The James Altucher Show

A Note from James:Carlo Rovelli is one of the smartest people I know. He is a theoretical physicist and the author of a lot of great books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, White Holes, and now On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy.He has been on the show before, and at the end of this conversation I told him I felt like he was just tolerating my questions. He was nice about it.But the first question I asked was: Do I actually exist?Because in Carlo’s new book, nothing really exists on its own. Not a person, not a particle, not you, not me. Everything exists in relation to something else.So I spent an hour trying to understand what that means.Does absolute truth exist? Is free will fake? Are we just machines? Is consciousness quantum? Is everything doomed to decay? Is time real? Was there a before the Big Bang? And what does any of this actually do for us in ordinary life?Carlo’s answer, again and again, is not that nothing is real. It is that