Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox
Guest 3 (guest), Host (host), Guest 2 (guest), Host (host)
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Guest 3 and Host, Joe Rogan Experience #2217 - Brian Cox explores brian Cox and Joe Rogan Dive Into Black Holes, Life, and AI Destiny Brian Cox and Joe Rogan explore cutting‑edge cosmology, focusing on black holes, Hawking radiation, and the black hole information paradox, explaining how new theory and experiments like LIGO and Event Horizon Telescope are reshaping our understanding of space-time.
Brian Cox and Joe Rogan Dive Into Black Holes, Life, and AI Destiny
Brian Cox and Joe Rogan explore cutting‑edge cosmology, focusing on black holes, Hawking radiation, and the black hole information paradox, explaining how new theory and experiments like LIGO and Event Horizon Telescope are reshaping our understanding of space-time.
They discuss the apparent “Great Silence” of the cosmos, the Fermi Paradox, and how rare complex life and civilization might be, including the unsettling possibility that humanity is the only source of meaning in the Milky Way.
The conversation ranges into AI, quantum computing, and the idea that life and intelligence could eventually manipulate stars or even the universe itself, raising questions about purpose, motivation, and what it would mean to “become godlike.”
They also touch on dark matter and dark energy, James Webb’s surprising early-galaxy data, the dangers of nuclear weapons and political instability, the distortions of social media, and how scientific thinking—being delighted to be wrong—offers a model for better decision‑making.
Key Takeaways
Black holes likely do not destroy information after all.
Hawking’s original calculation implied black holes erase information—violating core physics principles—but modern theoretical work suggests information is somehow encoded in Hawking radiation, possibly involving wormhole-like structures and emergent space-time.
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We now have multiple independent ways of “seeing” black holes.
Event Horizon Telescope images of supermassive black holes and LIGO’s detections of colliding black holes (and neutron stars) give converging empirical support for general relativity and provide real data on extreme gravity, not just theory.
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Intelligent civilizations may be extraordinarily rare in our galaxy.
Earth spent over three billion years with only single‑celled life, suggesting complex multicellular organisms and technological civilizations could be statistical outliers—possibly making humanity the only current bearer of meaning in the Milky Way.
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AI and quantum computing could eventually reshape the universe itself.
Cox cites thinkers like David Deutsch and Tipler to argue that sufficiently advanced life and technology might manipulate stars or cosmic evolution, meaning life may not just be a temporary flicker but a long‑term agent in the universe.
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Knowing everything might erase core aspects of being human.
They debate whether a godlike, immortal intelligence with complete knowledge would lose hope, curiosity, and surprise—traits that currently give human life much of its meaning—and whether those drives are biological or fundamental to intelligence.
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Cosmology strongly supports a 13.8‑billion‑year‑old expanding universe, but the true origin is still unknown.
Observations like the cosmic microwave background, galaxy formation, and element abundances fit a model with dark matter and dark energy, yet we still don’t know what those are or whether the universe had a true beginning in time.
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Scientific humility—being happy to be wrong—is a vital civic skill.
Cox stresses that science is “the best picture we can manage” at any moment, not absolute truth; welcoming disproof and updating models is crucial for issues from climate to technology policy and could improve how democracies handle complex problems.
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Notable Quotes
“It’s possible that this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.”
— Brian Cox
“The most vital component of being human is standing on the edge of the known and peering into the unknown with excitement and curiosity.”
— Brian Cox
“How do you explain that a quantum computer can do something no classical computer can ever do? Where is it doing the math?”
— Brian Cox
“No one’s coming to save us from ourselves, so let’s assume that.”
— Joe Rogan, paraphrasing Carl Sagan
“Democracy is a technology to avoid civil war.”
— Brian Cox
Questions Answered in This Episode
If black holes ultimately preserve information, what does that imply about the fundamental nature of space, time, and reality?
Brian Cox and Joe Rogan explore cutting‑edge cosmology, focusing on black holes, Hawking radiation, and the black hole information paradox, explaining how new theory and experiments like LIGO and Event Horizon Telescope are reshaping our understanding of space-time.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should humanity behave if we seriously adopt the working assumption that we’re the only intelligent civilization in the Milky Way right now?
They discuss the apparent “Great Silence” of the cosmos, the Fermi Paradox, and how rare complex life and civilization might be, including the unsettling possibility that humanity is the only source of meaning in the Milky Way.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Are curiosity, hope, and ambition inherently biological, or would a non‑biological superintelligence also be driven to explore and transform the universe?
The conversation ranges into AI, quantum computing, and the idea that life and intelligence could eventually manipulate stars or even the universe itself, raising questions about purpose, motivation, and what it would mean to “become godlike.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What kinds of observations or evidence would genuinely convince you that a UAP/UFO event is of extraterrestrial origin rather than human technology or error?
They also touch on dark matter and dark energy, James Webb’s surprising early-galaxy data, the dangers of nuclear weapons and political instability, the distortions of social media, and how scientific thinking—being delighted to be wrong—offers a model for better decision‑making.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Given that dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of the universe but remain unidentified, how might their eventual explanation transform physics and our worldview?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day. (rock music plays) All right. Brian Cox. Good to see you, sir.
Good to see you again.
How's, uh, things in the world of the discovery of the universe? Any-
Exciting-
Yes, very.
... I would say. I, I've been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn't started last time I saw you, actually. So I got interested in it. And the, the amount of the progress that's been made in trying to understand how they work, and, and a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, really 1970s, early 1980s, which is, "What happens to stuff that falls in?" The simplest question you could possibly ask.
Right.
There's progress being made on that now, which I think is profound and exciting.
How is the progress being made? Like how, how do we... how do we study a black hole?
I mean, it's mainly theoretical. Although, um, we, we have now got photographs of them. So we have two photographs, which are radio telescope photographs.
Right.
One of the, the one in the center of our galaxy, which is a, a little one. It's called Sagittarius A*. A lit- it's a s- it's a little super massive black hole. So it's about six million times the mass of the sun-
(laughs)
... which makes it a little super massive.
(laughs)
And then there's another one. The first photo that was taken, it's a collaboration called Event Horizon, and they took a photo of one in the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away. That thing is around six billion times the mass of the sun. Can you imagine that? 6,000 million times more massive than our sun.
Is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered?
No. There, there are bigger ones than that, but that's the... (laughs) The, the, that, that's the scale of them. It's a biggish one, that.
Oh.
But if you think about it... I mean, so there's a number, it's called the, the Schwarzschild radius of the thing. So if you, if you took our sun, which you can fit a million Earths inside, and collapsed it down to make a black hole, it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of three, three kilometers, about two miles. So you've got to take this thing, which is-
Wow.
... well, I have to convert from kilometers to miles, don't I? But it's about-
That's okay. Seven hundred... Seven hundred thousand kilometers. So it's about five, five- 500,000 miles radius or something like that, the sun. So it's a... You squash it down till it's about two miles, and then that would form a black hole. Wow.
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