Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku

Joe Rogan sits down with theoretical physicist Michio Kaku to discuss his book 'Quantum Supremacy' and the global race between the US and China to build quantum computers. Kaku argues these atom-based machines could be millions of times more powerful than supercomputers, enabling virtual chemistry and biology, cures for cancer and aging, and potentially immortality. The conversation ranges across AI chatbots and their lack of fact-checking, his theory of consciousness as feedback loops, civilizations rated on a Type 0-3 scale, and humanity's path toward becoming a planetary civilization. Kaku recounts building a particle accelerator in his garage at 17, speculates on aliens, wormholes, and baby universes, and explains why a perfect simulation of reality is impossible.

• Quantum computers enable 'chemistry without chemicals, biology without biology,' replacing billion-dollar trial-and-error drug testing with virtual experiments in memory.
  00:05:46
• Kaku built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator in his mom's garage at age 17, blowing out every circuit breaker in the house.
  00:11:50
• As a teenager he photographed antimatter, capturing positron tracks from sodium-22 that bent the wrong way in his magnetic field.
  00:13:36
• He ranks civilizations Type 0 to 3; humanity is Type 0 and mathematically headed toward a planetary Type 1 around the year 2100.
  00:34:46
• Kaku's theory of consciousness: it is feedback loops modeling yourself in space, society, and time, with humans uniquely possessing a prefrontal-cortex 'time machine.'
  00:55:09
• A Harvard group has explored what it would take to bring back a Neanderthal child, raising deep ethical dilemmas.
  01:08:09
• Friends of his at MIT have published papers on what it would take to reach the Planck energy and create a baby universe.
  01:33:28
• He argues a perfect simulation of reality is impossible because the smallest computer that can model a room is the room itself.
  01:51:36

• A global race between China, the US, IBM, and Google could turn Silicon Valley into a 'Rust Belt' as quantum computers obsolete today's chips.
  00:00:36
• His garage accelerator generated up to 20,000 Gauss, strong enough to pull fillings from teeth and comparable to a hospital MRI machine.
  00:12:34
• Chatbots have no fact-checker and cannot tell true from false; they just cobble together existing essays and pass them off as original.
  00:18:14
• Two monkeys in India killed roughly 250 dogs in a revenge massacre, dragging them onto rooftops after a dog killed an infant monkey.
  00:50:57
• At the 2014 Brazil World Cup, a fully paralyzed man kicked off the games using a brain-controlled exoskeleton built at Duke University.
  01:15:19
• Photosynthesis in a single leaf is effectively a room-temperature quantum computer, something nature solved that our machines need near-absolute-zero for.
  01:20:33
• Quantum computers are so powerful because they 'compute in parallel universes,' drawing on the multiverse concept from quantum physics.
  00:30:38
• The anthropic principle: our universe's stable protons allow atoms, DNA, and life, while most string-theory universes are dead clouds of electrons and neutrinos.
  01:24:39
• The Planck energy is a quadrillion times more powerful than Geneva's collider; at that point space itself 'boils' and bubbles into baby universes.
  01:31:24
• Quantum supremacy has already been reached: some quantum computers are millions of times faster than supercomputers on specific tasks.
  02:07:39