Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian

Narrator 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)

Joe Rogan 0:12 Uh, first of all, thanks for coming, man.

Bobby Azarian 0:15 Thank you for having me. This is amazing.

Joe Rogan 0:16 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.

Bobby Azarian 0:33 Yep.

Joe Rogan 0:35 Tsk, yep. How does the... how do we know this? How do we know how the universe organizes?

Bobby Azarian 0:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:38 Is this... Are you guessing? (laughs)

Bobby Azarian 0:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:41 First of all, tell people what you do.

Bobby Azarian 0:42 I mean, I think, I think it was an intuition that I had, um-

Joe Rogan 0:46 Can you tell people, like, what you do? Like, what your field of study is?

Bobby Azarian 0:48 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.

Joe Rogan 3:23 Can we get you to turn your phone off? Or just shut the... It dinged.

Bobby Azarian 3:27 Oh.

Joe Rogan 3:27 Just, just shut the... Just put it on, uh, do not disturb or something like that.

Bobby Azarian 3:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:31 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?

Bobby Azarian 3:45 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.

Joe Rogan 5:44 Mm.

Bobby Azarian 5:44 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.

Joe Rogan 7:07 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 7:07 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.

Joe Rogan 8:21 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?

Bobby Azarian 8:39 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.

Joe Rogan 11:55 So, meaning like the amino acids? What do- what do you mean by-

Bobby Azarian 11:57 Yeah, they're not conscious.

Joe Rogan 11:58 Right.

Bobby Azarian 11:58 So, yeah. So-

Joe Rogan 11:59 But do we know that, though?

Bobby Azarian 12:01 Uh, no. I know you had on a guest, Philip Goff, who is a panpsychist.

Joe Rogan 12:07 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 12:07 And those people believe that there's a little bit of consciousness in everything. And I don't think that's right. But, um, you can look at the universe itself as this kind of computational machine and it's doing information processing. So, it's understandable to think about, like, everything in terms of information. But consciousness, uh, when I use that word, I'm talking about subjective experience. So, you're having a unified conscious perception of the world.

Joe Rogan 12:40 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 12:41 There's- there's a light that's on. And I don't think there is a perspective, a subjective perspective, uh, for an amino acid.

Joe Rogan 12:49 What is the argument against that? Like, what is the argument that there is a subjective experience for everything?

Bobby Azarian 12:54 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, um, basically, uh, consciousness is kind of mysterious still. Um, and, uh, there's the hard problem of consciousness, which, uh, was, uh, put forth by a philosopher named David Chalmers in the '90s. And it basically said, um, we can explain all of the physical processing in the brain in terms of, uh, mechanical processes and interactions. Um, but how- how does the interactions of these physical things give rise to the qualitative world of experience and sensation? And since that's such a hard problem, how does experience arise? Uh, one solution to that was thinking that it doesn't emerge and suddenly, like, poof into existence. That there must be a little bit of consciousness in everything, uh, and that consciousness is fundamental, and that when those things come together to form these more complex systems, the little bits of consciousness kind of add up and create more, uh, richer conscious experience.

Joe Rogan 14:15 N- so, you don't believe that, but you do ... Well, we can all agree that human beings have consciousness. Everybody agrees on that. That's, like, pretty simple.

Bobby Azarian 14:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:24 But, like, at what-

Bobby Azarian 14:25 Well, no, actually. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 14:26 No? Some people don't believe that?

Bobby Azarian 14:28 So, um, yeah. It's kind of funny. I mean- (laughs) so, the materialist position is, like, pretty much opposite of panpsychism. So, materialism is the idea that there are only material things in the world. And that would seem to exclude consciousness, because consciousness seems to be this immaterial thing.

Joe Rogan 14:52 But is it just immaterial because we can't measure it? I mean, there's obviously something going on. There's some process going on.

Bobby Azarian 14:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:57 So, whatever that process is that, uh, 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-

Bobby Azarian 15:15 Yes, I think so.

Joe Rogan 15:16 Right. 'Cause consciousness is a thing, right?

Bobby Azarian 15:19 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 15:19 We can ... We- we're talking about it. It's- it ... Even if it's theoretical.

Bobby Azarian 15:23 It is a thing. So, yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:24 Right.

Bobby Azarian 15:24 I don't think it's necessarily right to call it immaterial. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:27 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?

Bobby Azarian 15:34 We're starting ... Yes, we did.

Joe Rogan 15:36 We did.

Bobby Azarian 15:36 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.

Joe Rogan 16:10 So, what I was gonna ask you is, if we agree that humans are conscious, what is not? Is a single-cell organism-

Bobby Azarian 16:15 Oh. So- so-

Joe Rogan 16:16 ... conscious?

Bobby Azarian 16:16 I mentioned materialism.

Joe Rogan 16:17 Yes.

Bobby Azarian 16:17 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-

Joe Rogan 17:04 They do have experiences, s- meaning they have consciousness.

Bobby Azarian 17:07 Yeah. They have consciousness.

Joe Rogan 17:09 So, like, what is ... Like, what is their definition of what consciousness is? It's like ... So, the thing that we're calling conscious-

Bobby Azarian 17:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:16 ... or consciousness, if they're saying it's an illusion-

Bobby Azarian 17:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:19 ... like, what do they think the process of creativity is?

Bobby Azarian 17:22 It-

Joe Rogan 17:22 What ... The- the process of cognitive function? There's something going on.

Bobby Azarian 17:25 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.

Joe Rogan 18:24 So, how are you aware of this output? What is that?

Bobby Azarian 18:27 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.

Joe Rogan 18:38 But if they're saying it's there-

Bobby Azarian 18:39 But-

Joe Rogan 18:39 ... but it's not doing anything, it's still there.

Bobby Azarian 18:41 It's still there.

Joe Rogan 18:41 That means it's real.

Bobby Azarian 18:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:42 So like, if you're moving because of an algorithm, but you realize that you're moving because of an algorithm, isn't that conscious?

Bobby Azarian 18:49 Yes. So it's, it's kind of a ridiculous thing that they call it an illusion, and then other materialists might say, "It's not an illusion, it's an epiphenomenon." Um, so yeah, there's lots of confusion there. But the question about like, you know ... so let's say we all accept consciousness-

Joe Rogan 19:07 Okay.

Bobby Azarian 19:07 ... in, in the practical way of talking about things.

Joe Rogan 19:09 Let's say we accept consciousness as it is in human beings.

Bobby Azarian 19:11 In humans.

Joe Rogan 19:11 Without the double talk.

Bobby Azarian 19:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:13 What, what ... if we go back to single-celled organisms, do we believe that they were conscious?

Bobby Azarian 19:19 So, it's a really complicated, uh, topic. And, uh, I argue in the book that, uh, single-celled organisms probably are not conscious. Uh, but they are these information processing systems, these computational systems, um, so they do have, uh, some type of intelligence or cognition. Uh, you see a difference in the way, um, any living system behaves compared to an inanimate system, like a rock or a trash can. Those things don't do anything. Um, if you see a rock move, it's because like, a gust of wind pushed it. Uh-

Joe Rogan 19:59 Right. But couldn't the same be said for trees? Except you're looking at slow motion, you actually do see them move.

Bobby Azarian 20:05 Well, so-

Joe Rogan 20:06 You can see them grow.

Bobby Azarian 20:07 Trees, uh ... so, uh, I'm arguing that the difference between life and non-life is that living things are these information processing systems, and that would apply to trees, too.

Joe Rogan 20:19 Okay.

Bobby Azarian 20:19 So they're doing photosynthesis.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Right.

Bobby Azarian 20:21 And yeah, they might not move the way like, a mammal or some other organisms do. Um, they're very slow. But um, plants will perform, um, something that's analogous to what I explained, uh, about, uh, bacteria doing chemotaxis. They swim towards food and away from, uh, toxins. So that means-

Joe Rogan 20:44 The roots grow towards water.

Bobby Azarian 20:46 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 20:47 They also allocate resources.

Bobby Azarian 20:47 It's called heliotropism.

Joe Rogan 20:49 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 20:49 So uh, a plant will track the Sun in the sky, so it has some sort of abstract model of its environment. Some sort of statistical mapping of the environment is encoded in organisms, and it gives them this quality that philosophers call agency. And so, agency is kind of the defining characteristic of life. Uh, living systems pursue goals, intrinsic survival goals, while inanimate systems don't.

Joe Rogan 21:21 So, consciousness is an integral part of living systems?

Bobby Azarian 21:28 Yes. But you can have living systems, I'm arguing, without consciousness. That consciousness probably emerges with brains.

Joe Rogan 21:39 Hmm. Um, what do you say about the way plants react to things, the way they react to predation, the way they react to even the sound of predation?

Bobby Azarian 21:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:51 Do you know about those studies?

Bobby Azarian 21:52 So yeah, they're, they're definitely intelligent. They're definitely communicating using electrical signals and chemical signals. Uh, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're having a conscious experience. So, do you think that plants have this actual subjective perspective? Is there an observer they're experiencing something, or is it a system that philosophers call a zombie system? Uh, and basically, you will have like, intelligent, uh, behavior without actually having subjective experience.

Joe Rogan 22:29 Is that just a guess, though? I mean, it seems-

Bobby Azarian 22:30 That they don't have it?

Joe Rogan 22:31 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 22:32 So, uh, what I argue in the book is that, uh, basically, to have a self, to have an observer or an eye, some sort of witness to this experience, it's not good enough to just store some sort of model of the world. Uh, the model has to start modeling itself, and that brains create mental models of the world. But uh, in that process, uh, the, the individual and the brain is part of that world, so then it starts to model itself. And it's this, uh, phenomenon of the system kind of looking back on itself that creates, uh, a witness to experience, an observer. So, to answer your question, yeah, it's kind of a guess. Um, you know, maybe someone could argue that very simple life forms do do a very simple form of self-modeling. Uh, the biologist Michael Levin, um, would argue that. Uh, and uh, that could be right, but I think we can reasonably agree that it at least starts with life. Um, but I do think it, it probably, you know, requires some more-... sophisticated, uh, information processing, modeling machinery and that it's most likely, uh, to be in systems with brains.

Joe Rogan 24:08 (smacks lips) And w- when we're talking about consciousness, we're, we're talking about consciousness... Uh, when we, we're, first of all, we're talking about consciousness in terms of the way human beings view consciousness. But when you get into other animals-

Bobby Azarian 24:24 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 24:24 ... at what point... I mean, is it a function of avoiding predation or becoming predators? Is it a function of s- uh, m- foraging for food? Like, what is it that en- enables consciousness to emerge?

Bobby Azarian 24:39 Yeah. So, um, it's all those things. So, uh, an organism must be able to anticipate inv- events in the environment if it's going to survive. Uh, and it must be able to, as we said, like, capture energy if it's going to, uh, evade this tendency towards disorder. And, uh, so it has to model the world.

Joe Rogan 25:02 Right.

Bobby Azarian 25:02 And, uh, consciousness is a mental model. So, if you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself in this room. You can zoom out and you can see the whole building. You can zoom out and imagine how Earth looks from outer space. You can imagine your friend and what kind of personality they have, what jokes they tell. So, you've modeled all of these things in the world, uh, and you've even modeled other modelers. And it's this, uh, modeling that, uh, is necessary that, uh, leads to the phenomenon of consciousness.

Joe Rogan 25:47 So, when you're talking about consciousness in the universe, do you think that consciousness is a property of the universe that enables things to happen? Do you think that there's a reason why we have this incredibly advanced version of what we accept as consciousness? Like, are we designed for something? Are we building towards something as the universe gets ever and ever com- more complex? Are we a part of that? Because this is like a part of the whole system?

Bobby Azarian 26:17 Yeah. So, uh, I guess it depends on what scale you wanna talk about. Um, you can talk about the brain, uh, emerging and consciousness emerging to, uh, model the world, to, uh, find solutions to these survival problems. But if you zoom out and you look at the big picture, uh, you see that basically, uh, the universe and the matter in the universe, uh, is starting to wake up, uh, when life emerges and you have conscious agents. It's the matter in the world that's starting to experience the world. So, you could look at this, uh, process of increasing complexity, that is this sort of cosmic scale evolutionary process, as the universe itself coming to life-

Joe Rogan 27:09 Hmm.

Bobby Azarian 27:09 ... or even waking up. So, Carl Sagan, uh, has this famous quote. He says, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." And, uh, this book takes that statement very seriously. It says it's not just poetry. Uh, literally, the universe is coming to life, not in this pan-psychic view that, you know, kinda says the universe is already conscious. I don't think that's as interesting. It's kind of reducing consciousness to something trivial if you think it's in everything already. I think it's way more, uh, you know, way more interesting, way more kind of psychedelic that, uh, the universe, uh, starts to wake up, um, as a result of this evolutionary process. And so, that would say that life is an essential part of the increase in complexity. And life actually becomes the driver of this evolutionary process. So, this worldview, if you're to accept that, uh, says life's not an accident. It's not transient. Uh, life has this larger cosmic significance. And it's basically assisting the universe in coming to life.

Joe Rogan 28:22 When you say the universe coming to life, that means, like, this trend of ever-increasing complexity is a part of the design or a part of just how the universe functions? And that we are, in fact, like, like, the way we structure life, the way we structure civilization, we constantly move towards greater and greater levels of complexity with our electronics, with the, the sophistication of our societies and our cultures. If you go back thousands of years to today, it's a very clear trend-

Bobby Azarian 28:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:52 ... that things are com- be- So, do you think that's a function of the universe itself? Like, that is how the universe operates? And we would probably find that? If we could travel to other galaxies, we could probably find that-

Bobby Azarian 29:03 Yes.

Joe Rogan 29:04 ... all over the place?

Bobby Azarian 29:04 Absolutely. So, it's something that emerges from the, uh, laws and constants of physics and the evolutionary dynamics that naturally emerge from those laws. So, it is built in to the design of the universe. When you use the word design, um, you know, some people could think that you're getting at something maybe, like, spiritual or religious. And so, that's, like, another conversation as to why there seems to be this apparent fine-tuning of the laws to allow for life. And if you believe in this paradigm I'm describing, that the laws don't just allow for life, that they necessitate life, and they necessitate intelligence and consciousness. And so, yeah, it does seem to be baked into the fabric of reality.

Joe Rogan 29:52 What do you think is going on? Like, when, when you're saying it in this way, you're saying it almost like as if you're hinting that there's some sort of a design-

Bobby Azarian 29:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:59 ... behind it all.

Bobby Azarian 30:01 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.

Joe Rogan 30:58 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 30:59 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.

Joe Rogan 31:45 I'm not sure I follow you. So, w- a s- simulation theory is similar to intelligent design?

Bobby Azarian 31:51 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."

Joe Rogan 32:07 For lack of a better word, God.

Bobby Azarian 32:08 " Yeah, and I'm gonna-"

Joe Rogan 32:09 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 32:09 "I'm gonna create life right now."

Joe Rogan 32:10 Okay.

Bobby Azarian 32:11 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.

Joe Rogan 34:12 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.

Bobby Azarian 34:21 Well-

Joe Rogan 34:21 That could be possible. This is, this is what people think.

Bobby Azarian 34:24 I, I guess-

Joe Rogan 34:24 They think that if, if-

Bobby Azarian 34:25 Yes, sir.

Joe Rogan 34:25 ... if we are right now currently able to make things like virtual reality and Oculus Rift and all that stuff-

Bobby Azarian 34:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:32 ... that one day, we will be able to create something that's indiscernible from reality itself.

Bobby Azarian 34:38 Yes.

Joe Rogan 34:38 So, how do we know if we're not in that already-

Bobby Azarian 34:41 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 34:41 ... in the questions? We don't.

Bobby Azarian 34:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:42 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?

Bobby Azarian 35:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:09 Where they're, they're jazzing you up for this idea that you're not gonna have to live in reality anymore.

Bobby Azarian 35:13 The Metaverse.

Joe Rogan 35:13 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 35:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:14 This is the baby steps. When, you know, you've s- I'm sure you've seen that commercial, right? Where the-

Bobby Azarian 35:18 Uh, no.

Joe Rogan 35:19 ... the kids are at the z- th- they're at a painting, and the painting comes to life. Have you seen it?

Bobby Azarian 35:22 No, I haven't.

Joe Rogan 35:23 It's very compelling. But it's also interesting because you're wa- l- we'll show them the commercial. You're watching it, and you're like, "Wow. Like, is this a good thing?" Like, what are we saying? Like, you have these, um, these p- these kids, so watch this. So, they're in an art gallery, and they're looking at this painting, and they all step towards this painting, and then the painting comes to life.

Bobby Azarian 35:45 Yeah. It's pretty trippy.

Narrator 35:47 (instrumental music) This is the dimension of imagination. (instrumental music) Hey, hey. Hey, hey.

Joe Rogan 36:12 So all the sudden-

Bobby Azarian 36:13 (music)

Joe Rogan 36:13 ... the environment around them becomes just like this painting, and they're dancing and having the best time ever. Look, they're bobbing their head like they're at an awesome concert. This is going to be fun. Is it fucking really gonna be fun?

Bobby Azarian 36:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 36:27 I'm not sure.

Bobby Azarian 36:28 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 36:28 I don't know what that is. Like, that's a weird commercial, but it's- it's almost like-

Bobby Azarian 36:32 Makes it look fun.

Joe Rogan 36:34 Yeah. It's like, it's- it's- it's- it's a little honey pot trying to drag you into this weird world-

Bobby Azarian 36:40 Yeah. It's-

Joe Rogan 36:40 ... that they're about to create.

Bobby Azarian 36:41 It looks cool, I wanna be there. But it's a little scary that it's Facebook.

Joe Rogan 36:44 Well, it's, um ... Well, it is a little scary, because the amount of people that use and how quickly it will be adopted.

Bobby Azarian 36:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:51 Yeah. I mean, and what is that? Like, what- what are we doing? And is that inevitable? Like, if we're talking about l- increasing levels of complexity that seem to be inevitable, it seems to be ... Like, I've said this before, but this is m- my thought about people and technology, that I am fascinated by how we don't think about what we're doing, we just do it. Like, if you looked at the- the- the earth, if you looked at the human civilization from afar, if you had no context, you- you had no cultural connection to it, but you watch the way people interact and move, you'd say, "Oh, this is a life form that creates better and better stuff."

Bobby Azarian 37:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:31 'Cause that's what we do. So what ... And also, there's this tendency towards materialism. Like, what is materialism? Well, it's this obsession with objects and, you know, and this romantic idea that those ... that's futile, and you should just be out there in nature, and you don't need much. And ...

Bobby Azarian 37:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:48 But what is ... Why is it intrinsically? Why is it, like, it- it's inexorably connected to humans, that they want more stuff.

Bobby Azarian 37:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:56 They want better stuff. Well, I feel like because that is the engine that fuels innovation. If you constantly want newer and better things, there has to be a desire for that. And one of the desires for that is materialism.

Bobby Azarian 38:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:08 Materialism is almost like a built-in instinct that enables innovation. And if you look at where that goes, it goes to some sort of symbiotic interaction and connection with electronics, because that's our number one creation. That's the thing that we make that's better than anything else.

Bobby Azarian 38:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:28 If you think about all the stuff that we make, the one thing that's been most transformative over the last few decades has been technology and electronics. So th- our- our- our connection to the cyber world, our connection through phones and computers and watches, I mean, uh, there's something going on.

Bobby Azarian 38:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:45 And we're in the middle of it. And the way I liken it, I f- I say that we are like some caterpillar that is becoming an electronic butterfly, and we don't even know why we're making the cocoon. We're just doing it.

Bobby Azarian 38:58 I've heard you describe that idea before. I don't know who you were talking to, if it was, like, Roger Penrose or Sean Carroll, but you- you alluded to that, and I was like, "Joe sees it." Like, that's exactly what's happening. It's this process that we're not aware of, and, uh, you know, nature is carrying that out. But we're at a really interesting time, uh, because we're at a point in the process where we're actually becoming conscious that we're part of the process.

Joe Rogan 39:27 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 39:27 And, um ...

Joe Rogan 39:29 Some of us.

Bobby Azarian 39:29 There's- there's ... Yeah, some of us. So- so the idea is if we become conscious of it, uh, and that's part of the process also, becoming aware of this, um, we can start to, uh, shift society in the direction that we want to see. So, this, you know, materialism, all th- you know, these, like, desires to have, like, more and more and more, um, it's a natural part of this. But i- um, evolution occurs because life is always adapting, and it's correcting its errors. It's self-correcting. So, this march toward progress isn't a straight line. Uh, life basically, um, progresses because it's faced with constant, uh, existential challenges, and these challenges, uh, force us to come up with solutions, and that's the engine of progress. So, do I think, like, all of this technology with, like, these, like, you know, the metaverse, all of this stuff is inevitable? Uh, yeah, you can't really stop that. That's part of the process. But, uh, it doesn't mean that we're just supposed to go along with it or supposed to go along with false, like, consumerism, like what Facebook is, like, telling us to do and buy. Um, I don't think that we can slow it down and- and have this kind of, uh, you know, uh, Luddite, uh, civilization, where we just, uh, get rid of all of our technology and try to live in t- some, you know, natural utopia. That won't work. Um, so we can't, like, stop the train, but we can try to push it in the right direction. So, we might wanna go away from certain things. So, um, there is a trajectory that, uh, the book argues does, uh, argues is inevitable, and that's it- really what it's trying to articulate, is all the mechanisms that, uh, make progress inevitable. Because for a long time, uh, biologists were against that idea of p- progress, mostly for, like, cultural reasons, um, cu- uh, culture world- wars going on inside science. But, um, yeah, it's an e- inevitable process, and we have to try to steer it in the right direction. And if we don't, uh, it could be the end of our civilization. So, when I say there's progress that's inevitable, I don't mean our civilization has to succeed, but those who come after us will learn from our mistakes.

Joe Rogan 41:58 So, when you say, "It'll be the end of civilization," like, what do you- what do you mean by that?

Bobby Azarian 42:01 You know, I- I'm- I'm more of an optimist. I- I don't think there's going to be this end, but, I mean, nuclear war could-... uh, destroy a lot of the population and kind of, like, put us into, like, something like a dark age again.

Joe Rogan 42:16 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 42:16 Um, but I don't think that's gonna happen. There are all these, like, checkpoints along the way preventing people from doing that. I mean, it does- w- World War II happened. It was terrible. Lots of people died. But at the same time, uh, that time period, uh, uh, spawned the computer and all kinds of technology that we didn't have. So, if you, like, look at, like, this kind of, uh, trend line of like, you know, social and technological progress, like, it didn't really slow down by World War II. There seems to be this, uh, exponential trend towards, uh, greater complexity.

Joe Rogan 42:56 So, what do you think is stopping World War III though? I don't understand. Like, why do you think that that's not going to happen? What checks and- or in place?

Bobby Azarian 43:02 It could- it could happen. But I mean, uh, to- to become a president, I mean ... (laughs) So- so- well, this is a funny example. P- I was gonna say, like, you can't be totally crazy, but like, I mean, lo- lots of people-

Joe Rogan 43:12 Well, look at Putin.

Bobby Azarian 43:13 ... would argue with that. Yeah. No. Of course.

Joe Rogan 43:15 Yeah, look at Trump.

Bobby Azarian 43:16 Yeah. No. No. So-

Joe Rogan 43:16 You could be a dead man and be president. Look at Biden.

Bobby Azarian 43:18 Yeah. Yeah. So, um, uh, y- I guess the- the point would be that, um, they know that if they do that, they're going to harm their people. So, they're ... I mean, he hasn't done it so far, right? What has stopped him from doing it? Um, so that's not to say he won't do it.

Joe Rogan 43:38 You mean Putin? Is that who you're-

Bobby Azarian 43:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:40 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 43:41 So, there's- I mean, we have all of these ... He doesn't wanna s- he has a family. (smacks lips) He's-

Joe Rogan 43:46 He's supposedly dying of cancer.

Bobby Azarian 43:48 Yeah. Well, so someone in that-

Joe Rogan 43:50 Who knows?

Bobby Azarian 43:50 ... kind of position could do something totally crazy.

Joe Rogan 43:52 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 43:52 It could definitely happen. Uh, but what would happen was a lot of people would die, and then we would put greater checks in place to make sure that crazy people like Putin don't become president.

Joe Rogan 44:05 Boy, I don't know if you're right about that. I wish you were. But what about Xi Jinping? Like, what about the way he runs China?

Bobby Azarian 44:10 Oh, no. This is after-

Joe Rogan 44:11 This is-

Bobby Azarian 44:11 This is after-

Joe Rogan 44:12 This is-

Bobby Azarian 44:12 ... the disasters would already happen.

Joe Rogan 44:14 Yeah. But then China would be running the world the way they run China.

Bobby Azarian 44:18 Y-

Joe Rogan 44:18 Like, that's a- that's a real possibility.

Bobby Azarian 44:20 It's a possibility for an amount of time, but I don't think it's sustainable because ... So, one thing I talk about in the book is, uh, complexity is kind of a function of a couple things. Uh, for a system to be like, optimally complex, it has to have a lot of parts, and those parts have to be connected. So, the more parts with the more connections, the more complex something is. But you also want a diversity or variety, uh, amongst those parts. So, all of ... So, when I'm saying parts, you could ta- be thinking about, um, a civilization, a society, like Chinese society or American society. It's 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-

Joe Rogan 46:42 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 46:42 ... when like, they had all these lockdowns.

Joe Rogan 46:43 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 46:44 When their freedoms are taken away and like, there's some sort of existential threat looming, then, uh, the system gets chaotic. And, uh-

Joe Rogan 46:54 Yeah. But it's just people yelling. I mean, it- it- I don't-

Bobby Azarian 46:56 Yeah, no.

Joe Rogan 46:57 The- the system's been around for 1,000 years. I mean, China has been functioning in one form or another-

Bobby Azarian 47:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:03 ... as a dictatorship for a long, long time.

Bobby Azarian 47:06 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-

Joe Rogan 47:17 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 47:17 ... decentralization with the crypto and blockchain-

Joe Rogan 47:20 Yep.

Bobby Azarian 47:20 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 47:33 Right. So, they need us-

Bobby Azarian 47:33 ... for this balance. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:35 ... to steal ideas from.

Bobby Azarian 47:36 (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. Which is another problem. Um-

Joe Rogan 47:39 Which is fascinating.

Bobby Azarian 47:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:39 I mean, that's a big thing that they do in- in intellectual property theft.

Bobby Azarian 47:43 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.

Joe Rogan 48:05 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.

Bobby Azarian 48:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:37 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.

Bobby Azarian 48:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:44 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?

Bobby Azarian 49:05 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.

Joe Rogan 50:39 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-

Bobby Azarian 51:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:01 ... or as a law?

Bobby Azarian 51:01 Yeah, no. It's, it's ... I think it's the most mysterious question there is. Um, so is there an ultimate goal?

Joe Rogan 51:07 Right.

Bobby Azarian 51:08 Uh, so, uh, what I do think is that, uh, this increase in complexity is inevitable. But like I said, it's not this straight march of progress. There's, like, constantly these ch-

Joe Rogan 51:20 Sure.

Bobby Azarian 51:20 ... challenges. There's massive existential challenges. And that is the only thing that pushes us, uh, to create solutions. So, there's this principle in the book that I call Popper's principle, named after, uh, philosopher of science, Karl Popper. And, uh, the idea is that, um, yeah. So, that, that our challenges, uh, are what force us to find solutions. So, if progress is going to always continue, that means the challenges won't stop. So, even if we do attain some, like, globally unified state, I would like to see, like, some sort of agreement among nations that says, "Okay. We're all gonna demilitarize, and we're gonna put this money into, like, medicine or technology, whatever else." You know, all of the other things that, you know, we could be funding that could help s- you know, human society. Uh, and, you know, we could have something like that, but there w- there could still be, like, pandemics. There could still be someone crazy that takes over and starts to, you know, try to reverse that. So, the point is, you can never reach a utopia. And even if we did, it wouldn't be a utopia for a long time, because the world is always changing. It's this ... You know, reality is this noisy, thermally fluctuating thing, and there is chaos. Chaos is, uh, needed for complexity too. Um, actually, when a system transitions to a h- state of higher order, uh, you need some chaos in the system. So, that's because, like, if a system is too rigid and too, um ... So, you could think of, like, things seemed ... W- we had Democratic presidents. Like, you could think about, um, just like how things were under Obama for a while. You know, we didn't ... T- there wasn't the craziness that we're seeing today, so you might think, like, "Oh, well, whatever that system was, it was a good thing," or, "It was better than what we have now." But no system, no model, no way of doing things will work forever, because, uh, the external world is always changing. So, we're always going to be going through these cycles and phases where we have, uh, temporary stability, but then the system needs to change. And I think right now, when we're seeing all this chaos, it is indicative of what, uh, complexity scientists call a phase transition. And so basically, uh, the chaos, uh, is basically the system screaming for change. Um, so you see all of this chaos, and that provides ... Uh, it creates flexibility within a rigid system that allows the system to transition into something new and higher.... better.

Joe Rogan 54:24 So, so you think that this is a function of the universe, that the universe has a tendency towards complexity and that we are one of the driving forces of this?

Bobby Azarian 54:33 Yes.

Joe Rogan 54:34 So we're a biological driving force of a greater law of the universe?

Bobby Azarian 54:39 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:40 And, but what do you think the universe wants? Like, uh, what's the ultimate goal out of this?

Bobby Azarian 54:45 So, yeah. So, um, you know, when you talk about what the universe wants, we're already getting into, like, a little language trap.

Joe Rogan 54:52 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 54:52 Because are we saying that the universe is conscious, that it has a conscious intent? I don't think so. I-

Joe Rogan 54:57 Well, let me ask it in a different way.

Bobby Azarian 54:58 Okay.

Joe Rogan 54:59 Where do you think this is going?

Bobby Azarian 55:01 Well, no, it, so it's, it's good to kind of break that down and be like, "Does the universe have a conscious intent?"

Joe Rogan 55:06 Right.

Bobby Azarian 55:06 So, I don't think it does, but I think it has a sort of design. And when I say design, it's something that's not mystical. I'm saying that the laws of physics, uh, are such that, uh, complexity increases, and, um, the universe does have something like a goal. So it may not have a conscious intent, but life emerges inevitably in that the laws of physics place something, uh, you know, analogous to, uh, DNA in an organism. So, the laws of, and constants of physics are sort of cosmic DNA that ensures that this evolutionary program plays out. So, uh, maybe the universe is moving towards something like a cosmic attractor. And an attractor is a term that physicists use to describe, uh, a state of order. Um, so for example, when you take the stopper out of your bathtub, you will get the formation-

Joe Rogan 56:12 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 56:13 ... of a whirlpool, so you get this spontaneous order.

Joe Rogan 56:15 Where gravity is attracting the water down the pipe and whoosh.

Bobby Azarian 56:18 Yeah. So, so you have these attractors, which are basically kind of this goal state of a system. In living systems, attractors, uh, are basically states of stability that, that the system, that the living system is trying to maintain against this second law of thermodynamics. And, uh, so, um, it seems like cosmic evolution is a process of, uh, generating increasingly complex attractors. So when I say that, uh, there are these evolutionary transitions, which are versions of phase transitions that I just explained. So, if you look at the story of the universe, it's a story of nature's simplest parts coming together to form larger functional wholes. So, atoms come together to make molecules, which come together to make cells, which come together to make multicellular organisms, which come together to form societies. And now we have something like the emergence of a global brain, which is, uh, the network of humans connected by the internet as well as AIs. And so when humans, uh, leave the planet, like people out there like Elon Musk with SpaceX are trying to get humans off the planet, I'm saying that that's part of this natural evolutionary process. It wasn't just like a decision someone made or, you know, something that we decided to do because we're clever or something. It's actually baked into this process, and, uh, that's because if life is going to continue to persist, it has to get off the planet before its star dies. So it's sort of, it creates like a game clock that forces life to spread. What is the end state? M- maybe something like this cosmic attractor, where some very legitimate scientists have speculated, people like Paul Davies, um, Ray Kurzweil, you know, is a technology guy, may seem, you know, futurists may seem a little bit more out there. But, um, there's this idea that, you know, the universe is evolving, uh, and waking up, and that there could be this integrated state where something like a cosmic mind emerges from this process.

Joe Rogan 58:39 Is, uh, is it an egocentric way of looking at consciousness to, to think that the universe is waking up? I mean, we are th- this tiny speck that's riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe.

Bobby Azarian 58:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:57 For us to say, "Oh, one day the universe will catch up with us-"

Bobby Azarian 59:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:00 "... and be conscious like us."

Bobby Azarian 59:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:02 Isn't that kinda goofy? Like, but isn't it, like, if you think about it, isn't it kind of an egocentric biological function, the idea that consciousness, the way we term it, th- w- thinking about all our problems and the way we fit in with the universe and coming up with solutions for unique situations that we have to deal with, we think that's so amazing? But the universe is literally, they have stellar nurseries out there. They're creating stars.

Bobby Azarian 59:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:30 We have hypernovas. Stars are exploding that create carbon, which is literally the, the building blocks for all carbon-based life. That's, all that stuff is happening, and we're like, "Yeah, one day they're gonna catch up, it's gonna be conscious."

Bobby Azarian 59:44 (laughs) Well-

Joe Rogan 59:44 Like, why is consciousness even important?

Bobby Azarian 59:46 Well, first of all, you need stars and planets to have consciousness.

Joe Rogan 59:50 Right.

Bobby Azarian 59:50 So that's part of the process too. The first ordered structures that were created by this cosmic evolutionary process, which includes life, are, uh, those, those ordered structures.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 Right.

Bobby Azarian 1:00:02 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.

Joe Rogan 1:03:16 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:03:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:26 ... right? Other than ours, why is consciousness even critical?

Bobby Azarian 1:03:31 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,

Bobby Azarian 1:05:02 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.

Joe Rogan 1:05:24 Okay.

Bobby Azarian 1:05:25 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-

Joe Rogan 1:06:13 (coughs) Okay.

Bobby Azarian 1:06:13 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:08:39 So, the, the idea is that consciousness ultimately leads to the birth of the universe-

Bobby Azarian 1:08:45 Uh, so-

Joe Rogan 1:08:45 ... or a universe.

Bobby Azarian 1:08:46 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?

Joe Rogan 1:08:55 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:09:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:03 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:09:33 Well, it sounds like you already have this theory.

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 And they just reset, like a control-alt-delete reset for the universe.

Bobby Azarian 1:09:38 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-

Joe Rogan 1:09:45 (laughs)

Bobby Azarian 1:09:45 (laughs) No, I think it makes sense, but the question is where did they come from?

Joe Rogan 1:09:49 Right. Well, yeah. What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Bobby Azarian 1:09:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:53 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:10:27 I heard, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:28 It was really fun, really interesting conversation. But one of the things we talked about was the different types of civilizations.

Bobby Azarian 1:10:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:33 That we are about, uh, zero seven to 10 in, uh, l- in terms of like a Type I Universe.

Bobby Azarian 1:10:40 That Kardashev scale.

Joe Rogan 1:10:41 We're 7 out of 10.

Bobby Azarian 1:10:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:42 Yeah. And that a, a Type I, uh, t- excuse me, Type I civilization. Type I civilization has the ability to control the weather. We have the ability to stop natural disasters and ward off asteroids.

Bobby Azarian 1:10:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:53 And that as you get to Type II and then Type III civilizations, which could take, uh, ab- ... What was the timeline he gave us? I believe it was millions of years, right?

Guest (unidentified third voice) 1:11:02 It was a thousand-

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 To get to Type II.

Guest (unidentified third voice) 1:11:05 ... to ... Yeah, 100 to get to Type I, 1,000 to II, and I think maybe it's 100,000 for Type III.

Joe Rogan 1:11:10 So, in Type III, w- if we can keep it together-

Bobby Azarian 1:11:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:14 ... until we get to Type III, we will be able to control black holes. We will be able to transmit our, our consciousness throughout the universe. We will be able to transport physically from one place to another instantaneously.

Bobby Azarian 1:11:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:30 And that we're going to be able to have powers beyond our wildest imagination. And that this is what you're talking about when you're talking about something that can actually create a black hole or create a universe. Like, I remember there was a prevailing theory that inside, uh, well, I think it's actually true, that inside every univer- or like, every galaxy has a super massive black hole in the center of it, and that super massive black hole's one-half of 1% of the entire mass of the galaxy, and you could scale it.

Bobby Azarian 1:12:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:00 Right? But that, the idea was that if you got inside of that black hole, you would find a whole nother universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one with a super massive black hole in the center of it. You go through those, you find hundreds of billions of galaxies. Like, and the idea was that that's real infinity, and that there's ... It's not just infinite in terms of the amount of galaxies, the space in the universe itself, but the amount of universes. Like, it's impossible for anybody to comprehend the scale of this thing.

Bobby Azarian 1:12:31 Yeah. You know, I'm not really familiar with that model. It sounds pretty cool and trippy.

Joe Rogan 1:12:36 (laughs)

Bobby Azarian 1:12:36 Um, and it may be right in some way.

Joe Rogan 1:12:38 (laughs)

Bobby Azarian 1:12:38 Um, but the idea is that, uh, life is this robust, uh-... a phenomenon that, uh, evolves and it learns, almost like an AI program. Like, like, let's say a chess-playing AI program.

Joe Rogan 1:12:52 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 1:12:53 And you invent it and it's not very good at first, and it loses to human players but it keeps storing those patterns, storing all that information.

Joe Rogan 1:13:01 Right.

Bobby Azarian 1:13:01 So knowledge just accumulates. That's what the biosphere is. Evolution is a learning process that accumulates knowledge. Knowledge gets stored in different forms of memory, so it starts off as just genetic memory, and then, uh, brains emerge and you have neural memory. Then you have, uh, human civilization, so you have, like, collective memory in people's brains. But then you get books, and then you get, uh, you get the internet and you get wiki pages. And so it's all of these memory systems storing knowledge about how to survive, um, and evade this tendency towards disorder. They say how to stay far from thermodynamic equilibrium. So, you have all this complexity growing. You have life getting smarter, more robust, and better at manipulating the world around it, and so the idea is that this process doesn't end.

Joe Rogan 1:13:51 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:13:52 And so, um, this kind of challenges the heat death narrative. But so the idea is that maybe, uh, life, uh, isn't destined, uh, for death, and that, um, by using the, uh, free energy supply in a universe that's, uh, expanding, um, that that could potentially power life forever. If that, uh, is not possible, it's possible that life could propagate life, uh, into other universes. I'm sure Michio has a bunch of kind of far out ideas about how life can continue to exist inside this universe or outside this universe. But yeah, the idea is that reality is in some way biocentric. Even if this model that I mentioned, cosmological natural selection, is true, and it kind of- you know, some atheists might think, "Oh, well, that explains the fine-tuning and the design, the apparent design in our universe," you have this process where, you know, the laws are getting more and more fine-tuned for life. You still have an existence where 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:33 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:15:33 And it has spiritual implications to me.

Joe Rogan 1:15:36 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:15:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:59 ... 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?

Bobby Azarian 1:16:15 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:16:15 Like, what would we do? And also, the problem of natural issues, whether it's super volcanoes, asteroid impacts-

Bobby Azarian 1:16:24 Pandemics.

Joe Rogan 1:16:25 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:16:38 Problems create progress.

Joe Rogan 1:16:40 Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why you kind of need the chaos. You need the yin and the yang.

Bobby Azarian 1:16:46 Yes, yes.

Joe Rogan 1:16:46 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:16:46 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-

Joe Rogan 1:16:54 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:16:54 ... super interesting and probably the reason that the whole, you know, Taoism thing exists.

Joe Rogan 1:16:59 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:15 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:23 Yeah, yeah. No, that's really cool. I didn't think about that, but yeah, it totally is.

Joe Rogan 1:17:26 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:31 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:32 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:17:41 It's-

Joe Rogan 1:17:41 ... that that is on so many stoners' walls-

Bobby Azarian 1:17:44 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:44 ... that it's become trite, you know?

Bobby Azarian 1:17:46 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.

Joe Rogan 1:17:50 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:50 I think, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:51 It is, because-

Bobby Azarian 1:17:52 Because it's deep.

Joe Rogan 1:17:52 ... it's cool.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:53 It's super deep, and I lo- the design's, like, minimalist and beautiful, and I-

Joe Rogan 1:17:59 It's beautiful.

Bobby Azarian 1:17:59 ... I have some ideas about, you know, why they came up to- came up with this. But, um ...

Joe Rogan 1:18:05 What are your ideas?

Bobby Azarian 1:18:06 So, I think, um, you know, humans are information processing systems, and we are natural manifestations of the laws of physics and of the evolutionary process, and our brains are computing all of these things. You know, and things all the time. That's what intelligence is. Um, there's a lot of computation that's going on, uh, like, below- like, our conscious thoughts, like the subconscious mind. And so I think, um, a lot of times, especially maybe like Eastern cultures that were, you know, big on, like, meditation and reflective...... uh, practices that, uh, they sort of, uh, through those practices, um, were having very deep intuitions about, like, the structure and the organization of the world. Um, and so that, you know, our brains as complex information processing systems might be, you know, picking up on patterns that now science is starting to explain. They were articulating that in simple language back then because they had this intuitive understanding of it.

Joe Rogan 1:19:18 What do you think ... But where's that intuitive understanding coming from? Do you think it's just coming from introspective thought, self-reflection, examination of the natural world around them, examination of culture? Like, what- what do you think?

Bobby Azarian 1:19:30 Yeah. All of those things, but, um, I guess kind of, like, the, the kind of, like, magical aspect of that is that the brain is this computational system that is this product of four billion years of evolution. And that there's, uh, a lot of knowledge in there that we may not be consciously aware of that, uh, are, you know, creating insights. Like, when ... Intuition's still really mysterious to people. Like, where do mathematicians come up with these ideas? There's, uh ... I forget which, which physicist it was, but it was, like, you know, a physicist from maybe 100 or 200 years ago having this moment where, like, they stepped off a bus, uh ... Or not a bus. You know, whatever. A train. Whatever it was. Um, and that instantly, uh, some deep mathematical insight came to them. Um, so I think what is going on is that the brain's doing a lot of computation, uh, that is below, uh, the threshold for consciousness, and that our subconscious minds, uh, have a lot more intelligence than we think. And that, uh, these ideas that are correct about nature are just kind of spontaneously emerging from complex computational machinery shaped by, you know, eons of evolution.

Joe Rogan 1:21:01 What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we are in contact or have been observed by extraterrestrial intelligence?

Bobby Azarian 1:21:13 Um, so I recently wrote an article on this. And, uh, you know, it's really hard for me to, to say whether, you know, we're in contact or anything like that. But ... So I, I will talk about that, that though. I won't dodge that. But I will say that I do think there's, uh, intelligent extraterrestrials, and, um, Richard Dawkins would agree with that. Uh, basically the idea is that on these other planets with sufficiently Earth-like, uh, planetary chemistry, we get life inevitably. And then the book really argues that, uh, there is this, uh ... That the evolutionary process, um, creates this statistical tendency towards more intelligent life forms. Now, that was, uh, in, in, in the 20th century, there was a evolutionary theorist, um, named Stephen Jay Gould who was very influential, and he tried to kill this idea of, uh, the evolutionary process being this progressive process. And that's for a couple of cultural reasons. So one thing, people weren't comfortable with it because it was this kind of, uh, Christian-seeming process that said the process inevitably gives rise to humans, and that, you know, we're super special and that it's all about us. Um, first of all, um, yeah, that's not right. It didn't necessarily have to give rise to humans, but, um, that's not what most of the evolutionary biologists who do believe in this, you know, narrative progress were saying. They're just saying it has to lead to higher intelligence. It doesn't have to be a human made in God's image or anything like that. The other reason he was so against the idea of progress ... And I didn't know this at first. I thought it was mainly, you know, this war between science and religion, where science basically was forced to kind of take the opposite stance of religion. So if religion said, "Reality has meaning and life has purpose," then science kind of had to assume this, uh, opposite stance, which-

Joe Rogan 1:23:20 That doesn't seem very scientific.

Bobby Azarian 1:23:22 Yeah. No, and that, that's what's so scary.

Joe Rogan 1:23:25 (laughs)

Bobby Azarian 1:23:25 No. It's, it's, it's not. And, and, and we are pretty blind to how, uh, culture and social norms, things like that, have, like, really shaped science a- at the time.

Joe Rogan 1:23:36 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:23:37 Um, so, uh, yeah. What I learned was that, uh ... And he ... And it was from a book called Complexity by Roger Lewin, uh, exposed that Gould, uh, was so against it because the Nazis used this idea of, uh, progress towards, uh, something higher, this sort of ladder of progress, um, to, uh, justify ideas about there being, like, superior and inferior races.

Joe Rogan 1:24:04 Oh. Okay.

Bobby Azarian 1:24:06 And, and this, this theory that, you know, I describe in the book is definitely not saying there's anything like that. It's actually very important that we understand that, like, for this global superorganism that's emerging, that is human civilization, you need diversity. Diversity's super important. So, um, uh, yeah. The, this idea that there was this progressive evolutionary process, uh, for a long time, uh, um, scientists were just like, "We shouldn't talk about that." Actually, evolutionary theory was sort of banned from every field other than biology because there was this scare of that.Um, so for example, Herbert Spencer, who was a contemporary of Darwin's, he actually was more popular than Darwin in his time, thought that society was evolving towards something higher. And he talked about, uh, social evolution. But his ideas, uh, which were actually really good, got, uh, uh, appropriated by the Nazis and this idea of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest. And it really hurt evolutionary theory for a long time because people thought, "Okay, we shouldn't talk about culture as a whole as evolving, uh, towards something higher or more complex." And it's only been recently that this idea of progress has been revived. M- a lot- a lot of it has to do with the work being done at the Santa Fe Institute and, you know, complexity of science in general. And, uh, so now we're seeing that those ideas, um, were probably, you know, the ideas of Herbert Spencer, he was onto something seeing the universe as getting more and more complex. Uh, this process would occur on other planets so you would get something like intelligent aliens, uh, because, um, more complex niches, uh, emerge. So life starts out simple and it has a simple energy extraction task. Plants get sunlight, bacterium, uh, bacteria can live off, like, chemical molecules, like, that's their source of food. It's pretty easy to capture that. But, uh, a random genetic mutation will cause a change in an organism's design that will unlock a new source of energy. So for example, suddenly life will be able to eat other things. Life... The earliest forms of life were autotrophic, meaning they could survive off, like, inorganic inputs. But, um, then, uh, more complex life emerged that, um, eats other organisms. Now when you have that, now your food source isn't just like, you know, plants. We talked about tracking a sun in the sky, that's a pretty simple energy extraction problem. But if your food source is smart like you and it's trying to outrun you, then you have to, uh, have a lot more sophisticated predictive model encoded in the brain. And, um, basically, uh, life gets increasingly complex because we have a complex world around us. So you should see this trajectory where on alien planets, you would get, uh, a more intelligent system that has more, uh, mental states, more computational states because they can respond to more challenges in the environment. And, um, so they may be out there, but they maybe haven't been able to get here yet because it's possible that it's- everything is emerging sort of according to the same timeline. So maybe-

Joe Rogan 1:27:52 Right. But-

Bobby Azarian 1:27:52 ... maybe they're not just here. Maybe they are though.

Joe Rogan 1:27:54 Right. But our planet is only, what, four point whatever billion years old.

Bobby Azarian 1:27:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:27:58 Whereas the universe is 13-plus billion years old.

Bobby Azarian 1:28:01 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:28:01 So the concept of... L- like, it's not like we're on the same starting point as every other planet.

Bobby Azarian 1:28:07 No, we're not on the same starting point, but you still need, like, stellar and planetary evolution. So you're not gonna have, like, life emerging elsewhere in the universe, like, 10 billion years ago because you-

Joe Rogan 1:28:17 Right. But you could have it 10 million years ago easily.

Bobby Azarian 1:28:20 Yes. That's true but the-

Joe Rogan 1:28:21 So there could be 10-

Bobby Azarian 1:28:21 ... universe is a big place.

Joe Rogan 1:28:22 Right. But think about life on Earth, right?

Bobby Azarian 1:28:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:28:25 Life on Earth, y- you know, if it wasn't for the giant asteroid that hit the Yucatan-

Bobby Azarian 1:28:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:28:31 ... we would be dominated by giant lizards. I mean, that would be what was running the planet was dinosaurs.

Bobby Azarian 1:28:35 Maybe not. Maybe there would be some sort of catastrophe such that, uh, dinosaurs wouldn't make it and basically, uh, a lot of the organic material that comes from, like, dead dinosaurs (laughs) , like-

Joe Rogan 1:28:49 Okay.

Bobby Azarian 1:28:50 ... create, uh... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:28:50 But listen to this. Imagine if that didn't take place. Imagine if the world that existed post-Yucatan was the world that emerged from scratch. So there was no dinosaur period. So the mammals and the intelligent mammals that ultimately became primates that ultimately became human beings evolved far earlier, 100 million years ago.

Bobby Azarian 1:29:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:10 Like, that's what we could be looking at in terms of the sophistication of alien life on other planets.

Bobby Azarian 1:29:15 Totally.

Joe Rogan 1:29:15 But do you think that they have contacted us? Do you think-

Bobby Azarian 1:29:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:19 ... that they have visited us? Do you think that all this UAP, UFO nonsense and all the stuff you're seeing the Pentagon talk about and the front page of The New York Times from 2017, do you think that's real? Like, what do you think that is?

Bobby Azarian 1:29:32 So I absolutely think you have a good point about it, uh, potentially happening earlier, intelligence happening earlier elsewhere in the universe.

Joe Rogan 1:29:39 There's so many potential models that could have taken place.

Bobby Azarian 1:29:42 And... Yeah. So, so they could have developed, like, you know, that intergalactic traveling technology earlier than us such that they could have made it here. Totally possible. And so they may be among us, but, um, then you have a lot of questions 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.

Joe Rogan 1:30:18 Mm-hmm.

Bobby Azarian 1:30:19 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-

Joe Rogan 1:30:48 Yeah. Kristen Beck.

Bobby Azarian 1:30:49 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-

Joe Rogan 1:31:09 Is that something she talked about?

Bobby Azarian 1:31:09 ... like, ps- psyop or something.

Joe Rogan 1:31:11 Jamie?

Narrator 1:31:12 I'm thinking. I'm trying to think.

Bobby Azarian 1:31:13 Maybe she didn't mention that. Maybe it was, like, uh-

Narrator 1:31:16 There was something she was talking about-

Bobby Azarian 1:31:17 Maybe there's-

Narrator 1:31:17 ... about projecting things in the sky or something like that.

Joe Rogan 1:31:21 Right. Right, like holographs or something like that?

Narrator 1:31:23 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:31:24 But, so could it be a psyop? I mean, there are psyops. There's MKUltra-

Joe Rogan 1:31:26 Yeah, but there's other, there's other things.

Bobby Azarian 1:31:28 ... weird things. (laughs) Yeah, but-

Joe Rogan 1:31:29 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:31:35 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-

Joe Rogan 1:31:43 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:31:43 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:32:28 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-

Bobby Azarian 1:32:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:32:41 ... would roll his eyes at, would roll their eyes at.

Bobby Azarian 1:32:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:32:43 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:33:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:33:13 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.

Bobby Azarian 1:33:50 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.

Joe Rogan 1:34:27 Right, so who could do that, though? That's the real question.

Bobby Azarian 1:34:29 Well, okay, here's me going into kind of like, uh, you know, conspiracy theory territory.

Joe Rogan 1:34:33 Yeah.

Bobby Azarian 1:34:33 But, um, so because any, any possible explanation we go with, they're all far out, and that's what's so trippy about this whole thing. Like, they're all crazy. Like, the military,