Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      Uh, first of all, thanks for coming, man.

   3. BABobby Azarian0:15

      Thank you for having me. This is amazing.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      Well, when I g- got the request and I read the, the title and the subject of your book, I was immediately hooked. I was like, "Dude, I gotta get this guy in quickly." The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.

   5. BABobby Azarian0:33

      Yep.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:35

      Tsk, yep. How does the... how do we know this? How do we know how the universe organizes?

   7. BABobby Azarian0:38

      (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:38

      Is this... Are you guessing? (laughs)

   9. BABobby Azarian0:41

      (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       First of all, tell people what you do.

   11. BABobby Azarian0:42

       I mean, I think, I think it was an intuition that I had, um-

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       Can you tell people, like, what you do? Like, what your field of study is?

   13. BABobby Azarian0:48

       But yeah. So, you know, this is, this is all backed by complexity science, and when I say complexity science, uh, that's really not one field. It's an integration of all the sciences. So, physics, biology, cognitive science, uh, computer science, and, uh, yeah. From those sciences, we're getting a new picture of the universe and, uh, cosmic evolution and the role that life may play in the process. So, my background, uh, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, uh, I got my PhD from George Mason University. Uh, I was really interested in the problem of consciousness. So, how does the brain create consciousness? What is the connection between consciousness and complexity and cosmos? Um, so, yeah. It, it was sort of an i- intuition that I had when, uh, I guess I was an undergraduate and I started taking, like, all of the basic science courses, like a physics course, and you learn about the second law of thermodynamics and, uh, the kind of popular interpretation of that law, uh, is that the universe tends towards disorder. And that didn't completely match up with, you know, my observations and, you know, what we understood about how, after the Big Bang, you had the formation of planets and stars, and then, on this planet, we see organization all around us. Um, so most of the popular books at that time, like, that was, like, you know, I graduated high school in, like, 1999 and so, popular books were like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History in Time, um, and those books, uh, kind of painted life as this improbable, kind of, statistical fluke, not a regularity. And, um, so, you know, some of those ideas didn't seem quite right to me, and I was really interested in this increase in complexity, and so I started, like, looking up these sorts of topics and I found out about the, uh, research being done at the Santa Fe Institute, which is kind of like the, uh, mecha for complexity science, and then, uh, there was this emerging world view that the universe is becoming more and more complex and it doesn't violate the law of second, uh, the second law of thermodynamics at all.

   14. JRJoe Rogan3:23

       Can we get you to turn your phone off? Or just shut the... It dinged.

   15. BABobby Azarian3:27

       Oh.

   16. JRJoe Rogan3:27

       Just, just shut the... Just put it on, uh, do not disturb or something like that.

   17. BABobby Azarian3:31

       Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan3:31

       Um, so somewhere along the line, the idea was that the universe tends towards chaos. Like, why do you think they were thinking that? Like, what was the philosophy behind that?

   19. BABobby Azarian3:45

       So, yeah. It's kinda complicated. Um, the second law of thermodynamics started off being about, uh, heat flow. Um, thermodynamics is, uh, the science of energy or energy flow, and so originally, the law said that, um, uh, heat will flow from a hotter to a colder body, so there's this just natural tendency for, um, heat to kind of spread out and for energy to kind of disperse and dissipate. And, uh, this had to do with, uh, steam engines, and steam engines basically, uh, convert energy from heat flow to, uh, mechanical ene- energy that can power locomotives. So, uh, Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius, two European scientists, um, were trying to understand this in the 1800s and they found out that this, uh, energy conversion process wasn't always 100% efficient, that, uh, some of the energy, uh, some of the useful energy would, uh, get dissipated basically, uh, when this physical process creates heat. And so what the second law said originally was that, uh, the useful supply of energy in the universe was always dwindling, uh, because every mechanical process requires energy to do work and it creates some heat, and heat is basically like you creating body heat right now. You eat food, you metabolize that, and then that energy is dissipated as heat and you can't extract the energy, uh, that was dissipated as heat again, so it becomes useless.

   20. JRJoe Rogan5:44

       Mm.

   21. BABobby Azarian5:44

       It's still there. There's the first law of thermodynamics which is about the conservation of energy. You can convert, uh-... one type of energy into another type. But, uh, this, uh, useful supply is, uh, getting turned into entropy. And entropy was, uh, originally, uh, a measure of the quantity of energy no longer available to do work. It wasn't until later that there was a statistical interpretation of this law by a scientist named Ludwig Boltzmann. And he basically, uh, tried to understand the second law in terms of the, uh, uh, I guess the evolution of a mini-particle system. And what he saw was that if you had an ordered system, there would be this natural tendency towards disorder, simply because there's many more ways for, uh, a system of many components to be mixed up and spread out compared to ways to be ordered. So, then the law became about this order to disorder transition, uh, and we hear about that all the time. The popular examples are rooms get messier, they don't organize themselves.

   22. JRJoe Rogan7:07

       Mm-hmm.

   23. BABobby Azarian7:07

       Um, but the paradox that emerged from that was that life seems to, uh, defy this tendency. And so the question is, if systems tend towards decay, uh, what's going on with the biosphere and all this organization we see? And Erwin Schrödinger, uh, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, actually wrote a very influential book, uh, on biology called What Is Life? And he explained this paradox. He explained that, um, basically, the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and open systems have energy coming in. So, uh, the Earth is an open system. Uh, we have a sun, and it's beaming down energy on the planet. And that systems can evade this tendency toward decay, uh, if they can extract useful energy from the environment. For plants, it's sunlight. For us, we need to eat food. Uh, as long as we can continue to do that, we can sustain order against this second law tendency towards decay.

   24. JRJoe Rogan8:21

       So, you were, uh, looking at this idea of the universe tending towards chaos, and it didn't sit right with you. Like, how long did you theorize about this? Like, how- what- what led you to write a book about this?

   25. BABobby Azarian8:39

       So, as I mentioned, I was really interested in this mystery of consciousness, because, uh, it seemed like, you know, kind of the last frontier of science. Now we know there's- there's lots of mysteries to be solved. There's like dark matter and dark energy, all- all types of stuff. But in the '90s, uh, people were thinking that physics had essentially solved all the major problems. Um, but really it's because physics, it was reductionist physics. Uh, and basically, that approach doesn't think about life and consciousness and human civilization. So, it sort of leaves those things out of the picture. Um, but, you know, you can have a physics of those things too, and that's what complexity science is. So, um, yeah, I was interested in consciousness, but what happened was I found out to really understand how consciousness emerges, and intelligence, um, it really starts with the origin of life. And I'm not saying the most simple life forms are conscious, but what I understood was, you know, you can think about a bacterium, uh, performing a process called chemotaxis. And that's kind of a scary word, but all it means is that, uh, the bacterium swims towards chemical food and away from toxins. So, it has this, uh, uh, very rudimentary, uh, intelligence. And, um, if you're trying to understand the brain and consciousness and intelligence, it seemed to me that you have to understand, uh, life as well. And so at George Mason, uh, there was a professor named Harold Morowitz, and he came from the Santa Fe Institute. So, he's a big complexity guy and one of the premier origin of life researchers. And he was doing this work that, you know, got into the stuff I was just talking about, thermodynamics, because to understand life, you have to understand it as a phenomenon that does evade this tendency towards decay. And to do that, it has to extract energy from the environment. And so he had a book called The Emergence of Everything, which was like looking at the big picture, uh, because life is one emergence, consciousness is another emergence. As the universe gets increasingly complex, new phenomena emerge with surprising properties. And this is a lot different than the other approach that I mentioned, reductionism, which is focused on how nature's simplest components, like particles, uh, act in isolation. So, complexity science cares about how, uh, more complex systems, uh, h- you know, their dynamics, their evolution. And, um, you see that systems, uh, experience, uh, or- or display properties like consciousness that aren't, um, there when the components exist in isolation.

   26. JRJoe Rogan11:55

       So, meaning like the amino acids? What do- what do you mean by-

   27. BABobby Azarian11:57

       Yeah, they're not conscious.

   28. JRJoe Rogan11:58

       Right.

   29. BABobby Azarian11:58

       So, yeah. So-

   30. JRJoe Rogan11:59

       But do we know that, though?
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yes, I think so.…

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      en- enables creativity and communication, self-awareness, correction, like, all those different things that- that ... There- there's obviously something happening. So, it- the idea that you can't measure it, is that just because we don't understand what it actually is? Like, what's-

   2. BABobby Azarian15:15

      Yes, I think so.

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:16

      Right. 'Cause consciousness is a thing, right?

   4. BABobby Azarian15:19

      Uh-huh.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:19

      We can ... We- we're talking about it. It's- it ... Even if it's theoretical.

   6. BABobby Azarian15:23

      It is a thing. So, yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:24

      Right.

   8. BABobby Azarian15:24

      I don't think it's necessarily right to call it immaterial. Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:27

      Right. So, it has to be ... There's something going on. So, is it just that we lack the tools to measure it, or the understanding of how to quantify it?

   10. BABobby Azarian15:34

       We're starting ... Yes, we did.

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:36

       We did.

   12. BABobby Azarian15:36

       And that's kind of why those, um, philosophies got big. Um, well, actually, our- our tools, you know, and our theories that are being used to start to quantify it, one of those theories, uh, interpreted as cer- in a certain way seems to support the panpsychic view, or a- a sort of modified version, saying that not everything is conscious, but that you can have very, very simple systems that are conscious as long as they're integrating some amount of information.

   13. JRJoe Rogan16:10

       So, what I was gonna ask you is, if we agree that humans are conscious, what is not? Is a single-cell organism-

   14. BABobby Azarian16:15

       Oh. So- so-

   15. JRJoe Rogan16:16

       ... conscious?

   16. BABobby Azarian16:16

       I mentioned materialism.

   17. JRJoe Rogan16:17

       Yes.

   18. BABobby Azarian16:17

       So, since, uh, it was thought that consciousness was immaterial or kind of defined that way going back to Rene Descartes, they wanted to ignore it altogether. And so, that position is called illusionism, and the idea is that consciousness is an illusion. And, uh, so when you said everybody agrees that we're conscious, yeah, everybody does when they're pressed, but they have this kind of ... A lot of, uh, materialists or physicalists is kind of the- the- the modern term for that position, um, they say consciousness is an illusion. And it's not even really clear what they mean by that. I mean, they explain it, but at the same time, they say they do have experience. Um, so, yeah. It's-

   19. JRJoe Rogan17:04

       They do have experiences, s- meaning they have consciousness.

   20. BABobby Azarian17:07

       Yeah. They have consciousness.

   21. JRJoe Rogan17:09

       So, like, what is ... Like, what is their definition of what consciousness is? It's like ... So, the thing that we're calling conscious-

   22. BABobby Azarian17:16

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:16

       ... or consciousness, if they're saying it's an illusion-

   24. BABobby Azarian17:19

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan17:19

       ... like, what do they think the process of creativity is?

   26. BABobby Azarian17:22

       It-

   27. JRJoe Rogan17:22

       What ... The- the process of cognitive function? There's something going on.

   28. BABobby Azarian17:25

       Yeah. It's interesting. It's kind of double talk, because they will admit they have it, but when they say it's an illusion, I think what they mean ... They mean a few different things by it, but there is no point in the brain where you can, uh, you know, locate consciousness. Um, it's a global phenomenon. So, it's something that emerges from this harmonized collective activity of, uh, you know, 80 billion neurons interacting. And, uh-... they also mean that, uh, consciousness doesn't have any causal power. And by that, I mean they don't think that your conscious thoughts actually do anything in the world. Like, when you decide to raise your arm, they think it's just, uh ... the brain is getting sensory input and there's algorithms encoded in the brain, and then that's creating a behavioral output, almost like this reflexive machine, like an automaton.

   29. JRJoe Rogan18:24

       So, how are you aware of this output? What is that?

   30. BABobby Azarian18:27

       So basically, they say consciousness is what's called an epiphenomenon, and that means that it's there but it's not doing anything. So they, then they admit that we have conscious experience.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Um, so-... yeah, it…

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      it all.

   2. BABobby Azarian30:01

      Um, so-... yeah, it sounds like it when I say that. There, there are all these different options as to why there could be this fine-tuning. Um, but, uh, w- while the story I'm telling in the book is purely mechanistic, so you can describe this process, which I think is very spiritual and, uh, psychedelic. It's, um, also something that, you know, you can describe and articulate, uh, mathematically, uh, in ter- in computational terms. So, there's no m- mystical force pushing this. It's just, uh, basically, uh, components in nature interacting and evolving and adapting. But, uh, there does seem to be this larger design. So, for example, um, I know Elon Musk is a friend of the show. He believes in this, uh, simulation theory.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:58

      Yeah.

   4. BABobby Azarian30:59

      That we're not in base reality, and that there could be a base reality that co- sort of like encompasses this, and we are maybe a simulated world the way we can create computer simulations and video games. Those agents aren't conscious yet, but could it be possible? Maybe, maybe not. But that idea that we are living in a simulation, to me, is not that different from any sort of intelligent design theory of religion, uh, so you could see, um, a sort of general version of the world's religions as being something similar to a simulation theory that says that this, you know, reality is created by some other intelligent agent.

   5. JRJoe Rogan31:45

      I'm not sure I follow you. So, w- a s- simulation theory is similar to intelligent design?

   6. BABobby Azarian31:51

      Yeah, so the simulation theory is, uh ... Well, it depends on ... Okay, so there's the intelligent design movement, which says that life is, uh, like a product of God being like, "Okay, I'm going ... There's a universe already."

   7. JRJoe Rogan32:07

      For lack of a better word, God.

   8. BABobby Azarian32:08

      " Yeah, and I'm gonna-"

   9. JRJoe Rogan32:09

      Yeah.

   10. BABobby Azarian32:09

       "I'm gonna create life right now."

   11. JRJoe Rogan32:10

       Okay.

   12. BABobby Azarian32:11

       And that violates like the causal closure of the universe, basically the idea that, um, things can happen in the world that aren't caused by other physical causes. Um, so that's a bad theory. Uh, it, it doesn't, uh ... It's, it's not a scientific theory. But the idea that the universe is a simulation created by intelligent agents that are somehow outside of this reality is very similar to, uh, deism. And a lot of our most famous physicists and scientists of history were deists. So, the, the difference between deism and theism is that, uh, deism, uh, imagines a creator that set the laws of physics and then let the system evolve according to those laws. So, many of our greatest physicists, uh, Newton, uh, later, even more mo- you know, ones that came after him, like, uh, Maxwell and, uh, Sir Arthur Eddin- Eddington was a proud mystic. These were men of science. Uh, Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, was religious. Um, so, uh, the idea that this universe has some sort of design created by an intelligent agent, I'm not saying that's the case. But I'm saying, people who are considering simulation theories, there's not much of a like functional difference between those models. Um, you're talking about an intelligent agent that designed this process. Here's the thing. Uh, that agent, even if you're saying it's something like a god, could have been created by an evolutionary process as well. So, all we're doing is acknowledging that this level of reality might not be base reality.

   13. JRJoe Rogan34:12

       I see what you're saying. So, even though it is a biological thing, like, uh, evolution created life, but life created a simulation theater.

   14. BABobby Azarian34:21

       Well-

   15. JRJoe Rogan34:21

       That could be possible. This is, this is what people think.

   16. BABobby Azarian34:24

       I, I guess-

   17. JRJoe Rogan34:24

       They think that if, if-

   18. BABobby Azarian34:25

       Yes, sir.

   19. JRJoe Rogan34:25

       ... if we are right now currently able to make things like virtual reality and Oculus Rift and all that stuff-

   20. BABobby Azarian34:31

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan34:32

       ... that one day, we will be able to create something that's indiscernible from reality itself.

   22. BABobby Azarian34:38

       Yes.

   23. JRJoe Rogan34:38

       So, how do we know if we're not in that already-

   24. BABobby Azarian34:41

       Exactly.

   25. JRJoe Rogan34:41

       ... in the questions? We don't.

   26. BABobby Azarian34:42

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan34:42

       And so, when they ... The laws of probability theory, that's when this comes into play. When they take into account all of the potential life out there in the universe, all the in- potential intelligent life, where we're going, what we will 100% eventually attempt at least to create, which is some sort of an artific- artificial environment. I mean, that's what Facebook is doing with Meta, right? All those commercials?

   28. BABobby Azarian35:09

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan35:09

       Where they're, they're jazzing you up for this idea that you're not gonna have to live in reality anymore.

   30. BABobby Azarian35:13

       The Metaverse.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. BABobby Azarian45:00

      composed of all of these people. These people, uh, basically form something like a social organism or, uh, something like a brain. And because we're exchanging information in much the same way cells in a body or neurons in a brain, uh, communicate through chemical and electrical signals. So, (clears throat) uh, basically ... Yeah, um (smacks lips) , uh, Chinese, um (smacks lips) , ideology, uh, it has one good aspect. They believe in this concept of the interdependent whole. So, people should kind of, uh, care about, like, society as a whole. Um, you should put, you know, the greater good, uh, before your individual good. But, um ... So- so, that will allow the emergence of something like this social organism, which is a natural part of evolution. But, uh, China specifically doesn't allow, uh, criticism of the government and, uh, new ideas, uh, so there's not a diver- diversity of ideas in that culture. And so, the social organism that is that nation, uh, can't evolve, uh, optimally. It won't be sustainable. Um, you need this, uh, diversity of ideas to have the most functional, um, productive society. That doesn't mean in the short term China can't be like, super productive. But when something happens, when shit hits the fan, like we saw with the pandemic ... I don't know if you saw those videos of people just like, screaming out of their apartment buildings-

   2. JRJoe Rogan46:42

      Mm-hmm.

   3. BABobby Azarian46:42

      ... when like, they had all these lockdowns.

   4. JRJoe Rogan46:43

      Yeah.

   5. BABobby Azarian46:44

      When their freedoms are taken away and like, there's some sort of existential threat looming, then, uh, the system gets chaotic. And, uh-

   6. JRJoe Rogan46:54

      Yeah. But it's just people yelling. I mean, it- it- I don't-

   7. BABobby Azarian46:56

      Yeah, no.

   8. JRJoe Rogan46:57

      The- the system's been around for 1,000 years. I mean, China has been functioning in one form or another-

   9. BABobby Azarian47:03

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan47:03

       ... as a dictatorship for a long, long time.

   11. BABobby Azarian47:06

       Well, so, uh, with a society, you want this optimal balance of like, top-down and bottom-up control, or, uh, centralization and decentralization. We hear about-

   12. JRJoe Rogan47:17

       Mm-hmm.

   13. BABobby Azarian47:17

       ... decentralization with the crypto and blockchain-

   14. JRJoe Rogan47:20

       Yep.

   15. BABobby Azarian47:20

       ... movement. Um, so China has this like, top-down control, and they don't allow people to express opinions and criticism. So, they're not having that bottom-up influence of ideas, uh, that's necessary-

   16. JRJoe Rogan47:33

       Right. So, they need us-

   17. BABobby Azarian47:33

       ... for this balance. Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan47:35

       ... to steal ideas from.

   19. BABobby Azarian47:36

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. Which is another problem. Um-

   20. JRJoe Rogan47:39

       Which is fascinating.

   21. BABobby Azarian47:39

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan47:39

       I mean, that's a big thing that they do in- in intellectual property theft.

   23. BABobby Azarian47:43

       Yeah. Yeah. I know. So, um, with, you know, these sorts of authoritarian governments, you can get a lot done quickly because people at the top are making decisions. And, um, sometimes, you know, those decisions will be good for the people. But in the long run, I would argue that it's not a sustainable model.

   24. JRJoe Rogan48:05

       And you think this is because of the access of the information also seems to exponentially be increasing? I mean, if you go back to the invention of the printing press to what we have going on today-... one of the things you see consistently is that the access to information increases. And as the society expands, the access to information increases, technological innovation increases, and all of these things work functionally together. And what China's trying to do now is, uh, they're trying to create a bottleneck, right? They're trying to stop that and, and lock things down.

   25. BABobby Azarian48:37

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan48:37

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

   27. BABobby Azarian48:44

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan48:44

       They're trying to, you know, hide things about Tiananmen Square and all the atrocities of the, of the CCP, and they're doing their best to try to keep everybody scared and locked down. But you think that, like, ultimately, this is only ... They only have short-term success in doing this, but the system itself is just far too complex and expanding, and they won't be able to, like, keep all the water in the net?

   29. BABobby Azarian49:05

       That's what I think. Um, I mentioned that, you know, there are these two, uh, aspects to complexity, where you want a diversity of parts and you want, uh, connections between those parts. And so, us becoming connected through the internet, through blockchain systems, um, uh, allows ... Z- it's basically like creating, like, uh, synapses that are in the brain. You have, like, this, um, structure of the brain where you have 80 billion neurons, and every neuron is connected to another neuron by 10,000 connections. And so, everything is connected. Um, so that's kind of what the internet is doing, and social media and blockchain, and it's allowing for greater information exchange among individuals. And so, when you try to cut people off from the internet, um, you're basically, like, cutting these connections, uh, off, uh, that the system really needs to, uh, do computation. And like, collective computation is what nations do. They are very similar to, uh, standard biological organisms, which are communities of cells working together in an integrated fashion. So, one thing that I talk about in the book is how ... Basically, we can look at, um, evolutionary principles, uh, 'cause evolution is really optimizing systems to be as robust and energy efficient and stable as possible. We can look at these systems, we can look at how brains work, and we can try to model society after those principles.

   30. JRJoe Rogan50:39

       And so, you think that this is a process that is leading towards what? Do you extrapolate? Do you, do you really think that ... Like, do you wonder, like, what humans are actually doing, what consciousness is actually doing, and why the universe has this as a, a tendency-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Right. …

   1. BABobby Azarian1:00:00

      those, those ordered structures.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:02

      Right.

   3. BABobby Azarian1:00:02

      And, uh, so, um, well, one point you made was that, you know, we're on this small planet. Uh, what the book argues and what a lot of origin of life researchers are arguing is that life isn't improbable. It's probably not only here, that where you have the right conditions, life emerges inevitably. So if you have the right ingredients, it'll cook something up.... uh, and that will be life. So, there, uh, are estimated to be something like, you know, billions to maybe trillions of Earth-like planets out there that life may have emerged on and maybe intelligent life. To assume that we are the only intelligence out there is to say that what happened on this planet is extremely, almost infinitely improbable, and I don't think that's the case. People like Richard Dawkins have argued that, uh, life emerging on other planets will evolve according to Darwinian mechanisms and these new, uh, processes of self-organization that we're describing. And so, if the universe is waking up through life ... and so when I say that, I wanna be very clear that I'm not talking about panpsychism. When I'm saying, "The universe is awake," I'm talking about just, you know, conscious agents like us are awake and the univer- verse used to be all inanimate matter prior to life, so in a very literal sense, the matter in the universe is waking up. So, if there is this process and we find ourselves on this planet at this point, it's, of course, going to look, you know, like there's not much other life out there and that consciousness doesn't have this cosmic significance. But that's just how it looks right now at this stage, and we're already starting to see how technology can bring life off the planet. I mean, you know, couple hundred years ago, people thought it was impossible to fly. Actually, I, I learned this from a friend, there was a New York Times article that came out something like 10 months before the Wright Brothers created the plane that said it would take, like, 10 million years, some ridiculously long amount of time, for humans to invent, like, you know, aircraft. Um, so we can already see that this process, um, basically has no limits. Uh, and, um ... So, the, the other thing you said was that, you know, is it kind of like anthropocentric, uh, to, like, you know, people think we're projecting human qualities on the universe when you say, like, maybe, like, the universe is waking up. But I think that's a mistake to, th- to talk about humans as if we're not part of the universe. We're part of that physical system, so I don't think it's right to be like, "Oh, consciousness is something that only, you know, applies to humans and it's this, like, quirky thing." Um, we are part of the cosmos, and you can't strip away consciousness from the description of the universe without taking away one of the, its most interesting aspects.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:03:16

      Interesting to us, but why is it interesting to the universe? Like, if the universe doesn't care if stars blow up and, like, if, i- if there's, if there's no consciousness to the universe-

   5. BABobby Azarian1:03:26

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:03:26

      ... right? Other than ours, why is consciousness even critical?

   7. BABobby Azarian1:03:31

      So, um, I do believe there is an intelligence to the universe in the sense that, uh, there is fine-tuning of parameters that allow for this. So, a oak seed evolving into an oak tree, uh, I don't think many people think that seed is conscious. It doesn't have any experience, any subjective experience. But there's still an intelligence there that ensures that the seed develops along this trajectory into this complex thing. So, you can look at the laws of physics as, uh, serving as something like cosmic DNA that's leading to something greater. And if that's true, uh, it means that reality is fundamentally purposeful or goal-oriented, and philosophers use this term teleological. And, uh, for a long time, it was, you know, it wa- it was, it was considered, like, wrongthink for, for scientists to talk about teleology, but now it's coming back in a big way because of this story of complexity science and us trying to understand the, the physics and mathematics of biological agency. We, you know, we move with purpose. We're, we are, you know, material systems that have acquired information. So, it's starting to seem like reality is intrinsically purposeful. Now, what sort of spiritual implications you might, you know, take from that, you know, that's very subjective. But, uh, let me give you one example of a theory that would explain this design and this, uh, movement towards something conscious, um, that is not religious in nature.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:05:24

      Okay.

   9. BABobby Azarian1:05:25

      So, there's a theory called cosmological natural selection, uh, by a physicist named Lee Smolin, and he put this out in, like, the '90s. And string theorist Leonard Susskind, he, uh, said this theory should, you know, should get a lot more attention. Um, it's kind of strange that it doesn't. Um, people like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, uh, like this theory. So basically, it says, what if our universe, uh, is not the first universe? Um, in this model, basically, uh, so we have singularities, right? We, we know about the Big Bang. That's the beginning of the universe, but we also have black holes that are singularities. This is a little bit complex, but I promise-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:06:13

       (coughs) Okay.

   11. BABobby Azarian1:06:13

       ... it's gonna be simple in a second. So the idea is that when a black hole forms in this universe, it creates a baby universe, so it creates, like, this, you know ... There's this pocket of universes that evolve through this process. Now, the baby universe will inherit, um-... the laws and constants of physics of the parent universe, but with a slight, uh, variation, because nature is fundamentally noisy. Uh, it's, it's not going to give rise to the exact same thing. So now, you have a picture of a universe that gives rise to offspring universes, and, uh, those universes, uh, the ones that are good at creating black holes, uh, will thrive the way organisms that are good at reproducing thrive. And so, then you're going to have this gradual cosmic, uh, cosmological natural selection process, where universes that reproduce are the ones that are favored, and the conditions that favor black holes also happen to be the conditions that favor stable universes that produce life. So over time, even though you start with this, uh, lifeless universe, you will get this, um, tendency to create universes with order, that are stable. And then you can take the theory a little bit farther and, uh, say that, um, uh, an intelligent, technologically advanced civilization can create new universes by creating black holes with something like a particle accelerator. Uh, cosmic inflation, uh, theorists like Alan Guth, people have talked about how it could be possible, theoretically, to create a universe. Um, the idea would be that, uh, since life, uh, technologically advanced life could create universes, you get this natural tendency towards life, not only life-friendly universes, but these universes that become increasingly complex over time. So now, you can explain the fine-tuning of the laws and all this design in terms of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:08:39

       So, the, the idea is that consciousness ultimately leads to the birth of the universe-

   13. BABobby Azarian1:08:45

       Uh, so-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:08:45

       ... or a universe.

   15. BABobby Azarian1:08:46

       Yeah. So, so it's interesting, um, you know, it depends on the sort of language you use, because now it's starting to sound like panpsychism again, right?

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:08:55

       No, no, not necessarily. The ... Look, I used to have a joke about this, that, you know, the Big Bang is one of the great mysteries of science, right? They, they didn't, they don't know why it cre- and-

   17. BABobby Azarian1:09:03

       Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:09:03

       My thought was that if you sp- get enough time and people get more complex and develop more and more technology, and you develop people that are socially disconnected and maybe on the spectrum, and they're super geniuses, and one guy makes a Big Bang button. And, uh, and he just goes, "I'll fucking press it," and he hits it. Boom. And every 14 billion years, people get smarter and smarter and to the point where they can create a Big Bang.

   19. BABobby Azarian1:09:33

       Well, it sounds like you already have this theory.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:09:34

       And they just reset, like a control-alt-delete reset for the universe.

   21. BABobby Azarian1:09:38

       Yeah, we need to create a Wiki page and show you as the founder of this brilliant theory. I think ... No, I th- I think it ma-

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:09:45

       (laughs)

   23. BABobby Azarian1:09:45

       (laughs) No, I think it makes sense, but the question is where did they come from?

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:09:49

       Right. Well, yeah. What came first, the chicken or the egg?

   25. BABobby Azarian1:09:52

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:09:53

       And why ... But the, the, the thing I'm getting at is like, why is, if ultimately stars die and ultimately they consume all the, the, the gases around them, the planets around them, like, what is so important about biological life? And I guess the answer could be if biological life leads to further and further complexity to the point where further and further competency, uh, the ability to actually restart a universe or create a universe or create the kind of pow- Like, I had Michio Kaku on yesterday.

   27. BABobby Azarian1:10:27

       I heard, yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:10:28

       It was really fun, really interesting conversation. But one of the things we talked about was the different types of civilizations.

   29. BABobby Azarian1:10:33

       Mm-hmm.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:10:33

       That we are about, uh, zero seven to 10 in, uh, l- in terms of like a Type I Universe.
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. BABobby Azarian1:15:00

      life has to emerge inevitably, and then it starts to take over the whole structure of the cosmos. So, that's why I call the book The Romance of Reality. There's this intrinsic mystery. Now, we're not talking about anything supernatural, we're talking about natural processes, but the fact that it's not just life-friendly. The universe doesn't just support life, it seems to necessitate life, and then life, uh, is po- potentially propagated forever. Uh, I think that's just, like, the trippiest, like, most mind-blowing thing possible.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:15:33

      Yeah.

   3. BABobby Azarian1:15:33

      And it has spiritual implications to me.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:15:36

      And when you're looking at it this way, if you're looking at th- this as a function of life, you- w- the way we know of, a- at least as- we are the adv- most advanced thing in terms of our ability to manipulate our environment that we- that we're aware of in the cosmos. And if you look at how we got to where we are, we got to where we are by solving problems-

   5. BABobby Azarian1:15:59

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:15:59

      ... and avoiding conflict. So without those problems, without conflict, there would really be no incentive for innovation. There would be no reason. Like, if we all achieved some sort of oneness and spiritual enlightenment and we had no desire to make better cellphones, where would we go?

   7. BABobby Azarian1:16:15

      Yep.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:16:15

      Like, what would we do? And also, the problem of natural issues, whether it's super volcanoes, asteroid impacts-

   9. BABobby Azarian1:16:24

      Pandemics.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:16:25

       Yes. All sorts of crazy things that can happen that are natural, they create the need to innovate and to create- to create the need to advance society to avoid potential catastrophes like this in the future.

   11. BABobby Azarian1:16:38

       Problems create progress.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:16:40

       Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why you kind of need the chaos. You need the yin and the yang.

   13. BABobby Azarian1:16:46

       Yes, yes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:16:46

       Yeah.

   15. BABobby Azarian1:16:46

       Tha- that's order and disorder, life and entropy. So, the- there's this, like, kind of dualistic aspect to nature when you look at it in this way that's-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:16:54

       Yeah.

   17. BABobby Azarian1:16:54

       ... super interesting and probably the reason that the whole, you know, Taoism thing exists.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:16:59

       Well, the Chinese figured it out so long ago. It's like, it's really interesting when you look at that yin-yang. Like, that- th- they- they knew that this- all this ... And if you look at the yin-yang, like, what it- what is fascinating about that symbol is that it looks like it's in motion.

   19. BABobby Azarian1:17:15

       Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:17:15

       It's not as simple as, like, there's a circle and one half is black and one half is white. No, it's like it is a- it's- it's almost like it's in motion.

   21. BABobby Azarian1:17:23

       Yeah, yeah. No, that's really cool. I didn't think about that, but yeah, it totally is.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:17:26

       Pull up the- the image of the yin-yang. One of the things that I also love about it is there's a little bit of both in each one.

   23. BABobby Azarian1:17:31

       Yeah, yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:17:32

       There's a- there's a tiny dot of black in the white. Look at that. And a- and a dot of white in the black. And- this- that's what's so intres- it's unfortunate-

   25. BABobby Azarian1:17:41

       It's-

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:17:41

       ... that that is on so many stoners' walls-

   27. BABobby Azarian1:17:44

       (laughs)

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:17:44

       ... that it's become trite, you know?

   29. BABobby Azarian1:17:46

       Yeah, I was gonna say. I was like, maybe that's not unfortunate that that's on their walls, but that's become trite, yeah, and cliché.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:17:50

       Yeah.
7. 1:30:00 – 1:36:42

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. BABobby Azarian1:30:00

      like, why haven't they made themselves known to everyone? Uh, you have a lot of good answers to that too. Maybe it would be too shocking. Maybe it has to be in this gradual way. Maybe this is how they do it. They kind of show these little signs, they let, you know, the government release, like, these videos of their existence as to not, like, create total panic.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:30:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. BABobby Azarian1:30:19

      Um, so I'm not one of those people that says it's not possible, but, uh, we have to consider other theories. We have to consider that it's advanced military aircraft. Um, I heard some things from a friend who kind of, like, follows, uh... Oh, I think, um, I think it was a recent guest you had. It was a- a... I think it was a... I- I didn't watch it so I don't know for sure, but I think it was a transgender woman from the military and maybe talking about-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:30:48

      Yeah. Kristen Beck.

   5. BABobby Azarian1:30:49

      Yeah. So... And did she say something about that, like, there are, like...... uh, ideas that, um, the government has, like, created these videos, uh, uh, using, like, drone technology to make it look like, uh, that these are aliens, but it's actually, like, some sort of-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:31:09

      Is that something she talked about?

   7. BABobby Azarian1:31:09

      ... like, ps- psyop or something.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:31:11

      Jamie?

   9. NANarrator1:31:12

      I'm thinking. I'm trying to think.

   10. BABobby Azarian1:31:13

       Maybe she didn't mention that. Maybe it was, like, uh-

   11. NANarrator1:31:16

       There was something she was talking about-

   12. BABobby Azarian1:31:17

       Maybe there's-

   13. NANarrator1:31:17

       ... about projecting things in the sky or something like that.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:31:21

       Right. Right, like holographs or something like that?

   15. NANarrator1:31:23

       Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

   16. BABobby Azarian1:31:24

       But, so could it be a psyop? I mean, there are psyops. There's MKUltra-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:31:26

       Yeah, but there's other, there's other things.

   18. BABobby Azarian1:31:28

       ... weird things. (laughs) Yeah, but-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:31:29

       Yeah, but there's, there's, but there's other things that are d- undeniable proof of, uh, advanced technology that we don't understand. I mean-

   20. BABobby Azarian1:31:35

       Yeah, technology, yeah. So, I- I'm with you there. I- I just was throwing that out there because, you know, we wanna consider all possibilities, like this is some sort of-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:31:43

       Yeah.

   22. BABobby Azarian1:31:43

       ... psyop. It's just kind of strange that the government suddenly, it's like, is coming out with this. And like, if it was true, like, would they be coming out with it in this way? So, I'm not saying that's not true. I'm saying, there's a bunch of weird shit going on. The only way to get to the bottom of it is to consider all possible theories. It's kind of a Bayesian approach. And we need to lay out the evidence for each theory. Uh, and so, we need to rate how likely each is to be true, given what we know. Then we need to make predictions with those theories about if one was true, what would we expect to see? And then we need to go out and investigate. And then, uh, we need to update the probabilities of each of those being through, uh, being true after we've, uh, done more investigation.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:32:28

       One of the interesting things about the conversation that I had yesterday with Michio Kaku was that, at one point in time, he thought that it was preposterous, that the idea of, uh, us being in contact with alien life, it was silly. It was one of those things that physicists, he said-

   24. BABobby Azarian1:32:41

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:32:41

       ... would roll his eyes at, would roll their eyes at.

   26. BABobby Azarian1:32:43

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:32:43

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

   28. BABobby Azarian1:33:13

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:33:13

       And he was explaining how these are sophisticated tracking systems that have found these things, and then multiple points of evidence, video, eyewitness accounts, tracking systems, and that all these things point to something that is a phenomenon that is clearly real. There's too many different points of evidence that point to something actually taking place, but something that we don't understand, something that exists in a technological realm that has not been, in h- in his eyes, has not been explored currently on Earth.

   30. BABobby Azarian1:33:50

       Yeah, so I think we're at the, you know, the most interesting point in history. Because, uh, assuming that the kind of conspiracy theory that I just mentioned isn't true, that these videos are somehow faked, um, then we have two possibilities, which both are mind-blowing. Uh, either it is aliens and they're here, or there's advanced military aircraft, so advanced that, uh, it, it's stuff that our world-leading physicists don't know how to explain because we didn't know that those kind of exotic physics ex- physics existed.

Episode duration: 2:09:11