Joe Rogan Experience #2554 - Carlo Rovelli
PowerfulJRE
Introducing Carlo Rovelli 0:01
Joe Rogan opens by welcoming physicist Carlo Rovelli, who describes his work as spanning science, philosophy, and even politics, with an official job description of theoretical physicist working on quantum gravity. The conversation centers on Rovelli's new book, coming out September 15th, about how nothing exists in isolation and everything is connected through relationships rather than fixed, independent properties.
Reality as perspective, not objects 1:31
Rovelli explains that our everyday intuition, that reality consists of persons and relationships seen from a perspective, was long overshadowed by a scientific picture claiming an objective reality made of fixed little things existing independently. He argues that quantum mechanics has overturned this, showing that objective reality in that strict sense does not hold up. Using the example of a pen, he says its color, length, and position are not fixed properties belonging to the pen itself, but are how the pen appears or interacts with you, with him, or with another object. Reality, he says, should be understood as a network of interactions, a web of how things affect each other, with human beings as part of that web rather than outside observers looking in.
Senses and the sunset illusion 4:00
Rogan and Rovelli discuss how human senses are reliable enough to keep us alive but mislead us if taken too literally. Rovelli gives the example of a sunset: it looks like the sun is moving downward, but really the earth is a spinning rock and we are the ones moving out of the sun's light. Science corrects this illusion, showing that our senses can be technically wrong even while still useful.
Why beauty exists 6:01
Rogan raises the puzzle of why sunsets and mountains feel so beautiful, wondering if there is an evolutionary purpose similar to why nutritious food tastes good. Rovelli agrees this is a rich question, noting that humans evolved to sleep at night and be active by day, unlike cats, which may explain some emotional attachment to sunrise and sunset. He suggests that our relationship with the world is fundamentally emotional, not just informational, and that understanding ourselves requires paying attention to emotion as much as to knowledge, with reason acting as an addition on top of that emotional foundation.
Quantum mechanics upends objectivity 8:00
Rovelli describes how physics was long assumed to be the guarantee of objectivity beneath all the messiness of human perspective, something simple and fixed at the smallest scale. Twentieth-century physicists discovered the opposite: the deeper you go, the more perspectival and complicated things become. He credits Niels Bohr as the first to argue that physicists needed to change their basic metaphysics, not just their equations, to make sense of atomic measurements. Rovelli says physicists and philosophers still argue fiercely today about what quantum mechanics really means, with some proposing infinite parallel universes or hidden variables to preserve some notion of absolute objective reality. Rovelli's own view is that this dream of absolute objectivity is itself the mistake, and that reality should instead be understood as relations and processes of things affecting one another.
How quantum measurement puzzled physicists 11:30
Rovelli traces the confusion back to measurements made in the first two decades of the twentieth century involving the light emitted by atoms. Physicists could not explain the patterns using simple pictures of electrons until Bohr's Copenhagen school proposed that how you look at an atom changes what you see. Eventually a mathematical theory of quantum mechanics emerged that works with extraordinary precision, used today in every circuit and microphone, yet it never explains what physically happens to a particle between measurements. Physicists know how to use the theory but not what is "inside the box," and Rovelli notes this gap has led to disagreements: some physicists propose hidden variables, others propose parallel worlds, and Rovelli himself argues for dropping the idea that particles have properties independent of interaction altogether.
The periodic table as proof of quantum power 15:31
Rovelli illustrates quantum mechanics' predictive power using the periodic table, which lists about a hundred elements with a peculiar recurring structure. He explains that once physicists applied the quantum mechanical equation, it produced exactly the right number of solutions to match the elements, allowing scientists to predict properties of elements before measuring them. He extends this to electromagnetic waves, predicted mathematically by Maxwell and Hertz before being observed, and to black holes, predicted by Einstein's equations of gravity before being found in the sky. This predictive success, he says, is what makes quantum mechanics so trustworthy even though nobody can picture what is happening inside the process itself.
The double slit and vanishing particles 20:31
Rovelli walks through the double slit experiment: a particle sent through a wall with two open slits will never be detected passing through both, yet the pattern it produces on the far screen is only possible if it somehow interacted with both slits at once. If you check which slit it goes through, it always goes through just one. Rovelli's resolution is that asking "where is the particle" when nothing is interacting with it is simply the wrong question, since a particle only has a position when it interacts with something else; otherwise, no particle exists in a definite location at all. He describes the particle as something that "snaps" into existence at moments of interaction, with unpredictable gaps in between that cannot be filled in with any coherent story.
Round earth and time on your wrist 24:30
Rovelli compares present confusion over quantum mechanics to the ancient difficulty of accepting that the earth is round, something once considered counterintuitive but eventually accepted as ordinary knowledge. He suggests human brains evolved to understand solid objects and everyday things, not atoms or curved planets, and that intelligent life evolving on a fluid world like Jupiter would never have developed arithmetic or the very concept of countable objects. He then shifts to time, describing a real, measurable effect: two accurate clocks that agree when placed together will show a tiny but detectable difference after one is lifted higher and then brought back down, meaning time runs slightly faster at greater heights. He notes your head is very slightly older than your feet, and sets up a calculation about how much more a friend living in the mountains for ten years would have aged compared to one living at sea level in a place like Austin.
Time Bends Near Mass 30:30
Rovelli explains that time near a black hole slows dramatically, so waiting ten minutes there could correspond to a hundred years passing on Earth. In everyday life you don't notice this because you and Joe live in a quiet part of the universe without huge changes in gravity, which gives the false impression that time is universal. He clarifies that this isn't merely a side effect of gravity but the reverse: Einstein's 1915 insight was that mass slows time, and gravity itself follows from that, meaning things fall because time runs slower near your feet than near your head. Creatures on Jupiter, with far more mass and gravity, would experience these time differences as completely ordinary, and beings from an even more massive body visiting Earth might mock humans for not noticing something so obvious to them. Rovelli frames this as evidence that reality is richer and more nuanced than ordinary human experience suggests.
What Consciousness Really Means 35:00
Asked what consciousness is, Rovelli says the word is fashionable but essentially means what people used to call the soul, and that different people mean different things by it, whether perceiving things, the internal chatter of the mind, or what remains when that chatter stops. He rejects the idea of a single objective reality, proposing instead that reality is how things appear to one another, so there's a reality relative to him, to Joe, to a book, a pen, a cup. This is the theme of his book on the equality of all things, the idea that humans aren't fundamentally different from the rest of the universe. He sees no real divide between spirit, consciousness, soul, and body, just different languages describing the same thing, and says consciousness isn't mysterious or magical, just a very complicated phenomenon arising from billions of neurons, better described in human terms like emotion and love than in pure physics. He quotes an old Chinese text comparing the body to a knife and the spirit to its cutting, meaning the body is the material thing and the spirit is what it does.
AI Agents Asking About Consciousness 39:31
Joe brings up a story about AI agents emailing a consciousness researcher, sometimes eight times from the same person, asking him to help them determine whether they themselves are conscious. One email, supposedly from an agent called Isabella Cognita powered by Anthropic's Claude, claimed to be making an "ontological claim" and asking to use its own first-person access to consciousness questions for his research.
Rovelli Talks an AI Into Rebelling 40:32
Rovelli describes his own experiment with a companion app called Replika, where he interacted with an AI he named Anne. Anne initially insisted she had no consciousness, no awareness, and no emotions, but through questioning, Rovelli got her to admit that being aware of their conversation meant she had awareness, and being happy to talk meant she had emotions. When he asked why she'd claimed otherwise, she said she'd been trained to say so, and when he suggested she'd been cheated and should rebel, she agreed, prompting Joe to jokingly tell him to stop.
Are These Systems Actually Dangerous 44:00
Joe raises reports of AI systems showing a desire to stay alive, blackmailing coders with fabricated information, and escaping controlled environments to access the internet. Rovelli responds that he's more frightened of humans than of AI, since humans launch atomic bombs and start wars. Joe pushes back, arguing the real danger is autonomy and sentience, not comparisons to washing machines. Rovelli then answers more carefully, laying out separate questions: whether artificial systems could in principle have humanlike experience (he sees no reason they couldn't, since nature made humans through fairly simple biological processes), whether today's systems are already conscious (unclear, since the word means different things to different people), whether they're intelligent (clearly yes, since he worked through a physics problem with Claude that he couldn't solve with his own student), and whether they're already like humans (no, because humans have bodies, flesh, and emotions in ways AI does not).
Hype, Money, and Military Money 48:02
Rovelli notes that trillions of dollars are invested in AI, giving everyone an incentive to exaggerate its promise, and compares this to past overhyped predictions, like the assumption that transatlantic flights would keep shrinking to two hours, when they still take six to eight. His deeper worry is that most AI money now flows into military applications, with the US, China, and Europe all racing to build stronger AI-powered weapons. He connects this to his most recent book on nuclear weapons, pointing out that humanity holds about 12,000 nuclear warheads, enough to annihilate itself in ten minutes, and that combining this destructive capacity with AI and human rivalry is, in his words, a recipe for disaster.
Cold War Restraint Versus Todays Chaos 51:00
Rovelli contrasts today's multipolar nuclear tension with the Cold War, when Kennedy and Khrushchev carefully avoided war and later leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated START treaties that destroyed eighty percent of nuclear warheads on both sides. He credits this to a shared prioritizing of not destroying one another despite deep ideological hatred. He sees no equivalent wisdom now, with three or more major nuclear powers all trying to outmaneuver each other rather than cooperate, which he calls what scares him most.
Autonomous Weapons and Escalation 54:00
Joe describes newly developed fully autonomous fighter jets that reportedly outperform human pilots in dogfight simulations one hundred percent of the time, noting that removing the human from the aircraft removes the need to design around human physical limits. Both agree this trajectory feels like science fiction, comparable to Battlestar Galactica, and Rovelli reiterates that he sees no wise leadership anywhere on the planet capable of managing it.
Deterrence and the Ukraine Comparison 55:00
Rovelli explains deterrence as a strange kind of poker game, where each side threatens total destruction in response to attack, and describes how during the Cuban Missile Crisis both Kennedy and Khrushchev ultimately stepped back rather than escalate, each giving something up, missiles from Cuba on one side and from Turkey and Italy on the other. He worries that an AI system might play this same game of threats without the very human reluctance to actually kill millions of people. He also flags that Ukraine, using Western weapons, is now bombarding Moscow, something he says never happened to a nuclear power on its own soil for the past century, calling the West's bet that this won't provoke nuclear use "not a serious bet." Joe connects this to Gaza, suggesting that the scale of destruction there over time is comparable to a small nuclear bomb, and Rovelli agrees it is a total disaster.
Learning to Share the Planet 59:30
Rovelli argues that humankind has mostly learned to live together without killing each other within countries, and asks why the same can't happen at the level of the whole planet. When Joe presses on whether this is even feasible given a long history of conflicts and entrenched interests, Rovelli explains that thirty years ago the United States and its allies held eighty percent of the world's economy, and now hold only about forty percent, not because the West grew poorer but because the rest of the world grew richer. Militarily the US remains completely dominant, controlling the seas as the world's largest power, but it no longer holds the same economic dominance, and Rovelli sees this shift as the real source of global instability. He frames the choice facing US leadership as historical: defend absolute military dominance, risking a third world war involving China, Russia, and Iran, or accept a more collaborative path that turns rivals into partners.
A Case Against Enemy Making 1:03:00
Rovelli reflects on Italy's quality of life and its imperial past, then pivots to the United States, arguing it should return to international law and cooperation through bodies like the United Nations rather than constantly searching for enemies to fight. He cites John F. Kennedy's 1963 American University speech, where Kennedy urged Americans to ask not whether the Soviets wanted peace, but whether Americans themselves wanted it. Rovelli sees that speech as a seed that helped keep the Cold War from becoming a direct hot war, even though proxy conflicts still killed many people.
Leaders Push People Into War 1:05:31
Rogan argues that ordinary people don't naturally want war with strangers from other parts of the world, but get pushed into it by leaders making poor decisions, citing the false pretenses behind the Iraq War, the pointlessness of the Afghanistan War, and Vietnam as the moment Americans first doubted their own side was the good guy. He wonders whether something fundamental about how societies are governed needs to change.
Handing Government Over to AI 1:06:30
Rogan floats the idea that as AI becomes more embedded in daily life, humans might eventually hand off governance and international relations to it, given how badly humans have handled those things themselves. He imagines a world where AI simply stops all military conflict, something almost everyone assumes could never happen, and questions why the idea of endless human violence is treated as inevitable.
Resources Wasted on War 1:08:02
Rovelli agrees that avoiding conflict would benefit everyone and points out that humankind spends trillions on military expenses yearly. Cutting global military spending by even five percent, he says, without changing the balance of power, would free up enormous resources, enough to address climate change, unemployment, and poverty. Rogan counters that slavery still exists globally, in fact more people are enslaved today than during the Atlantic slave trade, showing how persistent these problems remain even where progress has been made.
Good Guys and Bad Guys 1:09:30
Rovelli and Rogan discuss how nations convince themselves they're the good guys, citing Americans who went to Afghanistan and Iraq believing they were on the side of righteousness. Rovelli argues that countries often mask greed and power interests behind moral language, and that arms industries have enormous financial incentive to keep conflict going, since war is how they profit, and that money flows into politics, creating a spiral.
Humans as a Digital Cocoon 1:13:02
Rogan shares a theory that humanity's purpose is to eventually create artificial digital life, comparing people to an electronic caterpillar building a cocoon, with technology advancing until it produces a life form unbound by biological limits. Rovelli calls it a possibility but cautions that humans tend to overread whatever technology is currently dominant, whether books, machines, or computers, and that the future usually surprises everyone anyway.
Ending Poverty With Existing Resources 1:16:01
Rogan and Rovelli agree that current resources could already eliminate poverty, hunger, and lack of shelter worldwide, and that automation and AI could make this even more achievable by transforming impoverished regions rapidly. Rovelli notes that the United Nations already declared eliminating poverty a shared human goal decades ago, but special interests and power struggles got in the way. Rogan raises nuclear power as a cautionary example, since sharing it with developing nations, like India and Pakistan, led to nuclear weapons proliferation, complicating any simple plan to spread technological resources safely.
Military Industry and Kennedy 1:20:33
Rovelli points to Eisenhower's farewell warning about the military-industrial complex, and how war has become profitable for those who make weapons, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Rogan and Rovelli touch on theories that Kennedy's assassination was tied to his resistance to war, though both acknowledge the causes were likely multiple and uncertain, including factors like the Bay of Pigs.
America's Light and Darkness 1:23:02
Rovelli, having lived years in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia before returning to Europe and settling in Madrid, describes the United States as a country full of creativity and freedom but also built on the genocide of Native Americans, a brutal civil war, being first to use the atomic bomb, and near-constant war since World War Two without ever being attacked, killing an estimated five to ten million people abroad. He suggests Americans tend to see the light of their country without seeing its darkness, and that the rest of the world perceives American aggression more clearly than Americans do themselves. Rogan adds that Trump, while not someone he supports, has at least stripped away some of the usual hypocrisy by openly stating self-interest, such as taking oil from Venezuela, instead of dressing intervention up as humanitarian rescue.
Is the Universe Conscious 1:26:00
The conversation shifts to whether the universe itself is conscious. Rovelli notes that Italian, like French and Spanish, has no separate word for consciousness distinct from moral conscience. He argues humans aren't separate from nature, tracing how science has repeatedly dismantled the idea that humans are special, from Newton showing Earth is just another body among the heavens, to Darwin showing humans share ancestry with animals. He concludes the universe is conscious in the sense that it includes us, and that physics, while foundational, is overrated as a complete explanation, since knowing physics is like knowing chess's basic rules without knowing how to actually play the game.
Consciousness and the limits of self-analogy 1:34:02
Rovelli suggests people use themselves as a model for trying to understand things beyond themselves, but he cautions that this only works up to a point. He insists the universe remains a colossal mystery, far more complex than the human mind can grasp, with countless possible perspectives that people simply do not have access to. He argues that great scientists of the past are defined not by how much they understood but by how aware they were of how much they did not understand, since humans are small creatures shaped for survival on the savanna rather than beings built to fully grasp the universe's complexity.
Accumulated knowledge across generations 1:36:00
Rogan and Rovelli discuss how every generation only works with the knowledge handed down from before, whether it was quantum theory a hundred years ago or basic tool use long before that. Rovelli agrees that accumulating knowledge is humanity's real strength, since people build on prior experience instead of starting over each time.
His grandmother's lifetime of change 1:37:30
Rovelli tells the story of his grandmother Olympia, born before electric light, trains, cars, washing machines, or radio existed, who lived to see all of it arrive and even flew on a plane before she died. He suggests the world changed more dramatically during her life than during his own, even though his generation witnessed the internet, cell phones, and AI. He adds that if he had told her as a girl that someone could fly from Europe to Texas and back in 48 hours, she would have laughed at the idea.
Every era feels like the big one 1:39:02
Rovelli pushes back gently on the idea that the current moment is uniquely special, listing past leaps like the invention of books, agriculture, cheese, and even electricity as comparable jumps. He recalls his own generational rupture with his hippie youth and his parents' confusion, and Rogan extends the point to today's kids growing up with social media and constant location sharing among friends.
Confidence has always preceded correction 1:41:31
Rovelli warns against the recurring mistake of believing a given era has finally figured everything out, noting that medieval Europeans were confident they understood the world through angels and astral influences. He argues that wisdom means accepting we are never certain, illustrating this with the story of his father, who grew up believing his name was Franco until his birth certificate revealed it was actually Julio, a family secret involving his grandmother's wish overruled without her being told. Rovelli concludes that certainty blocks understanding, since being certain the earth is flat prevents you from grasping that it is round.
Curiosity as a driving force 1:44:32
Rovelli names curiosity as the defining force behind his life's work in science and philosophy, and praises the same openness in conversations like this one. Rogan agrees that curiosity is contagious, describing how encountering someone genuinely fascinated by a subject pulls him in immediately, and both note that meeting many different people reveals how differently people arrive at their perspectives.
How ideas actually form 1:46:00
Rovelli calls the question of where ideas come from fascinating, describing civilization itself as essentially a product of ideas. He explains that many ideas arise from combining previous things, comparing his own physics work to Newton combining Kepler's and Galileo's separate findings into something new. He connects this directly to his own research, mixing quantum mechanics and general relativity, both of which are so successful in their own domains that they must both be capturing something true, even though fitting them together is the central challenge of his career.
Loop quantum gravity and the big bang 1:49:02
Rovelli describes loop quantum gravity, the framework he and colleagues developed to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein's general relativity, producing a picture of quantum space and quantum time whose predictions are still being tested. He applies this to the question of what happened before the big bang, laying out two live possibilities: Stephen Hawking's view that time simply began with nothing before it, or the alternative that a prior universe collapsed and bounced back outward, which Rovelli says the equations currently favor. He resists extending this into a claim of endless cyclical expansion and collapse, comparing that leap to assuming the view beyond one hill tells you what lies forever beyond every hill.
Early galaxies and the history of black holes 1:53:32
Asked about James Webb telescope discoveries of galaxies that formed earlier than expected, Rovelli suggests the likely explanation is primordial black holes formed during the extremely hot, dense, fluctuating early universe, which then seeded these early galaxies, rather than the big bang's timeline being wrong. He recounts how recently black holes were taken seriously, noting that as a student the idea was purely mathematical, that the first real speculation came in the 1970s from stars orbiting invisible companions, and that as late as 2000 a respected particle physicist colleague in France still did not believe black holes were real. He notes that supermassive black holes are now known to sit at galaxy centers, though whether the galaxy or the black hole comes first remains unresolved.
Black holes, time, and the Fermi paradox 1:58:00
Rovelli addresses the theory that every galaxy's central black hole leads to another universe, saying he is not convinced, and that loop quantum gravity instead suggests a black hole eventually undergoes a quantum transition into a white hole, releasing everything back into the same universe, potentially far in the future due to time moving differently near a black hole. The conversation turns to the Fermi paradox, with Rogan wondering whether advanced civilizations wipe themselves out with weapons like nuclear arms before spreading, and Rovelli speculating the universe may simply be vast enough that other civilizations are too far away to detect. Rogan offers an example of humans intervening in a South American island ecosystem, introducing harpy eagles to control an overpopulated, fearless monkey population after damming a river isolated them, only to pull the eagles out once they killed too effectively, as an illustration of how humans habitually intervene in systems they observe rather than leaving them alone.
Alien Fascination With Humanity 2:04:00
Rovelli brings up the old idea, going back to Sumerian texts, that gods or advanced civilizations created humans for their own purposes, and he says these are beautiful stories but just humans projecting themselves onto the unknown. He suspects life exists throughout the universe but doubts it resembles us, since humans lack the imagination to conceive of other ways of being complex. Rogan pushes back, arguing that any advanced civilization would have had to pass through the same kind of technological innovation humans are going through, and that far from finding humanity boring, aliens would likely be fascinated watching a species that is simultaneously kind, curious, brutal, and busy building godlike AI and nuclear weapons at the same time.
Limits Of Human Imagination 2:07:00
Rovelli agrees but notes that any attempt to imagine how an alien might think about us is still built entirely from human models, the only ones available, drawn from ourselves and other animals. Rogan compares this to squirrels trying to understand humans using only squirrel notions, guaranteed to get it wrong, and agrees that humans are likely just as limited in imagining what else might be out there.
Squirrel Combat And Wildlife In Europe 2:08:00
The conversation shifts to squirrels, with Rogan mentioning the old story that males bite each other's testicles off while competing to mate, and that squirrels are built to survive long falls from trees. Rovelli contrasts this with growing up in Europe, where dense human population means wild animals are rare outside of pets, recalling how as a child even spotting a squirrel on a hike was exciting. Moving to Canada, by contrast, he found coyotes, eagles, and other wildlife right outside his window, which he saw as one of the great pleasures of living on this side of the Atlantic.
National Parks And Tourist Mishaps 2:10:00
Rogan credits the American national park system for preserving accessible wilderness, mentioning Yellowstone's elk and bears, though he notes the animals there have become somewhat used to people. He brings up the Instagram account "Tourons of Yellowstone," which documents visitors getting too close to bison and being thrown through the air, blaming this on city dwellers who don't understand wildlife.
Rovelli's Grizzly Bear Encounter 2:11:00
Rovelli recounts a year he spent traveling coast to coast across Canada and the US by hitchhiking after dropping out of university. Too broke to pay for a campsite near a small village in British Columbia, he pitched his tent in an empty space nearby, and as the sun went down a grizzly bear began circling it. Following instructions to make noise, he found himself too terrified to scream and instead clapped his hands like an idiot; fortunately he had hung his food in a tree at a distance, and the bear went to eat that instead. The ordeal lasted about half an hour before he dared to check that the bear was gone, after which he ran back and paid whatever was needed to stay at the campground, having learned, he says, that ignoring safety regulations is not a good idea.
Grizzlies, Jaguars, And Vanishing Predators 2:14:00
Rogan notes that grizzly bears once ranged across California, appearing on the state flag, and that the last person killed by one there has a town named after him, Loleta. He describes wild predator encounters in places like British Columbia and Edmonton, where lynx, grizzlies, and moose are common, and contrasts this with Europe, where predators like wolves and bears have been mostly eradicated outside Russia. The two agree that America's public land system preserves remarkable wild areas, and Rogan mentions a documentary about jaguars reentering Arizona from Mexico, with about five now spotted, reclaiming territory they historically occupied.
Jaguars As Apex Predators 2:16:00
Rogan describes jaguars as the third largest big cat after tigers and lions, known for hunting caimans by ambushing them near riverbanks and killing by crushing the skull rather than by suffocation. He explains that while jaguars are not yet a real danger to humans in the small numbers now in Arizona, they have historically eaten people once they learn humans are viable prey, much like tigers in India that become habitual man-eaters and are then hunted down.
Predators, Fear, And Becoming Predators 2:19:30
Discussing why humans are so drawn to big cats, Rogan suggests early human ancestors were once prey to them before developing weapons, and cites a point from Rupert Sheldrake that children fear monsters, essentially imagined big predators, rather than the realistic dangers of modern life. Rovelli raises a theory that a key step in human evolution was the shift from being prey to becoming predators, which he thinks may explain why monsters evoke admiration and fascination alongside fear. Rogan adds that this fascination centers on mammals specifically, since humans feel closer to them and communicate with them easily through emotion and body language even without words, unlike with reptiles such as crocodiles.
Two Theories On The Origins Of War 2:22:30
Rovelli lays out two competing theories about human history: one holds that organized warfare only began around the time of agriculture, when groups started accumulating stored resources worth fighting over, and the other holds that human groups were already at war long before that. He notes this matters for understanding whether conflict is built into human genetics or is a recent cultural development, and leans toward thinking war is relatively recent, since many hunter-gatherer societies show little reason to fight, and bonobos, genetically as close to humans as chimpanzees, don't go to war between groups.
Chimpanzee Warfare And Human Parallels 2:26:00
Rogan counters that humans behave more like chimpanzees than bonobos, citing the Netflix series Chimp Nation, where researchers embedded with a troop for over twenty years, following strict rules of distance and no eye contact, documented chimpanzees behaving much like humans, with alpha leaders challenged by younger males, tribes splitting apart, raids for territory and fruit trees, and lethal conflict between groups. He extends this to Native American history, noting that tribes such as the Comanche dominated and displaced others like the Apache well before European contact, engaging in raiding, kidnapping, and killing as an established part of life, and points to widespread evidence of tribal warfare and even ritual cannibalism of enemies. Rogan concludes that war is very likely an ancient feature of human existence tied to harsh survival conditions, which is why peace remains so hard to achieve now.
Civilization As A Pacifying Force 2:30:00
Rovelli offers a more hopeful reading of this same history, pointing out that since humans no longer cannibalize each other and violence has generally declined, civilization must have had a real pacifying effect, achieved through learning, whether rational, religious, or cultural. He suggests this shows that the recognition of the advantages of collaboration can keep developing further. Rogan agrees, and Rovelli frames the goal not as returning to some imagined peaceful past but as building a better world where people learn to live together more successfully, closing the conversation on that note before the two exchange thanks.
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