, and that means that entertainment is gonna be totally revolutionized.

Joe Rogan 22:34 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 22:34 You know, Charlie Chaplin used to be this great actor, dominated the movies until the talkies came. And when the talkies came, nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore. You wanted to see actors talk. That lasted (laughs) for 50 years. And once we have brain net, then the actors of today could be put out of business 'cause people will want to know what actors are feeling, their emotional state, their sensations, and that's then gonna be the internet of the future, Internet 2.0.

Joe Rogan 23:09 D- What is the bottleneck in terms of communication? Is it, uh, the, like, if we do develop some sort of a, a method where human beings can commu- communicate through technology with our brains, uh, via Neuralink or some similar technology, would the bottleneck be language? And if so, would there be a way to create a universal language? Like, we, are we married to the m- the languages that we currently have because of our region? Because of, you know, you live in America, you speak English or Spanish or whatever you speak, but it's primarily English and Spanish. But you, if you live in Chinese, you speak the various dialects. You l- you, well, obviously, there's a lot of languages and that is an impediment to understanding each other.... do you think that it's possible that a universal language could be created? And if so, would it be created in a way that is very different than any language that's ever existed before?

Michio Kaku 24:09 Well, we're not there yet. Uh, first of all, the impulses of the brain are digital signals, uh, little blips on a computer screen, and then a computer simply tries to interpret what these little blips are-

Joe Rogan 24:22 Right.

Michio Kaku 24:23 ... and then tries to construct, for example, an alphabet so that you can type. You can type by thinking about it. But that requires you to take the, the signals from the brain and then have a computer decipher it through the English language into text. You want something different. You want a universal brain language. Uh, we're not there yet.

Joe Rogan 24:46 What about a visual language, like a hieroglyphics, like something along those lines? Like, where you could have a, a universal visual language that everyone learns at a young age?

Michio Kaku 24:58 Well, we already, at the University of California at Berkeley, been able to put the human brain into an MRI machine which calculates blood flow at thousands of points inside the living brain. Once you know the blood flow at thousands of points on the human brain, you feed that into a computer and the computer prints out a picture, a picture of what you are thinking.

Joe Rogan 25:23 Hm.

Michio Kaku 25:23 Now, I've seen these pictures. They're, they're not very clear. But the very fact that we can extract a picture from a living brain is incredible.

Joe Rogan 25:32 Yeah, I've seen that. It's pretty fascinating.

Michio Kaku 25:34 It's fascinating stuff. And even when you go to sleep-

Joe Rogan 25:38 Hm.

Michio Kaku 25:38 ... the machine keeps on going and will eventually print out your dream.

Joe Rogan 25:42 Whoa.

Michio Kaku 25:43 Now, this has not been done. I've seen pictures of the dreams. (laughs) They're, they're not very good yet. But that's just a matter of time, uh, because, of course, the number of pixels that we have is about 20,000 pixels of the human brain. In the future, we'll have millions of pixels of the human brain to have a much finer, uh, resolution of your dream. And of course, after your dream, uh, just make sure that your wife or husband doesn't get access to the picture. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 26:12 Ha, ha, ha. Or get a better wife or husband if they're getting mad at you about dreams. Um, do we have a video of the Sao Paulo? Yeah. Let's see this. Not a lot- So this is the guy. ... can't see much happening there. Oh, that's okay. So... It'll replay it, yeah. Oh, so it's very- It's quick. ... simple, yeah. Wow, what a, what a machine that's- Yeah. ... he's connected to. And, and do you liken that to, like, ancient technology, like Morse code as opposed to, like, what we could do now with cellphones? (laughs) And eventually this is gonna get far, far better?

Michio Kaku 26:46 Yeah. Remember, this is the first time in history-

Joe Rogan 26:48 Right.

Michio Kaku 26:48 ... that someone with an exoskeleton has been able to, on national television, execute something that we just take for granted.

Joe Rogan 26:54 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 26:55 You know? And that's today. Can you imagine what, what's gonna happen in the future?

Joe Rogan 26:59 Well, one of the things that Elon has said is that one of the first uses of this Neuralink technology will be to help people that have damaged spinal cords and help them regain full motion of their body.

Michio Kaku 27:10 Right, to bypass the spinal cord, right.

Joe Rogan 27:12 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 27:13 You know, the human brain... We, we can have a map of the human brain where the arm, the leg, the tongue are attached. So this creates what is called the homunculus. The homunculus is an image of a human body superimposed on the, on the surface of the brain. So when you wanna activate your leg, you simply know what part of the brain is connected to the leg and you simply put a chip there, and by thinking, uh, through that chip, you can then move your leg. Well, obviously by putting many chips throughout the surface of the brain, you can control the entire human body and stick that into an exoskeleton and become Iron Man.

Joe Rogan 27:54 Hm.

Michio Kaku 27:55 And Iron Man can fly, but of course, we can put, uh, jet packs, uh, with hydrogen peroxide fuel inside a jet pack and you can start to fly (laughs) just like Iron Man. Now, we're not there yet, but I'm just saying that in principle it is possible.

Joe Rogan 28:11 Whew. Do you... I mean, how old are you now?

Michio Kaku 28:16 Uh, 75.

Joe Rogan 28:17 Do you wonder how much you're gonna see before your time on this earth is done?

Michio Kaku 28:22 Well, you know, digital immortality is something that's coming.

Joe Rogan 28:25 I was gonna bring that up next. (laughs)

Michio Kaku 28:27 Uh, for example, uh, William Shatner sat for, what, three, four days, uh, answering questions and having it then recorded and then a computer homogenizes it, cuts it up, puts it in logical sequence so that you can talk to William Shatner years after he has passed away. And so this gives you a form of digital immortality.

Joe Rogan 28:51 Pretty crude, though.

Michio Kaku 28:52 Pretty crude. But then the question is, what do you do with it?

Joe Rogan 28:55 Right.

Michio Kaku 28:55 One is you can talk to your great, great, great, great, great grandkids. Uh, long after you're gone you can talk to them because all your thoughts, your feelings, your history, your dreams have been recorded, and you can impart your knowledge, your wisdom to your great, great, great, great, great grandkids long after you're gone. Another application is then to take this digitized human, put it on a laser beam, and shoot it throughout the universe at the speed of light. I call this laser porting. So you digitize the human, so all the responses of the human are on a digital signal, you put it on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon. In one second, your digital brain is on the moon. In 20 minutes, you're on Mars. And in four years, you're on Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. And so what do you do when you're on the moon? On the moon, you download your digital information, that codes who you are, onto an avatar.... and the avatar then can roam the moon and not have to suffer from weightlessness, cosmic rays, accidents, loss of oxygen. No, you are an avatar controlling all the movements on the moon. In other words, you can explore the galaxy this way. At the speed of light, the fastest known velocity in the universe, your digital brain waves and information about your brain and thinking can be shot throughout the universe. Now, this is all well within the laws of physics, and this is something that could easily be done within the next 50 to 100 years. However, I'll stick my neck out. I think this already exists.

Joe Rogan 30:42 Really?

Michio Kaku 30:43 I think that aliens in outer space don't use rocket ships. They don't use that rocket ships 'cause they, they crash, they have problems with gamma rays, radiation, food, whatever. They've digitized themselves, placed, placed their consciousness on a laser beam, and there's a laser highway, a laser highway that could be right next to the Earth for all we know, carrying the digitized souls of civilizations, and we're totally clueless. We're so stupid, we don't even know that that's how the aliens move from place to place.

Joe Rogan 31:19 What other options are there? I mean, isn't there an option of without, uh, with a lack of better words, folding space-time and generating enough power where you can move from one point to another point almost instantaneously?

Michio Kaku 31:35 Yeah, there are two ways to do that. Uh, first of all, in 1935, Einstein with his student, Nathan Rosen, wrote a paper about wormholes. So, a black hole is like a funnel. Take two funnels, stick them back to back, nose to nose. Uh, that is a wormhole that connects one funnel universe to another funnel universe. So, I have two universes connected by a gateway, uh, which is called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, otherwise known as a wormhole. That's one way to do it. The second way to do it was done by Mi- Michael Behr, a friend of mine, who was watching Star Trek one day and noticed how the Enterprise zapped across space by contracting the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you so that you do not go to the stars, the stars come to you.

Joe Rogan 32:31 Mm.

Michio Kaku 32:31 So think of walking across a carpet. You can walk across a carpet, which is the long way, or you can contract and compress the carpet in front of you, expand the carpet behind you, and then simply hop, hop over to the other side of the carpet. That is called the Alcubierre drive. Now, then the next question is, what's the catch? There's always a catch someplace, right?

Joe Rogan 32:56 Right.

Michio Kaku 32:56 Otherwise, we'd be zapping across the universe today, and that is energy. You would probably have to have energy comparable to that of a black hole. In other words, a Type III civilization would have the power perhaps to utilize wormholes or compress space to go across galactic distances. This, of course, is science fiction, but it's well within the known laws of physics that wormholes and Alcubierre drives, uh, that are there possible within the laws of physics.

Joe Rogan 33:27 What kind of an energy source could at least theoretically be used to generate that kind of power?

Michio Kaku 33:34 Well, in Star Trek, of course, they talk about the dilithium crystals.

Joe Rogan 33:37 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 33:38 Of course, there's no such thing as dilithium crystals, but there is something that can energize this machine, and that's called negative energy. Now, energy, as we know, is positive, but there is a situation where energy can become negative, and that's called the Casimir effect, which is actually measurable. We've actually measured in the laboratory. Uh, the Casimir effect is negative energy, and that's the fuel for a wormhole. Wormholes are stabilized by negative energy. In fact, it was Stephen Hawking who actually created a theorem using Einstein's equations to show that all possible wormholes, all of them, are based on negative energy. That's Hawking's theorem, where he proved that mathematically. Which means that if you have enough negative energy, then in principle, you could rocket to the stars.

Joe Rogan 34:30 And you could rock to the stars pretty quickly.

Michio Kaku 34:33 Oh, instantly.

Joe Rogan 34:34 Instantly.

Michio Kaku 34:34 Right.

Joe Rogan 34:35 So, l- if we're talking about a civilization that is 100,000 or a million years more advanced-

Michio Kaku 34:41 Type IIIs, right.

Joe Rogan 34:42 Yeah, that's what we're possibly looking at.

Michio Kaku 34:44 That's right.

Joe Rogan 34:45 So when you have these, uh, encounters like they had with that Tic Tac-shaped object that went from, I believe it was 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level and, you know-

Michio Kaku 34:57 Seconds.

Joe Rogan 34:58 ... less, yeah. So when you're talking about that kind of speed, possibly that's what you're looking at.

Michio Kaku 35:03 That's right. Uh, we're talking about them reaching us through a method that is far beyond chemical rockets. Chemical rockets, as I said, take, uh, 70,000 years to reach us from the nearby stars. While if, this is a huge if, if you could harness the power of Einstein's wormholes or Alcubierre's drive, then you could do this almost instantly, but you would need negative energy on a fantastic scale, stellar scale. In other words, you're basically Type III. So if you are a Type III civilization, then you do have access to the Planck energy, which is the energy of a black hole.

Joe Rogan 35:43 So, we're doing a lot of looking at the potential for the future, and we're looking a lo- uh, you know, what we think human beings are capable of doing thousands of years from now. What about... Are we...... are we looking at the potential different kinds of life forms? Like, we're the only intelligent life form on Earth that manipulates its environment in the sense of like what humans do. We build houses and planes, and things along those lines. We have other intelligent life, like orcas and whales, but they don't have the same capabilities that we have. Is it possible that there's something that exists that evolved in a way far different than us that has access to, uh, intelligence beyond what we think is possible?

Michio Kaku 36:36 Well, there are three basic ingredients that made us become intelligent. First is the opposable thumb, or a claw, or a tentacle, a manipulation device. Second is predator eyesight, eyesight of a predator. Predators are smarter than prey. Predators have to scheme, they have to stalk, they have to have camouflage, they have to deceive, which is much more difficult than that of a prey, which simply has to run. So, in other words, some kind of stereo eyesight of some sort. Third, language. Uh, a baby learns, uh, you know, several words a day. Uh, by the time they're in high school, they know f- several thousand words. Animals are lucky if you can get maybe 50 or, or so words out of them. So, those are the three ingredients that made us intelligent. And then you ask yourself a simple question, how many other animals have all three, an advanced language, opposable thumb of some sort, and stereo eyesight? Well, (laughs) we're the only game in town. But that doesn't mean that in the universe there couldn't be other situations with different combinations which have these three ingredients-

Joe Rogan 37:50 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 37:50 ... communication, manipulation of the environment, okay, and coordination of that. Um, that's how we became intelligent, and it could happen in, uh, o- other planets.

Joe Rogan 38:02 Do you think that one of the impediments is what we were talking about earlier, that the, the languages are so different? Like, in order for us to share knowledge with people in China, we have to learn their language, to share knowledge with Germany, we have to learn their lang- w- there, there's gotta be some sort of, uh, communication. What if a species developed where they didn't have a language barrier, or perhaps they communicate in a method that we don't understand yet, or that we're not capable of 'cause we live in a completely different environment than them? Like, maybe they communicate from the jump telepathically.

Michio Kaku 38:38 Well, they would have a definite, uh, advantage-

Joe Rogan 38:41 Yes.

Michio Kaku 38:41 ... if they could t- communicate telepathically 'cause then they can share, share knowledge almost instantly.

Joe Rogan 38:46 And that's not outside the realm of possibility, right?

Michio Kaku 38:49 Not outside the realm of possibility. However, (laughs) it'd be very difficult because our brain has not developed a universal language that allows us to communicate with other brains. Now, we do have what is called synthetic telepathy. Synthetic telepathy already exists, but that's mediated by a laptop computer.

Joe Rogan 39:08 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 39:08 You take two people who are paraplegics or, uh, have problems with, with their brain, you can connect the two brains together, but the language these, these two brains speak is still English.

Joe Rogan 39:22 Right.

Michio Kaku 39:22 So, that's a problem.

Joe Rogan 39:24 But we do-

Michio Kaku 39:24 We want a universal language.

Joe Rogan 39:25 Yes. But we do know that there's some species that communicate without language, like bees. You know, I remember we were filming this, uh, television show once, Fear Factor, and one of the things we did was we had this stunt that these people had to get covered in bees. So, this beekeeper who was, uh, hired to cover these people in bees had to stop the production down because a neighboring beehive had come over to investigate. And so these bees flew up into the air to visit with the neighboring bees, and they communicated. And I said, "Well, what do you have to do?" And he goes, "We just have to let them work it out." He goes, "They're gonna figure it out. It'll take a little while, though, so everybody should just move away." So we all moved away, and he watched his bees communicate with these other bees. I go, "What are they doing?" He goes, "We don't really know. We real- really don't know. We think they use pheromones. We think there's a... But somehow or another, they're going to relay that they are not moving in, that they're just temporarily here, and that will be enough for the neighboring bees to say, 'Well, enjoy your time here and take care.'" And that's what happened. I mean, obviously I'm simplifying it in the language. But something happened where they worked out that they w- these bees somehow or another knew that these other bees were not from there.

Michio Kaku 40:42 Well, when you look at ants, uh, in your own house, for example-

Joe Rogan 40:46 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 40:46 ... or in the forest, you notice that when two ants meet, uh, they, mm-m, they exchange chemicals-

Joe Rogan 40:53 Yes.

Michio Kaku 40:53 ... invisible chemicals, and they move on to the next ant, and they bump into them and then they exchange chemicals, right? So, we've tried to decipher that language, and it turns out there's only a handful of chemicals that we've identified that are exchanged between ants. And then, at MIT, they tried to construct artificial ants, robot ants. So when two robot ants meet, they exchange a limited vocabulary, just like what ants do in real life, a limited vocabulary. And then the next question is, with these mechanical ants, can you reconstruct ant society-

Joe Rogan 41:29 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 41:29 ... all of ant society given a primitive language that exists between two ants? And the verdict is still out, but the answer seems to be yes, that given a limited vocabulary between two ants, it's possible to construct ant society on the basis of a rather primitive language.

Joe Rogan 41:48 And when you say ant society, do you mean like the hierarchy of queen and workers and all that?

Michio Kaku 41:53 That's right, and building the nest-

Joe Rogan 41:55 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 41:55 ... and fending off invaders, and disposing of, uh, dead ants. And yeah, all the things that ants do can, can be replicated by a rather simple language that ants use when they communicate with each other.

Joe Rogan 42:09 What, what about really complex ant societies, like leafcutter ants that develop these caverns that allow for fermentation and air vents and... Have you ever, have you seen when they've poured cement-

Michio Kaku 42:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:21 ... into leafcutter ant-

Michio Kaku 42:22 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:22 ... colonies?

Michio Kaku 42:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:24 Fascinating.... like, they have very complex systems of caverns and labyrinths. I mean, it's weird stuff.

Michio Kaku 42:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:33 It's like, it's all these tubes that lead to these rooms and there's vents that go up through the, the, through the ceiling. And when they pour cement in it, it's, it almost is a shame because it's the only way they get to see it, but you have to kill all the ants and, you know, we, we, we get a chance to look at it, but it's magnificent what they're able to do.

Michio Kaku 42:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:53 And somehow or another, this is a universal trait amongst these leafcutter ants. I mean, they're able to do this all over the world.

Michio Kaku 43:00 Yeah, but unfortunately, we humans are stuck with language (laughs) and these languages are embedded through, through a society that created that language and there's no universal language, unfortunately. And it would be very difficult to extract a mental language using electrodes, uh, because the language that we get from the brain is interpreted through English and so it would be very difficult to have two brains communicate telepathically without having to go through English.

Joe Rogan 43:29 But what about what the ants are doing? How are they doing that? Do you have a theory? Do you have, have you ever stopped and thought about, like, f- the technology involved in the creation of all these labyrinths and the, the, these, the, these, uh, colonies and the fact that they're able to do this repeatedly?

Michio Kaku 43:45 Well, figure for the moment that they have a language, a language that is chemical, and they're able to exchange maybe 10 to 100 different chemicals. What kind of society can you create with 100 words? Well, if you think about it, (clears throat) we humans do pretty well with just a few hundred words to take a look at the evolution of human society. A few hundred words is enough to create a, a semblance of human society. A few thousand words, and then of course you're talking about accumulating new knowledge and new strategies, but just to have a society that operates, a few hundred words is probably enough. When people gossip, how many words do people use when they gossip? Just a few hundred words. And we know that because we have robots now that try to communicate by gossip.

Joe Rogan 44:34 That's hilarious.

Michio Kaku 44:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:35 You know, busy bodies of robots.

Michio Kaku 44:35 And we realize that just a few hundred w- few hundred words is sufficient to communicate most human interactions.

Joe Rogan 44:42 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 44:43 Now, to c- communicate power, high-rish, high-rish, hierarchies, engineering requires more than a few hundred words. But with a few hundred words, that's enough to create a model human society. And I imagine that these insects you talk about have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

Joe Rogan 45:00 But what's interesting that you just said, uh, to communicate things like power hierarchies requires more words, but they have power hierarchies. So, how are they communicating that?

Michio Kaku 45:11 Well, I don't know. I'm not an, not an insect scientist.

Joe Rogan 45:14 I didn't know that they farm fungi. Yeah. That might have a lot to do with it. You may have seen the impressive spectacle of leafcutter ant highway full of millions of bugs carrying cut sections of leaves, grass, or flowers back to their homes. Well, did you know that leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves that they harvest? So, they use this th- to, uh, okay, here it is. Leafcutter ants use leaves as their fertilizer to grow their crop. Fungus. They cultivate their fungal gardens by providing them with freshly cut leaves, protecting them from pests and molds and clearing them of decayed material and garbage. In return, the fungus acts as a food source for the ants' larvae. So, tha- that's really interesting, right, because we know that fungi and, uh, mycelium allows plants to communicate back and forth with each other through the soil.

Michio Kaku 46:04 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:05 (laughs) And they, they even use it to distribute resources.

Michio Kaku 46:09 Mm-hmm. But I claim that the, uh, number of words necessary to communicate with other entities, like insects, is probably not that large. Uh, uh, a human being, for example, could reasonably work with about 5,000 words. Someone who is semi-educated, went through high school, knows about 5,000 words. But just to create a society that works (laughs) probably requires only a few hundred words.

Joe Rogan 46:33 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 46:33 And that's probably well within the capabilities of insects.

Joe Rogan 46:36 Is it ... Are we limiting our, uh, ability to th- theorize by saying words? By thinking of words? Is it possible that instead of words, they have an understanding of the tasks at hand without defining them with sounds or with symbols and that this allows them a freedom of communication without all of the baggage that comes with words? Enunciation, context, all those different things.

Michio Kaku 47:09 Well, it's possible to record memories now. This has been done in a laboratory and these memories could be universal. Now, how do you do this? Short-term memories go through what is called the hippocampus. It's shaped like a horseshoe. It's at the very dead center of your brain. That's where the hippocampus is. If you put two electrodes, two electrodes on either side of the hippocampus, you can then calculate the, uh, the impulses that go back and forth. You recor- record it like a tape recorder. So, I now have a tape recorder of a memory created by a mouse whose hippocampus was connected to the tape recorder. Then, I take that memory and put it into another mouse.

Joe Rogan 47:51 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 47:51 Or I play it back to the first mouse after they've forgotten that memory. And bingo. Memories can now be transferred to the same mouse over time or to another mouse. So, this has been done already. So, it's possible that memories may be, in some sense, universal. The memory itself can bypass the English language and go directly to another human.

Joe Rogan 48:16 And perhaps bypass ant language. Like, there's no need for it, that they can express themselves without that.

Michio Kaku 48:23 Right. This has been done with mice already.

Joe Rogan 48:25 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 48:25 Now it's being done with primates. We wanna see whether or not primates can learn a simple task, like, for example, drinking water. That's what the mice were trained to do.... drink water, record the memory of drinking water, and then give it to another mouse.

Joe Rogan 48:40 Was it a complicated way to drink water? Was it like drinking water from a feeder or something?

Michio Kaku 48:44 Very simple. These are simple memories 'cause, of course, this is the first time it's ever been done.

Joe Rogan 48:47 Right.

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

Joe Rogan 48:55 But isn't drinking water a universal thing with mammals?

Michio Kaku 48:59 Uh, yeah, but any, any feat that they learn, okay, can, in principle, be encoded in the hippocampus, and then the hippocampus, in turn, its memory can then be encoded into another hippocampus. That's the point, that memories, in some sense, can be recorded.

Joe Rogan 49:17 I understand, but how do we know that the memories of drinking water are recorded and transmitted to another mouse? Because-

Michio Kaku 49:22 Uh, because they learn skills.

Joe Rogan 49:24 Oh, okay.

Michio Kaku 49:25 You can transfer skills that the other mouse did not have by transferring this.

Joe Rogan 49:29 So skills on, uh, different methods of acquiring water?

Michio Kaku 49:33 Yeah. So that different memories can be... And again, these are small snippets of memory. We're not talking about reading a book.

Joe Rogan 49:40 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 49:40 We're just talking about a simple memory can be recorded by looking at the impulses that go across the hippocampus.

Joe Rogan 49:47 Wasn't there an experiment where they took a mouse or they took mice or rats and they put them through a maze on the East Coast, and because of that, the m- the mice or rats, I forget which rodent it was, on the West Coast, was able to go through this maze quicker?

Michio Kaku 50:08 Uh, well, it turns out that with, uh, monkeys, it's possible to train monkeys to do certain very simple tasks and hook that by the internet to another monkey in Japan, and that these, these memories can be transferred via, via the internet. And so that is something that's been done with monkeys, not just with mice.

Joe Rogan 50:28 Right, but with the mice, I don't think there was a, an exchange of information in a traditional sense. I think the, uh... it was, this was, if I'm remembering it correctly, this is Rupert Sel- Sheldrake's, um, concept. He had this concept of morphic resonance, and the idea was that you could somehow or another bestow information, like in a primitive sense, through a species, where one spec- one member of the species learns it, and that in- information somehow, through some unknown method, becomes more readily available to other members of that species that are not directly connected.

Michio Kaku 51:07 Well, I don't know about that. We're talking about things that are reproducible in the laboratory-

Joe Rogan 51:11 Yeah, that's why I'm asking you.

Michio Kaku 51:12 ... using electrical signals.

Joe Rogan 51:13 I don't, I don't know if that was reproducible. See if you can find if that's reproducible, if that, they did that. 'Cause I remember... I'm 99% sure it was Rupert Sheldrake who was talking about that, and I remember thinking, like, that seems to be something that would be, like, a lot more popular, popularly known.

Michio Kaku 51:29 Yeah, but we're talking about things that are done... Uh, this w- these studies were done in Los Angeles. Um...

Joe Rogan 51:34 Right.

Michio Kaku 51:35 And, uh, we're talking about these th- uh, these things are publishable. Other groups at MIT have replicated these experiments. And so we're beginning now to understand the ways in which memories are created and transferred.

Joe Rogan 51:48 And when they transfer these memories, uh, from primate to primate through the internet-

Michio Kaku 51:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 51:52 ... what, what method are they using to transmit it?

Michio Kaku 51:54 Electrical.

Joe Rogan 51:55 Electrical.

Michio Kaku 51:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 51:56 So what is the, wh- what is the informa- how is the information encoded?

Michio Kaku 52:01 It's encoded as impulses, electrical impulses that go across the, uh, hippocampus that you simply tape recorded. In other words, there's no translator. There's no intermediary that translates into English and back into electrical signals. We're talking about raw electrical signals, the raw signals that you don't process at all-

Joe Rogan 52:20 Right.

Michio Kaku 52:21 ... simply being tape recorded and then shot into the same person months later, and they recall the memory that they forgot.

Joe Rogan 52:29 Right. And w- what was able to be achieved with these primates?

Michio Kaku 52:34 Uh, well, that's what's being done now.

Joe Rogan 52:36 Right.

Michio Kaku 52:36 First, it was demonstrated in mice. Uh, simple tasks like drinking water can be then transferred on- onto the internet.

Joe Rogan 52:45 I'm still confused about that because drinking water is a universal trait.

Michio Kaku 52:48 Uh, there were other traits too. Any trait that can be-

Joe Rogan 52:50 But when you say drinking water, does- doesn't every mouse know how to drink water?

Michio Kaku 52:54 Uh, yeah, but other things can be done. But they started with the simplest first.

Joe Rogan 52:58 Right, but how do we know that this information is transmitted to the mice since water drinking is just from the womb, they know how to drink water?

Michio Kaku 53:05 Well, what happened was they taught the mouse some tricks, and then they actually gave it a chemical (laughs) which allowed the mouse to forget the trick, okay? And then later, months later, after the mouse forgot the trick, they then did the, uh, shot the same electrical impulses into the hippocampus, and the mouse immediately remembered the trick.

Joe Rogan 53:26 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 53:26 That's how it was done.

Joe Rogan 53:28 And so what are they attempting to do with these primates specifically?

Michio Kaku 53:31 The same thing, that what you can do with a mouse, they think they can per- perhaps do with a primate. And eventually, the goal is Alzheimer's patients.

Joe Rogan 53:41 Ah.

Michio Kaku 53:41 A memory chip. They wanna create a memory chip that you push a button and then memories come flooding into the hippocampus of a Alzheimer's person so they know where they live. Uh, if they get lost, they know how to get back home. They know who to call, telephone numbers and things like that. That's the ultimate goal, is to create a memory chip for people that have fading memories like Alzheimer's patients. That's the goal.

Joe Rogan 54:08 And then once that's achieved, ultimately, the possibilities are endless.

Michio Kaku 54:14 Well, yeah, learn calculus at college by pushing a button. (laughs) And then-

Joe Rogan 54:18 The Matrix.

Michio Kaku 54:18 Just like The Matrix, right.

Joe Rogan 54:19 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 54:20 Having whole memories shot into, into the brain.

Joe Rogan 54:23 Um, I'm sure you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil.

Michio Kaku 54:26 Oh, yeah, I know Ray.

Joe Rogan 54:27 What do you think about Ray's ideas that we're going to eventually be able to download consciousness into some sort of a computer or something, and you will essentially inhabit that rather than be a biological entity like the...

Michio Kaku 54:44 Well-

Joe Rogan 54:44 Do we know enough about consciousness that that's even possible?

Michio Kaku 54:48 Well, digital immortality is coming, but digital immortality is coming in stages. What's being done now, today, is something that, that can be done anywhere. Uh, they took William Shatner, uh, sat him-

Joe Rogan 55:00 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 55:00 ... in a room and simply let him talk-

Joe Rogan 55:03 Right.

Michio Kaku 55:03 ... and, about his life. They recorded this huge volume of information, digitized it, so that in the future, his descendants can talk to him with a holographic image.

Joe Rogan 55:14 Right. But that's not him, right? Like, he-

Michio Kaku 55:16 That's not him, right.

Joe Rogan 55:17 We always think of ourselves as how we feel, like you're sitting here across from this table to, with me. It's not just your voice. It's not just th- your information that you have. It's you. Like, if I smile, you smile back. We laugh. We joke around together. This is two human beings interacting with each other. If, if it's just your digital memory and just your d- your voice in this digital mo- That's great for other people to experience, but you won't experience it at all. How far do you think we are... or is it even possible to make you exist inside some sort of a computer or some sort of an electronic entity?

Michio Kaku 55:58 This gets us into the Connectome project, uh, which I mention in my book, The Future of the Mind. The Connectome project is to locate the connections of every single neuron in your brain. So far, the Connectome project has been able to take a fruit fly, slice up the brain of a fruit fly, put it in an MRI scan, and then map exactly all the neural connection of 100,000 neurons inside the brain of a fruit fly. That's today. Now, that's 100,000 neurons. The brain has 100 billion neurons. So, you see how far we have to go before we have the Connectome project being able to create a digital copy of your brain. Uh, and then of course, you would live forever. All your thoughts, memories, personality, quirks-

Joe Rogan 56:50 Hm.

Michio Kaku 56:50 ... everything would live forever.

Joe Rogan 56:52 Right. But would it evolve? I mean, isn't a thing about your personality that evolves and changes depending upon your life experiences?

Michio Kaku 56:58 Well, in principle, it would be you. It would be a digital copy of you down to the neuron, uh, level. We don't have this. We won't have it for many decades to come. But we're making progress. Right now, we're up to 100,000 neurons being digitized. And in the future, it'll be perhaps a few million neurons, perhaps a mouse, uh, a rat, a rabbit. That's perhaps the next jump. And from there, perhaps jumping to a m- monkey, and then perhaps after that, jumping to a human.

Joe Rogan 57:26 Right. But what is a person, is the real question, because we fluctuate. We vary depending upon whether or not you got good sleep, whether or not your heart is broken, whether or not you got fired from your job, whether or not you've had a great success in what you do for a living or wha- what your, your hobbies are. You, you change your mood. You change the way you interact with people. Like, that's what a person is. Um, you know, are, are we... The romantic idea of what a person is, is something that creates and interacts, and there's so much more to a person than just your digital memory and the amount of information that you've accumulated and the standard patterns that you've expressed throughout your life up until now. I mean, you can have some sort of a profound life-changing experience tomorrow and decide that you're gonna change your ways and essentially be a different person than you were prior to that experience. When we're talking about a digital identity or a digital life, we're really talking about this sort of static thing that you are now, existing forever. But isn't what being a person is, one of the more interesting things about it, is that we evolve, and that with adversity and new information and relationships and the way we interact with each other, it changes. We, we vary depending upon our company. We vary depending upon the climate that we live in, the community that we find ourselves in. There's so many variables that we could think of as just data points, but there's something more complex about being a person.

Michio Kaku 59:05 Okay. Now there are two approaches to this question. The first approach is the top-down approach. The top-down approach says that we're nothing but a bunch of neurons, and you duplicate all the neurons and you feed all the information necessary for these neurons to calculate, and voila. We have a human.

Joe Rogan 59:22 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 59:22 Now the top-down approach met a lot of problems because of course the sophistication of the robot you created was extremely primitive. People were not satisfied with that. The thing couldn't learn, couldn't adapt, couldn't evolve, as you said.

Joe Rogan 59:36 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 59:36 That's the top-down approach. Now, we're looking at the bottom-up approach. Bottom-up approach is when you bump into things, you learn. Every neuron has to be changed every time you learn a new task. And so, the bottom-up approach is successful in doing things that we didn't think were possible. For example, a walking robot. It takes a lot of effort to make a robot walk because every single motion you have to include Newton's laws of motion, mechanics, leverage, and so on and so forth. That's a lotta work. However, bugs, bugs can walk instantly as soon as they're born. How do bugs do it when our most advanced military robot cannot do it? You take our most advanced military robot, put it in the forest and ask them to move around, what happens? They fall over. They, they're upside down like a turtle that's upside down. How does nature do it? Nature does it by neural networks, by rewiring itself after it learns every new task. So, you make a mistake. Well, you learn from that mistake. You make another mistake, you learn from that mistake. It's like when every mother says to their child taking music lessons, "How do you go to Carnegie Hall?"... practice, practice, practice. That's a bottom-up approach. So what ha- we now realize that human beings are both. We have the bottom-up approach when we're children and infants. We learn by bumping into things. That's why, uh, babies bite their toes. Why do babies bite their toes? Because they don't realize that their toes is connected to their body. (laughs) Their, their toe, they think is just an, an alien thing. They have to bite it in order to convince themselves that the toe is connected to the brain. That's the bottom-up approach. The top-down approach is when we go to college. When we go to college, we take courses on literature, philosophy. That's the th- the top-down approach. We now realize you have to have both. You have to have both. One is the bottom-up approach, what's called the neural network approach, and the other one is the top-down approach, which is what most people think robotics is.

Joe Rogan 1:01:45 One of the things that we were talking about with th- in the nurse outside before we came into this podcast is that I think that what we are now is not long for this world. I think that this thing, this romantic thing that creates music, that can-

Narrator 1:02:02 (coughs)

Joe Rogan 1:02:04 ... that can create a Jimi Hendrix or that can make comedy, create a Richard Pryor. Like, that thing is emotions. That thing is illogical sometimes, impulsive, but it creates these brilliant, moving works of, of art that affect us. It doesn't affect other creatures. I mean, I'm sure if you played a Jimi Hendrix song to a giraffe, it wouldn't give a shit. But to us, it's something incredibly magical. But I think that if you looked at what's possible in the future, that might be more of an impediment than it is an asset. And I wonder if w- with our integration, if we have this symbiotic integration with technology, that that might be one of the bottlenecks that we have to lose, and that our future selves, whatever we become... Like, if we used to be a single-celled organism, we became multi-celled organisms, we became a- ancient primitive primates, we become modern humans, we become symbiotic with some sort of an electronic thing. We, we intertwine with this. And one of the problems, if we look at all the things that are going on in the world, if we look at the greed that makes people become corrupt politicians, if we look at the horrors of war, we look at some of the more terrible things that people are capable of, how many of those things are attached to our ancient primate minds and our ancient primate instincts? And wouldn't it be far simpler and far easier to evolve if we left all those behind? But in doing so, we're gonna lose everything. We're gonna lose art. We're gonna lose love. We're gonna lose creativity and chaos and laughter and music and literature. We're gonna lose it all because we're not gonna be people anymore. We're gonna be more efficient thinking machines.

Michio Kaku 1:04:14 Well, some people ask yet another question, which is corollary to what you said, and that is, at what point do the machines become dangerous and turn on us? Well-

Joe Rogan 1:04:24 Artificial intelligence.

Michio Kaku 1:04:25 First of all, our robots today, believe it or not, our military robots have the intelligence of a cockroach, a retarded cockroach, a lobotomized, retarded, stupid cockroach. You put them in the forest, and they get lost. They get lost. You put a cockroach in the forest, they find food, mates, shelter. They do perfectly well in the forest. But I can visualize a time in the future when our military robots have the intelligence of a mouse, and then maybe a rat, and then maybe a rabbit, and then maybe a dog or a cat, and by the end of the century, I think perhaps, uh, the intelligence of a monkey. At that point, I think they're potentially dangerous because they have a mind of their own. They realize that they're not human. Now, dogs... You see, dogs are confused. Dogs think that we are a dog.

Joe Rogan 1:05:22 Do you think... You met Marshall. You met my dog out there.

Michio Kaku 1:05:24 Yeah. I-

Joe Rogan 1:05:24 Do you think he thinks you're a dog?

Michio Kaku 1:05:26 Yeah, because imprinting, when you're very young as a puppy, you imprint immediately on who's the top dog, who's the mother dog. And you're very early in your stage of, of growing up, you know your pecking order very, very clear because they are pack animals, unlike cats. Cats are not pack animals. They're hunter, lone hunters. That's why cats are very mysterious. While dogs are pack animals. They understand the hierarchy, and they understand that you are the top dog. They are the underdog, and they are, uh, you are the top dog.

Joe Rogan 1:06:00 But if you met my dog, you know that he reacts very differently to people than he does to animals. If he meets another dog, it's a very different experience. I think he knows the difference between a dog and a person. I just think he accepts the fact that humans are the dominant animal, but I don't think he thinks we're dogs.

Michio Kaku 1:06:21 Well, he thinks that w- they're his tribe-

Joe Rogan 1:06:23 His tribe.

Michio Kaku 1:06:23 ... because dogs are tribal animals-

Joe Rogan 1:06:25 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:06:25 ... that whatever you call it, we are members of that tribe, and we're the top dog. We're the leader of that tribe, and therefore, they follow.

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 But I don't think he thinks you're a dog.

Michio Kaku 1:06:34 Bu-

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 I think he's got the ability to discern between people and dogs.

Michio Kaku 1:06:37 Well, it's a question of hierarchy. We are at the top of the hierarchy. Whatever you call it, okay? Now-

Joe Rogan 1:06:42 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:06:42 ... what I'm getting at is, what happens when they have the intelligence of a monkey? At that point, they're potentially dangerous-

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:06:50 ... 'cause they can scheme.... they know that we're not monkeys, we're alien to them. So I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off once they have murderous thoughts.

Joe Rogan 1:06:59 But don't you-

Michio Kaku 1:07:00 Then-

Joe Rogan 1:07:00 ... think-

Michio Kaku 1:07:01 ... the next question is-

Joe Rogan 1:07:01 Sorry.

Michio Kaku 1:07:02 ... what happens 200 years from now when the robots become so intelligent that they know how to remove the chip, they remove... know how to remove all fail-safe systems? At that point, I'm guessing, maybe 200 years from now, I think we should merge with them.

Joe Rogan 1:07:20 Oh, boy. So, (laughs) so, um, when you say that they could have, like murderous intentions, aren't murderous intentions attached to all the things that we discussed earlier like ego, like, uh, the y- the need to breed, to control territory, all those things, all these biological functions that make c- competition a necessity for human beings in order to perpetuate the survival of the fittest? Like, all those things exist because human beings are these complicated animals that are trying to advance. But why would an artificially intelligent thing that's been created have any instincts to advance or to get better?

Michio Kaku 1:08:10 Well, we would have to program it because we are the gods, in some sense. We have to create these things in our machines.

Joe Rogan 1:08:18 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:08:19 But that's where we're headed. We're headed toward creating machines that are smarter and smarter, and eventually they'll realize self-awareness. Now, robots do not know they are robots. You go up to a robot and congratulate it for doing a fantastic feat, it thinks you're crazy. Robots have no self-awareness. However, by the time they're as smart as a monkey, I think they will start to have self-awareness. At that point, I think they're potentially dangerous because they realize that we are not part of the self, we're not part of the tribe, and why should they take orders from us when they're not part of the tribe? So I think as a interim measure, we should put a chip in their brain that simply shuts them off once they start to question who they are with respect to humanity. What I'm saying is, what happens when they're so smart that they can remove that chip?

Joe Rogan 1:09:09 Right, I understand what you're saying. But what I'm saying is, all those feelings of wanting to do bad things, of, you know, not trusting people, of wanting to dominate people and take over, aren't all those things biological? And aren't all they rel- aren't all those thoughts and all the negative aspects of human beings, aren't they related to our biological need to reproduce and to control territory? And why would they have that?

Michio Kaku 1:09:38 They don't.

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 Right, but they would never have that, uh, is what I'm saying.

Michio Kaku 1:09:41 Oh, no. We could program to-

Joe Rogan 1:09:42 But... Right, but why-

Michio Kaku 1:09:43 ... mimic our- our bad behaviors.

Joe Rogan 1:09:45 If we wanted to do that.

Michio Kaku 1:09:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:09:47 But we wouldn't, right? Why would we do that?

Michio Kaku 1:09:49 Well, for- for one thing, we have to realize, who pays for all this? I mean, these are all very abstract concepts, but who is the largest funder of this technology?

Joe Rogan 1:09:57 The government.

Michio Kaku 1:09:58 The Pentagon.

Joe Rogan 1:09:59 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:09:59 Not just the government, the Pentagon.

Joe Rogan 1:10:00 The military, yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:10:01 And the Pentagon does not create these objects to lose wars, they create these objects to win wars.

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 Right. And the idea of war itself isn't the problem, that human beings have these primitive primate minds that are accustomed to tribal warfare, so we scale that up when we can control entire continents and perhaps even control the entire world, that this is what we're doing.

Michio Kaku 1:10:27 So, some people have p- postulated that what we need is a new philosophy toward AI, good AI, friendly AI, as they call it-

Joe Rogan 1:10:37 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:10:37 ... rather than having robots being created to kill other robots and kill humans, which is the driving force behind this technology, to create robots that wanna help, that wanna nurture, that wanna be cooperative. And of course, there has to be money involved because who's gonna pay for all this? This is not cheap, right?

Joe Rogan 1:10:55 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:10:56 But that's ideally where you wanna go. This is called friendly AI, where AI does not necessarily go in the direction of survival of the fittest.

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 Right, but wouldn't there be money involved in cooperative interaction with all people? If- if human, like if we- we... Our economies are based on interactions, they're based on exchanges, wouldn't more cooperation and more exchanging of resources and more cooperation in terms of, uh, intellectual properties, wouldn't that be better for everyone overall because we would advance better? We would be able to solve some of our problems like climate change, pollution, things along those lines?

Michio Kaku 1:11:35 Well, ideally, yes, but we live in a practical world.

Joe Rogan 1:11:39 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:11:39 A world where sometimes idealistic notions don't get anywhere because there's no funding, there's no impetus, there's no desire in that direction, so we have to create one. We have to create a situation where we want to create robots, wanna create entities that want cooperation and to build rather than to destroy.

Joe Rogan 1:11:58 Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And w- wouldn't it be more intuitive for people to sort of accept those ideas if we slowly but surely abandoned a lot of our biological instincts? Like, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens is that they're so uniform and, like, when people have these visions of these grays... Now, I don't know if they're real or not, I don't... I have no- no opinion on that. But it's fascinating to me that they all take on the same sort of image. It's like this spindly thing with no muscle, it has a big giant head, and it seems to have no sexual organs. And when I think about humans and all the things that trip us up and all the things that, you know, cause so many of the problems we experience as civilizations-... it's ancient primate stuff. Like, if we didn't have sexual desire, if we didn't have ego, if we didn't have all the biological necessities of breeding and controlling property and territory, all the things that make war and violence, if all that stuff was eliminated through technology and through the advancement of the species, we would look like that. That, to me, is almost like a window into the future. If we go back from ancient hominids, Australopithecus, and look at what we hypothesize, what we theorize they looked like, they were very muscular, like, chimpanzee-like, you know, some sort of hairy creature, and then we look at what we are now. We're losing our hair, we're losing our muscles, our brains are much larger. The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, g- a gigantic mystery. What, what are we doing? Well, we're becoming more like what we imagine those aliens to be. It's almost like they're a blueprint for us.

Michio Kaku 1:13:58 Well, if you go back a few hundred years into the past, back then, they didn't talk about aliens. They talked about gremlins.

Joe Rogan 1:14:06 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:14:06 And they talked about, uh, all sorts of forest creatures and things like that. And then you look at pictures, pictures created by, uh, people that were fearful of gremlins and leprechauns and stuff like that. You say to yourself, "Oh my God, they look just like the (laughs) aliens of today." So, in other words, uh, there's a subconscious fear in our brains that these objects are gonna be dangerous to us, and it's been with us for hundreds of years. Now, there's something called sleep paralysis.

Joe Rogan 1:14:35 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:14:36 Sleep paralysis afflicts about 5% of the human race. When you wake up in the morning, you are paralyzed. Now, of course, when you dream, you are paralyzed, otherwise you would act out your dream, which is very dangerous. So, when you dream, you are paralyzed, and these people are the 5%, these people are still paralyzed when they wake up. They can't move and they have an image, an image of something sitting on their chest staring down on them.

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:15:06 And if you don't believe me, Google it. There's some paintings done during the Victorian era-

Joe Rogan 1:15:10 Oh, I'm well aware of it, yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:15:12 Yeah. And they are the gremlins.

Joe Rogan 1:15:13 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:15:14 So, it's part of our subconscious mind that we fear this image of a, of a dwarf-like creatures, uh, weak, big eyes, and that's the aliens that we see, uh, in the movies.

Joe Rogan 1:15:25 T-

Michio Kaku 1:15:25 It's part of our subconscious.

Joe Rogan 1:15:27 But, uh, uh, the, the gremlins, the images of the gremlins were always grotesque and terrifying. It's more nightmarish visions than... and mo- seems like it's more connected to the animal world than it is to some sort of a futuristic, advanced civilization tar- type thing. I wonder if we know when human beings started seeing that very specific iconic image, the image of the gray, because that's the, you know... Like, I, I mean, how much of it is through pop culture? We don't know, but I know Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first people that experienced this. You know, ironically, it always happens at night, right? So, it always happens when people are sleepy and the, the problem with th- that I have with that is that we know that when people are asleep, when they're dreaming, the brain releases all sorts of psychoactive chemicals, and that's responsible for these hallucinations and all these wild, vivid imageries. And I wonder how much of what's happening when people see these aliens is just because it's permeated pop culture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is the, you know, the quintessential alien encounter movie. I mean, that's what they all look like. There are these tiny creatures with the big heads. You remember that movie.

Michio Kaku 1:16:47 Yeah. Well, I agree with you that there's a canonical alien-

Joe Rogan 1:16:50 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:16:50 ... that, uh, big eyes and a dwarfish body and spindly arms and legs and so on and so forth, but that may have nothing to do with the aliens that actually do exist in outer space.

Joe Rogan 1:17:01 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:17:02 I believe they are out there. I believe that there are intelligent life forms in the galaxy. Galaxy has 100 billion stars and, uh, we know that 100%, uh, of them have planets on average. 100% of the stars you see at night have planets going around them.

Joe Rogan 1:17:19 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:17:19 Therefore, they probably have life forms on them, but they don't have to look like us. As I said before, all you, all you need is eyesight and, uh, uh, an appendage to manipulate the environment and language. Beyond that, like an octopus, I believe you could take an octopus, breed it, breed it for a few thousand years, and perhaps it'll become intelligent because it has eyesight, which is kind of feeble, but it has eyesight, it has tentacles by which to manipulate the environment, but it has no language. Okay? But I think it is possible that we could, if we could orchestrate this, grow an intelligent species from the Earth that don't look anything like us.

Joe Rogan 1:18:00 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:18:01 So, the fact that we see these alien creatures look just like a, uh, a dwarfish version of us is imprinted in our hippocampus and, and our, our, uh, amygdala of our brains.

Joe Rogan 1:18:13 Is intelligence limited to language, though? Because we do know that octopi do things that seem to indicate intelligence, like they know how to twist jars open, they know how to open things, they know how to manipulate stuff, they know how to climb out of a fish tank, go into another fish tank, climb in, kill the fish, and then climb back into their fish tank. Have you ever seen those videos?

Michio Kaku 1:18:35 Yeah. Amazing what they can do, right?

Joe Rogan 1:18:38 Yes.

Michio Kaku 1:18:38 But they do these as solitary creatures.

Joe Rogan 1:18:40 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:18:40 They don't do this in a coordinated fashion.

Joe Rogan 1:18:43 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:18:43 To build a starship, you had to have lots of coordination, uh, lots of minds put together to create a starship.

Joe Rogan 1:18:48 Right. I'm not saying that they have the kind of intelligence that we have, but there's a type of intelligence. You can't say that octopi aren't intelligent.

Michio Kaku 1:18:56 Oh, no. I think they have a level of intelligence that we've underestimated.

Joe Rogan 1:19:00 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:19:00 And I think a lot of, uh, things like the porpoise, the dolphin-

Joe Rogan 1:19:04 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:19:04 ... they have a language that we still have not deciphered.

Joe Rogan 1:19:06 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:19:06 We still have not deciphered the language of dolphins and, and, uh, sea creatures.

Joe Rogan 1:19:11 Yeah. Yeah. That, that's really fascinating because they also have dialects. They, they have different sounds that they make if they're in different parts of the world.

Michio Kaku 1:19:20 And we know they're intelligent because if you tape record their signals and run it through a computer program, the computer program looks for the repetition of certain sounds, like the letter E. The letter E is the most common sound in the English language, and you can rank them in terms of, of how often you use these symbols and then run Shakespeare through it. And you can actually tell whether two works of art were written by the same person, whether Shakespeare really did invent and write all these plays by running them through a computer program. You do that with a dolphin now, and sure enough, there's intelligence there.

Joe Rogan 1:19:57 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:19:57 You can actually see the intelligence in a tape recording of the sounds made by a dolphin.

Joe Rogan 1:20:02 How much of an effort, uh, is underway to try to decipher what they're doing and, and to be, maybe even communicate with them somehow or another by recreating those sounds?

Michio Kaku 1:20:11 Not much, unfortunately. Uh, but I think that's a shame because I think animals do communicate with each other. Their vocabulary, I don't know, I'm guessing, is on the order of 20 to 50 words, but still, that's enough for them to survive in the wild, and they definitely do communicate with sounds that are rep- repetitive-

Joe Rogan 1:20:29 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:20:29 ... indicating intelligence.

Joe Rogan 1:20:32 Are you aware of John Lilly?

Michio Kaku 1:20:33 No.

Joe Rogan 1:20:34 John Lilly is a pioneer of interspecies communication who developed a... He, he tried to come up with methods to communicate with dolphins and they, they had this one study that they were running that got shut down because this woman was living with a dolphin, essentially. They filled, uh, uh, a tank up and had it waist high in water and gave her a bed so she would climb out of the water into the bed and she would live with this dolphin and communicate with it. But the dolphin was always, um, sexually aroused and it wouldn't communicate and it wouldn't participate in any of the things while it was horny, essentially. So she, for a lack of a better phrase, manually manipulated the dolphin to climax and, uh, they found out about that and they shut down the study 'cause they thought it was disgusting that this woman was masturbating a dol- uh, a dolphin. But what he was trying to do, he was trying to come up with a bunch of different ways to interact with, uh, with dolphins and he... but he was trying to get the dolphins to communicate with human language, like get the dolphins to say human things and teach them. I don't think they ever really got anywhere with it, unfortunately. But he was a wild guy. He was also the guy that invented the sensory deprivation tank.

Michio Kaku 1:21:54 Well, I think it's the opposite, that instead of having dolphins learn English-

Joe Rogan 1:21:58 Yes.

Michio Kaku 1:21:58 ... we should learn (laughs) the language-

Joe Rogan 1:22:00 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:22:00 ... of the dolphins.

Joe Rogan 1:22:01 But this was in the '60s. Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:22:03 Also, back then, I still remember-

Joe Rogan 1:22:05 In the '70s.

Michio Kaku 1:22:05 ... that the, uh, pleasure center of the human brain was isolated.

Joe Rogan 1:22:08 Mm.

Michio Kaku 1:22:08 And that by pushing a button, you can stimulate your own pleasure center. You take a mouse and you stick a mouse to a telegraph key and the telegraph key stimulates the pleasure center of the mouse until the mouse dies of starvation. So the mouse would rather die of starvation than stop stimulating his pleasure center.

Joe Rogan 1:22:28 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:22:28 They go up the evolutionary scale and then they started to do the dolphin. They put a dolphin in a chamber. By moving forwards and backwards, the dolphin can stimulate its own pleasure center. So they wondered, what would happen? Would it starve to death? Well, (laughs) what happened was the dolphin would hit the pleasure center repeatedly until it realized, "I'm dying. I'm gonna die." So the porpoise would stop, get some food, and then go back (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 1:22:55 Hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:22:55 ... and stimulate himself some more.

Joe Rogan 1:22:57 Well, you know, those dolphin study, or the, the, um, the mice, when they did that with mice and rats, they... The problem with that was they had put these things in a very unnatural environment, like the same thing they did with cocaine and heroin with, with rats. And that when they tried to recreate the study but they gave them a much larger, more natural environment, they stopped doing it. They stopped taking cocaine until they died, they stopped taking heroin until they died, they didn't self-stimulate the same way they did before. They essentially were doing it to medicate themselves because they were in a very unnatural laboratory environment of being in a cage and bright lights and the whole deal.

Michio Kaku 1:23:35 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:23:36 When they gave them an environment that's much more normal and natural, they, they didn't do that. They would l- you know, occasionally d- dabble with whatever drugs they were stimulating them with, but they went on to live normal rat lives.

Michio Kaku 1:23:50 Hmm. Well, as I understand, some experiments were done on humans-

Joe Rogan 1:23:54 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:23:54 ... years ago. This, of course, would be unethical probably today. But back then, humans had realized that, um, this is going nowhere, that at a certain point they begin to stop. They're smart enough (laughs) to realize this is madness.

Joe Rogan 1:24:07 Well, do you know about the woman who... There was a woman in the 1970s, I actually have a joke about it in my act, where she was, uh, allergic to pain medication.

Michio Kaku 1:24:14 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:24:14 So they, they drilled holes in her head and they stuck wires, uh, into various parts of her brain and gave her an electrical device, and when she felt discomfort, she could hit this button and a surge of electricity would go into the pleasure centers of her brain and she would orgasm. And she orgasmed all day long. She stopped communicating with her family, she stopped personal hygiene. It was a very complicated study because they, they were trying to figure out what to do about this. She begged them to take it away, and then she fought them when they tried to take it away from her. She developed an ulcer on the finger she used to manipulate the, the thing, because, uh... I'll, I'll read it for you because it's very fascinating 'cause I, I saved this, uh, this study because it's so crazy, 'cause it tells you so much about human nature.... it's, uh, I think... See if you can find it, Jamie. I th- I wanna s- It's somewhere in... It's, uh, it's somewhere in the 1970s, but this is- this is from the study. "At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed on the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude. At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator and each time demanding its return after a short hiatus." So they did try that with people.

Michio Kaku 1:25:46 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:25:47 We're not ready. (slaps desk)

Michio Kaku 1:25:49 Also, there was an experiment done, I think in the '50s, with bulls. There was a professor at Columbia University who located the part of the bull's brain that would stop them if they're charging.

Joe Rogan 1:26:03 Mm.

Michio Kaku 1:26:03 So what they did was, of course, bulls will charge, uh, uh, a bull in the wild will charge you if you enter a, an arena with them. He personally, a Columbia professor, would enter the bullring-

Joe Rogan 1:26:16 Oh, God.

Michio Kaku 1:26:17 ... with a live bull-

Joe Rogan 1:26:18 (laughs)

Michio Kaku 1:26:19 ... and there are videotapes of it, I just saw it the other day, videotapes of the bull charging this professor at Columbia. He had a button, he pushed the button and the bull stopped immediately.

Joe Rogan 1:26:32 Wow.

Michio Kaku 1:26:34 And this, of course, raised a lot of eyebrows 'cause we're no longer talking about reading the mind, we're talking about mind control, which is different from simply reading thoughts and transferring thoughts from human to human. We're actually talking about changing behavior from the outside. And so there are videotapes, you can, you can Google them, showing that there he is, pushing this button. He's right there with the bull, just a few feet away, and the bull comes to a dead stop when you push that button.

Joe Rogan 1:27:06 Now, is the device-

Michio Kaku 1:27:08 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:27:08 ... connected by wires or is it wireless?

Michio Kaku 1:27:11 Uh, I forgot whether it was connected by a wire. It probably was, I'm not sure.

Joe Rogan 1:27:15 Good. Boy, you would be really terrified if one of those wires broke.

Michio Kaku 1:27:18 (laughs) Right. Oops, sorry about that.

Joe Rogan 1:27:21 (laughs)

Michio Kaku 1:27:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:27:21 It just seems like such a risky move-

Michio Kaku 1:27:23 (sighs) .

Joe Rogan 1:27:23 ... for the actual professor. I feel like you could hire a rodeo clown and teach him how to hit the button-

Michio Kaku 1:27:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:27:28 ... he'd be better off. At least he would understand how to evade the bull.

Michio Kaku 1:27:31 Yeah. But after that, people-

Joe Rogan 1:27:33 Oh, here it is right here.

Michio Kaku 1:27:35 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:27:35 So this is Jose Delgado, Implants and Electromagnetic Mind Control. So you have this bull, they operate on it-

Michio Kaku 1:27:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:27:44 ... and we're watching this video and this is... It seems like it's a long time ago.

Michio Kaku 1:27:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:27:48 What year was this?

Michio Kaku 1:27:48 I think it was in the '50s.

Joe Rogan 1:27:50 Wow. So he, the bull comes at him and it seems like he does something and the bull just stops.

Michio Kaku 1:27:57 Yeah, see? It stops-

Joe Rogan 1:27:58 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:27:58 ... and goes the other way.

Joe Rogan 1:28:01 Wow.

Michio Kaku 1:28:02 There he is.

Joe Rogan 1:28:02 So, but I'm, I'm confused as to how it's-

Michio Kaku 1:28:04 (clears throat) .

Joe Rogan 1:28:05 ... attached. Whether it's a radio signal, because it doesn't seem like there's a... It's hard because it's very low resolution. It's in someone's hand.

Michio Kaku 1:28:12 Yeah. It looks like it's wireless.

Joe Rogan 1:28:14 Yeah, it's, it's definitely something in his hand, but is it-

Michio Kaku 1:28:16 Probably.

Joe Rogan 1:28:16 ... connected by a wire? Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:28:19 Probably, probably a radio.

Joe Rogan 1:28:21 Wow. Boy. (scoffs) It's amazing that... So what does it say there? 19- Oh. I'm just trying, I'm gonna try to Google more information. It says, "1965 experiment-" Wow. That's far. "... with an implanted bull." Wow. So the name of this, uh, the, uh, video, if you wanna watch it folks, Jose Delgado Implants and Electromagnetic Mind Control.

Michio Kaku 1:28:42 Now, remember, this was done at the height of the Cold War-

Joe Rogan 1:28:44 Right.

Michio Kaku 1:28:45 ... when people were worried about The Manchurian Candidate. You know-

Joe Rogan 1:28:47 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:28:47 ... that movie?

Joe Rogan 1:28:48 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:28:48 And mind control. During the Korean War, uh, certain GIs were brainwashed, so there was a whole hullabaloo around brainwashing, mind control. So what did the CIA do? The CID cons- constructed something called MKUltra.

Joe Rogan 1:29:05 Mm-hmm.

Michio Kaku 1:29:05 You've probably s- read about-

Joe Rogan 1:29:06 Sure, yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:29:07 ... MKUltra, right?

Joe Rogan 1:29:07 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:29:08 But that's one of the motivations for MKUltra, the fact that you could actually determine the behavior of a bull who's charging at you-

Joe Rogan 1:29:16 Yeah.

Michio Kaku 1:29:17 ... with a button.

Joe Rogan 1:29:18 There's a fascinating book called Chaos, uh, written by a guy named Tom O'Neill who wrote about