The Jordan Harbinger Show - 512: Michio Kaku | The Quest for a Theory of Everything

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Michio Kaku (@michiokaku) is a theoretical physicist, famed futurist, on-air personality, professor of physics, and bestselling author. His latest book is The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything. What We Discuss with Michio Kaku: Why do we need a theory of everything, and what set a young Michio Kaku on the path to search for it? How we're all born scientists with a yearning to understand the world around us, and what tends to dampen this enthusiasm for most of us before we even make it to adulthood. Why physicists seeking to wrap their minds around a universal string theory are more like daydreaming composers than academic blackboard warriors. The four fundamental forces of a universe governed by string theory, and the challenge of discovering how they fit together -- and proving it. What makes the human brain so unique in the animal kingdom, and why Michio thinks IQ is a woefully incomplete way of measuring intelligence. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/512 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Things that we cannot answer can be answered by the theory of everything. Time travel, other universes, gateways to other universes. Is it possible that there was a universe before the Big Bang? Is there a black hole connected to a white hole on the other end? All these questions cannot be answered using Einstein's theory. That's why we need a theory of everything. So once and for all, we can see.

say time travel does or does not happen, that there are other dimensions, other universes, and then, of course, people ask me the question. If there are other universes, then is Elvis Presley still alive in another parallel universe? And the answer is, possibly yes. In this universe, Elvis Presley died. But there could be another universe where Elvis Presley is still building out those hits. Yes, that is definitely possible. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional billionaire investor, organized crime

figure, or former jihadi. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, we have episodes starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes, organized by popular topics. These will help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. And every time you share the show and you tell me about it, it just makes my day.

So please go right ahead and do that. Today on the show, Michi Okaku, this guy obviously super incredible. He popularizes physics for the public as a science communicator. them on TV. You've probably seen him on National Geographic, the BBC Discovery Channel, everywhere. He's written various popular science books, including physics of the future, beyond Einstein, the cosmic quest for the theory of the universe. He's a big thinker, right? There's a lot of books. There's a lot of bestsellers in there. I won't bore you with all of them. You can read them yourself. They're fascinating. Mityo Kaku focuses on theoretical physics and the continuing

search for a so-called theory of everything. This is a theory that's going to unite the four fundamental forces of nature, which, by the way, I didn't even believe this when I looked this up. They're called the strong force, the weak force, gravity, and electromagnetism. I just thought it was funny that we're talking about string theory and multiple parallel universes, and there's two forces out of four, one's called strong and one's called weak. Like, as a layman, thank you. I appreciate that. Dr. Kakku's latest book is the most personal drawing on the search for this universal theory of everything that he calls the God equation. Now, this is obviously super complicated. This isn't something I can explain to you very easily. It's not something anybody

can explain very easily. Dr. Kakuh is going to give it a damn good try here on the show. And as I tried to wrap my head around this, which wasn't easy, I found the following. All right. Scientists know that even in a vacuum, space is never empty, right? So we have this so-called vacuum, but really it's filled with an invisible sea of virtual particles that, in accordance with the laws of quantum physics, pop in and out of existence for incredibly short moments of time, which experts call quantum foam. This group of particles. The group isn't even the right word, right? These just pop in and out of existence all over the universe, even in space. In examining movements in the quantum foam to see if the standard model of physics, so all the stuff we think we know right now,

see if it has holes, see if those holes can then be fixed by a universal theory of everything. So that is what Michi Okaku is trying to find. In string theory, each note on a string is a particle. And physics, in turn, is the laws of harmony that describe these vibrations. chemistry is the melodies we can play on the strings, which can bump into each other. The universe is a symphony of strings, and the so-called mind of God that Einstein struggled with for so long is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace. Can you see why I had a hard time wrap my head around this stuff?

This is so abstract for somebody like me, and for most of us, I would think. So physics is the laws of harmony that describe the vibrations of the string. Chemistry is the melodies we play on the string, and the universe is a symphony of strings. and the whole theory that he's looking for is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace. So honestly, if Mishio Kaku were not a physicist, I'd say he did way too much jealousy or something, but I can really see his passion for this stuff. That's part of what makes this episode so interesting for me, and I hope for you as well. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators

every single week here on the show, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, there's Dr. Michio Kaku. So I want to start where I think a lot of people have started, which is, I heard that you built a particle accelerator of some kind of an atom smasher in the garage. What was going on there? Well, it all started when I was eight years old. A great scientist had just died, and all the newspapers published a picture of his desk. On that desk was a book, just a book that was open. And the caption said that the greatest scientists of our time could not finish that book.

Well, I was fascinated by this story. I went to the library. I had to know who was this man. How come he didn't ask his mother? How come he didn't do this as a homework assignment? Well, I found out the man's name was Albert Einstein. And that book was the theory of everything that would allow us to, quote, read the mind of God. Well, I was hooked. I had to be part of this great revolution. So I went to my mom,

and I said, Mom, when I was in high school, I said, can I build a particle accelerator in the garage? I want to build a 2.3 million electron volt beta-tron accelerator in the garage. And my mom said, sure, why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage. Well, I took out the garbage. I assembled 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I built the Betatron particle accelerator in the garage. Every time I plugged it in, it consumed six kilowatts of power. I blew out all the circuit breakers. And my poor mom, you know, she come home from a hard day's work and say, how come I don't have a son who plays baseball? Maybe if I buy a basketball. And for God's safe, why can't you find a nice Japanese girlfriend? Why does he have to build these

machines in the garage? Well, because of that, I went to the National Science Fair. I met Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, and he offered me a scholarship to Harvard, and that began my career. But then when I graduated from Harvard, he offered me a job, a job designing hydrogen warheads. So I thought, well, maybe that's not what I want to do. I want to work on something bigger, something even bigger than a hydrogen bomb, and that is the Big Bang. I want to work on this dream to help complete Einstein's theory of everything. So I said, no, I don't think I'm going to build hydrogen warheads. I want to build universes with the theory of everything.

And that's how I got started. How old were you when you tried to build this accelerator in the garage? I was 16 years old. Okay. Luckily, Stanford University was not too far away. And I went to the library and I was able to get all the equations and all the blueprints. And it was just a question of me then haggling to get all the parts, transformer steel, vacuum tube technology, capacitor banks, all that in the garage.

So did you just show up to labs and go like, hey, I kind of need 16 miles of copper wire, and they're like, sure, there's some in the back go take it? I mean, how do you even get all of that stuff? Yeah, well, luckily, Westinghouse was not too far away, and Westinghouse had extra transformer steel 400 pounds worth, and so I was able to get that for almost nothing. Varian associates was close by, because this, of course, was before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley. And so there were some electronics firms there. And from varying associations,

I got 22 miles of copper wire. And when I wound it, I wound it on the high school football field. My mother got the wire from the goalpost. We strapped at the gold post to the football field. My mother then raced to the 50-yard line, gave it to my father, who then raced to the other gold post, and we wound 22 miles of copper wire over Christmas vacation. So that's what I did for for Christmas, basically wind magnets for a particle accelerator. So now it makes sense why your mom said, why don't you just play baseball? Because she probably thought, it's funny because this is probably all parents, but she probably thought, here's my son just wasting his life, winding magnets up when he could be out running around

egging people's houses and playing catch like everyone else. That's right. Well, actually, my mother didn't know what the hell I was doing. She just knew it kind of sounded important and pretty much let me have my way. So I advise all the parents, all the parents who email me, let your kids follow their dreams, you know. This is what they have decided for themselves. They're taking the initiative, the independence. They think that this is going to put them over the top. Go for it.

That's my attitude. Yeah, I like that. I've got a small kid. And when I was young, I wasn't making particle accelerators, but I liked making things. And my dad was a mechanical engineer. But my parents still weren't totally thrilled with the things I was making because, of course, I wanted to make things that exploded or made lots of noise, and they were like, why don't you just, you know, read about those things? And that wasn't as exciting to me.

But of course, I also understand their kind of biological imperative of trying to keep their offspring alive while also making sure that the house didn't get blown up. So I kind of get both sides of the story. Well, you know, we are all born scientists. We're born wondering why the sun shines. We want to know where we came from. We want to know why the stars light up at night. And then we hit the greatest killer of scientists known to science. The greatest killer of scientists known to science is junior high school. We lose millions of young scientists every day, every day because science is made boring. Science has made memorization. Learn the parts of a flower, no rhyme or reason. And that's why we lose so many young budding scientists. You see, science is about principles. It's about concepts,

memorizing the parts of a flower, okay? I would agree with that, although I do still remember lots of the parts of a flower. I don't remember enjoying the learning process involved with memorizing. It's like languages, right? I mean, I was terrible at French, and I thought, I'm not a language guy, I'm never going to be able to learn a language. Then I moved overseas to Germany in high school as an exchange student, and I learned German really, really well. And then I moved to Serbia, and then I moved to Ukraine, and then I moved to other countries, like Israel, countries like this, Mexico. It turns out I'm actually really good at languages. I'm just not good at memorandum spreadsheets with the ways that verbs are conjugated like we were made to do in school. So I understand

that. Right. Now, Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in physics, like to tell this story. When he was a child, his father would take him into the forest and explain everything about birds to them, why they're colored the way they are, the shape of their beak, the shape of their wings. So the young Feynman became an expert on birds. And then one day, a bully comes up to him. And he says, hey Dick, what's name of that bird over there? Well, Richard Feynman, future Nobel laureate, knew everything about that bird except its name. Why it was colored that way, why it flew that way, why it was feeding that way, everything about the bird except its name. So the young Feynman said, I don't know. And then the bully said, what's the matter, Dick? You stupid or something?

and in that instant, Feynman realized the difference between science and the appearance of science. You see, the appearance of science is knowing all these fancy words, but the essence of science is concept, principles, the concepts in physics, relativity, the quantum theory, concepts in biology,

DNA, and evolution. The concepts are what drives science forward. Of course, you have to know some names, but knowing the names does not make you a scientist. You mentioned that you were invited to go make, I guess, the next generation of nuclear weapons, but you decided to study universes instead. Did you feel more pushed away from nuclear weapons

or pulled more towards studying universes? Like, was it, I really don't want to work on nukes because I'm against it, or was it more, I'm just really more interested in universes? Well, I began to realize that bomb making, which is what we could do, is engineering. that the basic physics of the chain reaction, the basic physics of the fusion process, unleashing the energy of the sun, E equals MC squared, where M of the sun turns into E of sunlight. All these things are basic science, but we're known. We're known by the 1950s.

Back then, the main thing that they wanted to do was create bigger bombs, more efficient bombs, what I call third-generation bombs. First-generation bombs were huge, gigantic weapons, that could be carried by a gigantic bomber. Second generation bombs are Merv, that is, small warheads packed into one missile, like 10 warheads in one missile. Third-generation hydrogen warheads is what he wanted me to work on. Third-generation hydrogen weapons are Star Wars.

We're talking about hydrogen bombs in outer space, zapping things with laser beams and particle beams. All the Buck Rogers stuff you read about in high school. And to me, that was engineering. And I wanted to do physics, that is concepts, principles that make the universe work. And I kept thinking back to Einstein's book. I wanted to help finish that book. And today, by the way, we think we have it. It's called string theory, very controversial. Nobel Prize winners have split on the question, but we think that music.

Music is the paradigm that Einstein missed for the last 30 years of his life. You see, if you had a super microscope and can appear into an electron, it would not be a dot. A dot is very boring, not very interesting. It's actually a rubber band. And when you twang the rubber band, it changes frequency. It changes note. It turns into a neutrino. You twang it again, it turns into a quark.

You twang it again, it turns into all the subatomic particles, and it's the same string. So particles are nothing but notes, musical notes, on a rubber band. Physics is the harmonies you can write on these rubber bands. Chemistry is the melodies you can play when these rubber bands bump into each other. The universe is a symphony of strings. And then the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein chased after for 30 years of his life, we now believe is cosmic music, cosmic music resonating through hyperspace. That we think is the mind of God.

It just seems so when you're developing a theory like this, you know, are you drawing, I'm imagining one of two things, right? You're either doing lots of equations that have little symbols that nobody ever knows what they mean, or you're just staring out the window blankly. What is the majority of your time spent doing when you're figuring things out like this? Well, cartoonists always like to put scientists at the Blackboard yelling and screaming at each other. Yeah, we do that. But that's not. not the bulk of what we do. We are like composers of music. If you ever watch a composer, they look out the window and have melodies dancing in their head, fragments of melodies in their head. And when these melodies begin to coalesce, then they get a sheet of paper, write down some notes, plunk up the nose on a piano, and then they go back to staring at the window again. That's what we do. We spend most of our time just like a composer staring at the window, except equations.

Equations dance in our head. And then once in a while, these equations began to gel. They begin to condense into something interesting. Then we write it down on a sheet of paper, and then we go back and look at the window again. And so my wife says, what are you doing? You say, I'm doing physics.

And she says, no, you're staring out the window. You can't fool me. Don't worry. I have tenure. It's fine. All right. So how do you know if you're doing something productive, right, by staring out the window,

or is it always productive because you, it's hard for me to imagine this, right? As somebody who talks instead of things, as evidenced by this program, but it seems like you could easily go down pathways. You must constantly be going down roads and then going, ah, this wasn't it. Turn around, go back, start over. I mean, it has to be kind of all day, every day, right? That's right. We have something called File 13. File 13 is the garbage can, and we fill up, the more the garbage cans you fill up, the better you are. And the way we work, though, is that we have concepts in our minds that we want to fit together. Now, there are four fundamental forces. We have gravity, which keeps us on the floor. We have electricity and magnetism,

which lights up our cities, with dynamos, television sets, and radio. Then we have the two nuclear forces. The key to the game is to mill them together, to fit these equations. We have the equations for each, but they don't fit together that well. After 50 years, we finally figured out how three of the four forces fit together, except gravity. So we have gravity on one hand, and we have the quantum theory on the other hand. And these two theories we try to put together. But they don't fit. They don't fit. It's as if God had a left hand and a right hand, and they didn't talk to each other. Now, that's stupid. Why would God create a universe where the left hand and the right hand don't talk to each other? But relativity is a theory of the very big, based on smooth surfaces of gravity.

and the quantum theory is based on particles, particles that you chop up. And how do you put these tube theories together? A theories of particles and the theories of smooth surfaces. Well, the paradigm that does it is music. All of this is nothing but musical notes. In fact, if Einstein had never been born, we would have discovered relativity as the lowest octave, as the lowest octave of the string.

And so that's magic. When magic starts to occur in your equation, you're onto something. You know you're onto something. I've spoken to a lot of brilliant creatives for the Jordan Harbinger show. And many musicians, for example, they'll hear these little fragments or beats and melodies in their head like you mentioned with the composer. I'm wondering, do you actually visualize the equation or do you have it so do you almost feel that process because you don't need the math anymore? I'm wondering sort of how second nature these equations are in your brain. These equations are real. We've memorized all the

equations, let's say, of string theory. And our job is to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Literally, it's like a jigsaw puzzle, putting these equations together until they fit. And so these are real, and they're gorgeous. The guiding principle is that it has to be beautiful. Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and then this picture, this gorgeous picture emerges as you put the pieces together. That's the reason of why you know you're in the right track. In other words, the universe in some sense can also be likened to a chess game. After thousands of years, we finally figured out how the pawns move, the bishop, the knights move, and now we're beginning to become grandmasters.

We're beginning to figure out how all the pieces move, and then we begin to strategize about how to apply this to create something new novel. Like, for example, things that we cannot answer can be answered by the theory of everything. Time travel, other universes. gateways to other universes. Is it possible that there was a universe before the Big Bang? Is there a black hole connected to a white hole on the other end? All these questions cannot be answered using Einstein's theory.

That's why we need a theory of everything. So once and for all, we can say time travel does or does not happen, that there are other dimensions, other universes, and then, of course, people ask me the question. If there are other universes, then is Elvis Presley still alive in another parallel universe? And the answer is, possibly yes. Wow. In this universe, Elvis Presley died.

Right. But there could be another universe where Elvis Presley is still building out those hits. Yes, that is definitely possible, consistent with the known laws of physics. That to me is kind of crazy. So there's another version of me somewhere, but theoretically, there's another version of me somewhere where instead of my parents being like, hey, don't blow up the house, they were like, blow up whatever you want. And I became some sort of, oh, maybe scientist. And I'm giving an interview to you because you're a podcaster, unfortunately for you. Yeah. And I'm telling you all this

incredible stuff. Exactly. No, that's a real possibility. In fact, there's a TV series based on that principle. Men in a High Castle. Yeah. Men in the High Castle is on TV and is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, which in turn is based on quantum theory. You see, in that short story, there was an assassin who killed Franklin Delano Roosevelt before World War II. In one universe, the gun misfires, and Franklin Roosevelt leads the allies to victory against the Nazis. But in another universe, that bullet goes through and kills FDR, America is paralyzed. The Nazis win World War II and take the East Coast, and the Japanese Imperial Army take the West Coast. So one bullet, which in turn could be reduced to a quantum event.

A misfire, misfiring of the gunpowder could cause a bullet to misfire or fire. And so two universes, two universes open up on the basis of one incident, which is a quantum event, the burning of gunpowder inside a bullet. Isn't that amazing? It is. That you can have universes split in half. This is called the many worlds theory. and string theory is compatible with the many worlds theory. And so, yeah, universes might be being

created even as we speak. So like there's a universe in which my internet went out and we didn't have this interview and it changes everything from there out and that's just another world that's created. So there's an infinite amount. It's not just many worlds. It's like infinite amounts of worlds. In principle, yes. And all we can do is calculate the probability. You know, for our PhD exams, we give our PhD students questions like, will you, wake up on Mars tomorrow. Now, of course, most people would say, that's crazy. You can't wake up on Mars tomorrow. But there's a finite probability that your wave function will in fact go to Mars tomorrow and we ask students to calculate it. Well, to be honest, you would have to wait longer than the

lifetime with the universe for that to happen. So in other words, chances are you're not going to wind up on Mars tomorrow. But there's a finite probability that you can calculate. Now, if you don't like this idea, get used to it. This is called quantum theory, and the quantum theory is the foundation for the digital revolution of today. Transistors, lasers, the internet, digital technology. It's all based on this idea that electrons can be two places at the same time, that electrons can bifurcate to create two universes. That's why we have lasers, for example. Because they can be in two different places at the same time? That's right. You don't exactly know where the electron is. You can actually say

electron is two places at the same time, then that determines the firing of an electron inside a laser. The very fact that we have lasers, we have the internet, transistors, computers, diodes, the wonders of modern technology is based on the quantum theory. And so we have to realize that the quantum theory has a philosophical foundation of sand. That's why Einstein couldn't get his head around it. But hey, get used to it. It works. Is that the Heisenberg uncertainty principles? When you're looking at it, you can't see. My God, he's got it.

That's right. The Heisenberg and uncertainty principle says you don't know where the electron is or it could be two places at the same time. And that is the basis of what we call lasers and transistors and modern electronics. That's why we're having this conversation. This conversation by rights should be impossible. Newton would say, no way that you can talk to someone instantaneously across the country. No way. Nope. Newton was wrong on this question. The world is quantum mechanical. Get used to it. Did Newton have an opinion about talking over distance? I missed that with his other amazing discoveries.

Yeah, for example, Newton thought that the speed of light is just an ordinary velocity. Nothing new. You can go faster than the speed of light. Newton thought that an electron is here, not there. Electron cannot be two places at the same time. But 20th century science proved that wrong. 20th century science proved that the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe, that Einstein is the cop and the block, and second of all, because of the Heismberg and the certainty principle, electrons can be two places at the same time. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Michi Okaku. We'll be right back.

And now back to Dr. Michi Okaku on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You mentioned white holes before, and I didn't plan on going there, but so black hole sucks everything in, that's my lay understanding of that. So white hole blasts everything out from inside? Exactly. Let's say I have two sheets of paper that are parallel, two universes, but I can create a wormhole that connects these two so that if I fall into one universe, that's it called a black hole, I can be spewed out the other universe, and that is called a white hole. Now, who invented this bizarre idea? Einstein himself. In 1935, He writes this path-breaking paper when it's now called the Einstein Rosenbridge.

In fact, I was watching some Marvel comics, and even in Marvel Comics Day at Viodopis Nomenclature. This gateway between universes is the Einstein Rosenbridge. It is a wormhole. Now, you've seen this all your life. Alice's Wonderland was written by a mathematician, Charles Dodson, writing under the pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, and the looking glass is the wormhole, a gateway between two universes. So when you fall into one, like in a black hole, perhaps, we're not sure, perhaps you're

blown out the other end on a white hole. And so this is something that we physicists have looked at very carefully. Stephen Hawking even concluded that such a solution is possible. Of course, you would take a very advanced civilization to do it. But yeah, Stephen Hawking said that, Well, time travel could be difficult, but wormhole travel that is going faster than the speed of light is consistent with modern physics. I wonder, I guess, we probably have no idea that if you get sucked through a black hole and you end up on the other side in another universe, you don't end up in the same place, right? If I'm in San Jose, California, do I end up in the San Jose, California in another universe, or am I just in the middle of nowhere? We don't know, right? Well, it is possible that the universe can curve around and back on itself.

If I have a universe here and a universe there and a wormhole opens up connecting these two, then you're right. This is, for example, a time machine. You go into here and you wind up on the other sheet of paper in a different time. And so it was Einstein himself, by the way, who wrote about time travel. Many people don't realize that generality does have time travel solutions in it, but we don't know if they're stable or not. Stephen Hawking looked at it and thought that they were not stable.

that is as soon as you enter a time machine, it would probably explode. Well, we're not sure. There's still some debate about that question. But it is a solution of Einstein's equations. You go into a time machine and you come back before you left. I mean, that's cool. Everybody should love that, right? I mean, there's kind of no, that's incredible by the, that's literally the definition right, of incredible. It's just unbelievable in so many ways, but also would be, no wonder you're so excited about this. Yeah. I mean, we're pushing the boundaries of, common sense. Right. And you know, time travel, of course, presents problems of paradoxes. Like, you go backwards in time and kill your grandparents before you're born. How can you be born if he

just killed your grandparents before you're born? Or you commit suicide in the past. How can you be alive if he just killed yourself in the past? Not only that, but Robert Heinlein showed that you can be your own mother, your own father, your own child, if time travel is possible. Here's how it works really briefly. Let's say there's a transgender woman who gets pregnant and gives birth to a baby, but then later in life decides to switch from a woman to a man. He now goes backwards in time, meets himself as a young girl, makes love to himself in the past, and has a baby. So in other words, if time travel is possible, you can be your own mother and your own father. So there's all these bizarre paradoxes you can make if time travel is possible.

That is bizarre, and there's a lot of, it's either the plot of a horror movie or just the most brilliant thing ever. I mean, there's a lot of roads that can go down. Many, many worlds as a result of that line of thought. Is finding out whether or not string theory is accurate? Is this, is it the lack of technology that's stopping us? Is it a lack of data? Or is it just something that we, how do we prove that it's right and then, you know, full stop? Or is that not possible? Well, first of all, for those people listening to this program, If they ever figure out all the details of the God equation, what should you do? First, you should tell me first. Yeah. And then, of course, we'll split the Nobel Prize money together, you and me, okay?

Yeah. But realize that there are ways to test this theory. Two weeks ago, outside Chicago, we have Fermilab, a gigantic particle accelerator, and they found that the mu meuson, which is a higher version of an electron, was behaving magnetically different than the theory said it should. So right now we have something called the standard model. It does seem to govern the behavior of subatomic particles, but it is ugly, does not contain gravity at all,

and is ugly as sin. So why should Mother Nature at the fundamental level create this bizarre theory called the standard model with so many particles that it's a theory so ugly, only a mother can love it? Well, we found the first deviation two weeks ago. This is big news making the headlines, at least in physics journals. It could mean that there's a higher theory out there,

that the four forces have to be joined with a fifth force. There's a hidden force there as predicted by string theory. String theory predicts there should be a fifth, sixth force, higher octaves, higher octaves of the string. And we may just have picked up the first clue two weeks ago. This is big news because it means that perhaps we now have experimental evidence of a higher theory, a theory which is beautiful, elegant the way Einstein thought it should be. And that's big news. How come we didn't see it before? Is the force too small to measure in the

past or does it exist like in a different dimension or something that we couldn't see? No, these are extremely tiny effects. You're talking about atom smashers a billion dollar machine that are sensitive enough to pick up slight deviations, but there's a crack. There's a crack in the standard model of the subatomic particles. We now believe that the standard model is nothing with the lowest octave, just the lowest octave of the string. It contains all of Einstein's theory, so that if Einstein had never been born, I repeat, if Einstein had never been born, we would have discovered gener relativity anyway as the lowest octave of the string. But the string is higher octaves. One octave we think is

dark matter. Dark matter is the most mysterious substance in the universe. It is invisible but it has weight and it holds the galaxy together. The galaxy, Milky Way should fly apart but dark matter holds the galaxy together

from flying apart. What is it? Nobody knows. There's a Nobel Prize out there for anyone who could figure out what dark matter is. I think dark matter is again the next octave. Just another vibration, a higher vibration of the string. That is what we think dark matter is.

Do you get crazy people emailing you with like, I've solved dark matter? I had a dream last night. Here's what it is. You must get that. I get a lot of emails. And yes, quite a few of them say that they are the next Einstein, that they have everything. Well, I have three criterion to win the Nobel Prize. If you want to win the Nobel Prize and be considered the next Einstein, you have to

satisfy three criterion. First is you have to contain relativity, Einstein's theory. Second, you have to contain this ugly theory called the standard model and propose a higher theory. And third, it has to be finite and self-consistent. In other words, two plus two is four, we know. If there's a mistake in the theory, then the theory might predict two plus two is five. And that's ridiculous. And so those get thrown out. Now, the only theory which satisfies all three criterion is string theory. Some people say, well, I don't like string theory. Give me an alternative.

Well, there is none. It is the only game in town. In fact, if you watch the Big Bang Theory with CBS, Sheldon works on string theory, naturally because it is the only game in town. Now, that doesn't mean is right. It just means that there's no competition. Are there credible people that think, okay, string theory is a bunch of BS.

Mishio Kaku, he just loves the camera. There's probably some other explanation, but we just don't know what it is. Like, is there anybody out there that just thinks you're full of it? Yeah, these people think there's a bandwagon effect, and this bandwagon effect crushes alternate theories so that by default, string theory is the theory that's talked about the most. I get some of that.

However, you have to realize that, you know, physics has always been that way. When I was a grad student, string theory was on the outs, People said, what? Hyperspace, vibrating string? You got to be nuts. So we were on the outs back then. The theory that everyone wanted to work on was called the Quark Model, which turned out to be correct. But it shows you that we humans at the cutting edge were human. We do believe in bandwagon effects. We take favorites. We put our bets on certain horses and we shun other horses. That's just human nature. And 50 years ago, string theory was on the outs. We were the bad boys. We were the ones people laughed at. And so the tide is turned. But look, I've seen the tide turn many times. In other words,

get used to it. Yeah, right. I guess sticking to your guns and science has got to be pretty tough when a lot of people think you're wrong. But if you're the only game in town, it's got to be a pretty good position finally to be in. Yep, that's right. Not without the crazies on social media. I know you're not a huge fan of IQ and the focus on IQ. Tell me a little bit about that. I wonder if you prefer a different measure of intelligence, if you can even call IQ, a measure of intelligence. Well, I wrote a book, which is also a New York Times bestseller, the future of the mind. And I had to look at the evolution of the brain. That is what makes us so-intelligent. The back of the brain is the so-called reptilian brain, the brain of eating, food, mating,

territory. Alligators have it. Reptile, snakes have the back of the brain. The center of their brain is monkey brain, the social brain, the brain of pecking order, how to defer to your elders, how to be polite, how to deal with social societies, social animals, wolves, animals like mice live in groups and they have to be social. That's the center part of the brain. Then the question is, what are we? What is the human brain? What separates us from the animals, the front part of the brain? Because a brain has been evolving from the back to the middle, to the front. And what is the front part of the brain? It is the prefrontal cortex, and what does it do? It sees the future. Let's do a test. Go to your dog tonight and teach your dog the meaning of tomorrow. Yeah, not going to happen.

Teach your dog the meaning of tomorrow. Your dog can't do it. Dogs, animals live in the present, for the most part, maybe a few hours in the future, but for the most part, animals live in the present. This part of the brain is a time machine. We are obsessed with the future. We daydream about it. We muse about it. We wonder. We plot. We scheme. Everything in the front part of the brain. And that's what makes us different. Now, does IQ measure that? Not really. IQ measures some of that that is bookkeeping, because that's what IQ exams are. Good for calculating bookkeeping. If you're an accountant, I imagine you do very well on IQ exams. because that's what IQ exams do, basically bookkeeping. But the front part of our brain sees the future. Constantly schemes, plots the future. Let me give you an example. The United States Air Force during the Vietnam War gave exams to its pilots

who might be shot down over Viet Cong territory and held prisoner, and so they were given a test, a test to see how creative they are. If you're shot down over North Vietnam, can you devise a way to a way to a prison? escape? How many ways can you escape? They found out that the pilots who had the highest IQ, they're rather bad. They were not creative. They didn't know how many ways to escape. The people who were very creative were the least likely, you'd think, to be, quote, smart, but they had all sorts of crazy methods of trying to escape. In other words, they saw the future. They schemed, they planned, they plotted. So if you have a bunch of criminals, who's the small?

Mark one, the safecracker or the guy who has the biggest muscles, the safecracker, because he's the one who plots things and maps things out. That's what intelligence is all about, seeing the future, and evaluating which future is the most realistic. Now, do IQ exams do that? No. I know tons of people with high IQ that are not successful in many areas of their life, and so it doesn't, hasn't seem to help much. I mean, some of them are really good at math or other sort of, what do you call, left brain stuff, but they struggle with people or they can't work in teams very well, or they don't, you know, it's not really a universal thing. I just always wondered about that because there was a huge emphasis on this that's dwindling now, and that's probably a good thing.

Yes, and at Stanford University, they had the Stanford-Ben-A IQ exam, and they were tracked, these people who did very well on the Stanford-Ben-A exam, they were tracked for many decades, and they found out that, yes, some of them went on to win the Nobel Prize, high IQ people, but a lot of them turned out to be marginal. They lived in the margins of society. They were not successful. They were, quote, losers, and they were also among the high IQ people. And so the people who analyzed the Stanford-Binné exam realized that IQ exams, they do measure something.

They're not totally irrelevant. They measure clerical skills. But skills that are human, human skills, how to be. make friends, how to negotiate, how to see the future, how to plot, scheme, plan. That thing was not measured by the IQ exam. And those are the people who become the millionaires. They're the ones who become the entrepreneurs. They're the ones who, you know, do very well in society because they're constantly plotting and scheming. That describes me pretty well. Plotting and scheming. My mom always just say, what do you do? When I was staring out the window, she wasn't thinking, wow, you must be

thinking about string theory. She was thinking, this is not good. We got to get this kid that television or a book, because whenever I started thinking about something, then it was, Mom, can I have 16 miles of copper wire? But it sure wasn't to make a particle accelerator, but I might have blown out the electricity in the house one or two times, just like you. What would you want to see your work used for the most? So if you solve, and I put that in quotes, right, air quotes here, if you solve the God equation string theory, what are some of the most exciting applications you would like to see done with it, both inside your lifetime and beyond. I mean, we talked about time travel, but I wonder if there's something that's maybe

we've never thought of or maybe seems mundane to an average Joe that you're just like, I want to apply it to this. Well, you know, my parents were Buddhists. And in Buddhism, there is no beginning or end of the universe. There's only nirvana, this all-pervasive nirvana. But they put me in a Presbyterian Sunday school. So I learned all about the Bible and Genesis and the fact that the universe had a beginning. So the universe either had a beginning or it didn't. There's no two ways around it, right? Wrong.

This new theory, string theory, allows us to create a multiverse that explains and melds these two opposing theories together. You see, our universe had a big bang. Our universe had a beginning. But there are other universes out there. Our universe is a bubble. We live in the skin of the bubble. the bubble's expanding, and that's called the Big Bang Theory.

Well, string theory says there are other bubbles out there, other bubbles. And what are they floating in? You know, children ask the question, you know, at a science museum, you hear children say, mommy, daddy, if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Well, it's expanding into a higher dimension. These bubbles that I mentioned are two-dimensional. They expand in the third dimension. These universes are three-dimensional, and they expand in hyperspace or 11-dimensional space.

And so, in other words, even as we spoke in this interview, universes have been created. Universes are being created all the time, somewhere in this great supercosmosis of ours. This is the multiverse theory. In fact, it is so popular now that if you watch the latest Avengers movie, the whole plot of the latest Avengers movie is the multiverse. is the entire plot of Thor and etc. Battling Thanos, the battle of Thanos in the multiverse.

So that I hope we can test. Now, we're going to launch a satellite called Lisa, laser interferometry space antenna. It is a space-borne gravity wave detector. It'll pick up vibrations from the instant of the Big Bang. We're going to get baby pictures. We're going to get baby pictures of the infant universe as it emerges from the womb, and maybe, just maybe, we'll pick up evidence of an umbilical cord,

an umbilical cord connecting our infant universe to a parallel universe. This is all predicted in string theory. So string theory is correct. It explains why we're here. We're here because these universes sometimes collide or they fission in half to create a baby universe. And that's where our universe came from. How do you know that universes collapse and fission together? How do we know that? Well, it's a theory, but again, this theory is testable because as we get radiation from the instant of the Big Bang, we'll compare it. We'll compare it to the predictions of string theory. And if string theory does not match the predictions and the data, then of course we can throw it away. But this is a way to test the theory again by using satellite data of the instant of creation.

You know, when you turn on your radio and you pick up static, some of that static comes from the Big Bang. You are actually listening to Genesis. A certain fraction of the static you hear on a radio is from creation itself. With satellites in out of space, we can pick up signatures of the instant of creation itself. That's the goal of Lisa. And it's being funded by the European Space Agency and NASA. And so, yes, we hope to actually get signals from Genesis, the instant of creation. How do you know which signals are Genesis and which signals are like a kid in his backyard

screwing around with some radio device? Well, this device is way and out of space. Yeah, that was a bad example. But you know what I mean, right? Like, there's a lot of radiation out there. How do you know which is which? Yeah, there is static out there. And plus there's the background radiation of the explosion itself.

You have to subtract out, subtract out all the spurious radiation to get the right. to get the radiation at the instant of the Big Bang. But we've already done that with black holes. When black holes collide, it creates a shock wave of gravity, which we detect with LIGO. LIGO already exists. It's based in Louisiana and Washington State. What does it do? It picks up radiation from colliding black holes.

Something that was once considered science fiction won the Nobel Prize for three physicists who helped to design LIGO, which, which actually does detect radiation from the collision of black holes. Next will be radiation from Genesis itself. That's amazing. It's just sort of incredible that even when, in this day and age, when our internet goes out and things like that, we also simultaneously have the technology to detect radiation

from the origin of our universe. It seems a little lopsided, honestly, in some ways. Like, why won't this stay connected? Well, here's the radiation from the genesis of the whole universe. at least we have that. It's incredible. Right. So the point is that all theories are testable. Now, some theories are difficult to test directly, but most theories are tested indirectly. For example, we know the sun is made out of hydrogen. How do we know that? We've never been there. It's too hot. We know the sun is made out of hydrogen by looking at sunlight, an echo of the sun. We put the

echo of the sun, sunlight through a prism, and the colors that come out identify hydrogen. That's why we know the sun is made out of hydrogen. So it's same thing with string theory. We'll prove string theory indirectly. A direct proof is impossible because we're talking about creating a universe. You cannot create a baby universe in your living room anytime soon. But indirectly, we'll pick up radiation from the instant of creation. And that, I think, will prove string theory. You say a direct proofs impossible, you just mean right now. But in a million years, maybe we can create a mini-uner. There'll be a CERN on whatever planet we're on that just goes, mini-universe, here's everything. Is that possible? A million years from now will be what is called a type 3 civilization.

Believe it or not, we physicists actually catalog advanced civilizations far beyond our civilization. A type 1 civilization controls the weather. They control planetary forces, sort of like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. A type 2 civilization controls the entire energy of a star, like Star Trek. Star Trek would be a typical type 2 civilization. Then there's type 3. Type 3 is galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes like Star Wars. Star Wars would be a type 3 civilization.

Now, on this cosmic scale, what are we? Do we play with the weather? Do we play with the sun? Do we play with black holes in the galaxy? See? No. We are type zero. Zero. Of course. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But we are about 100 years from making the transition to type 1. That is a planetary civilization. For example, what is the internet? The internet is the first type 1 technology that fell into this century. It's a planetary communication system. We're seeing the beginnings of a planetary language.

On the internet, the two languages that are most dominant are English and Mandarin Chinese. So we're already beginning to see a planetary language emerge for this type 1 civilization. And we're beginning to see type 1 sports, Olympics, soccer. We're beginning to see a type 1 fashion. Chanel, Gucci. We're beginning to see a type 1 music, rock and roll, rap. And so we're beginning to see the birth of a type 1 culture. emerging as we hit 2100. 2100 is when we think we'll hit type 1. And then you mentioned a

civilization millions of years more advanced than us. They would be type 3. Type 3 civilizations would access what is called the Planck energy. That's the energy of the Big Bang, the energy of wormholes, the energy of parallel universes. So if the aliens are out there, they're not going to be type 1. They're not going to be type 2. Probably they'll be type 3. They'll have. have galactic power and they'll access the Planck energy, the energy of the string. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Michio Kaku.

We'll be right back. Hey, thanks for listening and supporting the show. I love it when I hear from you. I love that you listen to the show. And all I've ever wanted is for people to listen to the stuff that we create. Further, thank you for supporting our advertisers. All of the deals, all the codes you hear,

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The link to the worksheets is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Dr. Michiokaku. You do think about extraterrestrial and alien life forms and things like that. How many planets out there do you think are capable of sustaining life? Like, I say advanced, but I'm putting that in quotes because I'm talking about humans. Advanced life forms like us. Well, first of all, I get a lot of emails from people that say, Professor, you're wrong.

The aliens are not there. The aliens are here. And how do they know? Because they've been kidnapped. They've been kidnapped by aliens and put in a flying saucer. So I have word of advice. The next time you are kidnapped by a flying saucer, For God's sake, steal something.

An alien chip, an alien hammer, an alien toolkit, anything. Because there's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization. You're not going to go to jail. There's no law that says you can't steal from an alien civilization. And you'll have proof, proof that you were in that flying saucer. So just don't brag about it that you've been in a flying saucer. Steal something. That's my advice to you.

Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Just grab a paperweight or, you know, a pair of alien AirPods or something like that. I mean, even just one. Anything. Anything. And that'll clinch it right there. End of story. It'll clinch it right there. End of story. Of course, let's talk about planets. There are 4,000 planets that have now been cataloged by the Kepler satellite. And we have a census now of the Milky Way galaxy. On average, on average, every star has a planet going around it. So how many planets are there? About 100 billion. In our own backyard, 100 billion planets. And maybe a quarter of them are Earth-like. So in other words, billions. Billions of Earth-like planets are out there. And so then the question is,

if they're out there, how come they don't visit us? Well, if you're going down a country road in a forest and you meet a squirrel, do you go down to the squirrel and talk to it? Not anymore. Well, maybe at first, yeah, but after a while you get bored. Why? Because they don't talk back. They have nothing interesting to say to you. And so you simply go about your business and ignore the squirrel. So if they're that advanced, we're like forest animals to them. We're like the deer, the squirrel. We have nothing to offer them. Gold? Gold is useless to an extraterrestrial civilization. Shakespeare, they don't read English. They can translate English, but they don't necessarily understand. the English language. So we have nothing to offer them. So I think for the most part, they'll simply

ignore us. If you could interact with aliens and ask them something or get some bit of knowledge or even technology, what would you get from them? If they said like, an alien genie says, look, man, can't take all this stuff back with me. Or if you have any questions, fire away. I'm about to leave. What are you asking them? Well, when I write down an equation in my heart of hearts. I would like to believe that an alien on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy is writing that same equation in a different notation. Because unlike the works of Hemingway or Shakespeare, which are great, physics is universal, that the equations I write down are going to be the same equations that an alien on the other side of the galaxy is also writing down. And so I would

like to believe that this is universal, that they're going to have the same equations. That they're going to have the same frustrations, they're going to have the same path that we took when we started to construct the theory of everything. So you think, would you ask him then, hey, by the way, I'm working on the string theory thing, how close am I? Have you heard about anything that's similar to this? Yeah, I would ask, am I working on the wrong theory? Is it a theory of nothing or a theory of everything? Because they, of course, would come up against the same problem that Einstein come up with. And that is, if we have four forces, why should there be four? There should be four. There should be one, one super force that governs the entire universe. So I would ask them, do you believe in a super

force that is the God equation, one equation which allows you to summarize all the other equations as a byproduct? I would ask them that question because, well, you don't want to be on the wrong track, you don't want to waste your life chasing after something that doesn't exist, but I personally believe that it does exist. Why? Because on one sheet of paper, we can write down the theory of of almost everything. We can write down the quantum theory and the standard model. Very ugly, very contrived, very clumsy, but you can do it on one sheet of paper. And it didn't have to be that way. The universe could have been messy. It could have been chaotic. It could have been random. But here we are with a sheet of paper that contains the theory of almost everything. And that's why

I think we can get it down to one inch, not this large sheet of paper with all this gibberish, but one inch that would be the theory that eluded Einstein and eluded the great philosophers for thousands of years, a theory of everything. There's a lot of questions I have about predictions and things like that. And I think maybe I'll leave them for another interview just because we have gone for a while here. But I do wonder what you think of simulation theory. You know, a lot of people who are experts in some areas are convinced that we are living in a simulation, but they're not really experts on this particular type of thing.

maybe? Well, let's take a look at the weather. How can you simulate the weather? Well, of course, we have computers that can track individual atoms, but there are so many, so many atoms inside the weather that the smallest object, the smallest object that can simulate the weather is the weather itself. No matter how great your computer is, it cannot possibly compute the trillions upon trillions of atoms that go into the weather right outside your door. So in other words, and make the quantum theory makes it worse. The quantum theory says the electrons can be many places at the same time, many worlds that can exist there. And so it's even worse once you go quantum mechanical. And that's why I think that we are not living in a simulation. The smallest object

that can simulate you is you. No computer, no computer can simulate. you to the accuracy that you want. That doesn't mean we cannot have digital immortality. Digital immortality is something that is well within the laws of physics, and that is to digitize everything known about you, your credit card transactions, your Instagram photographs, everything known about you digitize to create a digitized soul. For example, I believe that one day soon, somebody will digitize Einstein, all his letters, notes, will be digitized, and that will live forever. And I would love to talk to a digital version of Einstein, and one day we will be digitized. So our great, great, great, great, great grandkids will know everything

about what is known digitally about you. And you'll talk. You'll have a conversation with your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Now, our great, great grandparents, all they left was a record of their birth date in a book, in a church, and their death date. That's it. Two lines summarize everything known about your ancestor. That's sad. Today, of course, we have emails. We have messages to girlfriends and boyfriends and all that nonsense that goes on on the internet. We meet with digital legacy. So I think digital immortality is something that is well within the laws of physics, and it's happening even as we speak. there's anything I want to be my lasting legacy, it's going to be me arguing with some 12-year-old

kid on YouTube comments or on Twitter, right? Maybe I should pay more attention. It'll live forever. Maybe I should pay more attention to the things I'm putting out in the universe. I'm glad that these shows will be digitized, but you know, when they're looking for my true personality, they're going to go, yeah, but look what he wrote. Look at this YouTube comment. What an idiot, what an idiot Jordan Harbinger was back in a thousand years ago. Well, you know, you're a great, great, great grandkids. They may be curious. Legend has it that your great, great, great grandfather was a media personality. Oh, good. Let me download what he said. And these things will last forever. Yeah. It'll be forever on the internet. And that's why I think your soul, your soul could be digitized in that sense.

Now, as a physicist, I like this idea of digital immortality, because we could put that digital immortality, your digital soul, on a laser beam and shoot it to outer space. In one second, your digital soul will be on the moon. In 20 minutes, you'll be on Mars. In four, four years at the speed of light, you'll be on the nearest star. And what is on the moon? A mainframe computer that will download your digitized essence, download your digitized soul, and put that knowledge into an avatar. And that avatar looks just like you, except it can roam on the lunar surface, doesn't require oxygen, is super powerful, just like Superman or superwoman, and I think we will explore the universe as digitized beings.

So let me stick my neck out. All this is well within the laws of physics. It'll be done, I think, within a few decades, within the centuries for sure. Let me stick my neck out. I think that the aliens, that's how they travel, that they have a digital laser highway where the souls, the digitized souls of billions of aliens go racing across the Milky Way galaxy. And we are too stupid, too stupid to even know it. They even know they're right next to us, there could be a highway, a highway where millions of aliens souls go racing across the universe at the speed of light. They don't use rocket ships. That's old hat.

They don't use flying saucers. No, they ride on a light beam. At the speed of light, they go across the universe. I call this laser porting, and I think this is by far the most efficient way for aliens to go across the universe, not in flying saucers, but as pure energy at the speed of light. Digitized information conquering the galaxy at the speed of light. That's really fascinating. So, of course, the idea that we beam ourselves to something means there's something to beam us to in the first place, right? Like, if I want to beam myself to Mars,

there has to be that mainframe and that dish receiver on Mars. But what if the aliens built one that we could beam ourselves to, and we built one that they could beam themselves to somehow. Then, they're already there. Then, so we create the port. We just build the port on our own planet, and then we can build the ones on our own solar system eventually by getting there, but they could build one for us and we just go there. We don't have to go there first with rockets, or am I overthinking this? Well, the first generation, a laser porting, somebody has to go at sublight speed to build the mainframe computer that will then download your digital soul so that you can then wander around that planet as an avatar. So somebody has to

make the first generation. But once you make the first generation, then you can go zapping across the galaxy at the speed of light. Now, this also means that you can land on hostile planets with a hostile atmosphere and breathe the hostile atmosphere because you've downloaded yourself into an avatar. So if somebody downloads themselves to the earth, what would they look like? They could look like anything they want because they're avatars. They're basically robots. They download their digital soul into whatever they want when they land on the planet Earth.

I'm waiting for QAnon to make this a part of their new conspiracy theory. And it's going to be involved you and me. Like Jordan Harbinger and Michi Okaku are aliens that have beamed themselves to Earth. And this show was us accidentally letting go of our strategy. And we're just avatars. That's all we are. Sure. I mean, look, it's possible. I guess what I meant before was on another planet, we could be communicating via lights with aliens and we could build something on Earth and they could

build something over there. And then we beam ourselves over there and they go, great, thanks for coming. Good thing this machine work that we built. Now we can start doing, we can start correcting the process and adding to it. Because yeah, you're right, we would have to fly to the moon or Mars to build our own thing there. But if we find another planet with a civilization and it takes us a decade to communicate back and forth with light, they could send us the plans for that device and we could build it here. Isn't that, that seems like the plot of a movie I probably have seen. Although now I can't remember what it is. Probably starring Jody Foster, if I had to guess. Probably contact where the aliens, where the aliens zap the blueprint for a wormhole machine,

that could then go faster than the speed of light. Now, laser porting that I mentioned uses light beams. So it is traveling at the speed of light. While in the movie contact, they actually go faster than the speed of light with a wormhole. And it's a catch. The energy necessary to drive a wormhole is the energy of a black hole. So you're talking about a type 3 civilization way ahead of us that can play with stars, play with black holes, and use them as gateways to go faster than the speed of light. The method I'm mentioning is for a type 2 civilization. Sub light speed, but colonizing the galaxy at the speed of light using off-the-shelf known technology. There's nothing in what I said violates the laws of physics.

This is well within the laws of physics. The only bottleneck is how long it will take to digitize the human mind. A few decades, but we're making progress in that direction already. And when it happens, we're going to digitize ourselves and send ourselves across the galaxy. Incredible. Okay, in closing here, when you make future predictions, how do you have confidence in those predictions, right? Because in 1950, whatever, people are like, the car, we're going to be flying around and flying cars, but instead I'm sending me doing the macarena to another friend of mine in Germany on TikTok or in a video.

I'm not, there's no flying car. I'm just doing stupid stuff and filming, you know, with my little kid and sending videos. I mean, it's just a completely different. What makes our current predictions or your predictions better than something that I read in a novel that my mom read as a kid? You know what I mean? Well, first of all, we already have flying cars. They're just very expensive and they're not very fuel efficient.

And jet packs, we actually have jet packs now. The Nazis during World War II, World War II, perfected the jetpack with hydrogen peroxide, and they put their soldiers on jet packs to go over bridges that were bombed by the Allies. And so these things that we consider science fiction actually are possible. Now, then the other question is, what about the predictions that were made that turned out to be wrong, like the paperless office? That was a huge mistake. We have more paper than ever, not a paperless office.

And so how do we reconcile this? Well, when I was a child, not only was I mesmerized by Albert Einstein, I was also mesmerized by Flash Gordon. I used to watch the old Flash Gordon series on TVs every Saturday morning, and I was hooked. And then eventually I began to realize that they were really the same thing, that if you were a physicist, you understand exactly what Dr. Zarkov was doing with his machines. You know what's possible, what's plausible, and what is impossible if you are a physicist. And so if you were a physicist, you can make predictions that have a reasonable chance of being true. I wrote a book called Physics of the

impossible, where I divided these predictions into at least three types. You have things that are possible, things that are plausible, and things that are simply impossible. And so you have things that you can categorize and then give a time frame for if you are a physicist. And so being a physicist allows me to make predictions, some of them, of course, being incorrect. But for the most part, you can see the outline of where future technology will take us. And what I repeat, my earlier books, I realized that my predictions came right on the dot. Right of the dot, my predictions came true because if you know the laws of physics, you know what is impossible and what is simply implausible. And that's how we know where we could, it is possible for us to wake up on

Mars tomorrow, at least that possible. Possible, but not likely, right? And I can calculate the probability of that happening. You would have to wait longer than the lifetime with the universe for that to happen. But it is theoretically possible. Mishio Kaku, thank you so much. This has been fascinating. In 66 minutes, I was right, really right over an hour, always. Talk about predictions. Well, my pleasure. Your predictions are more meaningful than my predictions. I think that's the outcome of that particular of that. Thank you. This is really great. I've been trying to get you on the show for years, and I really, I enjoyed this a lot. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode as usual, but before I get into that, you're about to hear a preview of my interview with the world's best counterfeiter. How long does it take to print $250 million? Five months.

It needs to be worthwhile. It's going to need to be perfect. Because perfect, go big. One day, for no particular reason, I was driving and thinking, and I stopped at a red light. It just hit me out of nowhere. You know, we're chasing something to make money from, sell something, make something, do something.

All we do is to translate that into a lot of. money. Well, we wake up in the morning to do that. I need to do something for money. Well, why don't I just literally make money? $1 million in $20 bills is about 50 kilos. So $250 million is $12,500 kilos or over eight Toyota Camrys or six Ford F-150s. That is multiple metric tons of cash. You must have been f-and-stoked.

man, because you knew you were going to put $20 bills all over all of that and then just never work again. Yes. When I did bring it in and then I slammed the door shut, I was confident enough that everything I did opt to that. I hadn't done any mistakes. I was good to go. By design, there are people specifically looking for you all the time. This is all they do. If you get suspected, you know, in any way, let's say you're done.

you can tell them whatever you want. They're not dummies. I mean, this is as high as it goes. This is the stuff of the line. For more on how Frank Barossa printed his own fortune and got away with it, check out episode 488 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, I've got a bit of a close here because there were some questions I didn't get to on air, but I got to them afterwards.

So I'm just going to go through some of these with you because they are super interesting, in my opinion. So as he says in the conclusion of the book, are we really just flatlanders waiting for proof of a suspected extra dimension? Now, there are four forces governing the universe. I talked about this in the show open. Gravity, electromagnetism, so light, and the two nuclear forces, the weak force, the strong force. In three dimensions, there's just not enough room to fit all the theories together into a

single theory. But if we have higher dimensions beyond three, perhaps up to 11 dimensions, which obviously I can't really fathom and neither can you most likely, then all of the four forces collapse into one super force. That's literally what it's called. These dimensions cannot be seen or felt by us since we evolved in a three-dimensional universe without the ability to even visualize higher dimensions. But in 11 dimensions, all the forces fold up into one force. And as he said during the show, the universe is like a chess game. After 2,000 years, we've finally figured out how the pawns move, how the knights move. So Dr. Kaku thinks, in some sense, the ultimate destiny of humanity

is tied to finding what he calls the God equation. And we've heard him say that all of biology can be explained using chemistry. All of chemistry can be explained using physics, and all of physics can be explained by relativity and the quantum theory. And it is truly remarkable, as he stated during the show, that all of physics can be described at the fundamental level by two sets of equations that fit neatly on one page. So all those huge chalkboards we see in movies with tons of equations on them,

they're not even really necessary. A lot of that is just sort of hyper-executive. or like explaining something down to minute levels of detail that really aren't necessary. Dr. Kakku further said that it was just a remarkable fact that the universe is much more simple than we first thought, that fundamental forces of nature can be unified under the God equation that he is searching for. So of course, that is why he is searching for that God equation. And I also asked him for some future predictions as well. We will be able to connect our brains to machines. We did a show about that with Brian Johnson in episode 223 about human brain

and machine interfaces, he thinks we'll be able to send emotions over the internet, not just emojis, but the actual emotion itself, not the words that trigger the emotion, the emotion, which is incredible. Also, Dr. Kaku thinks we'll be able to detect and eliminate clusters of cancer cells like a decade before they become a tumor. And cancer will be like the common cold, probably even less annoying because we won't even have any symptoms. It'll just be like, oh, thanks for coming in and drinking your nanobots, they killed 10,000 cancer cells that were in a decade and a half going to become pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, whatever it is. And they're gone now, and you've excreted these bots safely. It's just incredible with the future holds, and I hope that all of you

live long enough to see it. Once again, big thank you to Dr. Michi Okaku. The book title is The God Equation. He's got a lot of books. All of them very interesting. Links to that will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy the book. It does help support the show. A lot of you do that. Most of you do that. There's a few outliers. You know who you are. Please do use those website links. Worksheets for the episode in the show notes, transcripts in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, software, and tiny habits. Over at our six-minute

networking course, the course is free. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Do dig the well before you get thirsty, folks. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. They contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird,

Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. Know some science buffs, share it with them. know some people who love space and future predictions. Share this with them. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show. Please share the show with those you care about.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask,

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