Diary Of A CEO: w/ Physicist Michio Kaku on Aliens and UFOs (Transcript)

Close encounters of the first kind is when you see something in the sky. First kind. Close encounters of the second kind is when you have something tangible, an engine, a body, a wreckage of a UAP. That’s second kind. Close encounters of the third kind is when you actually encounter them and shake their hand.

Now, where are we? We’re at close encounters of the first kind, where we see things floating in the sky, but we don’t know what they are. We don’t have anything tangible. Now, in science fiction, we’ve captured the flying saucer. We have the aliens in a case or so forth. That’s the movies. We have yet to see an alien in a laboratory. We have yet to see an alien ship.

In other words, people say, “I saw something.” Now, what does that mean? I’m a physicist. We go where the observation goes and we have no observations to verify what you saw, except of course sensationalists who say, “I’ve seen the bodies.” Okay, show us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So from that, I conclude that you don’t believe alien life has arrived here on Earth.

MICHIO KAKU: No, I’m open to the possibility. 95% of the sightings we can explain using the known laws of physics. 5% are either optical illusions or they are evidence of visitation. You can’t rule it out. So I’m open to the idea that maybe they’re here.

Now, President Trump has released the first mountain load of 160 encounters of alien technology, we think. But we haven’t yet seen a close encounter of the second kind. When that happens, that’s a game changer. When we have a piece of UFO hardware, that would nail it to the wall right there.

Government Secrecy and Cover-Ups

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a narrative that the US government, or generally governments around the world, wouldn’t want the people to know about aliens because they’re not ready for it. Do you buy that?

MICHIO KAKU: That’s the traditional excuse for not revealing these things. But the other excuse is that it’s a cover. It’s a cover for the stealth bomber. It’s a cover for the fact that the military does experiment with aerodynamically novel forms of transport. And so those are the reasons why the military keeps it a secret and actually lies about these things.

But now it’s leaking out. Congress, the President of the United States, they’re demanding these sightings to be declassified. So we physicists now are analyzing them to see whether or not they’re really real or not.

Signs of Life Beyond Earth

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any evidence when we look out at the stars that there is non-human life out there? Is there anything that you’ve seen when you look at other planets and how they’re operating that might suggest there’s a different type of life there?

MICHIO KAKU: Oh yeah, but there’s no tangible evidence for it yet though.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me one example.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, for example, they could look at Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the planet Earth, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How far away is that?

MICHIO KAKU: 4.5 light years. And if you take a look at the Alpha Centauri system, the closest system to the Earth, you have red stars that could have life on them. We’re not sure. They’re not super hot, super large, in which case it would be very difficult to get life forms off the ground.

But the point I’m raising is that the Milky Way Galaxy, our backyard, has 100 billion stars. And the probability of life existing among those stars is almost 100%. The question is, can they reach us? That means, is it possible to create a space warp such that you can break the light barrier so that you can travel across the galaxy and visit the Earth?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And did you say that was theoretically possible?

MICHIO KAKU: It’s theoretically possible, yeah. But of course you need energy, fantastic amounts of energy. But the laws of physics do allow for the possibility of space warps. I mean, you’ve seen space warps on Star Trek, but where did Star Trek get the word space warps? It comes from physics.

The Mysterious Dimming Star

STEVEN BARTLETT: I also heard you telling, I think it was Joe Rogan, you were telling a story of one particular star that reduces in its intensity by 20%?

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, there is a star that oscillates.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

MICHIO KAKU: So it drops by about 20%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s reducing its light output by 20%.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How often?

MICHIO KAKU: We don’t have to wait for centuries. It’s within a matter of months to years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A star that reduces, frequently reduces its light output by 20%.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah. Which is very unusual. It’s the only one we’ve seen so far.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You explained one of the theories, I think, when you first talked about this, was that a civilization might have built something around that star?

MICHIO KAKU: Oh yeah, that’s one of several theories that a civilization that advanced would have tremendous energy needs. And the easiest way to get energy is by encircling the mother star with an envelope. And the envelope then would absorb most of the energy. In fact, that was an episode of Star Trek. They meet a star that is totally enveloped by a metal shell. The aliens left it centuries ago. But, you know, it can’t be ruled out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The theory goes that an advanced civilization will surround it with like a metal sphere to capture its energy.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that would explain why we see a 20% reduction in the light output?

MICHIO KAKU: No, they think that it’s probably an orbiting globe that eclipses the mother star. Rather than envelops the mother star, it simply goes around the mother star and eclipses it. That’s the theory.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’d be like a big ball that circles the star, extracting its energy.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. And that would cause a dip. That would cause a dip in the intensity of light.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As far as we see it.

MICHIO KAKU: As far as we see it, right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because this big ball is sometimes moving in front of it.

MICHIO KAKU: In front, that’s right, exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why couldn’t it just be a planet?

MICHIO KAKU: Planets are not that big. Planets are about 1%, like Jupiter is about 1% the size of the Sun. So the sunlight would drop by about 1 or 2% if Jupiter goes in front of our sun.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I’ve got you.

MICHIO KAKU: So this is much bigger. It’s huge.

The Big Bang and the Origin of the Universe

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve written a lot of books about the universe and physics and everything in between. I’ve waited a long time to ask someone this question, and it’s a very broad question. And the question is, where do you believe that we came from? Where do you believe that life came from? Where do you believe this universe came from?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, the universe came from the Big Bang. The question is, where did the Big Bang come from, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so what is the Big Bang?

MICHIO KAKU: The Big Bang is a cosmic explosion that took place around 14 or so billion years ago that created the expanding universe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know that happened?

MICHIO KAKU: Because we have evidence of this expansion that took place, you know, 14 or so billion years ago. We see the stars moving away from us. So think of a big balloon, the big balloon with points of light on the balloon, and the balloon is expanding and the stars are moving away from each other. That’s what we see today, not moving toward each other. All the stars are moving away from each other like the sphere is expanding. And so we believe in the Big Bang Theory, and we believe that the universe is expanding rather than contracting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Expanding into what?

MICHIO KAKU: Hyperspace.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

String Theory and the Fabric of the Universe

MICHIO KAKU: Well, we live in a 4-dimensional universe, 3 dimensions of space, 1 dimension of time. We live in a 4-dimensional universe. But in string theory, we believe that there are 11 dimensions altogether.

STEVEN BARTLETT: String theory is something that you came up with?

MICHIO KAKU: I came up with string field theory, which is one of the branches of string theory, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is string theory?

MICHIO KAKU: String theory says that what is a proton, what is an electron, they’re nothing but vibrations of a string. So from a distance, this looks like a point particle. From a distance, this is an electron. But if you could magnify that, we find that it’s not really a point at all. It’s really a vibrating string. And each vibration corresponds to a node. So this would be a proton. This would be an electron. This would be a neutron. This would be a neutrino. That’s why we have so many subatomic particles.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so to simplify this in a way that I understand, you’re saying that at the very base layer, particles are the same, but they’re just strings that are basically vibrating differently.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that would be the sort of foundational matter of everything.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. Is basically a vibrating string. So when the string vibrates in this direction, we call it an electron. If it vibrates in this way, we call it a proton. So why do we have so many subatomic particles? How many of them are there? Hundreds. We’ve seen hundreds of subatomic particles. And how could Mother Nature be so malicious to create a universe at the fundamental level based on hundreds of different kinds of strings vibrating in different directions. Well, it’s really just one string. One string that can vibrate in different modes. Each mode is called a particle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why does it need to be a string?

MICHIO KAKU: We don’t know why things are. I’m a physicist, we just try to figure out the way things really are. But it would explain why there’s so many particles. We used to think there was an electron, a proton, and a neutron, and that’s it. That’s it, period. Nope. We’ve seen pi mesons, we’ve seen lambda particles, omega particles, hundreds of subatomic particles. Why do we build atom smashers? Outside Chicago, outside Geneva, huge gigantic atom smashers smashing atoms apart. Why? Because then from the debris, we begin to figure out these vibrations are particles. We can categorize them. We can give them names. And that gives us a “theory of everything.” So we have what is called the Standard Model, which explains all the subatomic particles other than gravity. And we create these particles with their atom smashers.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is the big machines where they fire atoms at each other in Geneva and so on around the world.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. To figure out. That’s the Large Hadron Collider, right? But now we realize that there’s another octave, there’s another layer even beyond what we see with the Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter. Dark matter is invisible matter that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy, and we don’t know what it is. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting for somebody who could figure out what dark matter is. It’s invisible matter. Invisible matter that surrounds the entire Milky Way galaxy. We think, though we cannot yet prove, that it’s nothing but the next octave.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by octave?

MICHIO KAKU: Vibration. In other words, this would be the lowest vibration, which corresponds to an electron, but there are other vibrations much bigger, and they would correspond to a higher octave.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know it’s there if it’s invisible?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, this is a guess, but it turns out that when you do the math and you look at the vibration of a string and you look at the higher vibrations, some of them are invisible. In other words, they don’t interact with light. Now, we know that this interacts with light, therefore we can see it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The table.

MICHIO KAKU: But these are the lowest vibrations. Some of the higher vibrations are invisible. And so we think that’s what dark matter is.

The Big Bang and the Multiverse

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess this all comes back to the question we were talking about, the Big Bang. Scientists tend to agree that there was some kind of Big Bang because when you look at the universe, it’s expanding outwards. So one would, if you rewind time, at some point there was a central point where something, where a big explosion occurred if you reverse time. I mean, it begs the question, what caused the Big Bang?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, we don’t know, but there are theories. String theory is a theory even before the Big Bang. It’s a theory of everything. The Big Bang in some sense is a misnomer because it disguises the fact that we’re ignorant. We’re ignorant of what caused the thing to bang. String theory, there was no bang. That is, it did collapse, if you go backwards in time, it did collapse to a very small thing and then came out again. It bounced.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.

MICHIO KAKU: So we think that there could be a bubble bath of universes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by a bubble bath of universes?

MICHIO KAKU: Our universe is a bubble of some sort and the bubble is expanding and that’s called the Big Bang Theory, which fits all the data. But we think there are other bubbles out there. In other words, string theory says that we live not just in a 4-dimensional world, but in an 11-dimensional world. These other dimensions we cannot see, but we think that the universe coexists with other universes. There’s a bubble bath. Think of bubbles, soap bubbles floating in the vacuum.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about marbles? So when you’re talking about bubbles, could you mean like kind of like this?

MICHIO KAKU: Right, okay, give me the big one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: All right.

MICHIO KAKU: Okay. So let’s say this is the sun.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

MICHIO KAKU: And these are planets, asteroids, whatever. And they’re going around. They’re going around the sun. Why? Why are they going around the sun like that? It’s because this exerts gravitational force that is pulling these things toward the sun. The Earth is just one. Asteroids are none of the other. Saturn, Jupiter, they’re nothing but planets going around the mother star.

And so then the next question is why? Why is it that planets are going around the sun? It’s because the sun is warping the space around it. It’s creating a shallow depression. Space is not flat. This is Einstein’s achievement. You go in this direction, seems flat. You go in this direction, everything seems to be flat, right? But nope. The Earth, for example, is round, but it looks flat, but it’s not. The universe looks flat, but it’s not. It’s curved. That’s why planets go around the mother star, because gravity is the byproduct of the warping of space.

And that’s why we are sitting on this chair right now. Why are we here? How come we’re not flying in outer space? The Earth is spinning, right? If the Earth is spinning, we should be flung out into outer space. So how come we’re here?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Gravity.

MICHIO KAKU: Gravity. What is gravity though? That’s just a word, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just because the mass of the Earth is so much greater than us that it pulls us in.

MICHIO KAKU: Oh yeah, well, why is it pulling us in? Einstein says that the reason why the Earth is pulling us in is because the Earth warps the space around us and is pushing us into the floor. That’s why the solar system works the way it does, because the sun grabs the planets and forces the planets to move in a curved line because it’s curved space that is causing it to move this way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And going back to what you were saying about the bubble bath idea.

MICHIO KAKU: Right. Then the question is, are there other stars? Yes. Are there other galaxies? There’s billions and billions of planets out there. We think that the whole shebang, the whole thing is curved. We’re nothing but inhabitants on the skin of this gigantic bubble. Now we’re saying that maybe there are other bubbles out there. A multiverse. A multiverse of universes, parallel universes.

In fact, the word multiverse has gotten into the literature. Comic books now refer to the multiverse, Spider-Man and things like that. So it’s even part of the vernacular, common language of the average person, that we believe in parallel universes. So yeah, these parallel universes come from physics.

Black Holes: Points of No Return

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other thing that comes from physics is black holes.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. If this star becomes so massive that its gravity is so great that it pulls the entire shebang in, like this, and then that would be a black hole. And we now believe that at the center of almost every galaxy we see, and there are trillions of galaxies, we think that at the center of these galaxies, there’s a black hole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even our galaxy, the Milky Way.

MICHIO KAKU: Even our galaxy, right? If you look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation Sagittarius, there’s a black hole there. So tonight, go outside, look for the constellation Sagittarius, and there’s a black hole at the center of our own backyard that holds the Milky Way galaxy together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how did it get there?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, we think that it’s a remnant of the Big Bang, that when the Big Bang exploded, clusters of matter began to attract other clusters of matter. And this is where the galaxies and the planets come from. The condensation of the matter ejected out of the Big Bang gives you the galaxies, the solar systems and the planets.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I use this as an example, there was the Big Bang and all the pieces flew everywhere. And then because of gravity, the pieces came together and they got so, so, so big, so much mass that they collapsed inwards.

MICHIO KAKU: We’re not sure exactly which came first. The galaxy came first or the black hole came first. But let’s assume for the moment that the black hole came first. Gas concentrated into a small area called the black hole, and then it drew all the other stars and galaxy around it to create the Milky Way galaxy. We’re not sure, but that’s one possibility of where it came from. And where did that come from? That in turn came from the explosion that created the universe roughly 14 billion years ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking black holes, they are extremely dense, like areas of matter, and they — if you were to go near one, everything that goes near it gets sucked in.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. And you never get out again. If this is a black hole, there is a ring or a sphere surrounding it, a point of no return. You go towards the black hole and you pass this ring, and then you go into the black hole, never to be seen again. It’s a point of no return.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know that?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, we’ve never seen it happen, but we can calculate the escape velocity. In other words, if you want to leave the Earth, how fast do you have to move to leave the Earth? 7 miles per second. Our astronauts travel 7 miles per second to reach the moon. That’s called escape velocity. So every gravitating piece of matter has an escape velocity. For the Earth, it’s 7 miles per second. What about the escape velocity of a black hole? It’s the speed of light. That’s why if you fall through the event horizon of a black hole, you never come out, because otherwise you would have to go faster than the speed of light, which is not possible. So you go in, but you never come out. That’s why it’s called black holes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s in there?

MICHIO KAKU: If you knew, you’d win a Nobel Prize.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This area has loads and loads of mass inside it. It’s sucking things into it. So one would assume that there was a lot inside there, but it’s tiny, right? Black holes are tiny?

MICHIO KAKU: We don’t know how big they are. We think at the very center it could be very small. We’re not sure. No one’s ever been there because if you go past the event horizon, you never come out again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do people think is inside a black hole? Because I’m thinking of it as just this area in space that looks black on a — when you look at it, and it can suck in planets, anything.

The Nature of Black Holes and Wormholes

MICHIO KAKU: If I were to take a guess, I would say that it’s an entrance. It’s a gateway, perhaps to another universe. We think, for example, if I have a warp space and you fall into warp space, if the warp space is powerful enough, it may come out again on the other side. So there may be another universe on the other side of a black hole. We’re not sure, of course.

If you want to go to Alpha Centauri with a Saturn V rocket, it would take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star with our most powerful rocket. Very impractical. You need a shortcut. And that’s the gateway called a wormhole, which is very similar to a black hole, a little bit different, but very similar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long have you been studying physics and the universe now?

MICHIO KAKU: Since I was 8 years old, I’ve been studying the universe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 71 years.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah. When I was 8 years old, a great scientist had just died. It was in all the newspapers, and the newspaper said that he failed on his last try to create a theory of everything. So I was fascinated by this idea that this man was attempting to find the final theory.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re talking about Einstein.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. Later I found out the man’s name was Albert Einstein. And at that point I said to myself, that’s for me. That’s what I want to work on. I want to be part of this great journey to complete Einstein’s dream of a theory of everything. And that’s what I do for a living. I work with Einstein’s equations.

God, Religion, and the Theory of Everything

STEVEN BARTLETT: So for 71 years you’ve been trying to understand the universe and create this theory for everything. In that time, how has your perspective on God developed?

MICHIO KAKU: Yes. Most of my family were Buddhists, coming from Japan. But my father was a Christian and put me in Sunday school. So I had the benefit of two religions as a child. Now I’m a physicist. And physicists are, quote, agnostic. They don’t take a position. They simply go where the physics takes them, into areas that are distasteful, mysterious, whatever. You go where the evidence goes. And that’s what I am today.

In other words, we have the laws of physics. We have string theory, which takes us to the instant of the Big Bang and even before, even before the creation of the universe. But then the next question is, where did string theory come from? At that point, we have to say that that’s where our ignorance takes over. We simply don’t know.

Simulation Theory

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about simulation theory? Do you think it’s plausible that in fact we are living in a simulation?

MICHIO KAKU: I would say the answer is probably no.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably no.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. Simulation theory is basically saying that the universe is a puppet show and there’s a script. We’re living out the script because somebody is pulling our strings. First of all, that violates quantum theory. Quantum theory believes in probabilities. Probabilities that I’m sitting here today, probabilities that maybe one day I’ll go into outer space. We can calculate the probabilities of atomic events, chemical events with accuracy that is incredibly precise. But simulation theory is not one of them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The theory, which was proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom, says that there are three possibilities logically. Either number one, that human-like civilizations always destroy themselves before they get to the point where they can do advanced hyper-realistic simulations. And if you think about things like virtual reality at the moment, or video games, and you imagine them on a spectrum — if they just get 1% better a year, at some point they are indistinguishable from this reality that we’re experiencing now. So theory 1, we wipe ourselves out before we get to the point where we’re advanced enough in hyper-realistic simulations.

Theory number 2, or possibility number 2, is that advanced civilizations do exist, but they have zero interest in simulating their ancestors, which would be us. Or theory number 3 is that we are a simulation and civilizations do survive and they do run millions of simulations because there would be millions of fake universes and only one can be base reality in this scenario. And the mathematical odds are incredibly high that we are currently living inside one of those simulations and not in base reality.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, my personal point of view is there’s option 4 that you don’t mention. And option 4 is that there is no simulation at all, that all this talk is nothing but fairy tales. Fairy tales that we tell our children to amaze them about the universe. But you see, the universe is based on probabilities. Probabilities that uranium will fire, for example, which gives us nuclear weapons. Probability that hydrogen can fuse, and that gives us stars. So the universe is based on probabilities, not on simulations.

The Nature of Reality and Human Perception

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think what we’re seeing — this is a strange question to ask because again, there are so many definitions within it — but do you think what we’re seeing is real? Because people do psychedelic drugs and I hear about things like DMT. You inhale a little bit of smoke and suddenly everything you see is different. And people talk about how they’ve met other types of life when they’ve taken an inhale of DMT, they’ve interacted with some type of other life form.

So I guess all this is to say that if our perceived reality is that fragile where we inhale one puff of smoke, and suddenly we’re amongst a different life form, then it makes us question whether this is real at all. And also, just to extend it a little bit further, if one inhalation of smoke — and I guess you could think about that as a bunch of small particles — can interrupt something in my brain that causes me to believe that I’m in a different universe, then doesn’t that prove that my reality is just the projection of a very fragile, small amount of particles that are right now lined up so that I see you and this?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think the answer to that is that what you consider to be reality is really a partial fiction, that your senses are limited by what your senses can retrieve from the outside world, which is only a teeny weeny little fraction of what actually exists. Look at the electromagnetic spectrum of light, for example. You can’t see all the ultraviolet radiation, the infrared, X-rays. This room is full of realities that you can’t see. Most of what you see is a fragment, a teeny, eensy-weensy little fragment of reality. You can’t see cosmic rays. You can’t see ultraviolet radiation.

So what I’m trying to tell you is that you live in an illusion. It’s a good illusion for survival. But in terms of being able to see the full spectrum of reality as it exists, no, there’s no way. So you think reality is everything. Nope. It’s only a tiny, tiny, incy wincy little fragment of reality. And then talking about this reality, that’s a fantasy on top of a fantasy. The first fantasy is that you think that what you see is real and everything. That’s the first fantasy. The second fantasy is there’s a fantasy within the first fantasy. So you’re going layer upon layer of fantasies.

Now let me give you another example. Let’s say you hear rustling in the forest. You think it’s a tiger there. Nine times out of 10, there’s no tiger there. But how come your senses are constantly alerting you to the tiger? And that is evolution. Evolution gives you the ability to see things that are not really there at all because it’s good for survival. One time there is a tiger and it saves your butt. In other words, why are we here today? We’re here today because our senses are overactive. Our senses think there’s a lion, there’s a tiger there when there’s no lion or tiger there at all. But it was good for our survival.

So our senses are only necessary for our survival. That’s why we cannot see infrared, we cannot see ultraviolet, we cannot see the whole spectrum of reality, radio, everything. We can’t see it all because it was not necessary for our survival.

The Meaning of Life and the Purpose of Consciousness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why does life matter in the universe? What function does life have in the universe?

MICHIO KAKU: I think we create our own meaning individually. I think there’s no universal meaning for life in general, but I think each of us create our own meaning.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was saying this because you were talking about survival, and I was just wondering if there was some universal reason why survival is so important to the universe.

MICHIO KAKU: Survival is important for the universe because survival writes history. If there’s no survival, there’s nothing to write. There’s no memories. There’s no stories to tell, nothing. There’s just the vacuum of space.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was also asking that, I guess, because you were saying how we only see one version of reality. And so one would assume therefore that there’s another version of reality that we can’t even see. I mean, I’ve heard this before from physicists, and if you just think about different animals, the bat sees a different version of reality to the whale.

MICHIO KAKU: Like sonar, for example.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sonar, for example. Even my dog — my dog seems to see a completely different version of reality than the one I see.

MICHIO KAKU: It smells much better than you. Olfactory nerves of a dog are infinitely better than our olfactory nerves in our nose. They have a different reality.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess it begs the question, what is all of this then?

MICHIO KAKU: You’re talking about the meaning of life, for which I have no answer. Sorry about that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess that was what I was asking, but that wasn’t what I was intent on asking, but that’s the base question, which is — what’s the point?

MICHIO KAKU: I’m not even sure if the universe has a point. But my personal attitude is we create our own point. We create our own world and meaning within that world. It could be different from another person’s meaning and understanding of the world, but it’s good enough for me.

Religion as Social Glue

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think of the human sort of proclivity to imagine a God and to assign meaning and morality to that God? Because we do live with this kind of God-shaped hole in our lives where we don’t really know where we came from. We don’t know what the point is. So I understand why it’s tempting to say this book that someone wrote once upon a time that says this person, this thing created us, and these are the rules, and this is what good is, this is what bad is, this is what we get if we follow the rules. As humans, we want that.

MICHIO KAKU: Yes, and I think there’s a reason for that. And the answer is evolution. What holds animals together? The alpha male, the top dog. As humans became more intelligent over millions of years, humans bicker. We argue. We challenge the leader. And then tribes would fall apart because you need some glue. You need some glue to hold it together. And if everyone becomes intelligent uniformly, there’s no glue anymore. Everyone bickers. I’m the leader. No, I’m the leader. So on and so forth.

So what happens is one person comes up and says, “I’m stronger than you. And I talked to somebody even stronger than me, God. And if you disobey me, then God will strike you down.” In other words, God is a glue. God is a glue that holds sentient beings together when there’s no reason to hold them together anymore. And they bicker. And then the tribe falls apart. What holds the tribe together? God. Who is God? Well, God is not here, but the Son of God is here. And the Son of God says, “You gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, and you gotta obey me.” Why? “Because I’m the messenger. I’m the Son of God.”

So I think religion has a definite purpose. The purpose of religion is a glue to hold sentient, intelligent beings together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think consciousness is?

MICHIO KAKU: Consciousness, I think, is a question of awareness, the ability to create ideas about why. What does it mean? Meaning, to give meaning to things. Otherwise, things become meaningless. So I think that’s the purpose of consciousness, is to give us an awareness of meaning.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think these big questions will ever be answered around where we came from, what the point is? Do you think we’ll ever have answers to these things?

The Nature of Human Intelligence and Curiosity

MICHIO KAKU: Probably not. However, we have this instinctive urge to explore, to look for new territories and new ideas. And that is what I think keeps us going. Animals do not have that. You can’t tell a dog, “Aren’t you thrilled that we’re going to this new house, this new whatever, right?” And dog says, “No, just give me my dinner.”

So I think that humans are different. The purpose of the front part of our brain, the cerebral cortex that holds us together, it’s a time machine. It asks the question, what’s going to happen in the future? If you don’t believe me, go to your dog tonight and ask your dog, what did he do last night? And the dog will just bark. No interest in what happened yesterday, what’s happened tomorrow.

We constantly think about the future. We can’t help it. We are constantly thinking about what’s for dinner tomorrow. Who’s my friend? Who’s my enemy? What am I going to do next year? What college am I going to go to? We are obsessed with the future. That’s what separates us from the animal kingdom. Animals do not care about the future. They just care about survival.

We, on the other hand, are obsessed with the future because that’s where our survival lies. And why is that? Because we don’t have claws. We don’t have fangs. We don’t have huge muscles. We can’t run very fast. We can’t fly. We’re not like the animals. We are dependent upon the front part of our brain. And that’s what we ask these questions that you just asked. Why are you asking these questions? Because you’re programmed to ask these questions. Animals are not.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Human Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: On the subject of intelligence, there is now new types of intelligence amongst us. One of them is referred to as artificial intelligence, which is actually modeled on how the brain works. I’ve sat here with some of the experts in AI, and they’ve told me that they learned a lot about the human brain and how it reasons and how it processes information with these neural nets, as they call it, which is a concept that has been inspired by the brain.

And with that, they’ve started to build these very intelligent machines, which a lot of people are now using in terms of large language models like ChatGPT. But we’re going further and further into the world of artificial intelligence. One would reason that the future looks very, very, very different because of this new type of intelligence and that it’s going to accelerate maybe a lot of the discoveries that we’ve pondered about today, but also that it’s going to change life as we know it. And some people even think that human life won’t be the dominant form of intelligence in such a world. What do you think?

MICHIO KAKU: Yes, I think that is a definite problem. Right now, I think a lot of our robots have the intelligence of a bug, an insect. They don’t plan, they can’t articulate their thoughts, and so forth, but they carry out orders very well. But eventually, it’s only a matter of time before they become as smart as a mouse, then as smart as a rabbit, then as smart as a dog or a cat, and finally as smart as a monkey. At that point, they are potentially dangerous.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The AI models though that are available now are PhD level in terms of intelligence.

MICHIO KAKU: No, you cannot talk PhD physics with them. They’re programmed. They’re programmed to have certain ways of thinking about certain things, but they’re not original. You can’t come up with a new theory of physics talking to a robot. They basically take what is programmed into them and work with that. Now, eventually they may become creative. But I think that’s going to take several decades before we are at that point.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say creative, what’s your definition of creative in that context?

MICHIO KAKU: Robots right now take what is available to them and rearrange things, like writing a book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Isn’t that what humans do? Don’t we take information and rearrange it?

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, but we come up with new ideas based on that information.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The AIs can make a photo that has never existed before, so isn’t that by definition the basis of what did exist before?

MICHIO KAKU: In other words, something new, but basically a rearrangement of something that already existed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m saying, the Michael Jackson documentary has just come out recently, and you see Michael Jackson, the way he moves, and you look at it and go, “Wow, no one’s ever moved like that before.” And then my friend sent me this video, which was what Michael Jackson was actually inspired by. I’ll throw it up on the screen so other people can see. But it was something that came before Michael Jackson, and it was this guy who moved in this very interesting way. And when I watched this guy, I saw Michael Jackson.

And so you look at someone like Michael Jackson and you go, “Oh my God, an unbelievable creative genius artist.” But even he was inspired by this individual. And then if I play it forward, this is how Michael Jackson moved, right?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, the bottom line of art is mimicry. That’s the bottom line of art, except you arrange things in an original way so it looks fresh.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking that with Newton, he took the existing laws of physics, and he—

MICHIO KAKU: Which were negligible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And he proposed—

MICHIO KAKU: There were no laws of physics before Newton.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And he proposed a question.

MICHIO KAKU: Mm-hmm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then he tested that question and found an answer.

MICHIO KAKU: He asked himself a question: how come the Earth goes around the sun? And he came up with an idea that was totally different from what people had thought about before. He came up with calculus. He came up with the inverse square law. So what I’m saying is true creativity comes from almost nothing and it’s like a supernova. Well, creativity of a robot is imitative. Now there’s nothing wrong with that because of course imitative artwork is still artwork, but it’s imitative.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you believe people like the big AI CEOs and Elon Musk when they say that AI will lead to new discoveries in science?

MICHIO KAKU: That’s possible because there’s so many laws of physics that are known that many of the new laws of physics are imitative and you rearrange them and combine them in different ways. So it’s possible that the big breakthroughs of the future will be guided by breakthroughs of the past. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you concerned about AI at all?

MICHIO KAKU: I’m concerned about AI in the larger perspective that one day they can learn to do things that are bad. Learn to kill, learn to maim, to harm people. Realize that every invention that we’ve made in the past, like the bow and arrow, could be used for good and bad. Everything. The bow and arrow could be good for game, for food, for eating, but a bow and arrow could be good for slaughtering your next-door neighbor. Any new invention has a double-edged sword to it.

And so I think that so far, most of the applications of artificial intelligence have been positive. We’re talking about labor costs, we’re talking about creating wealth, we’re talking about making things faster, cheaper, better. That’s all great. But you can also create artificial intelligent weapons as well. And the battlefield is where it’s happening. And if you take a look at what’s happening in Ukraine and Russia, already we’re talking about aerial weapons that can use wires to lock onto their target. And they use artificial intelligence to guide them with this wire, and they cannot be stopped using the usual techniques.

The Big Bang and the Origin of the Universe

STEVEN BARTLETT: Going back to this question of the Big Bang and where we all came from, if you had to posit a guess as to what caused the Big Bang, would you land on this bubble bath theory that you talked about where there’s just lots and lots of universes, some of them are contracting and expanding? Is that where you would personally land?

MICHIO KAKU: Probably. If you take a look at empty space, we now believe that empty space is frothing, frothing with little bubbles, bubbles that pop into existence and then annihilate and go back into nothingness again. So even pure nothingness is chock-full of activity. And one day, we think, one day one of these tiny little bubbles decided not to go back into the vacuum but to keep on expanding and expanding. And that became the Big Bang. And so the theory says that the universe is dynamic and that universes are being created all the time.

Religion, Science, and the Meaning of Existence

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about Adam and Eve?

MICHIO KAKU: What about Adam and Eve?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you don’t think this story is true, that there was a garden, Adam and Eve, Adam ate the apple, put your clothes on, behave yourself, and then, you know, we all come from—

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think there’s evolution, and evolution did create life forms that are single-celled, multi-celled, and then cells with a nervous system like fish, and then this became land-moving organisms. So I think there’s a linear progression.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you don’t believe the stories told in the First Testament of the Bible around how humans came to be? God created the world in 7 days — you don’t believe that stuff?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think it’s a fairy tale. I think it’s a very compelling fairy tale. But I think that even the people who teach religion realize it as a metaphor, that we don’t really mean 24 hours in a day, because that deals with the earth. In the universe, there could be other worlds where a day is not 24 hours. A day does not look like what the Bible says in Genesis.

So I think it’s a way to organize your religion into a way that is digestible and people can understand it. And it touches people, which is the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion is to touch people, to bring them together into a commonality. And that’s what the story of Genesis does. Religion, in some sense, is a way to help people, to show people guidance, the good life, so that you don’t terrorize other people, that you make life better for other people. Not that it explains the meaning of existence, but it gives you a reason for existence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you would consider yourself to be an atheist?

MICHIO KAKU: No, I’m agnostic. I believe that there’s a lot of truth because it’s a way of behaving. It’s a way of learning how to be good to your neighbor. Is a glue that holds things together. Not that it gives meaning for life, but it shows the way.

Morality, War, and the Human Condition

STEVEN BARTLETT: It shows the way. And the subject of morality is often so intrinsically linked to religion, which is what is good and what is bad. Where does your morality come from, Dr.?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I was in the United States Army for 2 years, and at that point I had to face death. And I had to face war. It was the height of the Vietnam War. There were 500 GIs dying every week, every week. Life magazine published an issue where they had the pictures, just the pictures with no commentary, of all the GIs that died that week with no commentary, no I told you so, just the pictures of those people that died.

And then I realized that I would have to put my life on the line because my number was up and people were going into the military and people were realizing, well, war is the way people work out their differences. But then I began to realize being in the military that there is a morality there. I began to realize that the people that we were fighting had their own religion. They had their own way of looking at good and evil and whatever. And they were willing to sacrifice their life for their own freedom. I began to question religion at that point. Is it just a glue that holds people together? Is there a deeper meaning to the whole thing?

So one day I was learning how to throw hand grenades. And our sergeant, who was explaining to us how to throw hand grenades, had scars on one side of his face, big scars on his neck. And we asked him why. And he said, well, one day a little Vietnamese boy came up to him and the Vietnamese boy says, “Candy, candy, you want candy?” And the GI says, “No, no, no, get away from me. I don’t want candy.” Well, the little boy showed what was in his hand. It was a hand grenade. It was not candy at all. And the little boy threw the hand grenade at the sergeant. Well, the sergeant immediately saw what the danger was and he hit the ground as soon as he could, flat on the ground. The grenade exploded and one half of his body got saturated with shrapnel.

And then you have to ask yourself a question. Why would a young boy do something like this? It’s because he believed in something. And I think that was a real big lesson for me. And that is, you have to believe in something. You have to believe in the goodness of men and also the fact that men can do evil. And you have to fight for what you think is right.

And therefore, it’s not just a question of we’re number one, we’re going to win this war. I used to sing a song in the morning, “I want to go to Vietnam. I want to kill a Charlie Cong.” I used to sing that every morning at 4 o’clock in the morning. And then I ask myself now, why? Were we on the right side or the wrong side? And then at that point, you begin to question what is right and what is wrong. And then you realize, maybe I’m on the wrong side.

Ideology, Conflict, and the Human Condition

STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe I’m on the wrong side. I mean, it goes back to all the conflict happening at the moment because we’re ideologically captured by whatever our own religious beliefs are, and that’s causing us to turn against each other and cause so much pain and suffering in the world. Do you think there’s any chance that this could at all change, or is this just part of the human condition?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, if you take a look at the human condition, you realize that warfare has been an integral part of our evolution as a species. Even in the animal kingdom, animals will fight against other animals. And so my hope, however, is that we’re different from the animals. We have a brain. We can make moral decisions. Animals do not understand the meaning of a moral decision. Animals is survival, is who’s stronger, who has the food. We don’t necessarily have to engage in that conflict. And so I would hope that we use the brain that we have to think through and create a better world.

The Many Worlds Theory and the Infinite Universe

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I heard when I was very young about the universe, and I guess this was inspired by some theory within physics, was that there are infinite amounts of worlds out there. And I heard this — I heard someone say, if the world is infinite, that means that there’s someone like me, a Stephen Bartlett, who has an identical life to me up there somewhere out in the stars who’s living an identical life to mine, maybe other than instead of in this cup there’s lemonade instead of coffee. This is what they call — is it called the many worlds theory where they think there’s theoretically —

MICHIO KAKU: — a version of the many worlds theory. But most many worlds theory simply says that there’s an infinite number of universes and worlds out there, none of them necessarily identical to ours, but independent of us. That that is a distinct possibility.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if there’s infinite numbers, that means there’s one just like this, identical to this.

MICHIO KAKU: Not necessarily. You can have an infinite number of things that don’t repeat. So in other words, okay, yeah, you don’t necessarily have to have another civilization that is exactly like ours. You could, but it’s not necessary if you believe in an infinite universe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s true, I guess. Do you think that’s plausible, that there’s an infinite number?

MICHIO KAKU: First of all, when you look at the night sky, you’re overwhelmed by the majesty of the night sky. And then you realize that we’re nothing but a dot, a dot on this gigantic disk called the Milky Way Galaxy. And if this is the Milky Way Galaxy, then here we are thinking that this is the entire universe. This is nothing but a pinpoint on the Milky Way Galaxy. And how many galaxies are there? We’re talking about trillions of galaxies that are out there. Each one containing roughly 100 billion stars.

Do Our Lives Matter to the Universe?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How are we supposed to feel about this? I did this star tour a couple of months ago in LA, where all it was was a guy took me out to a field, not even a field, it was the desert in Joshua Tree at nighttime, and he just explained how far away all the stars are. And then I looked through a telescope and he was like, “Okay, this thing you’re seeing here is a galaxy and it’s a gazillion miles that way, and this one is a galaxy as big as the Milky Way and it’s a gazillion miles that way.”

It made me feel, one, irrelevant from a cosmic perspective. It also relieves one’s anxiety. If anyone’s anxious about this life, you kind of feel like you’re not — you don’t matter that much. But also, it can make you feel like it doesn’t matter, like there’s no point. Because I think there’s a certain ego to humans where we want to think it really, really, really matters. Now, it might matter to us, but does it actually matter to the universe? Does our lives matter to the universe?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I like to think of it slightly differently. I think on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, there’s an alien who’s writing the same equation that I’m writing down right now in different language, in different notations. But he’s also discovering string theory. And there are a lot of galaxies out there, each one with an individual saying, “Gee, I think I discovered something new about the universe.”

And these laws are universal. The equations that I’m writing down right now are identical, in different language, with equations that they’re writing down billions of light years from us. And that gives me a sense of oneness. It gives me a sense that, wow, we’re part of a fellowship. We’re part of a camaraderie. We’re on the same quest, a quest to understand the nature of matter and energy. We’re on the same boat, even though we speak different language, even though we’re on different sides of the universe. We’re all part of the same club.

Will Humanity Destroy Itself Before Reaching the Stars?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Don’t you think it’s plausible that we’re going to destroy ourselves before we ever figure that answer out, or before we get to meet these aliens? Because the technology we’ve been able to create so far, like nuclear weapons and even things like AI, you play this forward just on — you talked about probabilities being the most important thing. The probability that one of these egomaniacs who has the launch codes for a nuclear weapon at some point decides that they’re unhappy or they feel threatened is pretty high if you just extend time. I mean, the probability goes up theoretically with every year that passes that someone is going to make a mistake that wipes us out. And the more advanced our science gets, presumably — again, I’m just theorizing — the higher the probability that we create something that can destroy ourselves.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I like to look at it slightly differently. I say to myself, what is the smallest unit of history? And I say it’s the decade. Anything smaller than a decade, you get random fluctuations, noises, accidents taking place in a decade. But if you look at human history decade by decade by decade, you realize that, oh my God, just a few decades ago, it was horse and buggy. Before that, we just had plows. Before that, we were barbarians. And you begin to realize that we’ve come a long ways. Not that we hit the end, but we’ve come a long ways just in the decade-by-decade analysis of the history of the human race.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’ve got closer to being able to destroy ourselves.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s true too, because before we couldn’t destroy ourselves. Now for the first time in human history, we have the potential of destroying ourselves with designer germs, with nuclear weapons, with perhaps artificial intelligence. We didn’t have that capability before. And it’s only been in the last 80 years or so as a consequence.

So I think that first of all, it means that every decade tremendous progress is made. There’s no doubt about that. But second, we’re on a knife’s edge. You tilt it the wrong way and there’s world war. You tilt it the other way and there’s food and luxury for everyone. And it’s up to us to decide which way the knife will go. But my point is, decade by decade, we see the enormous progress that we humans have made. The next question is, what about the next few decades? That’s a big question mark.

Humanity’s Future Among the Stars

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think humanity are going to be able to travel out there amongst the stars and become multi-planetary like someone like Elon Musk is planning?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think it’s for certain that we’re going to go not just to the moon, but to Mars and maybe even beyond that. Maybe not in our lifetime, but in our grandchildren’s lifetime, we may break through and visit other planets within our solar system. Now, to go beyond that would require some sort of warp drive because of the fact that the nearest star is probably orbiting Alpha Centauri, which is 4.5 light years away from the planet Earth. So you realize it would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to begin the colonization of the nearby star systems.

The Search for the Theory of Everything

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you could answer any one mystery of the universe — I just have it down here, the answer. What would you seek to answer?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, it’s what I’m seeking for my entire life, and that is we want that one equation which is the secret of the universe. We have the electromagnetic force equation that’s like half an inch long. We have the equation for gravity that’s also about half an inch long. So why not the theory of everything, maybe an inch long? We’re not there yet. But I think it does exist. And if we were to find it, that would give us an understanding of the entire universe. And I think we’re very close.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think we’re close?

MICHIO KAKU: I think we’re close.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What makes you think we’re close?

MICHIO KAKU: Because so far, the theories that we do have, almost like magic, you look at the history of the equations of physics and you realize they get simpler and simpler and simpler with time. You can write down Newton’s equation, Maxwell’s equations, the equation for the nuclear force on one sheet of paper, one sheet of paper. The force that governs gravity, we don’t have that yet, but we have the other forces and the equations are very simple. And that’s why I think that the final equation will also be simple.

The Astonishing Human Brain

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that sometimes inspires me is that when you look at nature or when you look at something like the human brain, you see the same patterns as you see when you look up out at the stars. And I mean, I’m so fascinated by the nature of the human brain because it seems to be so, so powerful. And it also seems to have patterns we see in the wider universe. Do you ever think about this, about the brain and how astonishing it is as a thing?

The Future of Humanity: Physics, Immortality, and Quantum Computing

MICHIO KAKU: Well, when I look at the animals, that makes me triply impressed. The fact that animals cannot share in that, that we see a universe that the animals cannot see. We see patterns, we see meaning, we give rhyme and reason to what we see.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With animals, it says, “Where’s my dinner?” Do you think the brain is as fascinating as the universe is fascinating?

MICHIO KAKU: I think the universe is more fascinating. No matter how fast we are with physics and the mathematics of physics, pure mathematics is still more, more profound.

Life in 2100: What the Future Holds

STEVEN BARTLETT: You wrote this book called The Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. If I was alive in 2100, based on everything you know about physics, what am I likely to see, experience? How is life likely to be different in that future?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think we’ll probably be on the Moon, maybe onto Mars, and perhaps even dream about sending the first space probes even beyond that. We’re talking about being able to use artificial intelligence to send probes out there. Of course, we’re not going to go to the stars. That’s a few hundred years into the future. But I think that we will begin to understand the solar system within this century.

And this also means that we’ll have artificial intelligence, a cure for cancer, and maybe one will aid the other. Maybe artificial intelligence will help us to cure cancer and many diseases. And longevity perhaps will begin the process of solving the immortality crisis.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we will be able to live forever in the near future?

MICHIO KAKU: I think there’s a possibility that we may have an indefinite lifespan. I think that’s a possibility.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think it’s possible within the laws of, I guess, physics and biology?

The Science of Immortality: Telomeres and the Clock of Life

MICHIO KAKU: Yes. At the end of our chromosomes, every cell, there’s something called the telomeres. And the telomeres are like a clock. They get shorter every time a cell reproduces. And when the telomere gets so short, it frays, falls apart, and you die. So we have a time limit.

We’ve also discovered telomerase, a chemical that stops the clock. This was incredible when it was first announced that if there’s a clock in our body called the telomeres that tracks how long we’re going to live, and there’s something called telomerase which stops the clock, then can we live forever?

Well, that was the good news. Then the bad news was we found out that most of our, to our shock, cancer also uses telomeres and telomerase to live forever. Why does cancer kill you? Because they are immortal. In principle, they could live forever. And so it means that the secret of immortality is tantalizingly close. We do know that there are cells that make immortality possible. But there’s a price to pay. The price to pay is you don’t want cancers to also follow you.

So here’s the trick of the game. We have a whole bunch of top people in the sciences and medicine looking for ways to extend the human lifespan with the telomeres without waking up the cancers that make cancer possible.

Quantum Computing: The Next Revolution

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things you wrote a book about 2 years ago, or 3 years ago now in 2023, and that’s when it was published, is this thing here.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is this?

MICHIO KAKU: This is the future. This is a quantum computer. It’s a computer that computes not on transistors, which is old-fashioned. It computes on atoms. Think about that. The ultimate object beyond the transistor that you can compute with is the atom. And how do transistors work? Transistors can be up or down, up or down. It’s called digital.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can you demonstrate that on there? And this is your other—

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, so think of this as a cell, and the cell could either be switched on or switched off. If you take a computer and open it up, what do you find? Switches like this. They’re called transistors. Transistors that tell you whether it’s on or off. Now that’s digital. This is the revolution of today. This is the revolution of tomorrow. Not just up or down, but in between. How many states are there between 0 and 1? In principle, an infinite number of states between 0 and 1.

So this is the basis of a digital computer. This is the basis of a quantum computer. Quantum computers are so powerful that even the CIA is worried that one day, perhaps in the future, they’ll be so powerful they’ll be able to break into any known digital code. So even the CIA is worried about the fact that these could become so powerful that they’ll allow you to break into any known computer. So these are called quantum computers.

Why are they powerful? Because they compute not on transistors, they compute on atoms. And you can’t get much smaller than an atom and have stable matter. But that’s what quantum computers can do. And they exist. This is not science fiction. They already exist.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So just to simplify this in a way that I can understand it, normal computers are very, very simple, like this switch. They kind of exist in a linear direction.

MICHIO KAKU: Up or down, on or off.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kind of binary, yes or no.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Whereas a quantum computer is more like this, where it can process information in so many different directions at the same time, so that it’s going to be way more powerful, way more powerful, way faster.

And I was looking recently, and Google did an announcement, not actually this year, where they basically set a deadline for the cybersecurity world, and they started to warn governments and banks and other tech giants that because they have a quantum computer now that is very, very powerful, they’re worried that it will be able to crack a lot of the digital world that we all rely on, including banks, even Bitcoin, which was quite interesting. And they’ve set 2029 as the deadline for everybody to get their s* together.

This is a massive threat to things like Bitcoin, which is essentially secured by an equation that they believe quantum computers are going to be able to very easily crack. And if they do that, then everyone’s Bitcoin, for example, is at jeopardy. But beyond Bitcoin, what does the world look like in a world where we have these incredible computers?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, first of all, who’s doing this work? And it turns out the CIA is following this work very carefully, because with this you’d be able to crack any code. Why is it that a thief cannot steal your bank account today? It is because that thief does not have your digital code. If a thief has your digital code, there goes your life savings out the window. Capitalism would vanish. Society would come to a halt. There’d be civil war. There’d be all sorts of chaos taking place.

But codes are there not to be broken. To break a code, you have to have another code. And so the CIA and other organizations create these very complicated codes that you have to master. Quantum computers can do it. But we’re not there yet, but it’s coming. I don’t know when. Some people say in a few decades, some people say sooner. I don’t know. I just know that the world is gambling that we’ll find a way to stop quantum computers from breaking into digital computers.

A Life in Physics: From High School to the Atom Smasher

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve been working on physics for the last, what, we said, what, 71 years? As a kid, I was reading about how you started making your own atom smasher, I guess you’d call it, a particle collider machine.

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. When I was in high school.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a very strange thing for a high school kid to be doing.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I was fascinated by the work of Einstein and the work of people working on subatomic particles. And I got interested in antimatter.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Antimatter.

MICHIO KAKU: Antimatter is the opposite of matter. When I combine matter and antimatter, I get a bomb. So you have to be very careful that you don’t marry matter with antimatter. And antimatter behaves the opposite of ordinary matter. If ordinary matter goes clockwise in a magnetic field, antimatter goes counterclockwise in that same magnetic field.

And so as a science project, I wanted to photograph the tracks of antimatter. So I got hundreds of miles of copper wire, built a cloud chamber, and I was able to prove that I could photograph the tracks of antimatter. And for that, I won grand prize at the San Francisco Science Fair. And that began my career.

Just before I graduated from high school, I decided to top that by creating an atom smasher, a 2.3 million electron volt betatron particle accelerator. It consumed 6 kilowatts of power. Everything that my mother’s house had, it would absorb. And that was the goal, to build a machine that would create my own beam of antimatter. So I got started very early and I said to myself, “This is for me. This is what I want to do for a living.”

Physics, Perspective, and the Nature of Reality

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything you discovered through your work in physics that changed your day-to-day behavior and life? How you treat people, how you show up, what you think matters?

MICHIO KAKU: No, but the one thing that did change my attitude toward life, other people, was being in the Army. Yeah, that was a game changer that changed everything I knew, which I thought I knew. Before then, I was single-mindedly focused on physics, just physics. Do physics well. That was my life. But after seeing warfare up close, I began to realize there’s more to life than warfare.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I asked this in part because last time I spoke to a physicist and he talked to me about how the nature of reality is not what I think it is. And that there’s multiple, I guess, dimensions, and that I’m only seeing a fraction of what is real, which I think all physicists agree upon. It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory or something, but actually logically it makes a lot of sense to only see what you need to see to survive.

MICHIO KAKU: Actually, what you see, your conception of the three-dimensional world, is only the tiniest sliver of what actually exists.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when I heard that, it made me open-minded to a lot of the things I thought were conspiracy nonsense. It made me open-minded to ghosts. Maybe ghosts are real.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you know, maybe another dimension where there’s another— there’s spirits that can see me but I can’t see them.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, there could be other such dimensions. That’s within the realm of possibility.

What Happens When We Die?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think happens when we die? Do you think— do you think that’s it, or do you think there’s a possibility that there’s ghosts and that our spirit, our soul goes somewhere.

MICHIO KAKU: I don’t see it happening because your brain, your personality, your thoughts are electrical. And when you die, the electricity turns off. There’s nothing propelling thinking anymore. Thinking requires a lot of energy. Even ghosts, if ghosts exist, they would still require a lot of energy to keep the thoughts going. But that’s why I don’t believe in ghosts because I don’t see an energy source that propels the ghosts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People talk a lot about spirituality. They talk about things like chakras, and a lot of spiritual people talk about vibrations. It’s a phrase that I often hear in the spiritual communities. Do you believe in anything like that in terms of humans having energies and being able to feel each other’s energies?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think that if a person emanates a certain aura or a vibe, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re radiating something.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But is there any physics behind that idea?

MICHIO KAKU: I think it’s psychological that you are tuned into a certain personality, a certain way of movement. I think it’s psychological rather than physical.

What Michio Believes But Hasn’t Proven

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is something you believe that you haven’t proven?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, there’s a lot of things that haven’t been proven. All I can say is maybe, maybe not, like flying saucers. I don’t say they don’t exist or they exist. I say maybe. I just haven’t seen concrete evidence for them, that’s all. So there’s a lot of things that I’m not going to definitely say no, like ghosts. I don’t think there are ghosts, but I can’t prove it. Maybe there is some afterlife of some sort, but it does go against what is measurable. We’ve seen no measurement of somebody that has been able to pick up vibrations from a ghost.

On Legacy and Impact

STEVEN BARTLETT: How would you like to be remembered? Someday, long after you’re gone, do you care about being remembered? Do you care about legacy?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I care about leading a good life that I feel comfortable with. And if your books and your teachings and your lectures, if they live on beyond you, that’s a bonus. It means that you had an impact. It means you touched people. You touched people’s lives with ideas.

And when I go down the street, quite a few people come up to me and they say, “I saw you on this show. I saw you on that show.” And that gives me a nice feeling. Of course, after I’m gone, there’s nothing to feel. But when you’re still alive, it gives you a nice feeling knowing that you’ve had an impact, knowing that you’ve changed somebody’s life. Several people have come up to me and said, “I became a physicist because of you.” So that’s a nice way to view reality — that you touch people.

On Conspiracy Theories and Predictions

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything that you used to think was a conspiracy theory that you now know to be true?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I like to debunk, so as soon as someone says something outlandish, I say to myself, “Sure, sure.” But that’s what I mean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re a debunker. So at some stage in your life, you must have had the experience of thinking something can’t be true and being proven wrong.

MICHIO KAKU: Usually when I make predictions, they come out to be true. Maybe the timeline is a little bit exaggerated, but they turn out to be true. So I haven’t made any predictions or observations that were later shown to be false.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What predictions are you making now then about the nature of reality in the future?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I talk about the nature of string theory in the future, whether or not we really will have a theory of everything. Flying saucers — I talk about the fact that even though we have no evidence today, there’s a mountain of these things being declassified now. Maybe we’ll pick up shreds of evidence.

The Declassified UFO Files

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you look at the declassified information that Trump released on UFOs?

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, I’ve looked at the whole batch, 160 or so sightings.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was there anything in there that was compelling to you?

MICHIO KAKU: No, just lights dancing in the sky without any commentary. So you don’t know what they are. But they could be extraterrestrial. But you see, these things are two-dimensional. They’re taken by a camera, which flattens the image. Therefore, to judge distance is very tricky.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you believe that you’re looking at extraterrestrial life forms when you watch these videos of UFOs?

MICHIO KAKU: I’m open to the idea. I don’t think there’s any smoking gun yet. I’m open to the idea that these are extraterrestrial.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You see some of them going up and then down and then into the ocean and coming back up again. And when you watch that, do you think these are aliens or do you just think it’s people that have misunderstood what they’re looking at?

MICHIO KAKU: I leave open the probability that it could be one or the other. There’s no aha moment where I say that it’s nothing but reflection, it’s nothing but an optical illusion. There’s no aha moment.

Yes or No: Have Aliens Made Contact?

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you had to bet everything you love and cherish on either side of the fence — that non-human life had made contact with the Earth at some point in some form, or not — which side would you place everything you love and care about on? Yes, aliens have made contact with Earth in some form, or no?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I would have to say I don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if you have to—

MICHIO KAKU: I know it’s a cop-out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but if everything was on the line, one would have to move to yes or no. I would personally probably say no. If you made me bet everything, I’d say maybe yes. You’d say yes?

MICHIO KAKU: No, no, no, no — maybe yes. Very important, the word maybe. I’m a scientist and somebody’s going to use that against me by saying, “You said on television that this and this is true.” No, I said maybe. That doesn’t mean it actually is true. It just means I opened the possibility that it’s true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if you were held at gunpoint, Doctor, and at gunpoint they said, right, you’ve got to say yes or no, and if you’re right or wrong, that determines your fate.

MICHIO KAKU: I would have to say maybe. I know what you’re getting at. You want to corner the fox, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, to some degree, yeah, I’m trying to corner the fox. But I’m doing it to understand where your intuition or your bias lands, because I see there’s not enough conclusive evidence.

MICHIO KAKU: There’s no aha moment. I do see a lot of maybes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of maybes.

MICHIO KAKU: Hmm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that’s probably the intellectually honest answer — is maybe. But if I was forced to fall on one side of the fence, I’d probably say no because I don’t have enough conviction to say yes. I see no evidence to say yes other than some sightings of some things. But I’m open-minded. Maybe it’ll change.

The Closing Tradition: Dealing With Failure

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr., we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you in my diary is, what is the best strategy to deal with failure?

MICHIO KAKU: I think the best strategy to deal with failure is try it again. I think on the first try, you’re bound to make mistakes because it’s a learning curve. And that learning curve is instructive. It teaches you. It teaches you to try it again, but make a slight change. Make a slight change and hope that change is in the right direction. If not, make another change and see whether that puts you in the right direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you could go back to when you were that 7-year-old kid that was just getting into physics—

MICHIO KAKU: 8-year-old, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 8-year-old. And give him any advice that would best serve him for the next 70 years. What advice would you have given him?

MICHIO KAKU: I’d say carry on. I’ve made a lot of decisions that I feel good about, decisions that made me a better person. For example, when I went into the Army, at that point I thought, what could be worse than facing death on the battlefield, to die on some unnamed hill in some unnamed land? And then I began to realize, well, yeah, that’s a possibility. But there’s another possibility that you may survive, that you may learn from that experience. If you’re not here to learn, okay, so be it. But if you are here to learn, you gain wisdom by being in the military. And that, I think, is a positive thing.

Would Aliens Want to Destroy Us?

STEVEN BARTLETT: We were talking about UFOs and alien life at the start of this conversation, and one of the questions that’s adjacent to it is — if alien life were to come here at some point, do you think they would have empathy for us? Or do you think that’s potentially a human trait? Because in the movies they attack us.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, if I were to shoot in the dark, I’d say first of all, they’re robotic. They’re not organic at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

MICHIO KAKU: Because they exhibit maneuvers that would crush the bones of any living creature that we know of. These flying saucers can zigzag. They can dive from 70,000 feet all the way down. They can dive underwater. These require skills and tensions and vibrations that would crack any known US device in half. And there they are executing these things. Either they’re fake or they’re extraterrestrial. So I think that they have a technology that we can only dream of.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when we’re looking at these UAP images and videos, if they are to be real, then you’re saying there’s no life in them at all and it’s actually just machine intelligence?

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. In fact, that’s probably one reason why they don’t come out and greet us like in the movies. In the movies, they always come out and say, “Hello, Earth man.” No, I personally think they’re robotic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This question of empathy — do you posit that they might be empathetic? Do you posit they would want to destroy us?

MICHIO KAKU: Will they destroy us or will they want to? The answer, I think, is no, because they could have done it years ago. You realize that if you go back, even the Bible makes reference to a UFO. If you take a look at Ezekiel, Ezekiel saw the wheel in the sky. And some people say there was no wheel, that was a UFO. So who knows for sure?

But if the aliens really wanted to destroy us, they could have done it years ago. They don’t have to wait. But if you go to a zoo, even if the zoo is lifelike to the point where the animals themselves don’t even know they’re in a zoo, it’s peaceful. You can observe them without necessarily revealing your presence. And in that sense, it could be like living in a zoo. Not that they want to gawk at us and laugh at us, but just observe us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think they won’t want to destroy us, which is comforting to hear.

MICHIO KAKU: I think if they had the chance to destroy us and they wanted to, they could have done it decades ago. But here we are.

Merging With Robots: The Future of Humanity

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s an interesting idea when you talked about this extraterrestrial life potentially being robotic. It kind of makes sense to me because we’re on a course to create humanoid robots and robots that — I was actually watching this morning, there’s a video that one of these humanoid robot companies are streaming, and they’re streaming a humanoid robot working on a production line for 4 hours straight so everybody can watch. And all it’s doing is sorting packages out, but it’s been going for 4 days straight.

And if you play this forward, you go, this robot can go walk across the office and it can charge itself back up once it runs out of battery. And then they show it going back to work again. When I say play it forward, I mean, imagine this technology continues to improve on the trajectory it’s on. The battery technology gets better, the intelligence gets better. And then theoretically, this robot will be able to build a spaceship, theoretically, and travel into the universe, theoretically, at some point, if you imagine any rate of improvement. So it’s theoretical that humans might not be able to survive the crushing forces of that speed, but a robot could.

MICHIO KAKU: My personal attitude is that we should eventually merge with them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Merge with the robots.

The Future of AI and Humanity

MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. That’s my personal feeling. Because people talk about whether they’re good, whether they’re bad, so on and so forth. Well, the bottom line is they’re going to become more powerful. And not now, but who knows, maybe in the next century, they’ll begin to make reasonable choices. They’ll reason, they’ll plot future histories. And at that point, they could be potentially dangerous. So what do we do? Either we become super powerful and meet the challenge, or we merge with them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say merge with them, what do you mean?

MICHIO KAKU: Become like that, become part robotic ourselves, become superhuman.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As in when we’re born as kids, maybe we have an implant and it makes us, turns us into a robot or?

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, in other words, we are still looking the same, except we have superhuman abilities and our brain is connected either directly or by remote control to a central nervous system that does the calculations and performs these calculations much better than we can. And we become superhuman.

Robots in the Workforce

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is the video that I’m talking about. This is actually a live video. So this is live as we’re watching. What they’ve got is they’ve got a human being here who’s sorting the packages. And they’ve got the humanoid robot here. And they’re just counting how many packages each of them can sort. And this robot has been doing this for 4 days straight. Anyway, you play this forward and it asks a big question about the future of humanity when there’s humanoid robots that—

MICHIO KAKU: Well, I think menial jobs will go out the window like this. Jobs that are repetitive, jobs that just require your arms and legs, those jobs will be gradually phased out and new jobs will open up. New jobs that require thinking, human relations, organizing, directing other people. Robots can’t do any of that stuff. Robots simply do what they’re told to do, repetitively. We make decisions. We know how to interface with other things. We plot, we plan. Robots can’t do that.

Now that doesn’t mean they can’t eventually, but it just means that the next step beyond this will be robots that can do a little bit of mental work. And it means that we have to retrain the workforce so that they can become masters of the robots. In other words, we are masters of tools, hammers, saws, whatever. We’re the master of them. They’re not the master of us. We tell the hammer and the chisel what to do because we lord over them.

AI Agents and Decision-Making

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you used AI agents before?

MICHIO KAKU: I’ve used AI before, but not necessarily— which agent are you talking about?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ve got on my phone, I can say, I need a new umbrella for my patio outside my house. And it’ll go on the internet, it’ll look at the prices, it’ll look at everything.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, well, I can just type on the computer screen a question and the computer will come up with an answer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you were talking about planning there. So I was saying that the agent basically makes a plan and then it spends a couple of— it could spend an hour executing that plan.

MICHIO KAKU: Oh, you mean not just coming up with the plan, but actually executing the plan?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It can do both. But I’m just saying you were talking about how I’m not saying humans have this ability to make decisions. I’m saying that the AI agent is making decisions like a human would.

MICHIO KAKU: No, you tell it what to do. The computer is probably programmed to look for a reference, like an encyclopedia, a handbook, the internet. In other words, if you say, I want to know the best car, it’ll carry that out by looking at the internet, going through different cars. It doesn’t need you to tell it that. But if you were to ask something more complicated, go to the supermarket and buy me some eggs, no robot can do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you been to LA? Because if you’re in LA, there’s all these robots strolling around the streets delivering food. They deliver food in LA.

MICHIO KAKU: Oh yeah, but that’s just crawling on a sidewalk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s what humans do.

MICHIO KAKU: I thought you meant driving a car. Driving a car and going up the stairs and whatever. That’s just going on a sidewalk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is what a human does.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, but humans can do a lot more.

Closing Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, thank you so much, Dr. I appreciate your time today, and I’ve learned so much about all of these fascinating things. And as always, when I listen to your content, I find myself more curious about the nature of reality, and I realize how little we know, which makes me, and I guess thousands of other people that have followed your work— I was going through your videos earlier on, and so many of the top comments are people saying that you’re the reason they worked harder in their physics classes.

MICHIO KAKU: Oh, really?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I was on a couple of the podcasts that you’ve been on and so many of the top comments say exactly that. They say, “You’re the reason I worked harder. You’re the person that made me more curious.” And I just think that’s such a wonderful thing because as you said at the start, physics is the basis of everything.

MICHIO KAKU: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the more we understand, the better the lives we could live.

MICHIO KAKU: Right? Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One can hope. Thank you so much.

MICHIO KAKU: Okay, well, thank you.

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