Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku
Uploaded: 2023-05-02T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-02. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Good to see you.
Glad to be on the show again.
My pleasure.
The last time was fascinating, and you have sent me down a rabbit hole of UFO
stories
and reports and fascinating stuff.
But let's talk about your latest book, which is on quantum computing.
Which is equally interesting, if not more interesting, because it might lead us
to become aliens.
We'll talk about that, too.
Please.
So, first of all, if you could, just tell everybody what it means.
What is quantum computing, and how does it work?
Well, there's a race going on.
A race between China, the United States, between IBM and Google.
A race to dominate the next generation of computers.
Because Silicon Valley could become a rust belt.
Think about that.
The digital computer of today could be like the abacus of years gone by.
We're talking about the computer of today could become obsolete with this race
to perfect the next generation,
which is quantum computers.
Instead of computing on transistors, we're computing on atoms.
Think about that.
This is the ultimate computer.
There's nothing smaller than what you can do with atoms.
And that's what these quantum computers compute with.
And it raises all sorts of problems.
The CIA is worried that quantum computers will break right through the CIA
and any kind of barrier being placed around your secrets.
Industries are going to be created out of nothing.
Medicine is going to be turned upside down.
Energy production, society, entertainment, every aspect of society will be
changed with quantum computers.
And that's why there's this race, a race to perfect the quantum computer.
How far from the finish line do you think they are?
Well, it's three years away.
First of all, we've actually built one.
Different companies are fielding quantum computers.
They're kind of primitive.
But some computers, some quantum computers, are actually millions of times more
powerful than our supercomputer
for a certain definite task.
But it may take another decade or so before we get all the kinks out
and it becomes part of everyday life.
But it's going to change everything in the same way that the transistor changed
everything.
The world economy, medicine, art, science, everything was changed with the
microchip.
Same thing with the quantum computer.
It's very difficult for us.
There's only been a few science fiction authors who have been able to do this
successfully
where they can accurately predict what the future is going to look like.
I mean, even they're off usually.
You know, H.G. Wells had some pretty good ideas.
But are we looking at something that we almost don't have a reference for,
that it's so mind-blowingly different and much more powerful than anything we've
experienced so far,
that it's difficult for us to imagine how much it's going to change the world?
Well, to imagine how it's going to change the world, think of the progression
of the computer.
For thousands of years, the computer was basically an analog device.
We used sticks, beads, levers, gears, pulleys, cranks in order to do simple
calculations.
That was the first era of computation.
And that meant that we could keep track of things, which we couldn't do before.
Then World War II hit, and all of a sudden we had to break the German code.
And that required using electricity and using all sorts of vacuum tubes to
crack the German code.
And then we went into the second era, where we compute on digital and binary.
So zeros and ones, zeros and ones.
Now we're entering the third era, a natural progression from gears, levers,
pulleys,
to vacuum tubes and transistors, and then to atoms.
This is the final step in the evolution of the computer.
When we compute on atoms, these are atomic computers, nothing more powerful
than that.
So when you think about how much it would change life as we know it,
that's when things get difficult to understand, right?
Because if we think about just trying to imagine what it would be like living
in New York City in 1820,
and then imagining what it's like today, 200 years later, they would have never
been able to guess.
What kind of things is this going to change?
Everything.
For example, think of biology and medicine.
To test a drug, what do we do?
We get thousands, hundreds of different kinds of petri dishes, put the drug in,
put the tissue in,
and just cross your fingers and hope and pray that of these thousands of dishes,
one of them will create a super wonder drug.
That's why it costs upwards of a billion dollars to market the next wonder drug,
because it's all done by trial and error.
Now, think of putting that in the memory of a supercomputer, a quantum computer.
It analyzes whether or not germs can be destroyed by this substance at the
speed of light.
Not just one dish, but hundreds, thousands of dishes of these things
can be tested at the same time in the memory, the memory of a computer.
So we're talking about digital medicine, digital chemistry, virtual chemistry.
Think about that.
Chemistry without chemicals, biology without biology.
So that's the beauty of this technology, that we can mimic atoms.
We can mimic molecules and do virtual experiments in the memory of a computer
rather than using test tubes like we used to do, that we still do today.
And we could possibly see things that are just theoretical right now,
like with medicine, like regenerating limbs or regrowing spinal tissue
for a person who's been paralyzed, things along those lines.
In fact, even immortality is on the table.
Realize that scientists who have looked at the aging process
realize that the reason why we never understood aging
is that aging is the buildup of error.
That's what aging is, the buildup of mistakes in the replication of DNA.
But what happens if you could put DNA in a computer?
Then you can see where the aging takes place.
And then we can begin perhaps to slow down the aging process,
maybe even become immortal.
What about reversing it?
What about old women become young, hot ladies again?
I think that would be a problem.
Everything's on the table because we're talking about
changing the fabric of life itself.
You know, the greatest quantum computer is Mother Nature.
Think about it.
How does Mother Nature do photosynthesis?
How does Mother Nature create trees and flowers out of nothing?
It's all chemicals and molecules.
That's what quantum computers can do.
When you think about that, just to describe that complexity that you just
described,
do you ever wonder if there's some sort of an ongoing code in the whole
universe itself?
Like, there's a reason why all these things happen.
There's a reason why the mycelium and the trees have this relationship with the
fungus and the earth and the soil,
the animals have this perfect symbiosis.
Well, that was the subject of my previous book, The God Equation,
where we try to find one theory that allows us to calculate everything,
starting with the Big Bang, then the creation of galaxies and stars, planets,
finally the creation of life, photosynthesis.
And here we are talking about this on a podcast.
So, yeah, we're talking about one equation, which I call the God Equation,
which I write about in my book, The God Equation.
But there's a problem.
The problem is that the theory is so complicated
that no human has been able to solve the consequences of this equation.
That's where quantum computers can come in.
Quantum computers can solve the equation and then test it to see whether or not
it really is a theory of everything
or just the imagination of some physicist.
So that was my previous book, The God Equation.
So that's why I decided to write this book, Quantum Supremacy,
because it may eventually take a quantum computer to calculate with what is
called string theory.
And I'm one of the founders of string theory.
And we think that is Einstein's theory that eluded him for the last 30 years of
his life.
This quantum computing creating the answer to this God molecule or this God Equation,
if this does happen, what would that mean to you,
to a person who's studied this and been a scientist your whole life and the way
you look at the world?
How much would that change if there was some sort of a provable equation as to
why things become ever more complex
and universes exist and people exist?
Well, that's my childhood dream.
As I mentioned, when I was eight years old, everything changed in my life.
A great scientist had just died.
And all the newspapers said that he could not finish his final and greatest
theory.
And they put a picture of his desk on the news.
The desk was open and unfinished.
So I was fascinated by that story.
That story changed my life because I said to myself,
why couldn't he finish that theory?
Why don't I try to finish that theory?
That's amazing.
So I went to the library and I looked up this man.
This man's name was Albert Einstein.
The theory was the theory of everything.
An equation of when it's long that would allow us to, quote,
read the mind of God.
These are Einstein's words.
So I said to myself, that's for me.
That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
So now we have the theory.
It's called string theory.
There have been TV documentaries on the subject.
But it's not testable.
So I think that a quantum computer may one day be powerful enough
to test it in the memory of a computer.
However, we have to be careful.
Remember that novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy?
What happened in that novel was the aliens of the future
created a supercomputer to calculate the theory of everything,
the ultimate theory.
So the computer chugged and chugged and spit out the answer.
And the answer was, the meaning of the universe was 42.
So much for that.
So I would hope that our quantum computer,
computing on string theory,
I hope would not give us the number 42 as the meaning of reality.
Maybe we're just too dumb to know what that means.
Yeah.
But that's what motivated me.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's a beautiful motivation.
Just thinking about you being an eight-year-old,
looking at Einstein's, the photograph of Einstein's desk,
that's amazing.
I love stories like that.
I love origin stories.
Because I've always wondered with someone like you.
Yeah, well, that changed my life.
And then when I was in high school,
I decided to take it one step further.
And I decided to build an atom smasher,
a particle accelerator in my mom's garage.
So I assembled 300 pounds of transformer steel,
22 miles of copper wire,
and I assembled a 6 kilowatt,
2.3 million electron volt betatron particle accelerator
in my mom's garage.
In high school?
In high school, right.
Wow.
Every time I turned it on,
I would blow out every single circuit breaker in the house.
It consumed 6 kilowatts of power.
My poor mom comes home,
and she hears this pop, pop, pops out
as I blow out every circuit breaker in the house.
And she must have said to herself,
why couldn't I have a son who plays baseball?
Why not basketball?
Why can't he find a nice Japanese girlfriend?
How come he builds these machines in the garage?
Well, that machine got me accepted to Harvard,
and that began my career.
That began my career as a theoretical physicist.
What were you able to do with that machine?
Well, I was able to create a magnetic field
of 10,000 gauss,
that is 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic field.
If you got too close to my machine,
it would pull the fillings out of your teeth.
Really?
Yeah, so you had to be very careful.
What about objects that are close to it?
Scissors and things would fly in the air, right.
So you had to be very careful
coming next to my machine.
Oh, my God.
So compare that to,
you can't even go near
one of those scanners,
those MRI machines, right?
Magnetic resonance imagery.
That's right, MRI.
You can't have any metal near those, right?
Yeah, right.
But that's nothing like that.
And there are about 10,000 gauss to you,
about the same magnetic field as my machine.
Oh, okay, okay.
So my ma